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.

Silver for Silverberg

On one of the first days of sixth grade, Mrs. Toder, my math teacher, insisted that we laboriously show our work when we cancelled fractions. She wanted us to completely factor the numerator and denominator and draw a line through a common factor in both, in a long series of equalities, rather than doing it all at once.

We had been cancelling fractions without showing our work since fifth grade. I was incensed. We weren't children anymore; we were old enough to be allowed to cancel fractions!

Having been one of the best math students in fifth grade, I felt that I had the responsibility to speak up on behalf of my classmates, and regain our God-given right to cancel fractions. I ignored what was happening around me, as I planned the rousing speech I would give that would earn us back our rights.

Each student shared a desk with one classmate. Girls were paired with girls, and boys with boys, except that the number of girls and the number of boys were each odd, so Robert Goldberg and I shared a desk. I wasn't a popular kid, and I was afraid the girls would tease me for having to share a desk with a boy.

I raised my hand, and when Mrs. Toder called on me, I stood and delivered my speech. She moved away from the blackboard to reveal a math problem she had been writing there while I had been ignoring what was going on. "Solve this," she said.

Stunned, I froze. I wasn't prepared for this. Hands shot up around me, so I gave up, in shame. Worse, after Mrs. Toder called on Robert Goldberg and he gave the correct answer, she turned to me and, in front of the whole class, said, "if you were as smart as Robert Goldberg, I'd let you cancel fractions without showing your work."

Humiliated, I resolved that someday I would prove that I was as smart as Robert Goldberg!

Bob and I both did well in math that year. And the class eventually earned our right to cancel fractions. Mrs. Toder and I soon warmed to each other, and she ended up being my favorite teacher.

Postscript:

Two years later, at our junior high school graduation, some girls in my class came to me very upset because I had only gotten the Silver Medal in math. The Gold Medal went to Robert Goldberg. These classmates felt that I did (a little) better than Bob in math class, and they thought this was a clear case of sexism.

At that time, and for a long time afterwards, I was completely oblivious to the sexism around me (which probably made life easier for me for a while). And I didn't mind that Bob got the Gold Medal, since I knew we were both good at math and either of us could have gotten the Gold. I replied, "I don't think it's sexism. They probably felt, at least subconsciously, that they couldn't give the Gold Medal to Silverberg and the Silver Medal to Goldberg. That just doesn't sound right!"