"Next Time" or: The Free Lunch

When I first met Z, she and I immediately hit it off. Eager to make a new friend, I emailed her afterwards with some information I knew she would want, and suggested we get together for lunch sometime. She replied, "I really enjoyed meeting you as well. I would love to get together for lunch." But her schedule turned out to be too busy, and she couldn't find the time. 

Two and a half years later I tried again, we found a day and time, and met for lunch.

Lunch was lovely. We had a lot in common. When I complained about the self-absorbed people in Orange County, she was quick to agree. She felt strongly about it.

When the check arrived, I reached over and took it.

My friend seemed surprised. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'll pay," I said, as I got out my credit card.

"Why would you do that?" she asked.

"I'll pay this time, and you'll pay next time. That way I know there'll be a next time."

Z thought that was so clever. She liked the idea of ensuring that there'd be a next time. She wanted me to meet her husband, who got a PhD in my field before leaving mathematics.

Nearly a year later, having heard nothing from Z, I asked my friend K whether I should remind Z that she owed me a lunch. He told me not to; doing so would be terribly rude. So I emailed Z, "How time flies! I remember how much we enjoyed our lunch together in January, and was thinking we should do it again. Do you have time over the break?" and I added some info that I thought her ex-mathematician husband would be interested in. A few weeks later I wished her a happy New Year, asked if she had gotten my message, and said I hoped that everything was OK with her. 

She replied that she'd love for us to get together. She invited me to dinner at her home, for a date a couple of months in the future.

In the interim I invited F, a mathematician in my field, to give a seminar talk at UCI. He wanted to fly in on the evening of Z's upcoming dinner. I thought to myself, "What are the chances that the dinner with Z will really happen? Should I tell F that I can't pick him up at the airport or go to dinner with him because I committed to something else? Or should I reschedule with Z? After all, this is Orange County, the land of ghosting and bailing. Z will undoubtedly cancel at the last minute."

I decided that if I cancelled on Z to accommodate F, I'd be succumbing to unwarranted cynicism, in addition to being a bad person. So I told my colleague F that I couldn't meet him that evening.

Sure enough, a few days before the planned dinner, Z "postponed" it.

When Z emailed a month later and made a vague suggestion that we meet in two or three months for dinner at a restaurant, I again asked K whether I could remind Z that she owed me a lunch. He told me to let it go. Knowing that I didn't have the self-discipline to go to a restaurant with Z and not mention our "next time" discussion, I didn't reply to her email.

Years later my colleague G, who was a patient of Z's, told me that my name came up when she saw Z. Z told G the basics of our story (but not the part about her free lunch), and wondered whether it was too late to get in touch with me. G told her it was. I wish she hadn't. It's stories like this that make me think of Orange County as the land of missed opportunities.

Casseroles and Dinner Parties

Soon after I moved to Irvine, California, I became "friends" with X, who was always happy to take a beach walk with me when I invited her, but never asked me to do something with her. 

"I don't understand the `friends' who are happy to do things with me when I initiate it, but never initiate contact with me. What's going on there?" I asked X during one such beach walk.

"I know! I really hate that! What's wrong with those people?" exclaimed X animatedly. She clearly felt strongly about this, but didn't seem to realize that she was one of those people.

I decided to perform an experiment. I stopped inviting X, and waited to see if she would contact me. Of course, she didn't (or else I wouldn't have a story). For good measure, I tried the same experiment on Y, the one other "friend" I had made when I moved to Irvine, with the same result.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer about a year later. 

"The only nice part is that when you have your surgery, everyone will bring you casseroles," said an East Coast friend who had earlier gotten a similar diagnosis.

"No one will bring me casseroles," I replied, "because no one will know I have cancer."  I was in the middle of my experiment to see what would happen if I didn't initiate interaction with my two "friends" X and Y. And I didn't feel comfortable telling my work colleagues because I had heard that some of them use that sort of information against their colleagues in the "merit reviews" that determine our salaries.

After going through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance of the evidence that my concept of friendship didn't exist in Orange County, I decided to get more assertive about obtaining human contact, if not real friendship.

I started to accost people I met and ask them, "I'm going through culture shock from moving to the OC. People seem to have a different concept of friendship than I'm used to. What do I need to know, to help me survive here?"

The answers ranged (not very widely) from  "everyone is self-absorbed" to "there's a lot of narcissism and bipolar disorder in the OC. It's from being too close to Hollywood" to "When I want to talk to a friend, I pick up the phone. When I want to be with a friend, I get on a plane."

Someone told me, "you can't have a dinner party here."

"Why not?" I asked. "Is it because too many invited guests say no?"

"Not just that. The main problem is that they don't respond."

"Doesn't that mean they're not coming?"

"Not necessarily."

"They'd just show up, without telling you in advance? Why would anyone do that?"

"They're waiting to see if something better comes along."

The woman I had this discussion with was so impressed with our similar views about friendship that she enthusiastically added, "I like you. I'm going to invite you to a dinner party."

My first thought was "How nice!" My next thought was, "Oh, no. If she does that, I'll have to reciprocate. What a burden. I don't want to throw a dinner party." I had been living in the OC long enough to have absorbed its laziness.

I never got that dinner invitation, perhaps because she and I didn't exchange names. Maybe she too didn't want the hassle.

When the "fighting for my life" stage of my medical adventure wound down, I realized that I should swallow my pride and end the experiment with the two "friends" I actually had. I went on a beach walk with X, and clothes shopping with Y, where I told them about my diagnosis. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but their fear about whether I'd expect something from them seemed more palpable than their empathy. They certainly didn't offer to bring me casseroles. Nor, I'm sorry to say, did I bring Y any casseroles when she was diagosed with breast cancer a few years later, though I did express my sympathy.

If I had to do it again, I'd have kept inviting X and Y when I wanted company, and not worried about whether they reciprocated. "Friendship" in Orange County is often transactional. If you want something, you ask for it. I'm surprised by how generously my neighbors respond to pleas for help from total strangers on the neighborhood listserv, from supplying crutches to giving rides to the hospital. Here, friends can be people who do things for you or with you, rather than people who care about you.

Friends

"I have a friend who's a mathematician," people have said to me in Orange County, when I tell them I'm a mathematician.

"Oh, what's their name? Maybe I know them," I reply.

They give me a "deer in the headlights" look. They struggle to speak, but nothing coherent comes out.

"Do they not trust me enough to tell me their friend's name?" I wonder to myself. "Or have they forgotten the name of their friend?"

I prod. Eventually, it turns out that they don't know the name. Their "friend" is someone they met once at a party. If they were even told the name, they promptly forgot it.

That wasn't what I considered to be a friend. I knew the names of my friends.

I promised myself that I'd never become so Orange County as to declare that someone was my friend when I didn't know their name.

I've broken that promise. I've now lived in the OC long enough that I've become the deer in the headlights, when I realize that I don't know the name of someone I just referred to as my friend (and saw every day for the past month at the boathouse).

Medical Mystery Tour

When I arrived in Irvine in the summer of 2004 to start my new job, I chose a primary care doctor and went for a routine checkup. Late on a Friday afternoon, a nurse phoned me to tell me that my doctor was worried about one of my blood test results and I need to come in that day to get retested.

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"It's your pancreas."

"Is my doctor worried that I might have pancreatic cancer?"

"Maybe."

I remembered that a friend who had a terminally ill relative told me, "in case you don't know what pancreatic cancer is, it's a death sentence."

I immediately phoned the lab (which was down the hall from the nurse who phoned me). The recording said it was closed until Monday.

I spent that weekend sitting on the beach, watching the waves roll in and feeling sorry for myself as I tried to hold back the tears and not think about my new scare, pancreatic cancer, or my other current scare, breast cancer, which had killed my mother, and for which a recent mammogram was concerning enough that the radiologist insisted I enroll in an MRI clinical trial (under the assumption that my insurance wouldn't pay for a real MRI).

Blood was drawn when the lab opened on Monday. When I phoned a few days later to ask for the result, I was told I needed to wait until my doctor returned from vacation in a couple of weeks. I pushed back, and then changed my primary care doctor so I could learn the blood test result sooner.

Thus began a Kafkaesque nightmare with the health care system, as I was sent to one specialist after another, and for one test after another. 

One of the doctors made me walk down a hall in an open gown in front of a group of construction workers, to wait in a dark closet. 

Another time, my breasts were poked and prodded by a group of elderly male UCI doctors (i.e., colleagues of mine) who stood around discussing my breasts and alternately ignoring and getting angry at my questions. It wasn't how a doctor (let alone a colleague) should treat a human being.

The testing led to a concern that I might have ovarian cancer. Pancreatic, breast, and ovarian cancer scares were my welcome to UCI.

I was sent to a specialist who insisted on performing a procedure. The "informed consent" form said I understood that I was volunteering for a research study and the procedure would in no way benefit me. When I questioned this, the specialist yelled at me, said that what the form stated wasn't true, but I absolutely must sign it and not cross anything out. The procedure turned out to be not only unnecessary and unhelpful, but also left me doubled over in pain.

A recurring conversation with specialists was:

I ask: "What do you advise?"

The reply: "What's your insurance?"

"Does it matter?"

"It might!"

"I'd like your best medical advice. What would you recommend if cost weren't an issue?"

The specialists would give me a confused look. They had no idea how to give the best medical advice. They gave advice based on what the insurance company would be most willing to approve.

As time went by, I switched my question to, "If your mother were in this situation, what treatment would you recommend?" That seemed to elicit more useful information. But then I realized that some people in SoCal are either self-absorbed or hate their mothers, so I changed it to, "What would you do if you were the patient?" Eventually, I changed insurance plans to be on a plan that made the doctors' lives easier. 

After some truly shocking experiences with doctors (some too lurid to tell here), I switched back and forth several times between UCI and other medical groups.

Luckily, those initial scares eventually turned out to be false alarms. But four years later I got a real diagnosis of breast cancer (that probably should have been caught sooner). The stakes suddenly got much higher. 

Since I was on an HMO (Health Maintenance Organization), I needed the approval of my primary care doctor before anything could be done. She was on a long vacation in Maui. When she came back and learned I had cancer, her attitude toward me changed sharply from pleasant to hostile. I wondered whether her practice lost money on patients with cancer, and she was trying to get rid of me.

A friend who was an oncologist in another country thought that my oncologist was making major mistakes. I was told that I couldn't change oncologists unless I sent the HMO a letter of complaint, so I did. My request to change doctors was still denied, but my "grievance" was forwarded to my oncologist. The furious oncologist phoned me, yelled at me hysterically, refused to treat me, and hung up on me.

I suppose it's no wonder that I have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder whenever I go to a doctor.

A long battle with my medical group and insurance company eventually led me to a series of oncologists. One had been on probation for "gross negligence". Another told me he didn't want to see patients---his top priority was his own research. Weeks after I should have gotten the result of a test for circulating tumor cells (a particularly scary wait), I contacted his nurse. She was angry that I had called, and told me not to contact them again---the result hadn't come in and she'd let me know when it did. I eventually phoned the lab to learn that the lab had faxed the doctor the result just a few days after the blood was drawn.

The arrogance and anger of some of the specialists were disturbing and unpleasant, but what I found most scary were the mistakes, the downright dishonesty, and the lack of critical thinking skills, since my life depended on their getting it right.

I was glad that my surgeries were all bilateral, since the chances that a medical report stated the correct side of the body seemed to be around 50%.

I gave up trying to correct the false statements in my medical reports that were knowingly put there to cover the doctor's ass. No one was willing to change them, and it's not smart to alienate someone who holds a scalpel while you're unconscious.

As for their critical thinking skills, here's a subtle but mathematically interesting one. The doctor's argument for recommending that I do something was, "if you don't do it, then your chances of a recurrence are 2% each year. So there's a 40% chance it'll recur within 20 years." I knew that wasn't right. If it were really 2% a year (which it wasn't---it was considerably less), the probability would have been 33% after 20 years. I was too startled to reply, but as a math teacher I should have asked "so what would be the chances after 51 years?"

Then there were the blatant privacy violations. Like the vintage convertible in the hospital's public parking garage with its top down, with a list of private patient data (names, medical diagnoses, what looked like Social Security numbers) on the seat, fully visible to everyone who walked by. Or similar documents at the top of an open waste basket in the examining room, in full view of patients freezing in skimpy medical gowns as they waited an hour for the doctor to show up.

One specialist boasted to me that his patients waited an average of 5 hours after their appointment time before they saw him. He thought that proved what a popular doctor he was. (I thought it showed how poor he was at scheduling.)

I was more impressed by the chutzpah of the surgeon who scheduled my appointment for 11 am but didn't take me until after 12:30. It's not that he was seeing other patients all that time. Around 11:30 he walked through the waiting room and left the office. From the window I could see him walking down the street. He returned half an hour later with a sandwich. When he finally met with me his primary concern wasn't my health, it was making sure I signed his arbitration agreement.

Perhaps most disappointing was the heartlessness of some of the UCI specialists, who were my colleagues and neighbors. I had thought that doctors chose the medical profession because they care about people and want to help them. At UCI, I didn't feel I was being welcomed into a community of people who cared about each other.

Interviews

I didn't know how much I could trust the Boston transit system, so I played it safe and arrived at the hotel an hour and a half early. The instructions emphasized that the interviewers work on a very tight schedule, so get there early and phone the interviewer 5 to 10 minutes before your scheduled interview time. At 10:20 am I picked up the hotel phone and asked to be connected to the interviewer's hotel room.

He checked out yesterday, I was told.

That can't be. He's supposed to meet me now. Could you please connect me to his room? 

No, someone else has already taken that room.

I began to panic. I was a 20-year-old college senior who had been nominated by Harvard for a graduate fellowship for people who wanted to become college educators. I had made it to the final round, which consisted of the interview. Even though I had arrived absurdly early, I was going to either miss the interview completely, or at best show up late and flustered.

Suddenly, I remembered that a friend had told me about his interview with the same interviewer a day or so earlier. He helpfully described the experience in detail, down to the actual four digit hotel room where his interview took place. It was an odd piece of data to include in his report. Even odder was that I remembered it.

Hoping my memory was correct, but strongly doubting it, I hopped on an elevator, took it the appropriate floor, knocked on the door of the hotel room, and held my breath as I waited for a response.

Eventually, a man opened the door. He was surprised to see me there. All the other interviewees had called on the hotel phone. I explained what had happened when I tried to phone, and how I knew his room number. He phoned the front desk, and learned that they had confused him with another guest who had checked out.

His hotel room was taken up by two large beds that were perhaps a foot apart. He sat down on one of them, and motioned for me to sit across from him on the other bed. Our knees were almost touching.

What I remember most about the interview, more than 40 years later, was the interviewer constantly rubbing his thighs up and down with his hands. 

The only thing I remember about our discussion was that we had different ideas about the meaning of the ethical part of the fellowship criteria. Since it was a fellowship for future educators, I tried to steer the discussion to my views on ethics in pedagogy and education. My recollection is that the interviewer equated ethics with religion, and pressed me for my religious views. That's something I consider completely private, and not something I share with strangers. The New York City public schools had impressed on me the separation of church and state, which I had subconsciously extrapolated to a wall between religion on the one hand, and one's schooling and career on the other. The interviewer wanted to breach that wall. Further, I remembered my parents' belief that someone we knew didn't get into Harvard/Radcliffe because of her answer to a question her interviewer asked about her ancestry (my parents interpreted it as anti-semitism), so I was wary of interview questions about religion.

Sitting close together on beds while the interviewer rubbed his thighs didn't feel right to me. When I was asked afterwards to send feedback on my interview, I wanted to tell them that. But I didn't want to hurt my chances of getting a fellowship, and it felt too creepy and embarrassing to tell them about the beds. Instead, I briefly told them about the hotel room mixup and made suggestions to prevent that from happening to future applicants. I also praised the interviewer for being well prepared and well organized, but added that I thought that the interviewer's definition of moral and ethical values was more "political" than mine, so we didn't communicate well on that subject. Religion and sex felt like hot potatoes that I didn't want to touch in my comments.

I didn't get the fellowship. We were told that no information would be given to us about the reasons, so I don't know which parts of the interview I failed. As best I can tell, the winners were all at least as well qualified as I was, so I don't have a complaint about the decision.

But whenever anyone says that a woman who goes to a man's hotel room, especially a stranger's, is "asking for it", I think of that interview.

I was glad to see that Harvard now tells alumni interviewers to meet prospective students in neutral places such as coffee shops, rather than in their homes (or on beds in hotel rooms).

I remember my interview for an Ivy League college I'll call Ivory Tower, when I was a 16-year-old high school senior. It was in the New York City apartment of an alumnus I'll call Prince Charming, since he was quite handsome. Mr. Charming very kindly made me a cup of tea with honey, since I arrived on his doorstep with a very bad cold. Who goes to an interview with a cold? If an interviewee did that to me now, I'd recommend rejection based on atrocious judgment.

After I got accepted to Ivory Tower (have they no standards?), I went to the party that was intended to convince accepted students to enroll. Another student (let's call her Jane) and I had great fun playing ping pong with Mr. Charming. Jane's interview with Charming had been at his office. She teased me about having had my interview at his home, and claimed he was flirting with me. That seemed like total nonsense. In any case, Charming was way too old to be interested in us. Only later did I wonder whether Charming did something at Jane's interview that led her to think he was interested in her.

Jane and I turned down Ivory Tower and went to Harvard. In our first week, Jane told me that Charming was now the boyfriend of someone in Jane's dorm, whom I'll call Snow White. I never found out whether they met at an interview or some other way. But Jane was right that Charming was interested in dating someone our age. Snow and Prince married right after she graduated, and lived happily ever after (according to her reports in the alumni news).

Some things I've learned about how to hire

The below will appear in the Early Career section of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

The editor of the Early Career section of the AMS Notices has asked me to give advice for more senior mathematicians on the theme "How to hire a mathematician". I've told stories about hiring (interspersed with some advice) at https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com, often of what went wrong, but sometimes of what went right. I recently read some of these stories while asking myself "what can we learn from this?" I've collected below some of what I've learned. I hope it will be useful for those who hire. 

1. Write job ads that say what they mean and mean what they say. 

I'm frequently contacted by people who ask me for advice about how or whom to hire, or want me to help them spread the word about their job search. They tell me what they're looking for in applicants. 

Before responding, I look up the job ad and compare it to what I was told they're looking for. It's surprising how different those two can be.

My first recommendation is that job ads should say what they mean and mean what they say. The ad should give the true criteria on which you'll base your decision.

Make the criteria and hiring procedures public and clear, and stick to them. 

It's not good when an "inner circle" of applicants has access to information, or to the "unwritten rules", that the rest of the applicants don’t have. The inner circle knows the real rules, and knows which rules and deadlines they can ignore and get away with. People who know people in your department or on the hiring committee, or whose advisors have friends on the faculty, shouldn't have an unfair advantage.

The "rules of the game" should also be reasonable and make sense. Sometimes, job ads are so specific that it's clear that the people who wrote it already know whom they want to hire. They're just going through the motions, following the letter of the rules but not the spirit. If you have already decided whom you want to hire, don't waste the time of other applicants by posting a job ad.

If a goal is to hire good people, try to write a job ad that gives you maximum flexibility, and doesn't needlessly tie your hands. That helps you avoid a situation where the applicant you want to hire doesn't satisfy the criteria in the job ad.

Here's a story that illustrates some of the above:

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-rules-of-game.html

2. Advertise widely.

Don't rely on an "old boy network" of people you know (even if that's a diverse group). 

3. Put together a diverse hiring committee. 

There's a natural tendency (which we should all be fighting) to hire people who remind us of ourselves. We all have blind spots. While we can and should work hard to overcome our own subconscious biases, a diverse hiring committee makes it easier to hire the best people and not overlook them.

Here's a (hopefully amusing) story where a diverse hiring committee might have been helpful:

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2018/01/hire-me.html  

4. Choose the best applicants for the job.

When you decide to whom to make an offer, choose the best applicants, taking into account what the ad says you're looking for. This might seem obvious. But the below list includes some stories where that didn't happen, with various rationalizations that I didn't think were reasonable. (I do understand that "best" is subjective, and perhaps impossible or unreasonable to pin down. That's why it's helpful to think in advance about what your goals are, and to write an ad that helps you achieve them.) In particular, resist the temptation to base hiring decisions on guesses about the candidates' personal lives, and whether or not a candidate will take a job, or will stay.

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2021/09/but-she-misled-us-or-hire-people-based.html

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2017/09/wed-love-to-hire-woman.html

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2021/09/we-assumed-you-werent-interested-or-how.html  

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2017/08/but-is-she-on-trajectory-to-get-fields.html

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-meritocracy.html

5. Follow best practices. 

Train faculty and staff in best practices for hiring. Best practices include not asking irrelevant personal questions during job interviews. And being prepared to intervene if others who haven't been trained (such as faculty spouses) ask those questions, or say or do something they shouldn't. Here are some stories that illustrate this:

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2018/01/personal-questions.html

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2021/03/wives-with-spoons_3.html

6. Behave professionally, ethically and legally, and hold people accountable.

Behave professionally, not just to the applicants during their job interviews, but all through the process, to the applicants, to other faculty and staff who are involved in hiring, etc. This isn't your personal life, it's your job. Do your job professionally.

Put in place good practices and policies that make it easy for people to do the right thing, and hold people accountable when they break the rules. 

At many times in our professional lives, but especially in hiring, it can be helpful to ask ourselves “Is this professional? Is this ethical? Is this legal?”

Here are some relevant stories, which could just as well have been included in the above section on choosing the best applicants:

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2018/04/id-be-happy-to-hire-her-if-she-were-male.html

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2017/12/why-is-this-job-candidate-like-writing.html

7. Be honest.

Be honest, not just in job ads, though that too. 

Most importantly, don't mislead job candidates. For example, if they are promised something during the hiring process, they have a right (possibly a legal one) to expect such promises to be honored. 

Further, don't bring an applicant to your campus under false pretenses. I know of cases where applicants were told they were being invited for a job interview, and didn't learn until half-way through the visit that it wasn't actually a job interview. To get the job, they would have needed to visit again. This isn't fair to applicants who are traveling a lot for job interviews, and need to decide which trips are worth taking. I know of other cases where candidates were told at the interview that they weren't really being considered for the job they had been told they were interviewing for.

Honesty needs to extend further than just the job candidates. The people doing the hiring also need to be given accurate information, so they can deal honestly with the candidates. 

Two stories:

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2021/09/switching-offers.html

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2018/05/stage-whisper.html

8. Be kind.

Well, obviously we should be kind to job applicants. Early career applicants are at a vulnerable moment in their lives, and we should make them feel welcome and wanted. Going the extra distance to do or say something nice, even if it's small, can make a tremendous difference and be remembered for a long time. Negative interactions will also be remembered for a long time, possibly longer! 

Perhaps less obviously, we should also be kind to our colleagues (including staff) who are involved in hiring. Some of the nastiest interactions I've seen have involved hiring. We can disagree, and disagreeing is often necessary in order for us to do our jobs well. But it's easier to do our jobs well, and our communities are better and happier places, when we argue respectfully.

These stories of welcoming and unwelcoming experiences during the hiring process might help to illustrate what I mean:

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2021/10/hot-chocolate-and-handshakes.html

https://numberlandadventures.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-slice-of-lemon.html

--------

To summarize:

1. Write job ads that say what they mean and mean what they say. 

2. Advertise widely.

3. Put together a diverse hiring committee. 

4. Choose the best applicants for the job.

5. Follow best practices. 

6. Behave professionally, ethically and legally, and hold people accountable.

7. Be honest.

8. Be kind.

I hope that keeping these goals in mind will help our community behave professionally, fairly, legally, and kindly.

Acknowledgment: I thank David Pollack for helpful feedback.

California Time

"My wife and I will pick you up at your hotel at 6 and take you to dinner," said the department chair during my job interview.

He had already picked me up at my hotel several times during my visit, and he always arrived a half hour after the appointed time. Each time, I patiently waited at the curb for him to swing by.

This time, out of curiousity, I asked him how long it takes to drive from his home to my hotel. "Fifteen minutes," he replied. Then why was he always a half hour late? I decided not to ask, it being a job interview and all.

After dinner that last evening, he dropped his wife at home before taking me to my hotel. I timed the drive. The hotel was about 25 minutes from his house, if there's no traffic.

Now that I've lived in southern California where people are self-absorbed, I think I understand what was going on. "I'll pick you up at 6 o'clock" means that at 6 o'clock he starts getting ready to pick me up. 

It's like when people know they'll have a Zoom call at 6 pm. That means that at 6 pm they look at their watches, walk over to their computers, open their email, and start looking for the Zoom link. They don't show up on the call until 5 or 10 after.

Perhaps my question should have been "what time do you need to leave home, in order to pick me up at 6?" But that might have confused him. And it might look as if it's all about me.

The Stalker

"The course is full, so I need you to sign this form so I can enroll," said the student at the end of class. He was showing up to class for the first time a week or two into the quarter, after the first quiz.

"I can't do that. The Math Department office knows when people have dropped the class, and they can enroll you when there's an opening. You need to talk to them." If the course was full, that meant that the number of students was the same as the number of seats. I had learned in past years that if both the Math Department office and I signed students in, that caused havoc.

The student got very angry. He shouted at me and threatened me. He seemed unhinged, and I was afraid of what he might do to me. I hoped he didn't have a gun.

I thought to myself, "alienating the person who will give you a grade (if you're lucky enough to get into the course) isn't very wise." But then again, if I felt sufficiently cowed, perhaps his strategy was sound.

He demanded to know my name. My name was on the course list that he must have looked at to find out where my class met. If he wasn't smart enough to figure out my name, I wasn't going to enlighten him. I told him I felt threatened and didn't feel comfortable giving him my name.

I left the room. He followed me. My name was on my office door, and I didn't want him to know my name or where to find me, so I didn't want to go to my office until I threw him off my tail.

I walked down a hallway and up a flight of stairs, as I plotted my route. Then I sped up, ran down a flight of stairs, quickly rounded a corner, and ducked into the women's room. If he had good critical thinking skills (which seemed doubtful), he might have figured out that the only place I could have disappeared to was the women's room. If he dared to enter, I'd be trapped.

I locked myself in a stall, and waited for 15 minutes. I hoped that was long enough. When I left, he was nowhere in sight. From there, I took a circuitous route to my office, just to be sure that I'd lost him.

It would have been easy for him to have found out my name and and office number. I avoided my office for the next few weeks, and I never saw him again.

This took place at Ohio State. Something similar happened to me when I taught (while a grad student) at Princeton. I've heard similar stories from colleagues at UC Irvine. We aren't trained to deal with angry students, and our universities don't seem to have good ways to help us.

Folklore and Mythology

The Radcliffe College application form asked me to rank order my top three choices of field to major in. 

Intending to eventually write the Great American Novel, my knee-jerk reaction was to list "English" at the top (I think the Harvard department's full name was "English and American Literature"). 

On calmer reflection, I realized that it was hard for me, or perhaps for anyone from my high school, to stand out in the humanities.

For one thing, New York City was then on the verge of bankruptcy and the public schools were in dire financial straits. This led to larger class sizes, which made the teachers reluctant to assign or grade lengthy papers. One of my English teachers resorted to giving us multiple choice computer-graded exams instead of essay questions.

For another, the school's principal was a biology teacher who was rumored to value the sciences more than the humanities in that post-Sputnik era. The school gave us lots of opportunities (such as a science honors program) to excel in the sciences, but not in English or history.

I guessed that potential English majors were not in short supply in the Radcliffe applicant pool of the mid-1970s, while science majors would be rarer. Clearly, it would be easier to sell myself as a scientist than as a writer. Once I got in, I could major in whatever I wanted.

Though I felt awful about deceiving the admissions office, I listed my top three choices as math, physics, and chemistry. I highlighted my interest and accomplishments in math, and played down my love to write. But I planned to major in English if I actually got in.

Unfortunately, I was a good enough writer that I not only convinced the admissions committee that I should be a math major, I also convinced myself. By the time I got there, I planned to major in math.

However, in my first year I took a math course that was too advanced for me. I got discouraged, and thought about bailing out of math.

We were supposed to declare our majors (or "concentrations", in Harvard lingo) early in sophomore year. 

I couldn't go back to my idea of majoring in English, since I read too slowly to handle the workload (and I enjoyed savoring books too much to want to read them faster).

What I really wanted to major in was Folklore and Mythology. While my first thought was "what a cool subject," my second thought was, "but I can't justify spending my parents' hard-earned money on a degree in something that sounds so frivolous." (My parents had assumed, probably incorrectly, that applying for financial aid would lessen my chances of getting in, so I didn't apply for financial aid and my parents took out loans to pay for my college education.) 

I had always loved Greek and Roman mythology. Classics seemed like a respectable major, and I wondered whether I should choose it.

In my freshman year I took "The Great Age of Athens" from the legendary John Finley, who was teaching the course for the last time. Sitting in Sanders Theater, as a witness to the end of Harvard's Great Age of John Finley, I was overwhelmed by a sense of history. (Do read his obituary to the end.)

I eventually followed that up with courses by Albert Lord (another Harvard legend, known for "The Singer of Tales") and Gregory Nagy (a charismatic Classics professor of the next generation; in my notes from the last lecture of the course, I quote Nagy as saying, "Do Read Singer of Tales!! carefully. (He's tricky, subtle.) People tend to downplay Lord. You shouldn't.").

There was one major problem in choosing Classics as my concentration. I didn't know any Greek or Latin. Those languages weren't taught at my public school. I would be way behind the preppy Classics majors who took Greek and Latin in high school.

In my sophomore year, I went to the first lecture or two of beginning Greek, taught by Nagy. While students weren't literally hanging from the rafters, the room was packed so full with hundreds of students that there were worries that the fire marshal might limit enrollment. I sat on the floor, squashed between other eager students. Those who couldn't push their way into the room could try to listen from the hallway. Perhaps I should take Latin first.

But beginning Latin was taught by grad students, and the one I tried was dry and boring. 

Since Nagy's Greek class met at the same time as a math class I wanted to take, I decided to postpone Greek and Latin. This seemed to finalize the decision about my field of study, until a Teaching Assistant in one of the classics courses tried to change my mind.

I didn't know what to make of his handwritten comments on the papers I wrote for the course. For example, at the end of my first assignment he wrote:

Your paper surpasses my ability to praise it. Of course you don't get everything, but your intelligence, imagination, & the clarity of your writing (in general) make your work a pleasure to read. I hope my comments have been helpful as well as simply effusive in their admiration --- but I can only aspire to be a teaching assistant worthy of such a fine student.

and on the last homework:

Your sensitivity to "Homer" & co. is, in my opinion, a good deal greater than that of most classicists --- which must be its own reward. I am particularly gratified to see that the section meetings were of some use to you. You really owe it to yourself to learn some Greek --- which you could certainly handle. Start with Homer, perhaps (I have enough reference books and personal notes to make it all a breeze for you). Well, think about it as a possibility for the future, & be sure to let me try to convince you with details, if you are at all interested.

Should I believe him? The TA offered to give me free private tutoring in Greek. Should I take him up on that, or were there risks in doing so?

I told a friend about the TA's offer, and showed her his comments on my writing. She said, "Alice, you know what this means. He's hitting on you. No, you don't take him up on his offer!"

At Harvard in the 1970s, it was common enough for male TAs and professors to hit on female students, that dodging the advances of our instructors was something many of us learned to do automatically and subconsciously. (Perhaps less common, though still observed, were female students trying to seduce their professors.) I don't flatter myself that it was due to Radcliffe students being so attractive or desirable; it was just the scarcity of women among the students and faculty, at a university that was going coed at a snail's pace.

I took my friend's advice, and didn't learn Greek from my TA extracurricularly. I didn't see how my TA's effusive comments could be taken seriously; I didn't have that much confidence in my abilities and potential. Perhaps I should have. I eventually found out that the TA already had a girlfriend. Maybe he really was interested in my mind, after all.

One consequence of instructors hitting on students was that female students couldn't trust the advice and feedback their instructors gave them.

Christian-owned

Does the younger generation even know what a travel agent is? The Ohio State University gave us a list of three approved travel agencies, and required faculty to book our business trips through them. Only one of the three was anywhere near the university or where I lived.

One day, the agency was crowded. I took a number and sat down in the waiting area. To my left were assorted magazines and brochures on a low table.

I picked up a brochure that told customers to only frequent Christian-owned businesses, and gave a list of Christian-owned local businesses that included this travel agency.

I have no objection to people making their own decisions about where to shop. But it did not seem reasonable that a state university should essentially require me to purchase all my plane tickets for business travel from a place that told its customers not to patronize businesses owned by Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists, etc.

I assume that OSU faculty now buy their flights off the Internet (and hopefully travel less to help save the Earth). I have no nostalgia for travel agencies.

Rule Followers

When I moved to Orange County, California in 2004, I had a serious case of culture shock. The OC didn't seem to have the same understanding of community that I know from every place else I've lived. I asked a local what I needed to know to understand the people. She replied, "They're self-absorbed." That was helpful, but it wasn't the full story.

One day I was working at a picnic table on a bluff overlooking a particularly lovely beach. Two women arrived with their large dogs, and sat at my table, continuing their very loud conversation.

I looked around. There were three or four other tables, and they were all empty. They were all pretty much the same, except that my table was a few feet closer to the ocean.

I already knew about this OC habit of sitting too close. I choose an isolated spot on an empty beach, and a couple sits down near me with their boombox blaring. My East Coast sensibilities lead me to think it's both more polite and more sensible to sit far from the only other person on the beach. Why don't they? My guess is that they're too lazy to walk a little further to a spot that's just as good but more private. Sometimes, at a nice overlook, the goal is to chase me away so they can have the view to themselves. I wondered whether that was the case for the two women at "my" picnic table.

I could have moved to a different table, but I didn't think it fair that I should be the one to move. 

Their conversation struck me as particularly inane and annoying. I fumed for awhile. Then I remembered the adage "be curious, not furious," and decided to be curious about why they chose to sit so close.

I struck up a conversation with them. Startled, they responded civilly. I asked whether they were from around here. Yes, they were from Newport Beach. Eventually I said, "I grew up on the East Coast, and I've been having a hard time understanding the behavior of people in Orange County. What could you tell me that might help?"

They thought for a moment, then one of them, who had spent some summers on the East Coast as a child, said "The difference between the East Coast and here is that people on the East Coast are rule followers." She made it clear that being a rule follower wasn't a good thing. According to her, people from Newport Beach considered themselves to be free and independent spirits who weren't constrained by something so banal as rules. Stop signs? Turn signals? Not for us.

They don't follow the rules that help people coexist peacefully in a civilized society. This was a revelation for me. It really has helped me understand people from Newport Beach (and why I find some of them so difficult to like). I was glad I asked.

A colleague once told me disdainfully about the only woman to have been Chancellor at our university. He thought she was a terrible Chancellor. I asked why. He said, "she's a rule follower." I've often heard people sneer at women as being sticklers for the rules. But if women in academia are more likely than men to be rule followers, perhaps it's because they're more likely to be punished if they break the rules.

I've spent a lot of time in academia in the proverbial "smoke-filled rooms" where decisions are made. What did I learn there? The in-crowd benefits from breaking the rules, and everyone else gets punished if we either break the rules, or break the unspoken rules we didn't even know existed. These Newport Beach women belonged to an "in" group that makes the rules, knows which rules can be broken, and decides who gets punished.

Some of the committees I served on made important career decisions about people. When my service on one such committee ended, I thought back on the experience. 

I remembered that some of the people we evaluated broke the rules and got away with it. Some of their transgressions seemed serious, like changing dates on documents, or claiming full credit for work that was joint with others. Virtually none of the transgressors were female.

Some other cases were memorable for other reasons. Colleagues of the person being evaluated had visceral anger toward the candidate, and had the attitude "what's she trying to get away with?" Their accusations didn't come with proof or evidence, and there was no way for my committee to corroborate the allegations. The people under attack had pushed someone's buttons, but it wasn't clear to me that they had actually done anything that was wrong or that was a valid reason for the committee to issue a negative decision.

Who were the people who caused these strong gut reactions? They were disproportionately women, blacks, and Jews. Whether they were unempathetically viewed as the "other", or had violated unspoken rules that they didn't know, they weren't part of the in-crowd. In any particular case, any prejudice was subtle enough that it would have been deniable.

As my conversation with the Newport Beach women was winding down, I said I was curious as to why they chose this table, rather than an empty one. They beat about the bush for a bit, then admitted that it was because this was the best table (by epsilon). "Were you hoping I would leave?" I asked. "Yes," they replied.

The Little Blue Button

The cryptic October 19, 2012 email began by announcing that "Beginning Saturday, October 20, 2012, Facilities Management will be implementing a new Office Air Handler Unit (AHU) shutdown schedule." 

The memo seemed to say that to reduce energy costs, the air would be turned off all day on weekends, and between 6 pm and 6 am on weekdays, in the wings that house the math and chemistry departments and part of the physics department.

My office is in one of those wings.

The email said "the override buttons will enable you to turn the air handler unit ON for a two (2) hour occupancy" and that each office thermostat has an override button "indicated by a Sun/Moon symbol." 

However, most of the offices in the wings don't have thermostats (their temperature is controlled by some nearby colleague's thermostat). 

When the wings were built in 2008, I chose my office partly because the floor plan showed a thermostat. But my thermostat turned out to be in a locked box, and I'm not allowed to have a key to the box. When my whiteboard was installed, someone had to go to a lot of trouble to cut holes in it for the locked thermostat box and for the motion sensor that controls the lights. It seemed slightly cruel to be told that there is an override button in my locked box.

I replied to the email:

"Thanks very much for your message. I have a thermostat in my office, but it is in a locked plastic box. Could you please remove the box, so that I can access the thermostat? (This will also make it easier for me to use my whiteboard, since the thermostat is recessed in my whiteboard.) Thanks very much."

I sent a follow-up reminding them of my office number and saying I looked forward to hearing from them about plans to unlock my thermostat. I never got a reply.

"For those who do not have a thermostat, please use the BLUE override button located on the hallway wall near the suite entry", continued the original email notification. "This new schedule will allow you to work in your office 24/7 with full control at the thermostat or blue button, rather than a schedule where the AHU turns off with no option to turn it back on."

I managed to find a little blue button on a wall at the far end of the hallway in my wing. Should I keep pressing it until the light goes on and stays on? Or goes off and stays off? The message didn't say, and I never remember which. If someone else already pressed it within the past two hours then it's already in the "on" mode. So I hold it for 20 seconds no matter what. (A colleague recently told me that the button's timing is erratic---it can take 25 seconds or more for it to light up.)

Some of my colleagues have told me that if they forget to press the button, or they forget to press it again after two hours, they eventually feel faint.

While the piece of paper above the button says "Hold Button For 5 Seconds", it doesn't say WHY to hold it. New students and faculty aren't told about the little blue button or its raison d'être, except for two cryptic "reminder" emails in November of 2014 and 2015.

Over the years, I've pointed out that informing new occupants of the wings about the existence and purpose of the little blue button is a health and safety issue. When I mentioned it at a meeting with staff from Environmental Health & Safety during the infamous Rowland Hall asbestos battle of 2018 (a story for the future), we were assured that annual reminders would be sent out from then on. It's more than three years later, and I haven't seen a reminder.

Animals and Children

A colleague in Berkeley told me that the reason that X invited me to Japan was that I was one of the few people who had been kind to him when he visited Berkeley.

The only contact I had had with X was several years earlier, when I sat next to him at a dinner party at the mathematician Robert Coleman's house. I racked my brain to try to remember how I had been nice to X. Here's my recollection.

X's English wasn't very good, and it was a struggle for people to communicate with him over a noisy dinner table, so I was the one who was left to talk with him. After X and I had conversed for awhile, I looked up and noticed that most of our dinner companions were no longer in the dining room. X and I were starting to get hungry, so I told him I'd see what was happening in the kitchen.

Robert, who had multiple sclerosis, was fortunate to have many helpful friends who looked out for him. When I entered the kitchen I saw Robert in his wheelchair, and about half a dozen of his friends. The friends had just taken a very large salmon out of the oven and were trying to slide it onto a serving tray. I watched as the salmon slid off the pan, onto Robert's kitchen floor. Definitely a case of too many cooks.

Out of curiosity I stuck around long enough to see Robert's resourceful friends scrounging up spoons and forks, and using them to shovel bits of salmon onto the serving tray.

I went back to the dining room, sat down, turned to X, and quietly but firmly said, "Don't eat the salmon." 

Several years later, X invited me to visit his university in Tokyo. I had a wonderful stay in Japan; I loved the country and the food, and people were very nice to me. 

Especially kind and helpful was the graduate student whom X assigned to take care of me. He traveled with me when I gave talks at other universities or went sightseeing, sometimes bringing along a grad student friend of his. The point was to make sure I didn't get lost, given that I couldn't read the signs or the subway map. However, it turned out that I had both a good sense of direction, and adequate pattern-matching skills.

"We take this train," said one of my handlers.

"But isn't it going in the wrong direction?" I said, showing them the names on the map.

At first they ignored me, thinking I couldn't possibly know better than they did about Japanese trains. But eventually they were impressed with me, after I saved us from going the wrong way a couple of times.

I noticed that mathematicians of all ages called me Alice-san. "Shouldn't it be Silverberg-san?" I asked. "After all, they've just met me. Are they using my first name because I'm female? Or do they just not know which name is my surname?" My colleagues assured me it wasn't sexism, it was just that Silverberg is too hard to pronounce. I agree that it's probably a mouthful for Japanese speakers.

One day, the grad student confided the reason he was chosen to look after me. "X told me that I should be the one to do it, since I'm good with animals and children."

That took a moment to sink in. 

I wondered whether I should have pushed back more when people called me Alice-san.

I had brought with me a book that listed lots of free things to do in Tokyo, and introduced my grad student assistants to a few places they hadn't known about. They were suitably impressed by my resourcefulness. I gifted them the book when I left. But I was much more the beneficiary of the kindness of my Japanese friends, than the benefactor.

I hadn't thought that I was especially kind to X. At Robert's dinner party, I was just behaving the way I thought anyone would. It seems it does pay to welcome visitors and be polite to them, even if the kindness is merely the advice "Don't eat the salmon."

Taxpayers

In 2007 Michael Drake, the Chancellor of the University of California at Irvine, rescinded an offer he had made to Erwin Chemerinsky to be the founding Dean of the UCI Law School, a move that attracted the attention of the national press. 

While Drake told the faculty what his decision was not based on (namely, donor pressure, political pressure, Chemerinsky's political views, or anything ideological, political, or personal), he was vague about what it was based on.

This led to a sense of outrage among the UCI faculty, the likes of which I haven't seen before or since. The Academic Senate called emergency meetings amid concerns about academic freedom and Drake's leadership.

At one such meeting, Drake said that if the media weren't in the room, he could tell the faculty his reasons for rescinding the offer. Some faculty suggested that Drake tell his reasons to a small elite group of important faculty who would keep it secret.

When I was hired at the Ohio State University a common refrain of the Dean was, "We are responsible to the taxpayers of the state of Ohio." Some of my colleagues scoffed at the thought, but the idea made sense to me.

Naively assuming that UCI had a similar philosophy, at one of the meetings I reminded the faculty that since UCI is a state university, its administrators are accountable to the taxpayers of the state of California. I assumed that California had "sunshine laws" to promote transparency at state universities. Wasn't the Chancellor obliged to justify to the taxpayers the rationale for his major decisions, and wasn't the media there to convey his words to those taxpayers?

I thought that I was saying the obvious. I didn't realize it would be received as a revelation.

Though I spoke for only a few seconds and was one of many speakers, faculty came up to me to thank me (I was disconcerted when they told me I was brave to speak up), and reporters asked me my name (which I refused to give, suddenly fearing blowback from the university; I was aghast when a friend told me she heard me the next day on a southern California radio station).

The good that came from it is that I met nice colleagues I might otherwise never have met (at one of the least friendly and least welcoming universities I've seen). In an email discussion with one of them afterwards, I wrote:

A little more sunshine in the UC system, and fewer secret meetings in "smoke-filled rooms", would do a lot of good, and might have avoided some of the trouble that comes from doing what's in one's own best interest, rather than doing what's right (the controversy about keeping salaries secret, and the liver transplant scandal, come to mind).

Affirmative Action

When I was a high school senior, I got a letter that MIT sent to girls who did well on the SATs. I don't remember the wording, but the message it conveyed was something like, "You might think it's hard to get into MIT. But MIT accepts 90% of female applicants who are in the top 40% of their class." (I'm sure I'm not remembering the numbers accurately, but it was something astonishing.) MIT was telling top female applicants that it had lower standards for female applicants than for male ones.

The letter utterly failed to achieve its purpose of getting me interested in MIT. It had the opposite effect. It wasn't the only reason that MIT dropped from my favorite school to my least favorite, but it was a factor.

While it wasn't the only reason that Harvard became my top choice, one thought I (rather stupidly) did have when it was time to decide was, "If I go to MIT, some people will say that I only got in due to affirmative action. Harvard actively discriminates against women, so if I go there, everyone will know I got in based on merit. No one can say it was because I was female."

Ironically, the fact that Harvard blatantly and officially discriminated against women when I was admitted hasn't stopped people from telling me, ever since then, that I must have gotten into Harvard because of affirmative action for women. I'm grateful when people who think it also say it to me, so I at least have a chance to correct them on Harvard's history. More problematic are those who say it behind my back.

I knew what you'd think

1. The Sexual Harrassment Case                    

An Ohio State University administrator was woken up one night by a phone call from a reporter for The Ivory Tower Times, the campus newspaper at Ivory Tower University. The reporter told him that a sexual harassment board at Ivory Tower had found X, a postdoc at Ivory Tower, guilty of sexually harassing a freshman while she was taking a class he taught. Was OSU's math department still planning to hire him? The administrator said he was hearing about this for the first time, but of course OSU takes sexual harassment very seriously.

The case became something of a hot potato. The OSU administration asked the math department to re-evaluate its decision to hire X. Because X had delayed starting the job until winter quarter so that he could continue at Ivory Tower until the end of its fall semester, OSU's Board of Trustees hadn't yet approved the offer; there was still time to take it back.

Each day, The Ivory Tower Times published more about the case and about the reactions of Ivory Tower University students to how their university handled it. My OSU colleagues avidly read the articles online, and talked to each other about the case. But my male colleagues stopped talking to me.

I wasn't on my department's Advisory Committee, but the meetings were open to all faculty and I attended as an observer. I consider fairness to be very important, and I wanted the department to handle the case in as professional and fair a way as possible. When I learned that OSU added to X's personnel file some articles from The Ivory Tower Times that disparaged X, I objected. I thought that the committee should base its decisions on facts and reliable evidence and (as I learned from my journalist father) newspaper articles should not be treated as accurate sources.

At one of the faculty meetings, an OSU lawyer sat next to me and we chatted during the breaks. He had expected the math department to quickly reverse its hiring decision (based on the information in a file supplied by X), and he was astonished that the department was agonizing over what to do. What seemed most egregious to the OSU administration wasn't as much the allegations of sex with a young student in his class, as what they considered to be evidence of lying.

The Advisory Committee eventually reaffirmed the department's support for X, with a mixed (they used the word "ambiguous") vote. The decision not to forward the case to the Board of Trustees was made at a higher level.

2. The Scene in the Parking Garage

While my male colleagues wouldn't talk to me, I did hear their conversations in the Common Room. One of the more memorable comments came from the colleague I've called Nick Machiavell, who said, "Of course it's OK to sleep with our students. How else could a mathematician get anyone to sleep with him?"

Nick Machiavell had pushed the department to hire X. When Nick tried to convince the committee to reaffirm its support for X, he justified it by saying that X was comparable to Gauss.

On a dark cold night, returning to campus after a colloquium dinner, Nick and I went to the dimly lit parking garage to find our cars. When I recall the scene, I envision a noir film. Nick was angry with me (because I was being neutral and open-minded about X, rather than supporting him wholeheartedly). I was angry with Nick. We had it out. I said I didn't think it was reasonable to tell our colleagues that X was Gauss, when he knew how misleading that was. Nick (actually!) said, "The end justifies the means." He added, "Of course X slept with her. Only an idiot would think he hadn't. I'm not that naive." Since X's side of the story was that he never had any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with the student, what Nick was saying was that he believed that X was lying, but wanted OSU to hire him anyway.

3. I knew what you'd think

Toward the end of OSU's involvement, I ran into my colleague "Hamlet Prince" in the hallway. He was the colleague who should have known better.

Ham: "I don't want to talk to you about the X case since we're on opposite sides of the issue."

Me: "Have I ever told you my opinion on the X case?"

Ham answered correctly: "No."

Me: "Has anyone else told you what they claim is my opinion on the X case?"

Ham: "No."

Me: "Is it only because I'm female that you think we're on opposite sides?"

Ham: "Yes."

I was dismayed that Ham thought he could read my mind and know my opinions. What did it mean that he assumed all women would have the same opinion about this case, and that it would be the opposite of his? Did he believe that he chose sides based on the merits of the case, and that all women choose sides based on something other than the merits? Or did he expect everyone to take sides based on emotions, their own self-interest, or which (gender) of the two parties they identified with? Either way, he should have known better.

I reminded Ham that I had not taken a stand for or against X, and had spoken up only to address issues of fairness and professional behavior.

While much worse happened to me at OSU, the ostracism by my male colleagues and the conversation with Ham were the last straws. I felt sick to my stomach and knew I needed to leave OSU, the sooner the better.

4. Aftershocks

Serge Lang had strongly supported X (he sent some of my colleagues a "file" about the case), and was angry at anyone he thought was responsible for OSU deciding not to follow through on X's job offer.

A few years later, I began to hear rumors that Lang had been telling people (for who knows how long) that I spoke against X and was at least partly responsible for X's not getting the job.

The only reason I found out was that my sources felt justified in telling me, because they knew that Lang expounded at length about how he only deals in facts and evidence and thinks it's terrible to make claims about someone behind their back so that they can't respond.

I had been asking Lang to write letters of recommendation on my behalf. If he was spreading false stories about me behind my back, that was potentially a career killer.

The next time I saw Lang, I told him I heard that he had told people that I had taken a stand against X, and I asked if that was so. He said it was. I told him that what he heard was false. He refused to tell me who had told him.

Our conversations escalated, and included him yelling at me in a Berkeley math department hallway. He later told me he shouldn't have shouted at me. He also sent me letters saying my complaint that he had spread rumors without first checking with me was justified, and he regretted having done so. But he didn't apologize, and never told me his sources (who refused to confirm to him what he claimed they had told him), even though that seemed to violate his principles.

I don't know who or how many people heard Lang's fake news. I continued to meet mathematicians who had heard it and believed it, and hadn't been set straight. To this day, I don't know to what extent this hurt my career.

The mathematics community quickly rallied around X, getting him a temporary position at a research institute and eventually a tenured professorship elsewhere. They viewed him as one of their own.

The Packwood of the Ohio State Math Department

Below is a story I wrote before the #metoo movement. I delayed making it public, first because I wanted to deal with feedback I got from some of the people involved, and later because I don't like jumping on bandwagons (including the #metoo one). But it's hard to understand my OSU experience without knowing this story, so here goes.

About five of us number theory faculty were standing in front of the elevators inside the entryway to the Ohio State math department, right after I started my new job as an assistant professor in 1984. I didn't know who Y was when he approached us and started talking to me. It was hard to understand him due to his heavy accent, but he seemed to be asking me to go to his office sometime to have sex with him. I pretended that I thought he was joking, and laughed it off. So he got more and more explicit, to make sure I understood. I felt that he and the experience were slimy, sleazy, and unpleasant.

I didn't find the unwelcome and crude pass to be surprising. I had been a student at Harvard, Cambridge, and Princeton (I joke that all of my higher education was at single sex colleges, but not the sex that I was), so I was used to this sort of behavior. What surprised me was that he did it so openly, in earshot of my male colleagues. As soon as he left I asked a young colleague if he had heard what Y said. He said he hadn't. When I told him what Y said, he thought it was funny. While I no longer remember whether he actually said "relax and enjoy it", I felt as if he had. I asked A, a senior professor in the group, who the man was, and he identified Y as a senior professor in a different field.

Y's behavior toward me continued, at a low level. I wasn't concerned about myself (at least, that's what I told myself at the time). I had learned as an undergrad how to go into "repulsion mode" (as I like to explain it: they didn't call us "Radcliffe bitches" for nothing!). I did what I could to avoid Y. When I took the elevator, I kept my bicycle between myself and anyone who might get on later, to keep Y at a safe distance. If he was already in the elevator, or waiting for it, I carried my bike up or down several flights of stairs, to get to or from my office, rather than get on the elevator. I told myself it was good exercise.

What I was concerned about was that he would harass students, or visiting mathematicians from other universities who came to give a talk in one of the seminars. Y didn't seem to care whom he accosted; I don't think he knew who I was when he approached me. I didn't want others to get the treatment that I had gotten, or to be left with a bad impression of the math department. My goal was for it to stop.

I didn't know how to achieve that, so I asked some of my tenured colleagues. I learned that other women had been harassed by him. Retaliation, ridicule, or apathy were the results they expected if they made an issue of it, so none of them had. B, a tenured woman, told me "Alice, you could make a complaint, but that would hurt your chances of getting tenure." C said "European men are like that. There's nothing you can do about it." A, the male senior professor I had spoken with, laughed. He believed me, but didn't take it seriously. None of them was willing to do anything themselves, or to stand by me if I did something. And they thought that telling the department chair would do more harm than good. At best, I would become the laughing-stock of the department. At worst, it would end my career.

If I had thought that filing an official complaint would do some good, I would have done so. I considered explicitly telling Y that I found his advances unwelcome and unwanted and that I thought others would feel the same way. But my conversations with tenured faculty led me to believe that Y would retaliate against me and hurt my career, and that no one would protect me.

A few years later, after we had a new department chair, I heard that the chair's secretary complained that Y pinned her against a filing cabinet and kissed her. The department chair warned Y that there would be repercussions if he didn't stop.

Y began to shun me and other women. That seemed like an improvement. One good department chair can make a difference.

I learned that the secretaries referred to Y as "the Packwood of the Ohio State Math Department", referring to the Oregon politician who resigned from the U.S. Senate in 1995 when on the verge of expulsion due to an alleged pattern of making unwanted sexual advances.

A, B, and C went on to leadership positions in the university. I like all of them, and I believe them to be good people. But when I looked up the leadership chain to see where to go for help with such things, I didn't look to them.

B and I rehashed the subject of Y one day over lunch at the faculty club. She said that if she had to do it over again, she would still have given me the same advice that doing anything about it would hurt my career, and she defended her decision to keep quiet when harassed herself. I asked B if it was sexual harassment in the legal sense, given that the people Y harassed hadn't explicitly told him that his advances were unwanted. She nearly rose from her chair in anger and said "Of course it was sexual harassment!"

More recently, I told B that I was writing this story about Y. She was very encouraging, and said that I could add from her: "Most of the men I knew also warned women to stay away from him. People outside the department also knew that he was infamous, either because of rumors or because of what had happened to their female students."

Many years later a friend told me that she had complained about Y when she was a postdoc at Ohio State, not long after I arrived there. The department chair announced it to some of the faculty, referring to her as a young female faculty member but not giving her name. Since I was the only tenure-track woman, they probably thought it was me. So any retaliation that might have happened probably did (could that explain some of my colleagues' behavior towards me?). The moral I drew from this is that if you're at a place where people retaliate, they'll probably treat you badly whether you speak up or not. So you might as well speak up.

UCI-Speak

No foreign country has felt more foreign to me than has southern California. The university feels a little less strange than the rest of Orange County, but I still feel as if I'm learning a foreign language.

"I'll need to ask the MSO about this," said one staff member.

"Sure," I replied, "What's an MSO?" She stared at me as if I were an alien from another planet. It was as if I had said, "What's a cow?" Everyone was supposed to know this.

"What does it stand for?" I asked. Another blank stare. This stare meant something different. It meant that she had no idea. (It's hard to find anyone at UCI who knows what MSO stands for.)

"Everyone knows what an MSO is. It's what [the name of another staff member] is," she retorted.

I apologized for not knowing the term. I told her that I had been a professor for 20 years at a different large state university, but had never heard that expression.

I eventually figured out that MSO is the title that the University of California bestows upon department managers. Spoiler Alert: It stands for "Management Services Officer". When I finally learned the lingo, the title changed to CAO, for "Chief Administrative Officer".

When I had a financial question, I was told to "see your analyst". The first time I heard that, it sounded rather rude. If a New Yorker said it, I'd think they were telling me to see a psychiatrist. At UCI, the people who deal with the finances are called analysts. The Faculty Senate committees also have analysts, but they're something like Administrative Assistants.

More obscure is when we refer to someone as an "LPSOE". When the confused listener asks "What's that?" we reply, "Lecturer with Potential Security of Employment". They feel slightly more enlightened, but not much.

A staff member sent an email message to the department soon after I got here "reminding" us of something. I went to the office and pointed out that there must be a mailing list I'm not on but I'm supposed to be on, since I hadn't gotten any earlier messages about the thing we were reminded of. The staff member said, "No, you're on all the right mailing lists. This was the first message about it."

I've since learned that at UCI "reminder" often means "this is something I'm telling you for the first time." Someone conjectured that it really means "this is something I should have told you sooner!"

Every so often, when someone gets annoyed with me for not knowing something unique to UCI or the University of California that they tell me everyone knows, I apologize for my ignorance and ask, "How should I have learned this sooner?" They stop and think about it, and finally admit, "I guess there's no way you would have known this."

If you recognize the title of this piece as a pun on "You See, I Speak", you're on your way to becoming fluent in UCI-Speak.