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.)

----------------------------

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]

----------------------------

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, ...

----------------------------

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

---------------

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.