How I learned about the John Birch Society

 Soon after I arrived at the Ohio State University, I taught linear algebra. The person assigned to be my mentor, whom I've elsewhere called Nick Machiavell, had taught the course a lot, so before the term started I asked him for advice. Nick advised me to give the final exam on the last day of class, rather than in exam period. He said the students prefer it. Since Nick was an experienced instructor for that course, and he was my mentor, I dutifully took his advice. I wouldn't have done it had I known it was against the rules.

Three of us who were teaching different sections of the same course at the same time arranged to give the same exam on the last day of class. I was the one who got in trouble for it.

The Vice Chair for teaching who hated me (see my tribute to John Hsia), called me into his office and berated me for scheduling the final exam on the last day of classes, rather than during finals period. If the Vice Chair had told me that a student had complained, I'd have been happy to find a solution that worked for the student. But the Vice Chair refused to tell me whether a student had complained, or he had simply found a syllabus on the floor and he wanted to give me a hard time about it. He brought in his sidekick, Joe Cool, the department bouncer whose job seemed to include intimidating women, so they could do a "good cop, bad cop" routine on me.

They accused me of scheduling the exam so that I could go on vacation during exam period. I told them it wasn't true and I would be in town working for the whole exam period.

When I pointed out that two of my colleagues were doing the same thing, and asked why they weren't treating my colleagues the same way they were treating me, they asked me for my colleagues' names. Their hostility, and the way they angrily badgered me to name names, smelled sufficiently like McCarthyism that as a matter of principle I refused to divulge the names. Perhaps I was over-reacting, but I didn't want to rat out my colleagues and get them in trouble.

The Vice Chair insisted that I give the exam in the final exam period. He didn't care that some students had already bought plane tickets to leave town before then. I thought this solution at that late date was unfair to the students, so I went to the department chair to ask for a better resolution. We weren't able to agree on a better one.

The Acting Dean seemed nice---we had bowled together at the welcome picnic for new faculty---so I thought he might be a reasonable person to turn to. I phoned his office to make an appointment. His secretary told me, "He can't see you on Tuesdays, since that's the day he has his John Birch Society meetings." This felt like an odd thing to say, since I hadn't asked to see him on a Tuesday.

After we hung up, I told the story to a colleague and asked him, "What's the John Birch Society?" He explained it to me. 

We couldn't figure out why the secretary had brought up the John Birch Society. Was she trying to tell me that the Acting Dean was not sympathetic to working women, and wouldn't rule in my favor?

The Acting Dean's advice was to label the exam on the last class day as a "midterm," and give a dummy exam in finals period, worth zero points. That would follow the letter of the law (while being a waste of time). I politely told him that I thought it was absurd. 

But at least he was trying to be helpful, unlike the Vice Chair. I don't remember what I did about the exam, but I do remember that the students, the Acting Dean, and the Department Chair thought that my solution was fair.

Nick, my "mentor", told me that my mistake was that I had followed the rules by announcing the exam date during the first week of class and listing it on the syllabus.

On the bright side, finding out about the John Birch Society turned out to be good preparation for living in Orange County, California, currently a hotbed of anti-mask pandemic activism.

Princeton's Affirmative Action Plan

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The course catalog for the Princeton graduate program in the early 1980s included a statement that read something like "Princeton University has filed an Affirmative Action Plan with the Department of Education. You can see the plan in the Office of the Provost." When I read this, my reaction was "Princeton has an Affirmative Action Plan? What could it possibly say?" From what I'd seen, it looked to me as if women weren't welcome at Princeton. The idea that Princeton actually had an affirmative action plan was surprising to me.

Unable to suppress my curiosity, I phoned the office of the Provost and asked to see the plan. The secretary who answered told me that the only place I could see it was in Firestone Library. I dutifully trotted over to Firestone Library. There was no Affirmative Action Plan in the card catalog, and the librarians didn't know what I was talking about. So I went back to my office to phone again. The secretary now claimed that the plan was in the library's basement. After several trips back and forth between Firestone Library and the phone in my office, I eventually found, hidden in the depths of some level of the basement, a few disorganized sheaves of striped computer paper (the kind with holes down the sides) that contained cryptic, undocumented raw data. Each sheaf was labeled something like "Number 9 of 25" but there were only a few such sheaves; most of the data was missing, and it certainly wasn't a "Plan".

I was getting increasingly frustrated, and the Provost's secretary was getting increasingly hostile. In one phone call she asked me for the names of my Department Chair and my PhD thesis advisor. She made it clear that it was not in my best interest to pursue this.

Well, they hadn't accounted for the fact that I was a Silverberg. We're very stubborn, even when that's not in our best interest. Trying to prevent me from seeing the Plan only made me more curious to find out what they were trying to hide, and I kept pressing. I hoped that my father, a newspaper reporter who had taught me about investigative journalism, would be proud.

I reminded the Provost's secretary of the wording from the graduate catalog, which made a promise to the Department of Education that anyone at all could see the Plan in the Office of the Provost. She told me that wasn't possible; there was none there for me to see. Surely the Provost had a copy of his own Plan. Could I please see that one? Finally, she relented, and said I could only see it that afternoon. Checking my watch and seeing that it was about 4:30 pm, I rushed over to the Provost's office.

The hostile secretary gave me a large tome. She wouldn't let me photocopy any of it or use the empty table, but she grudgingly let me sit in a chair. I balanced the tome on my knees. 

Around 4:45 pm, she told me I had to start packing up to leave. She wanted to close up early for the day. Rushing through the pages, I tried to absorb as much as I could of the gist of what Princeton called its Affirmative Action Plan.

Somewhere, I still have the handwritten notes I scribbled down. I'll blame the pandemic for why I can't find them. But here's what I recall from memory.

My recollection is that the "Plan" was written with the help of Princeton's Statistics Department, and had three parts. The first part analyzed the data that the university had collected on the gender and race of its students, using a standard statistical analysis method that they were expected to use for this purpose. The university did not fare well under this analysis.

I recalled the bureaucratic paperwork process at the beginning of each academic year. Grad students were given cards on which we had to check off things including our race and gender. I remembered that I once tried to leave the race and gender boxes blank. The person who took my paperwork looked at me, shuffled through the cards until she got to the gender and race card, saw the blank boxes, and checked off "female". Annoyed, I hung around to see what she did when other people handed in their paperwork. When white men handed in their paperwork, she didn't bother to look at their race or gender boxes to see if they were blank. I walked back up to her and asked her about it, but she just shrugged. It looked to me as if Princeton wanted to make sure it got credit for all its female and minority students (but didn't bother to get accurate figures on white male students). Even fudging the figures, Princeton had a hard time making the numbers look good.

So Princeton took it up a notch. Part two of the "plan" analyzed the same (suspect) data using a different statistical method. The results still didn't look good. (It wasn't possible to make that data look good.) But it looked better.

Part three was the tour de force. In part three, the Department of Statistics came up with a brand new way to analyze data, never before used, that it created just for this data. Much of that section was a sad attempt to explain why this was a legitimate thing to do. In the end, Princeton looked a little better using this brand new method created just for this data, though not much. It all seemed like a waste of the Stat Department's time.

What struck me wasn't the questionable behavior of the university administrators (something with which I had already grown familiar). It was that the Statistics Department was in cahoots with the university to "cook the books". I expected better.

Princeton did away with its Statistics Department in 1985, the year after I graduated. Curiously, a 2013 history of the short-lived department didn't know the cause of the department's untimely demise but speculated, "It seems likely that it died of `natural causes.'" I don't really think it was killed off to cover up the department's involvement in that shameful report, though I did feel that it was a suitable punishment for its complicity.

Princeton University's Escort Service

In other stories, I've alluded to the day (April 5, 1983, to be precise) when the Princeton University Math Department's external advisory committee gave grad students an opportunity to meet them in a group. I've mentioned that the committee ignored my serious concerns, but got enthusiastic about my joke list. 

What were the more serious concerns that I told them about? Here's one.

Some of the backstory is well told in a New York Times article that appeared on November 29, 1981

(http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/29/nyregion/princeton-uneasy-in-wake-of-rapes.html) under the headline "Princeton uneasy in wake of rapes". Highlights include:

Since the beginning of the fall semester in early September, two teen-agers and a Princeton graduate student have been raped within a mile of the campus.

Prospect Avenue, the tree-lined home of the upper-class eating clubs, was the scene of two of the assaults - the rape of the graduate student on Oct. 22 and the attempted rape of a Princeton faculty member on Oct. 14.

The graduate student was riding her bicycle along Prospect Avenue shortly after midnight when she was struck by a car, knocking her to the ground. The driver stopped and offered to take her to a hospital, but then forced her into his car at knifepoint, bound her with electrical tape, drove her to a nearby field and raped her.

The article goes on to state that a student proposed that the university create a shuttle bus service.

"We're doing all in our power to make the Princeton campus as safe as it can be," said Alfred Terry, assistant director of security. Others are not so sure. "The university has been dragging its feet about putting locks that work on the women's bathrooms, installing emergency phones and changing the esthetic lighting to effective lighting," said Kathryn Carver, a senior and member of the student-initiated Rape Task Force.

"It's a shame that the university only gets responsive when the body count gets high enough," Miss Carver said.

Two pages later, the New York Times carried a long piece about sexual harassment that didn't show Princeton in a good light (https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/29/nyregion/handling-sexual-harassment.html) and gave the impression that Princeton cared more about its image than its students.

Princeton hated the adverse publicity. At first, I took the University at its word that it wanted to make the campus safer. But everything it did seemed to show that it did indeed care more about its image than its students. Below are some of my attempts to hold Princeton accountable.

The university did indeed create a shuttle bus service. The nearest stop to the math department was on the street near the front entrance to Jadwin Hall, which faced the football stadium. When it rained, the bus was full (of male students) so the driver wouldn't let me on and I had to walk home. More worrisome were that one never knew how long one would have to wait on the street in the dark, and the courtyard I had to walk across to get from Fine Hall to Jadwin Hall was unlit. My complaints about this led to the following:

The jig is up

 I've been waiting to tell stories about my Princeton experiences until I wasn't angry about them, and could write with compassion and understanding, or at least with humor. I'm afraid that's not likely to happen anytime soon (despite my best efforts at a Buddhist monastery). But perhaps my Princeton stories, such as the one below, will help to explain some of my later decisions.

I was admitted to Princeton with a graduate fellowship from the university, which Princeton took away after I was awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Like several mathematics students in the years ahead of me, I planned to use my NSF Graduate Fellowship to spend a year studying in England at the University of Cambridge, deferring my arrival in Princeton for a year. Princeton insisted that I funnel the NSF fellowship through them, since Cambridge tuition was less than the fellowship stipend, and Princeton planned to pocket the difference.

However, in my year, Cambridge significantly raised tuition on foreign students. When I forwarded Cambridge's bill to Princeton, Princeton balked. They didn't want to pay, since they wanted more of a cut. This went back and forth by snail mail throughout the year. During that time, the exchange rate turned against me, by a significant amount. What Princeton finally paid was less than Cambridge's bill. I argued it for years with both Princeton and Cambridge.

When I was a Harvard-Radcliffe undergrad, an advising office told students to always take advantage of our rights, by requesting and obtaining our records. You never know what information you'll find, and information is power. 

Sometime during my argument with Princeton about the debt to Cambridge, I asked to see my file in the Dean's office. The staff were reluctant to show it to me, but they eventually gave in. I wasn't allowed to photocopy anything, but I was permitted to take notes by hand, while balancing the file on my knees. A note from the math department Chair to the Dean about the Cambridge debt included the line "The jig is up." It pointed out that I was on to them, about their attempt to hold onto funds that they should have forwarded to Cambridge.

Even with this smoking gun, Princeton refused to pay the remaining balance.

Eventually I got tired of being in Cambridge's bad books, and I paid the debt myself.