How I got John Nash to stop smoking in the Princeton math department

Russell Crowe, who played John Nash in the 2001 film "A Beautiful Mind", said that Nash claimed he never smoked. But Crowe and I knew otherwise; Crowe had seen photos of Nash with a cigarette, and I saw and smelled the smoke when I was a Princeton grad student in the early 1980s. 

I shared an office that was across the hall from the Fine Hall Common Room, where tea and cookies were served on weekday afternoons. Nash often paced up and down the hallway in front of my office, chain smoking cigarettes and flicking ashes into the ashtrays that were bolted to the walls. 

While I was there, local laws changed and the university was forced to come up with a no smoking policy. After that, smoking was allowed only in the Common Room, but Nash continued to smoke in the hallway. 

I phoned the officer in charge of smoking, and asked that either a "No Smoking" sign be posted or the ashtrays removed. After all, who would believe there was a no smoking rule, if there were still ashtrays affixed to the walls? 

"There's a sign at the building entrance," she coughed back at me. 

I, Nash, and the rest of the world hadn't noticed the small "SMOKING PERMITTED only in designated areas" sign hidden in an unlit alcove near one of the many entrances to Fine Hall. 

"But people continue to smoke."  

"That's not my problem," she rasped, hanging up. I suspected she was a smoker. 

It must have been in one of my last years, after I'd been there long enough to know how to beat Princeton at its own game. By hook or by crook, I was going to stop John Nash from smoking outside my office.

I had overheard a faculty member mention that the department stationery was kept in the faculty mailroom --- the room behind the graduate secretary's desk, with a "FACULTY ONLY" sign at the entrance. When no one was looking I snuck in and stole one sheet of department letterhead. I was afraid that taking two sheets might double the penalty for my crime. At home, I cut the sheet in half, and on both the top and bottom halves typed: 

"SMOKING IS PROHIBITED IN THE HALLWAY IN FRONT OF THE COMMON ROOM".

The next day I Scotch-taped a sign to each of the two sets of doors that led from the hallway to the Common Room. The top half with letterhead, the bottom half without. Pretty amateurish. Would it fool anyone? Or would I be expelled for improperly posting stolen paper?

With my office door ajar, I watched and waited. Nash, cigarette in hand, walked up to one of the notes. His eyes were so close to it that he had to move his head from side to side to read the words. Then he walked over to one of the ashtrays that was bolted to the wall. To drop his ashes? No, to put out his cigarette. I never again saw Nash smoke in the hallway.

"No One's here"

During my later, more assertive stage of trying to create a community of friends who care about me in Orange County, I asked nearly everyone I met for advice. Sometimes I would tell my sad story about how no one would bring me casseroles because I had no one to tell about my cancer diagnosis.

Taking pity on me, one kind soul said to another, "Should we tell Alice about the lunch and Starbucks groups?"

That's how I ended up joining one group that met at a campus cafeteria for lunch, and another group that met one morning a week at Starbucks.

These were on-again, off-again relationships. I never did figure out the power dynamics. 

One morning at Starbucks, B told the group something that I thought might be incorrect. Since it was a medical fact for which misinformation could be harmful, I looked it up on my phone and learned that B had told us something that wasn't true. I let the group know what I had found. I expected B to thank me, but he was furious and told me I was rude. He claimed the group had a rule not to use electronic gadgets while we met.

Sometime within the next half hour, C showed up. The group wondered about something, so C pulled out his iPad, looked it up, and shared the information. B's face lit up in a wide smile. He profusely praised C for being so helpful and having the useful iPad handy. I looked at B in amazement, but the irony went completely past everyone who had heard B rebuke me.

For both the lunch and Starbucks groups, I think that almost everyone was individually a nice person. Put them together, and something went wrong.

Whenever I was shut down, or elicited an angry reaction, I promised myself to hold my tongue and take the opportunity to observe and study the social interactions, and learn from my colleagues about the university and how it operated. That would last a few weeks, until something factually incorrect was said that seemed sufficiently harmful that I felt an ethical obligation to speak up, only to be shut down again.

One day, one of the nicer guys in the lunch group walked past me while I was paying at the cash register and, without breaking stride, said "no one's here" to explain why he was leaving with take-out. Startled, I merely agreed with him. Only after I carried my tray to a table where I ate alone did I think to myself, "since when is my name No One?"

I think of myself as a problem-solver. Here were smart, good people who sometimes behaved poorly (by most reasonable standards). Surely this was a problem that could be solved. At a lunch with some of the people who had been nicer to me, I expressed my concern about the group dynamics, ready to give suggestions for improvement. They said they liked it as it is, and anyone who didn't could stop going. 

Like others who felt the groups were dysfunctional, I eventually stopped attending the lunch and Starbucks groups. In my last visit to Starbucks, a retired professor claimed he wanted to understand one particular aspect of the #metoo movement. When I tried to explain it by giving an example of something that happened to me, he blew up, said I might be lying, and left the table.

I occasionally run into B and other people from one group or the other, who kindly encourage me to rejoin. I thank them and remind them that while I'm very happy when people challenge my ideas, I left because I felt unwelcome; the personal hostility towards me by some people at some times eventually reached an unacceptable level.

Never once is their reaction, "I'd like to understand. Could you explain what you mean or give an example?" 

B was surprised and shocked that his own behavior was among the reasons I left, and he seemed quite offended. I was prepared to remind him of the stark contrast between how he treated C and his angry outburst at me, but he never gave me an opening.

What I find most striking in Orange County is a lack of curiosity. (I've learned the hard way that saying "be curious, not furious" doesn't help people who are already angry.)