Staff with Forks (and Vacuum Cleaners) or: Some Like It Hot

When I arrived at UC Irvine in 2004 as a Step VI full professor (supposedly a rank of "great distinction"), the desk in my office was old and falling apart, on wobbly legs and with drawers that didn't close. It was rickety enough that I worried about it falling over and crushing me. Its one charm were the cute stickers that some very young child must have stuck there years ago. It was not the sort of desk you put in the office of a new faculty member you'd like to keep.

The rest of the furniture was similar. While nothing matched in the usual sense, at least it matched in the sense that it was all run down and a bit insulting. It reminded me of my Cinderella-like experience at IAS and my window-less office at Ohio State. Wasn't I too senior for this?

The department manager wanted me to use my start-up funds to buy new furniture. I pointed out that my start-up funds were explicitly earmarked for research purposes, and furniture didn't seem like research. (When I later asked the Dean about it, he was shocked that anyone would ask me to use for basic necessities, such as a desk, the research funds he had given me.)

During my first few weekends at UCI, I shuttled boxes containing 20 years' worth of papers and books from my home to my office. To ferry the boxes from my car to my office I used one of the department's utility carts that the staff had lent me.

There was a sharp knock on my office door. I thought, "How nice! Some colleague heard me, and wants to welcome me to the department!" I opened the door to indeed find a colleague I had never met, but it was an angry one. He claimed that he had reserved a cart, and he was angry that I had it. (If I had been on the ball, I would have borrowed Maria von Trapp's line from "The Sound of Music" and thanked him for how kind and thoughtful he was to make my first moments, as a stranger in a new job, so warm and pleasant.) Since he turned out to be heat-loving, I'll call him Iguana.

On some particularly hot days, I noticed that the temperature in my office was hotter than was bearable. The windows didn't open, it felt as if there was no ventilation, and it was over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Some days I had headaches and felt dizzy, and once I realized that I had no recollection of the previous 15 minutes.

It turned out that Iguana's office housed the thermostat that controlled the temperature in my office, and he liked it hot. Facilities sent someone over, but Iguana refused to let them turn down the temperature. The department staff were afraid to talk to Iguana about it and told me to work it out with him.

Iguana and I eventually negotiated a reasonable settlement ... until he left for the summer without telling me, with the thermostat set way up high.

During my first three years at UCI, I occasionally reminded the department manager that when I was hired I had made clear how important my office environment was, the Chair and Dean had agreed to keep me happy in that regard, my offer letter made promises that weren't being kept, and three years is a long time to wait for a filing cabinet.

I made enough of a fuss that she eventually offered me the furniture of someone who had left, and the vacated faculty office of the new department Chair. I was eager to move to an office whose temperature wasn't controlled by Iguana.

Since I have a serious dust allergy, the staff assured me that my new office would be cleaned before I moved in. But on move-in date, large dust balls roamed the floor. When I pointed out the dust balls to the department manager, she sent another staff member to fetch one of the department's vacuum cleaners.

I was expected to do the vacuuming, while the two of them watched. Vacuuming wasn't in my job description. I suppose it wasn't in theirs, either. While I suspected that they would have willingly vacuumed for my male colleagues (this was the department manager who had said "Alice, Professor X is here" about a professor of lower rank), I thought it prudent to be agreeable and cooperative.

When I turned on the vacuum cleaner it immediately dumped a load of dirt in the middle of the office floor, spraying a cloud of dust in my face. After the dust had settled, and the vacuum cleaner adamantly and repeatedly refused to vacuum up the mess it had created, I interrupted their chat to point out that the vacuum cleaner was broken. I eventually managed to convince the skeptical department manager that there was no hope that this vacuum cleaner would pull through any time soon. She sent her staff friend to bring a different vacuum cleaner, and I vacuumed up the new dirt mound while they looked on.

I was reminded of the vacuuming, and of my Collecting Plates story, at a department party not so long ago, when I noticed students and faculty shoveling food into their mouths with their fingers because the forks had run out. 

The staff, who were running the event, were standing together chatting, near a bag of plastic forks. Trying to be helpful, I pointed out that there were no longer any forks on the food table.

The department manager (a more recent manager than the one who had watched me vacuum), who was standing closer to the food table than I was, grabbed a handful of forks. Rather than placing them on the nearby food table, she walked over to hand them to me.

Instinctively, I reached out to take them, but then I pulled back. I was pretty sure she wouldn't have tried to hand the batch of forks to any of the male faculty (not to mention that providing forks really was in her job description, and not in mine). While I wanted to be helpful, I didn't want to set a bad precedent in front of the students, faculty, and staff for how to treat female mathematicians.

"He reminds me of myself at that age" or: The Rules of the Game, Part 2

At a lunch with some undergrads in my freshman year, one of the most senior Harvard math professors told us that to get honors (summa cum laude, magna cum laude, or cum laude) in mathematics, a student had to submit an acceptable senior honors thesis. The department then decided whether to give you summa, magna, or cum laude based solely on how your grades fit into Harvard's formula for deciding honors; what level you got didn't depend on how good the thesis was.

The university had clear but peculiar rules about what grades you needed to get summa or magna. Strangely, you could qualify for summa without being good enough for magna, if your grade point average or lowest grade or whatever didn't rise to the right level.

It was nice that the rules of the game were clear. I tend to do well when I know the rules. I made sure that I was taking enough of the right courses, and getting high enough letter grades, to qualify for summa.

In my last year, I wrote what I knew was an "acceptable" senior thesis. I was taking hard courses that I wanted to learn, so doing well in them was a higher priority for me than writing a spectacular thesis. The word on the street was that the math faculty felt that there was plenty of time to do research in grad school and beyond, and it's more important for undergrads to learn as much as they could in advanced courses than to write a thesis. And the senior professor had told us that the reward for an acceptable thesis would be the same as for a great one.

A professor I'll call the Gryphon was in charge of farming out each senior thesis to a faculty member who would give the student an exam on the thesis. The Gryphon held onto mine since he was interested in the topic. I was very happy that he went to the trouble of preparing a written exam for me; the other students had oral exams.

The one faculty meeting that postdocs could attend was the one where the professors decided on honors for the graduating seniors. Although he was supposed to keep such deliberations confidential, one of the postdocs told me that the Gryphon reported that my thesis was good but not great; it's not of summa level so Alice shouldn't get summa. Luckily for me, the faculty who wanted to continue their tradition of basing the level of honors on Harvard's formula won out, and I was awarded summa.

I don't know why the postdoc decided to tell me this story. Though it stung at the time, I'm glad he did. Information can be useful.

Years later, when I was a visiting professor at Harvard, I went to a party given by some math grad students. Earlier that day, the postdocs had gone to the faculty meeting at which the professors decide on honors. 

At the party, a couple of postdocs told me their concerns about what they had observed at the meeting. Several female students were recommended for lower honors than male students who had lower grades. About those male students, the faculty said, "I think he's better than his grades" or "He reminds me of myself at that age." The Gryphon spoke against awarding summa to the best female student, saying something like, "She's very good, but she's not as good as Alice Silverberg, who really deserved summa when she got it." 

The postdocs believed that the male students were held to lower standards than were the female students, who were being held to a higher standard set by me.

I burst out laughing, and told them the story about the Gryphon arguing against giving me summa. I was glad I knew that story.

My Secret Learning Disability

I was a good writer and a good speller. So why were spelling bees such a nightmare for me?

At a spelling bee for my first grade class, the teacher gave me a word. I wrote it in my head. But I had trouble reading my (imaginary) handwriting. I knew it was a two-letter word ending in "e", and the first letter was one of those letters with mountains and valleys. But was it "me" or "we"? I guessed wrong.

The teacher freaked out. How could this smart student spell "me" incorrectly? It's only two letters long. And how could Alice say it starts with a "w" when it clearly begins with an "m" sound?

She decided I was just being difficult, and she made me continue with the spelling bee rather than be eliminated.

When she came around to me again, I managed to retain the information that the word she gave me was four letters long, and ended in "ome". I frantically raced through the alphabet to see what four-letter words ended in "ome", and grabbed the first one I found. Again, I guessed wrong. I don't remember what I said, but my guess is that the teacher said "come" and I spelled it H-O-M-E (so nervous that I skipped over "c"). The teacher freaked out more than before. The words "come" and "home" didn't even rhyme! But this time she let me sit down.

Fourth grade was infinitely worse. We were lined up against the wall. The teacher said a word I had never heard before. I told her I didn't know it, and I would just sit down. She said I had to try. Since the word sounded like nonsense to me, I strung together a bunch of consonants. That was the closest I could get.

The teacher didn't believe I was trying, and wouldn't let me drop out. 

I asked her if she could say the word in a sentence. She did, but that didn't help. 

The teacher and my classmates were getting quite angry with me for holding up the whole spelling bee. I didn't know why I couldn't spell it, but on a whim I said, "I can't spell something if I don't know what it means."

The other kids tried to define the word for me. They said, "It's not pants, and it's not a skirt." Well, that only confused me more. Lots of things aren't pants or skirts. One thing I did know was that this wasn't a definition.

I asked the teacher to say the word again. With tears running down my face, I closed my eyes tight, and listened as hard as I could. Doing the best I could, I started with a "k". I realized she would get angry if I didn't follow it with a vowel so I made one up, and then ... I had nothing. I threw in a few more letters to try to get the right length.

Seeing that I was in distress, the teacher softened a little. She didn't let me sit down, but she realized that I was trying. 

She went on down the row until someone correctly spelled "C-U-L-O-T-T-E-S". That's how I learned that word.

From my teachers' reactions, I suspected that my brain worked differently from most people's. I had almost a photographic memory for words I read, but I had much less room in my memory for words I heard (except for song lyrics).

Throughout elementary school, I had a terrible fear of being called on. When a teacher surprised me by asking me something I wasn't expecting, I would freeze like a deer in the headlights, and not process the question. When I had to read out loud, I could say the words, but I couldn't simultaneously understand what I was saying.

Without being fully aware of what I was doing, I developed a few coping mechanisms. One was to raise my hand and answer a lot of hard questions early in the school year to establish myself as a smart kid whom the teacher could leave alone. This way, I often managed to stay under the radar.

I was quite embarrassed that I won a French medal when we graduated from high school, since I could barely speak French or understand spoken French. I was good at reading and writing, and that was good enough for my French teacher, who valued those skills more than speaking or listening.

I managed to avoid oral exams for most of my life.

Unfortunately, the general exam at Princeton was oral. Only later did I realize that I should have written down the questions and solved them on paper, before presenting my solutions on the blackboard. Had I thought of it at the time, I might have considered it to be cheating, since it wasn't what was expected.

I was vaguely aware that this was a learning disability. I decided to train myself out of it.

Volunteering at Recording for the Blind was a big help. It gave me practice understanding what I was reading aloud in real time, without having to reread it silently to myself. I almost quit on the first day, until my trainer cleverly had me listen to audio tapes of a Princeton math professor who stumbled, made mistakes, backtracked, and generally didn't speak very smoothly. While I felt sorry for those who had to learn math from his tapes, it set the bar low enough that I knew that no matter how poorly I read, I wouldn't be that bad.

When I taught in a math program for gifted high school students, one student was viewed as a difficult kid who "acted out". He would call out the right answers, but he was viewed as a troublemaker. One of the teachers got angry at him for not bringing a notebook to class. The more the student was pressured to take notes, the worse his behavior, and the less well he did. I observed him for awhile, and realized that he was great at processing spoken words and working out problems in his head. Writing it down impeded his learning. He had been told he was trouble for so long, that eventually he took on a bad boy persona since that was what was expected of him.

When I teach, I try to both say and write everything that's important, and to remember that different students learn in different ways. The more chances we give them to succeed, the fewer we'll lose.

Cinderella at the Institute for Advanced Study

When I was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for the fall of 1995, I wasn't sure if I were Cinderella or Rapunzel. My office was a horrid, dark, swelteringly hot room in the attic of Fuld Hall, under the rafters, with no air-conditioning, and a radiator I couldn't turn off. There was no overhead light, the standing lamp didn't give enough light to read by, its cord was frayed, and I was worried it would electrocute me. The desk chair fell over backwards if you leaned back even a little, there was no computer, and there was no surface large enough to place a computer. Almost all of the other mathematicians were in the beautiful modern new math building, and had computers in their offices.

The room was almost impossible to find, and when a computer science grad student (Dan Boneh) knocked on my door to pepper me with questions about abelian varieties, I was very impressed that he had managed to find the room.

My quest to obtain a computer, a table to put it on, and enough light to read by, led to a power struggle with the Administrative Officer (AO), who didn't seem to want to fulfill my requests.

I hated to bother the senior faculty, but eventually one of them kindly intervened on my behalf. While that helped me get the needed computer, table, and lighting, the AO resented me for going over her head.

It was not an easy time for me, since my mother was in the end stages of several long years of dying of cancer. 

Knowing that the time was drawing near, I gave my father an algorithm: 

If you need to contact me, first phone my home number. 

If I don't answer, phone my office number. 

And failing that, here's the Math Department's number, in case of emergency.

One morning in late December, shortly before the end of my stay, I got a phone call in my office from the AO. She told me that my mother had died, and she put my Dad through.

After we cried, and discussed the usual logistics about the funeral, who should notify which relatives and friends, etc., I asked my father why he had phoned the Math Department, rather than my office number. He said, "This was an emergency, so I phoned the number you told me to phone in case of emergency." My Dad wasn't very good with algorithms; that was more my Mom's expertise.

Suddenly, lights flashed on my phone, and strange beeps rang out from it. Frazzled and confused, I hung up on my father to take the incoming call, in case it was important.

Who was it? The AO who had transferred my father, and knew full well that he called because my mother had just died. She was calling to see if there was anything the Math Department could do.

I had mixed feelings. Anger that she interrupted a call she knew I was having with my father about my mother's death. But gratitude that she was at last showing me some compassion.

"Why should I help them?" or: A Fountain of Filthy Water

I had just moved into an apartment in a high rise building in Germany. There was a knock at the door, and I answered it to find the elderly couple who lived across the landing. I naturally thought, "How nice! They want to welcome me!" I was quickly disabused of that notion by the scowls on their faces.

The woman explained in German that my front door made too much noise when I closed it. They believed that I didn't know how to close a door, and they were going to teach me. She demonstrated by holding down the handle, silently closing the door, then lifting up the handle. Usually when I arrived home, I simply pushed the door shut, and the latch clicked. That clicking noise was driving my neighbors crazy. Their door-closing method avoided the clicking noise.

After that, I tried to be a good neighbor. But once or twice, when I arrived home with my arms full of groceries, I pushed the door closed with my foot before I realized what I had done. Whenever I ran into my neighbors their expressions were dour, and I felt terrible about making their lives miserable with my occasional door clicking.

My next faux pas had a larger circle of critics. A friend stopped by to see me, but couldn't find my doorbell among the array of doorbells next to the ground floor elevator, since the buttons seemed to be in random order, not arranged by apartment number, and were labeled with only the occupants' names. I had sublet the apartment, so my doorbell had my landlady's name.

To solve this problem, I neatly printed my name on a piece of white tape, and pasted it over my landlady's name. A few days later I noticed that the label had been peeled off. I tried again, with the same result. Someone saw me trying a third time, and she kindly told me that some of the ladies in the building were upset, since the labels were supposed to be made using a labelmaker with white lettering on a black background. She suggested that I ask the Hausmeister to do it.

I obediently went to said Hausmeister, who grumbled about the fussy old ladies who made everyone's lives more difficult. He thought it was all very silly, but agreed to make a new label. Luckily he was an easy-going guy, who didn't ask any questions about what might have been an illegal sublet.

Some time later, everyone in the building was notified that the Hausmeister would come to bleed the radiators. Anyone who didn't want that had to tell him in advance. I didn't know what it meant to bleed a radiator, but I had no objection to the Hausmeister doing it.

On Bleeding Radiator Day, another knock at my door. The man who lived across the landing (of door-clicking fame) was frantic. He motioned me to follow him to his apartment. It turned out that he and his wife had refused entry to the Hausmeister, saying they would bleed their own radiators. What I saw when I entered their apartment was an arc of black water that emanated from a radiator, rose nearly to the ceiling, and descended onto their (formerly) pristine white carpet. The woman was trying to catch the stream in a medium sized pot.

The man tried to hand me an empty bowl, so I could replace his wife while she ran into the kitchen to empty her pot and he ran off to collect the Hausmeister.

For a brief instant, I hesitated. I thought, "These aren't my friends. They've made their hostility to me clear. Why should I help them?"

Then I collected myself, grabbed the bowl, and held it under the torrent, standing with outstretched arms in a hopeless attempt to keep my clothes clean. 

Why should I help them? Because I'm human, I'm part of a community, and that's what people do. What sort of world would we live in, if people didn't come to each other's aid in times of crisis?

The woman and I traded places, running back and forth between the living room and the kitchen sink, until the Hausmeister arrived with a wrench. I waited until everything was under control, and then left.

Later that day, when the Hausmeister bled my radiators, he complained about my annoying neighbors who thought they knew better than everyone else, and then ran to him for help whenever they screwed up.

While I knew I did the right thing, I was miffed that my neighbors hadn't even had the good manners to say "danke schön".

A week or two later, in the early evening, another knock at my door. I saw through the peephole that it was the man who lived across the landing.

"What did I do wrong this time?" I wondered. I thought about pretending I wasn't home, but they could hear all my comings and goings.

With trepidation, I opened the door. He sheepishly handed me a very small box that was beautifully wrapped.

I invited him in, and opened the box to find an assortment of chocolates. He, K (my significant other), and I sat in the living room and ate the chocolates. Our neighbor didn't know English, and at that time K and I didn't know enough German to have much of a conversation. We all knew a little French, so that's what we spoke. The man explained that he had picked up some French in Paris in 1942. What a lovely city, and what a great time he had there, he exclaimed in French. Knowing why he was in Paris in 1942, I was sorely tempted to make a cutting remark, but I knew that wouldn't be helpful or wise, not to mention that my French wasn't up to it.

I like to think that my neighbor and I made a tiny contribution towards global harmony, I by taking that empty bowl rather than walking away, and he with the lovely box of chocolates.

Proctoring, Princeton Style

I learned about Princeton's Honor Code one cold, wintry night when I was a teaching assistant for a section of calculus, and the course instructor asked me to proctor an evening exam.

I use the word "proctor" for lack of a better word. I was told that I wasn't actually allowed to proctor the exam, or even be in the room where the test took place, since the Honor Code forbade it. The point of my being there was to answer any questions the students had. If a student found a typo or an ambiguous phrase in the test, I had to deal with it. 

Princeton students came up with the Honor Code in 1893. The phrase the students had to write on their tests was: I pledge my honor as a gentleman that during this examination I have neither given nor received assistance, with the word "gentleman" remaining until Princeton went coed in 1969.

I distributed the exams, told the students where they could find me, and left.

The exam was given in a large cavernous lecture room. My recollection is that the nearest place I could go that was not in the room itself was outside the building. I was bundled up in my winter coat, hat, and gloves, but by the end I was freezing and shivering. Princeton winters could get quite cold, at least back in the early 1980s.

The students came and went as they pleased. If they looked lost, I pointed them in the direction of the nearest restroom. I could hear voices in the exam room, but I wasn't permitted to do anything about it.

The atmosphere in the room seemed to get more boisterous as time went on. That seemed less surprising when I observed an empty six pack of beer being carried out after I collected the exams (by someone who was gentlemanly enough not to leave it there; the room was left in a newly acquired state of disarray).

Princeton was very proud of its Honor Code. Seeing it from the instructors' side, I'm not surprised that it was the students who demanded it. It's hard to imagine faculty coming up with a plan that would leave them outside in the snow while the students partied indoors.

Election Subversion, Math Team Style

My first memory about elections was when I was too young to go to school, and my mother took me with her to the voting booth. She told me not to tell anyone that she was carrying into the booth a scrap of paper with a "cheat sheet" to remind her how to vote on the down-ballot candidates; she said that bringing such a thing was illegal. Was that ever really illegal, or did someone tell my mother that either erroneously or to intimidate her?

Another early memory is that my mother told me the philosophy behind not making it too easy to vote. If it's too easy to vote, then people who don't care about the issues, and haven't bothered to educate themselves about the issues or candidates, will be manipulated by others to vote the way they want them to.

On my high school's Math Team, I was the top scorer in my year. The kids in the year ahead of me were grooming me to be the team captain for my senior year. (In my junior year I was "co-captain", which was like Vice President.) The team expected that I would easily be elected captain.

The day of the vote, a group of guys who were not on the team walked into our meeting room and voted for a guy I'll call the Dormouse. There were enough of them that the Dormouse won.

When the team members protested, the guys asked us to show them a rule that said that only people who were on, or trained with, the team could vote. While we knew this wasn't fair, we had nothing in writing that gave eligibility rules for voting for Math Team captain. I was quite shaken by what felt like a coup.

We never saw Dormouse's posse again.

At a subsequent meeting, someone on the team pointed out that there was no rule that said we couldn't vote again, so we did so, and I won.

I wonder whether the Dormouse arranged to be elected so that he could state on his college applications that he was captain of the Math Team. He went on to become a philosophy professor, specializing in ethics.

The Princeton Math Department's First Wives Club

At one time, it seemed to me that the number of Princeton math faculty who divorced their wives to marry their grad students wasn't so very far from the number of women that Princeton had ever admitted into its math graduate program. This was rather different from Harvard, where some of the math faculty had affairs with some of the secretaries.

John Tate knew I was interested in the history of the Harvard math department, and I appreciated his willingness to talk about it. In 1991, he told me that in his early days on the Harvard faculty, the math department admitted men to the graduate program with the idea that they'd become mathematicians, and admitted women with the idea that they'd become wives of the male grad students.

At Princeton, the faculty wives were understandably nervous about the idea of their husbands supervising female students. This made it hard for female grad students to find a thesis advisor.

My PhD thesis advisor's wife was unfailingly kind to me, and I'm very grateful for how nice she was. I think we always got along. She had nothing to worry about from me.

One evening at a department party she told me about a recent dream. In her dream, she and I were college students, taking a course taught by her husband. The class had an exam, and she was distressed that I did much better on the exam than she did.

I told this to a more senior student, and I wondered what it meant. He replied, "Alice, you know what it means. Her husband's colleagues are having affairs with their grad students. She's letting you know that she has some anxiety about her husband having a female student." I didn't (and don't) know this to be true. But I can certainly understand how the behavior of some of the faculty was problematic for both female students and faculty wives.

Hot chocolate and handshakes

One of my strangest job interviews was at a university I'll call Dysfunctional U. An early hint that things might not be entirely normal was that the first email message from the chairman of the recruitment committee, Professor V, began "Dear Ms. Silverberg" rather than the customary "Prof." or "Dr." A bigger hint was when he asked me to use frequent flyer miles for the trip. 

When I arrived at V's office at Dysfunctional U, he shook my hand with an overly firm handshake, and I screamed. When he opened his hand, I saw that it held his keychain with about a dozen keys, which he had forcefully dug into the palm of my hand.

V's next act was to refuse to let me go to lunch with a group of his colleagues who asked me to join them. V insisted that I have lunch with him. Lunch with him meant that I bought a soggy sandwich and a hot chocolate with whipped cream from a cart on the ground floor of the building, to consume in V's office.

When we went back to V's office, he immediately sat down in the only free chair. With the wrapped sandwich in one hand and the overflowing cup of hot chocolate in the other (V had suggested that I not get a lid), I looked around and realized that the only other chair was filled with a three-foot-high pile of midterm exams, and every inch of desk and table space was covered with sloping piles of dusty books and papers. Was this his version of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party? V didn't clear any space until I pondered aloud that I could rest my cup on V's piles of papers and exams while I unwrapped and ate my sandwich standing up, but since the cup's bottom was already covered in dripping chocolate and whipped cream, I couldn't guarantee that his papers and exams wouldn't get stained.

Until I met V, I hadn't realized it was possible to mispronounce my last name. Each time he introduced me to someone, I repeated my name with the correct pronounciation, but V never caught on.

The most pleasant time I had with V was when I drove him around campus in my rental car. We'd pass an intersection, and he'd say, "You should have turned there." After the third or fourth missed turn, I had trouble suppressing my laughter. By then, I had decided to go with the flow and view it all as quite amusing. This was really getting too silly.

Perhaps the silliest part was that I was a full professor at a much higher ranked math department, but the job ad was for an assistant professorship. Numerous Dysfunctional U faculty had told me, "Of course you won't accept an assistant professorship. But apply anyway. Once people like you, we'll make a case for upgrading the position. But we can't do that if you don't apply." In my application I made it clear that I hoped they would consider making a senior level offer. But I did tire of reminding them of that each time someone asked "Why do you want an assistant professorship?"

The faculty members who wanted me hired warned me not to tell anyone that they supported me, since that would turn the other factions against me. If all the faculty who told me they supported me had really done so, it would have been a majority of the faculty. Professor V eventually notified me that the department decided not to fill the position that year.

Some of my "supporters" told me that things were said at the hiring meeting that they believed were illegal, and they urged me to report it to Dysfunctional U's Office of Equal Opportunity. I pointed out that I wasn't at the hiring meeting, so I had no evidence; such a complaint needed to come from a witness. Alas, they were too afraid of retaliation to report the violations themselves.

Before my visit, several of the faculty had insisted that Dysfunctional U had the most dysfunctional math department in the country. I responded, "I can't believe it's more dysfunctional than Ohio State's." But after I saw for myself some of the infighting in that department I told them, "You were right! Your department really is more dysfunctional than OSU's!" On the bright side, it made me feel better about OSU.

Of course, his wife is requesting to accompany him

When I was an undergrad, Harvard told its students that it's a good idea to get the files that your university keeps about you and see what's there. While universities discourage it, and sometimes even threaten people who ask for their files (which happened to me at Princeton), I was persistent.

After a bit of a battle, in November of 1987 I was allowed to see some of my Ohio State files. One file contained the letter that my department Chair had sent to the Acting Dean in June of 1985 in support of my formal request to spend the academic year 1986-87 elsewhere. They never let me photocopy that letter, but I still have the slip of paper on which I copied it by hand.

The letter began, "As you know, K was awarded a Sloan Fellowship this year. He is requesting approval of the following plans for using it." This was followed by three paragraphs explaining in detail K's plans, why one part "would be excellent for his research" and why another location he planned to visit "is also an excellent choice of sites for furthering his research and scholarship," giving names of mathematicians he would have contact with at those locations.

Almost as an afterthought, this was followed by: "Of course his wife, Alice Silverberg, is requesting to accompany him." I still feel an awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think about that sentence.

The letter goes on to say that I would fund my visit on my fellowship, and "The department has no objection to the arrangements in the areas of teaching and service. They are both excellent teachers who have given more service than required so far." No specific details were given as to why my plans would be excellent for my research or scholarship. The letter ends by recommending "approval of these requests" and that the year "be counted for service credit [i.e., towards tenure and sabbaticals] in both cases."

I wondered whether the Chair's letter contributed to the Acting Dean treating me like a baby-making machine rather than as a mathematician (when he recommended that I not get service credit).

In response, I sent the following to my new department Chair, with a request that it be sent up the hierarchy of administrators:

                                                 November 12, 1987

To be attached to all copies of the letter of June 26, 1985 from X (Chairman, Department of Mathematics) to Y (Acting Dean, College of Mathematical and Physical Sciences), and the letter of August 15, 1985 from Y to Z (Associate Provost)

   I have just seen the above-mentioned letter from X to Y for the first time. The letter begins with a discussion of how K, an assistant professor in the mathematics department, plans to use his Sloan Fellowship from Spring 1986 through Spring 1987, and continues with the sentence "Of course, his wife, Alice Silverberg, is requesting to accompany him." I would like my comments to go on the record.

   (1) First, some historical inaccuracies need to be corrected, and the chronology set right. My plans to use my NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at research institutes from Spring 1986 through Spring 1987 were discussed with and approved by X in winter and spring of 1984 before I (or K) were hired, and long before K was even nominated for a Sloan Fellowship. Therefore it is not only false that I was following K around, it is chronologically impossible.

   (2) The letter connects two separate, independent requests, implying (erroneously and irrelevantly) that one is dependent on the other.

   (3) The letter makes irrelevant, inappropriate, and unwarranted assumptions about personal lives and relationships.

   To elaborate:

   In my letters to and discussions with X concerning my plans, I have never made reference to any other person's plans. I have never informed him or the mathematics department of my marital status, and it is not relevant to my work as a member of the mathematics faculty. I might or might not be married to K; I might or might not want to follow K around. Such assumptions about my personal life, correct or otherwise, do not have their source with me.

   Three additional comments:

   a) Y's letter to Z on the same subject says "since they are husband and wife they are planning together". It seems appropriate here to draw attention to the fact that I objected (in a letter to Y) to the inclusion of this phrase in a draft of the letter in August, 1985.

   b) The inclusion in my files of a letter (which has no reference to me) from K to X is inappropriate.

   c) Considering the correct chronology, and X's differing views from mine on my comments (2) and (3) above, one is led to ponder the question: Why did he not begin his letter by discussing my plans, and continue with "Of course, her husband, K, is requesting to accompany her."?

                                    Alice Silverberg

                                    Assistant Professor of Mathematics

"You'll want to have babies"

When I accepted the job offer from Ohio State in 1984, the department Chair agreed, in writing, that I could spend the academic year 1986-87 at a mathematics research institute, where I would be funded by my NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship. (I learned much later, before I officially accepted the offer, that the Dean and Associate Provost had agreed, also in writing, that my time on the fellowship would count towards tenure, and would not delay my tenure review.) So I was surprised during my second year at OSU when the same department Chair asked me to submit a formal request to go on leave. Why did I need to request permission for something for which permission and approval had already been granted? The Chair assured me it would be routine.

K submitted a similar request to go on leave and have the year count towards tenure, and his request was approved.

One day, I got a phone call from the new Acting Dean (the one who attended weekly meetings of the John Birch Society). He told me that he was going to deny my request to keep the tenure clock running during the year away. Why? He said that since I was female, "you'll want to have babies", and that would slow my research productivity. 

Indignant, I told him firmly that I was not going to have babies, and I wanted the tenure clock to keep running. He replied that his decision stands, he was doing me a favor, and I would eventually be grateful to him. I guess I'm not a very grateful person, since that day hasn't come yet.

As I hung up the phone, I thought to myself, "I am not going to spend the rest of my life at Ohio State University."

"But there's only one door!"

In June of 1981, John Tate gave Larry Washington, K, and me a ride from Paris to the new mathematics conference center in Luminy, on the south coast of France. Larry was navigating. When we got lost in Marseille, I had the sinking feeling, "Oh my God! Larry is holding the map upside down! He doesn't have any sense of direction! We're going to spend the rest of our lives going in circles in Marseille!" I wrested the map out of Larry's hands. (Larry's rebuttal is: "Yes, we missed a turn and ended up down by the docks. We were going south, so I was holding the map upside down in order to orient it with the direction we were going. I was trying to figure things out, but you took the map from me. I would have gotten us out, but you were impatient." He's probably right on all counts!)

The building we were housed in was in the process of being renovated, and I remember the toilets overflowing and flooding the floors.

When we arrived, we found the caretaker and asked for our keys. 

K and I were sharing a room, and the caretaker wanted us to share a key.

It was clear to us Americans what was wrong with that plan, and that independent people should have their own keys so they could come and go as they pleased. John Tate tried to explain this to the caretaker.

John translated the caretaker's response for us: 

             "Why do they need two keys? There's only one door!"

John thought this answer was quite funny, and over the years he enjoyed reminding me of it, by saying emphatically, "But there's only one door!"

John rummaged around in the key box on the caretaker's desk, and found a second key to the room. The caretaker didn't know what to do about it, so he didn't stop him. He probably didn't feel comfortable stopping a senior professor from taking the key.

I was reminded of this story in 1995, when I asked Elham Izadi to share a hotel room in Utrecht during the Frans Oort 60th birthday conference. I had been staying in Europe, and Elham arrived jetlagged from the U.S., so we had very different sleep schedules. The hotel staff made us share a key, and pointed out that we could leave it at the front desk when we weren't in the room, so the other person could pick it up. But that didn't help us when one of us was asleep (with the key) in our hotel room, or showering, and the other needed to get in.

"Alice doesn't want to give a seminar talk, does she?"

In my last semester as a grad student, a postdoc I'll call the Mock Turtle was running the Princeton Number Theory Seminar. A professor I'll call Professor Gryphon told Turtle to ask the finishing grad students to give seminar talks.

Instead of asking me to give a talk, Turtle said to my significant other, K, "Alice doesn't want to give a seminar talk, does she?"

K told Turtle that if he wanted to know that, he should ask me. 

So when Turtle ran into me in the department, he half-heartedly invited me to give a talk, and I accepted.

The seminar participants generally went out to dinner after the talk. Turtle told me that there wouldn't be a dinner after my talk, since I was a Princeton student. The problem wasn't that the department didn't have funds to pay for it, since participants always paid their own way, and I was willing to pay my share.

When I found out that Professor Gryphon was hosting a pizza dinner at his own house for another finishing grad student after his talk, I went back to the Mock Turtle and told him that I would organize a dinner for my talk, which just meant that I would choose a restaurant and announce it at my talk. Afraid that that would make him look bad, Turtle said that he would announce the dinner.

The day of my talk, I got a phone call from Turtle. "I'm on my deathbed," he exaggerated, pleading that he was so ill that there couldn't be a dinner after all.

I replied that I was sorry he was ill, and that he shouldn't worry about the dinner, since I would organize it.

Turtle then mentioned that he would introduce my talk.

"What do you mean? If you're on your deathbed, you're too ill to go to my talk!" I exclaimed.

"Oh, I'm not that sick," he replied.

Turtle not only rose from his deathbed to show up at my talk, he also came to dinner.

I have one recollection from the dinner conversation. Turtle eagerly told us that the secondary sexual characteristics of female humans (which, for him, meant the breasts) were prominent and colorful, which was not the case for the secondary sexual characteristics of men. He believed that that pointed to an important difference in the purposes of male and female humans, and he wanted us to discuss it.

This was really not something I wanted my colleagues to discuss in my presence, at the dinner after my very first research talk, when I was the only woman at the table. I wanted us to talk about the subject of my talk, namely Mordell-Weil groups of generic polarized abelian varieties, and I tried to steer the conversation in that direction.

Luckily, I've mostly managed to avoid interacting with Turtle since then, though I am concerned about his female colleagues and students, and how he treats them.

While revisiting this story still conjures up feelings of annoyance, I'm pleased that I've at last reached the stage where I can look back on it with mild amusement.

"Dr. & Mrs. K"

When the Princeton University math department had an event or threw a party, the staff put an invitation into the cubbyhole of each faculty member and grad student, with their name on it. Everyone except me, that is.

K once returned from a trip to find in his pigeonhole an invitation to a party for math faculty and grad students, that had taken place while he was away. It was addressed to "Dr. & Mrs. K". Since he was a postdoc, K's pigeonhole was in a room marked "Faculty Only", so I wasn't allowed in (and I couldn't sneak in since the graduate secretary's desk was right outside the door). I didn't go to the party since I hadn't known about it.

I went to the department office and asked why all the other grad students got such notifications and not me, and was told the department was saving paper. I pointed out that I wouldn't necessarily find out about something before it happened, if K were traveling. This didn't bother the secretary. Pleading that I had as much right as any other math grad student to have an announcement in my box, with my name on it, led her to think of me as a radical feminist and a troublemaker.

The pattern continued at Ohio State, though the salutation was sometimes different. To welcome me to the faculty when I accepted the job offer, an OSU professor (who later became my Dean) sent a letter addressed to Profs. A/B (where A and B were K's and my last names), Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. Why he thought we shared a mailbox or should receive shared mail is anyone's guess. In addition, I wasn't a professor (I didn't yet have a PhD), and K didn't have an appointment or mailbox at Princeton University at that time. Somehow it made its way to me, since I have the letter.

A slice of lemon

I should tell one positive experience about applying for a university job. If my Looking-Glass University experience was the job interview from hell, then this was the job interview from heaven.

It began with a phone call offering me a postdoc position at the University of Chicago, and inviting me to visit. Not for an interview, since they had already made me an offer, but to help me decide whether to accept.

They put me up in a beautiful suite at the historic Quadrangle Club. Felix Browder, the department chair, took me for a lovely meal in the Club's elegant dining room.

Just before my talk, my host, Niels Nygaard, asked if I'd like some water. When I said yes, Niels went away and came back with a glass of water with a slice of lemon on the rim. I exclaimed at what a nice gesture that was, and he told me it wasn't him, it was the secretary. She had met me and liked me, and wanted me to take the job. I'll always remember that lemon slice. Sometimes it's the little things that one remembers.

Switching the offers

I was finishing my PhD and applying for jobs. My significant other, K, got his PhD a few years earlier, and was applying for tenure-track jobs.

Professor X was one of the good guys (he was the one who told me that I shouldn't let anyone get away with saying I got a job due to affirmative action, since I had a great file and I deserved any offers I got).  One day during that hiring season, Professor X phoned me and said his university (let's call it Confused State) planned to fill several tenure-track positions, and they wanted to interview K and me for two of them.

Three candidates were invited to interview at the same time, including K and me.

At my interview with the department Chair, much to my surprise, he informed me that the department had only one tenure-track opening. They also had a temporary postdoc position, from which one could eventually apply for a tenure-track job. He said it didn't matter to them which of K and I got which job.

He asked me which of us should get the tenure-track offer and which the postdoc. Should they offer the tenure-track job to me and the short-term position to K, or the other way around?

I was shocked at X's betrayal. I had been brought there under false pretenses.

I knew that I was terrible at thinking on my feet under pressure. I took a deep breath, and replied, almost without thinking, "Normally when hiring a senior person and a junior person for a senior and a junior position, the senior person gets the senior position and the junior person gets the junior position." That seemed at least like an obvious and innocuous statement.

K, X, and two other Confused State professors in my field were waiting for me outside the Chair's door, and asked how it went. When I told them, X and one of the other professors were furious at the third one, since he was on the hiring committee. It turned out that he had known that there was only one tenure-track opening, and he had misled his two colleagues. I was happy to learn that X hadn't in fact lied to me.

Eventually, K was offered the tenure-track assistant professorship and I was offered the temporary job.

K really wanted to be at Confused State for geographical reasons. But I wasn't willing to accept a postdoc position, when I already had tenure-track offers elsewhere. K was eager enough to go there that he would have been willing to take a temporary job in the hope that it would get upgraded later. We agonized at length, trying to figure out what to do.

Eventually, K came up with a good solution. K phoned the Chair and reminded him that he had left it up to us to say who should get which job. K asked the Chair to switch the offers. The Chair said he'd get back to him.

Some days later, the Chair phoned back. Downgrading K's offer didn't feel right to them. The department decided to upgrade my offer to tenure-track, without downgrading K's offer. At least we found out that they really were willing to offer me a tenure-track job.

I wasn't ready to forgive Confused State, and didn't accept the offer. The moral of the story is: don't mislead job candidates (or your colleagues). It isn't nice.

Consent Decree

Am I the only one who's had bizarre job interviews, or does that happen to everyone?

My first job interview was in 1984, when I was finishing my PhD. The Chair of the math department at Looking-Glass University phoned me at my office to invite me to interview for a postdoc position. This was well before the Internet and cell phones. We fixed the date, and he said he'd phone back with the details of who would meet me at the train station to take me to my hotel. I bought my train ticket, but never heard back from the Chair.

The day before my trip I phoned the Chair. "Hello, this is Alice Silverberg...," I began, and he hung up on me. I tried again. Same thing, except this time he angrily slammed down the phone. I tried a third time, but no one answered. Either he was being incredibly rude, or something was wrong with the phone connection and he wasn't able to hear me. It was shortly before offices close at 5 pm. Luckily, I managed to reach the department office and talk to a secretary who gave me the name of my hotel.

When I arrived by train, I found someone who could direct me to the hotel. When I rank the hotels I've been put up in on business trips, this one ranks near the bottom, both for how run-down my room was, and the discarded cigarette butt near the bed (though this wasn't as bad as the decaying sandwich I discovered behind a couch after a couple of weeks at a math summer school).

The next morning I made my way to the campus and found the Chair in his office. My main recollection is our walk from one side of campus to another. The point wasn't to show me the campus, it was so that the Chair could run his errands, which included picking up some large posters that a university printing office had printed for him, and mailing them at the campus post office. The posters were gifts for his children, who were in college. The Chair used his NSF grant to pay for the posters, the tubes, and the postage. I expressed surprise that NSF would pay for gifts for his kids, but he shrugged it off.

During the walk, the Chair asked me if I was married.

I had gone to a panel that Princeton put on for grad students, at which female faculty gave female students advice for how to navigate job interviews. They warned us that we would be asked the standard "illegal questions" about our personal lives, and our answers would be used against us. Their advice was:

Answer truthfully and politely. You could add "but here's why that doesn't matter and I'm still interested in the job." If you tell them it's not an appropriate question, you won't get the job. Maybe someday things will change, and we won't have to give you this advice.

When I replied to the Chair that yes, I was married, he asked what my husband did. When I replied, he told me that I couldn't take a job at Looking-Glass since they didn't plan to offer a job to my husband. I said that didn't matter because K already had nice offers in or near Nirvana, a nearby city. The Chair said that Nirvana was too far away. I disputed that, but the Chair wasn't interested.

Not long after my interview, I visited the city of Nirvana and stopped by the office of my friend Dr. Unicorn. While I was there he got a phone call from a mutual friend, Mr. Lion.

It turned out that Mr. Lion had interviewed for that same postdoc position at Looking-Glass U before I had. During Mr. Lion's interview, a Looking-Glass professor told him that the department had already decided that he was their first choice, but they might have to first offer the job to the woman they would be interviewing, before they could make an offer to him. Looking-Glass U was under a "consent decree", due to what (I was told by a colleague) was egregious discrimination against women. They had been forced to include a woman (me) on their short list.

Mr. Lion did indeed get the first offer, and turned it down. Looking-Glass U went far down their "short list", but I never got an offer.

Deciding that they wanted to hire a different candidate before I had even interviewed violated the consent decree. I asked K if I should report the violation, and his advice was, "If you do that, you'll get a reputation as a troublemaker, and you'll be unhirable anywhere."

Curiously, my friend Dr. Unicorn soon became a math professor at Looking-Glass U and continued to live near Nirvana, since his wife had a job there.

One reason I didn't feel too hurt by the rejection was that a colleague at another university where I applied, who saw my file with the letters of recommendation, told me, "Don't let anyone tell you that you got a job offer because you're a woman. Your file is wonderful. You're getting the offers based on merit." That was one of the kindest things anyone ever said to me.

"We assumed you weren't interested" (or: How not to make a job offer)

I've been holding back on telling any of the stories that will explain why I think of my Adventures in Numberland memoirs as having the subtitle "Why I don't discuss my personal life in professional settings." It's hard to tell those stories without discussing my personal life. And once I do that, it's hard to turn back. Well, here goes.

In my last year of grad school, my significant other, whom I'll call K, applied for a tenure-track job at Euphoria University, and I applied for a postdoc position there. We did not in any way link our applications. I even went to the trouble of using a different typesetting program from K's for my job applications, with a different font, and gave only my office address and phone number, not my home phone number. (This was back in the day of landlines.)

While K and I were traveling over the winter break, our friend and colleague Catsitter dropped by our apartment to feed the cat.

One day, while Catsitter was feeding the cat, the phone rang and Catsitter answered. The call was from Well Meaning, a young Euphoria professor, asking to speak to K. Catsitter explained that K was out of town, and he asked if K should return Well's call. Well replied, "No, I'll call again."

After we returned from our travels, I tried to get K to return Well's call, but K refused. "He said I shouldn't phone him. He'll phone me."

But Well never phoned back. Every so often I'd say to K, "Please phone him. Maybe it's about a job," but K wouldn't do it.

K and I eventually got rejection letters from Euphoria University.

A year or two later, I ran into Well in the Harvard math department Common Room. He said, "It's too bad you didn't come to Euphoria. The number theory group would have loved to have you." 

Perplexed, I told him I didn't know what he meant. "I got a rejection letter from Euphoria. In what capacity should I have come?"

Well said that the number theorists were very interested in making me a postdoc offer. Well had phoned K to see if he was interested in a tenure track offer. "When K didn't phone back, we assumed you weren't interested," Well said.

No one thought to contact me.

"But she misled us" (or: Hire people based on their own merits)

I am not enamored of discrimination on the basis of marital status.

In the late 1970s, two grad students told me that when they got married, their university took away one of their stipends, telling them that "two can live as cheaply as one."

Later, a mathematician told me that a department that planned to offer her a tenure-track job instead offered her a postdoc position, since the department was also offering her husband a postdoc job and thought they could get away with giving her a lower position than she deserved. She and her husband turned down the jobs, and took better offers elsewhere.

More recently, the pendulum has swung the other way. Rather than punishing women for being married, they're sometimes rewarded for it.

A scientist told me about two people her department hired, thinking that they were a married couple. Their new colleagues were angry when they found out the two weren't actually married, just living together. If the faculty had known, they wouldn't have offered a job to the woman.

Personally, I think that a job offer should be based on merit, rather than assumptions about the applicant's marital status. I think it's unfair to pass over people who worked harder and accomplished more, for reasons that are not based on merit or need.

A math department made an offer to a woman who then asked them if they could hire her husband. The department then hired the husband, but was furious when the couple divorced, especially when it turned out that the divorce had been in the works while they were on the job market. The two mathematicians wanted to live in the same city since they had joint custody of their children. But the department felt tricked into making an offer under false pretenses.

And then there's the job candidate who was treated like furniture, rather than evaluated as a mathematician in her own right.

I think that people should be hired based on their own merits, not on someone else's. If you are contemplating giving someone an advantage or disadvantage based on what you think is their marital status, keep in mind that:

• The situation might not be what you think it is.
• Circumstances can change. The person you really wanted might leave or die, and you might be stuck with the one you didn't want. Are you OK with that? Would it change your decision?
• Someone might be hurt by your actions. Are you passing over people who are better? Is that fair? Is it legal?

You can be the tea lady or the secretary

May is upon us which means it is time for the Generals Skit. This is our big chance to expose the lighter side of Generals(?) as well as to get revenge on those professors who asked us questions we would have preferred not to have seen. All graduate students who have taken generals since the last generals skit (May 1980) are invited, encouraged, and urged to participate. ... A first meeting will be held on Friday, May 1 at 4 p.m. in room 322. We need writers, actors and any suitable special skills.

So read the note in my grad student mailbox in April of my first year at Princeton. I thought, "Oh, what fun! I'd love to help write the skit!" It was a rare opportunity in grad school to be clever and funny.

I had gotten a form letter dated April 6 from the Director of Graduate Studies stating "Generals will be given in May. If you plan to take them, clear your special topics with me as soon as possible and see Etta for paperwork."

On April 20, the graduate secretary Etta sent me a handwritten note that read, "Generals are scheduled for week of April 27. I will let you know your date by 4/22".

Having already contended with broken promises by Princeton, I was miffed that they might not honor their promise that my General exam would be in May. I pointed out that I had carefully planned my April study schedule down to the last day, and an April exam would disrupt my best laid plans.

The response from Etta, dated 4/24, was succinct: "General is Fri (5/1) 1pm". (As was the case for the other messages, the salutation was just my last name.) I could no longer complain that the date wasn't in May.

I went to the first planning meeting for the Generals Skit, which had been moved forward to before my May 1 exam date. I asked to help write the skit. The guys in charge said I couldn't do that, since if I failed the General exam, I couldn't be involved in that year's skit. They planned to write the skit themselves, before my May 1 exam.

When I passed the exam, they gave me a choice of two parts. "You can be the Tea Lady or the graduate secretary." The role they wrote for the tea lady was a mildly cruel caricature of a frail old woman. I asked to play a professor, and was told that of course I couldn't do that since all the math faculty were male. I pointed out that Leslie Jane Federer had ably played Professor Bob Gunning a few years earlier, but that didn't change their minds.

I chose to watch the show as an audience member, rather than play the tea lady or the secretary. The other female student who passed the General exam played the Tea Lady, with such choice lines as "I'm hot to trot" and "Here, have a cookie" and, according to the script, nonchalantly filed her nails (not something I ever saw the real tea lady do). It didn't have to be me, but surely someone could have written a better script!

Catch-22 at Princeton

One of the most useful things I learned at Princeton University was to turn on the kitchen light in my grad student apartment with my eyes closed, immediately walk away, and return 10 minutes later. That gave the army of cockroaches time to retreat.

I was a bit frightened of the campus exterminator, who laid out poison for the cockroaches and mice with a sinister grin and gleam in his eye as he spoke with obvious relish about his love for killing things.

You might wonder why I even wanted campus housing (especially after I spent a month without a working refrigerator). But the cost of off-campus housing was considerably more than my income. In fact, my NSF Graduate Fellowship stipend was only slightly more than the rent Princeton charged me for graduate student housing.

Before I started grad school, I spent a year at the University of Cambridge. So it could try to pocket the difference between my NSF Fellowship and my Cambridge tuition, Princeton University insisted that I enroll at Princeton in absentia, rather than defer my first year as a Princeton grad student. This caused me no end of trouble.

For example, Princeton's Housing Department informed me that they would count me as a fourth year student in the housing lottery for my third year on campus. That meant that I wouldn't get campus housing in my fourth year on campus, since they would then consider me to be a fifth year student.

I still have some of the correspondence between me and the Assistant Dean. In one letter I wrote, "You state in your letter that I was eligible for graduate housing during my first year of enrollment at Princeton, i.e., while I was enrolled as a full-time student in England." I quoted the relevant passage from my lease that showed that I was not eligible for Princeton housing while in absentia in another country. I continued, quite logically, "To declare that my housing priority was greatest in a year in which it was impossible for me to use it is a Catch-22."

I countered the Assistant Dean's remark that the policy was recently reviewed by a campus committee and found to be fair by pointing out that a member of that committee told me that under the correct interpretation of the policy, my year overseas should not count against me.

I mentioned that another graduate student a year ahead of me had been in the identical situation, but the housing office didn't count his in absentia year against him. As far as I knew, I was the first student to be penalized in this way in the housing lottery.

I naively thought that the facts would sway the Assistant Dean. Isn't a university supposed to care about facts and fairness? But my letter rubbed her the wrong way. Concerning the student in the identical situation, she countered with, "Mr. X was the recipient of an error that was made when he initially came back from in absentia status, and then was carried through last year.  He has been informed that he will be listed as a 5th-year student this year."

My friend "Mr. X" was, understandably, angry with me for messing up his housing priority. I felt awful that I had involved him, and that the Assistant Dean's hostility towards me might hurt him. I pleaded with her not to penalize him.

I lived off campus in my fourth year of grad school. I admit that I was glad to be free of the cockroaches, the mice, and the creepy exterminator guy!

Empathy, Part 2

When math majors were assigned advisors at Prestigious University, Jane was the only one whose advisor wasn't a full professor. Her advisor was a postdoc, and was the only woman among the research faculty. There had never been a female tenured or tenure track professor of mathematics at Prestigious University, and Jane's advisor was the first female math postdoc.

Jane was miffed that her advisor was temporary faculty who would soon leave, while everyone else's advisors were long-time established professors who had much greater familiarity with the courses and with the culture of the department. Jane tried to convince the secretary who made the assignments to reassign her to a full professor, but the secretary thought that it would be best for a female student to have a female advisor.

Not surprisingly, the postdoc's knowledge of the department and the university weren't very deep. Neither Jane nor the postdoc found much to say to each other. And it wasn't fair to the postdoc to have to take on the extra burden of advising an undergraduate. The male postdocs didn't do that.

While I appreciate what the secretary was trying to do, I'm not a big fan of the idea that we should expect women to be better mentors for women than men would, and men to be better mentors for men than women would. At Prestigious University, it was the professors' job to advise students. If they were doing a better job advising men than advising women, then they weren't doing their job.

If a male doctor gives better medical care to male patients than to female patients because he feels empathy for people who remind him of himself, then he's not doing his job.

This story about a Harvard researcher going the extra mile for a patient because they were both women of about the same age reminds me that there's still work to be done in empathy training. We need to teach ourselves not to just mentor, hire, or promote people who remind us of ourselves, and not to give favoritism to colleagues because we share their nationality, gender, religion, race, etc. If we're going to get along with each other, and have the sort of world we'd like to live in, it's important to learn to treat everyone fairly and well.

Empathy, Part 1: The FedEx package

The world runs on empathy. While empathy is hard, and I'm not very successful at it, I would like cultivating empathy to be a high priority for everyone.

During my stays in Germany, one of my hobbies was visiting Jewish museums. I found those visits more chilling after someone told me that Hitler wanted to create museums whose purpose was to inform people about the Jews, after ridding the world of them.

In November of 1999, I went to part of a research conference about Jewish life in the local region. After a talk given by a curator at a nearby town's Jewish Museum, we exchanged contact information so she could send me a published version of her talk. I asked her how she got interested in the subject, and she said she was trained as a historian (but not in Jewish history), and this was the only job offer she got. I asked if anyone Jewish had provided input for the exhibits at her museum, and she said no.

In early December I visited the museum. I found one of the exhibits to be both strangely mundane and oddly memorable. A large display case contained only some closed black prayer books and the FedEx envelope they came in. The FedEx label on the envelope was easy to read. It included the name, address, and home phone number of the sender, and gave instuctions to bill the recipient for transportation charges, duties, and taxes. The exhibit's caption said that the books were donated by a former resident of the town, and had belonged to her uncle. The caption emphasized that the donor described the contents as "used prayer books --- sentimental value only".

The donor's address was in Bayside, Queens, in New York City. To a museum curator in Germany, Queens was far away. As a woman from Queens, I empathized with the sender. I would have been unhappy if my home address and phone number appeared on an exhibit at a German museum (let alone the information that I hadn't paid for the postage).

On December 9, I emailed the curator I had met, thanked her for sending me the copy of her talk, and asked about the FedEx exhibit. When I didn't receive a reply, I wrote to the museum with my question. I've lightly edited for anonymity and brevity the correspondence I had with a different museum employee. (I wanted to write in German, but decided that the recipient's English would be better than my German. I apologize for not correcting the recipient's English, but I wanted to retain the flavor of the correspondence.)

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To: Jüdisches Museum 

Date: Fri, March 3, 2000

Dear Sir/Madam:

I have visited the Jewish Museum in [town's name], and 

found it very interesting. I have a question that I

hope you can answer. One exhibit contained prayer books 

that had been sent from the USA. The exhibit included 

the FedEx envelope that the books had been sent in, and 

noted that the sender had put "sentimental value only" 

on the envelope. Why was the FedEx envelope included in 

the exhibit, and what was its significance?

Thank you very much. 

Yours sincerely, 

Prof. Dr. A. Silverberg

Professor of Mathematics, Ohio State University

Visiting Professor and Humboldt Research Fellow, [my affiliation in Germany]

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From: Jüdisches Museum  

Date: Mon, March 6, 2000

Dear Ms. Silverberg,

[apology that no one responded to my December message] 

The station is named "Preservation" and its more a museological topic 

than a historical one. The Pentateuch of Mr. X would not be 

complete as object without the fedex formular. At "Preservation" we 

are showing small collections of very different inhoulds from financial 

value far behind great collections as the Gundelfingers one for 

example. But for our museum they have another kind of value. These 

objects were all given with a letter or another kind of message. The 

donators want to communicate their history and those of their 

families to the public. They want to rescribe their history to the 

public history.

That in very short terms.

Hoping to have given a answer, I remain with kind regards, ...

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To: Jüdisches Museum 

Date: Thu, March 30, 2000

Thank you very much for your reply, and for taking the

time to answer my question.

I have 2 comments to make about the exhibit of the FedEx 

envelope, which I hope will be helpful to you. 

First, the phrase "sentimental value only" on a package

sent from the USA to overseas is only a formulaic phrase, 

and has a standard meaning. It is put there so that the

recipient will not be asked to pay customs duty on the

package. This phrase is not meant to be taken literally.

What it means is that the sender is asking the "Zollamt" 

to charge no customs duty. 

The second thing that struck me was that the FedEx envelope

included the phone number and address of the sender. I

wondered whether the museum had obtained the permission of

the sender, before exhibiting her phone number and address.

(In fact, I considered writing down the phone number so that

I could call the sender and ask her that myself, the next 

time that I am in New York.) Personally, I would not want 

my phone number and address to be displayed in a museum.

I hope that these comments are useful to you. I would be

interested in hearing your reactions to them.

Yours sincerely,

Prof. Dr. Alice Silverberg

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I never received a reply. I visited the museum again, and glanced through the guest book. Schoolchildren had scribbled in it, complaining that they found the museum incomprehensible. They said that the exhibits were not explained well enough for them to understand the point. I added a comment on how I thought the museum was sacrificing clarity to please postmodern museumologists, and I mentioned some of the problematic and unnecessarily obscure exhibits.

While I was there, I copied down the information on the FedEx envelope, and the exhibit's caption. When I returned to the U.S., I mailed a letter to the donor to let her know about the exhibit. She replied with a gracious handwritten note thanking me for alerting her. She had no idea that her full address and phone number were on public display. She phoned the museum director, who agreed to remove the address and phone number.

I recently found an article on the Internet from around the time I was writing to the museum, reporting that the local Jewish community was calling for the resignation of the museum's director for lacking the necessary sensitivity to the Jewish faith, and for nearly completely failing to include the Holocaust in the permanent exhibit. His critics pointed out that 90% of the exhibits come from members of the Jewish community, but the exhibits are not adequately explained. I was glad to see that I wasn't the only one who noticed.

If you believe in fairness, it's important to learn to empathize with everyone. Put yourself in the other person's shoes. If you wouldn't want your home address and phone number displayed in a museum on the other side of the world without your knowledge or permission, then perhaps you should think twice about displaying someone else's home address and phone number without their knowledge or permission.