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.