- Hawaii is a ``special place.'' You've all heard that cliché. It is a special hell for those unwilling to understand or appreciate how it works.
- -- flier from the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly (the faculty union)
During my last year at Kansas, it seemed for a while that my career as a mathematician was at an end. I actually looked into buying two small businesses in Lawrence -- a tavern and a used furniture store. And I was seriously considering the possibility of earning my living by translating Russian.
When I went to an Abelian Groups conference in Las Cruces that December (1976), I sat there wondering why on earth I was there listening to people talk about mathematics instead of being home improving my Russian.
Then, that spring, when I got the job offer from the University of Hawaii, I thought, ``Oh, I guess maybe I'm meant to go on being a mathematician for a while after all.'' But I was rather skeptical about the idea. I was no longer really convinced that mathematics was my destiny.
I am fairly convinced that if I had been able to get a permanent job at the University of Illinois when I got my Ph.D. in 1972, I would have become a serious mathematician. The environment at Illinois was very stimulating, and there were also lots of opportunities for me to do what really interested me, namely learn a whole lot of different kinds of mathematics. And, most important of all, there were people on the faculty there who I really enjoyed being with.
Probably if I had got tenure at the University of Kansas, I would also have continued being serious about my mathematics, because I probably never would have taken time out to seriously consider any other possibility. Although the environment at Kansas was much less stimulating than at Illinois, and the people in the department definitely less interesting, there were a lot of pressures and incentives to keep me doing mathematical research. In particular, I would have gone on applying for NSF grants, thus committing myself to write papers. And there were opportunities to do some graduate level teaching at Kansas that I found very fulfilling. (Here at Hawaii, I could teach the graduate algebra course more often if I chose, but we essentially don't offer any courses above that level.)
I had certainly not been anxious to spend the rest of my life in Kansas, though. So in a way, being denied tenure there was not in itself such a bad thing. It gave me a good reason to do what I wanted to do anyway, namely move somewhere else.
What was discouraging, though -- depressing even -- were the responses I had received when I wrote to all the notable mathematicians around the country who had at various times given me so much praise for my work. The answers were all the same: ``We'd love to have you here, but right now we're unable to hire anyone at all.'' What this said to me was that no matter how good the work I did was, I would probably never get the sort of rewards I wanted. (In retrospect, I realize that this was no entirely correct. But at that point, facing the loss of my job at Kansas, I was not looking at things in an entirely rational way.)
In some ways, at least from my point of view, the Math Department at the University of Hawaii was better than the University of Kansas, even if it was generally considered less prestigious. I found the faculty much more enjoyable as people (although not to the same extent as those at Illinois), and they were much more open to having seminars and learning new things than the algebraists at Kansas had been. (At Kansas, seminars were regarded primarily as a venue for faculty to present their own work, rather than to enlarge their horizons.) In fact, during the first three years when I was at UH, we had a several extremely good algebra seminars which I learned a lot from. (The fact that the algebra seminars subsequently declined was, in my opinion, largely my fault. It gradually became clear to me that I had been brought here, at least in part, to provide leadership for the algebraists. But as I grew increasingly disgusted with the University, I withdrew more and more into my own interests and had little desire to provide such leadership.)
Furthermore, the University of Hawaii had (and has) one extremely strong point in its favor, namely that it attracts a number of visitors, some of them quite distinguished.
The downside of the University of Hawaii, though, as I quickly discovered, was the financial situation. In particular, *my* financial situation, which I soon realized was disastrous.
The financial structure for faculty at UH is very different
than it was at the University of Kansas.
In fact, it is almost exactly the opposite.
At Kansas (and also at Illinois),
the chairman of a university department
is given a certain budget for salaries.
Within that constraint, he has absolute discretion
(subject to the advice of a small faculty committee)
in deciding on individual salaries.
The result is that one's salary depends very much on
one's productivity.
Within the Mathematics Department,
there were some wide discrepancies in the salaries
of different people with approximately equal
rank and seniority.
This was perhaps sometimes unfair,
but it made it very worthwhile to do good work.
In Hawaii, on the other hand,
where there is a lot of ambivalence about the University,
the State is very committed to considering faculty
to be part of the civil service system.
As such, faculty sometimes (but not always) receive modest step raises,
and very occasionally there are equally modest merit raises.
(As I recall, during the twenty years I have been here
I have twice had the opportunity to receive a merit raise
-- approximately 5 per cent -- and in both cases was awarded this raise.)
The fact that the faculty is unionized contributes
to this situation,
both because the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly
has the typical union attitude
that it would be unfair to allow departments to have discretion
over determining salaries,
and because, up until very recently,
every time it was suggested that the faculty was in bad need
of a large increase in salary,
the State would counter that it would be unfair
to give one of the civil service unions
more than was given to the others.
One result of all this is that even when, as in my case,
it is universally agreed that a faculty member was hired
at a salary which was much too low,
because of certain accidental forces at work in the University
the year I was hired,
there is still no mechanism for ever remedying that situation.
Another result is that despite the fact that
there are a number of very good faculty here,
and some very good programs and good departments -- especially in areas
where the Federal Government is committed to supplying a lot of
grant money, or in those disciplines whose faculty are attracted
by the many very positive,
non-financial ways in which Hawaii is a ``special place'' --
as a whole the University has no chance of ever overall excellence.
It is difficult for the University to consistently
attract really good people,
and when good people do come,
the University gives them no incentive to do good work.
It's not that I ever had much desire for a big fancy house
or a luxury car.
(In fact, I haven't even owned a car at all
or especially wanted to for about fifteen years now.)
But with my daughter about to start college,
and inflation starting to rage out of control,
it began to seem that my financial situation would soon be
completely hopeless.
I was discovering some of the more unpleasant ways
in which Hawaii is a ``special place.''
Most people who live here would say that it is totally unrealistic
to expect to support a family and also put a child through college
on a single income.
The National Merit Foundation gave my daughter only a token scholarship,
because they looked at our finances much more optimistically
than I was able to.
However we did have one piece of enormous luck
that enabled my daughter to go to the University of Kansas
as she wished.
Namely, the University of Kansas classified her as a Kansas resident,
even though she had applied as a non-resident.
(To some extent this almost made sense,
since she had recently graduated from a Kansas high school,
but it eventually turned out that it had been simply an error.
Two years later she lost her resident status.)
Even so, it was only because my wife and I had been saving
a considerable amount of money while living in Arcata and
Lawrence and had made a nice profit from the sale
of our little house in Lawrence
that we were able to survive the first few years in Hawaii.
With the help of some creative financing,
we did manage to buy a two-bedroom condominium.
The payments (about $400 oer month)
took half my take-home pay at first,
but in the long run, owning that apartment
was what enabled us to survive.
Things did eventually get better.
By 1986 (at which time I was already a full professor)
my salary had gone up quite a bit.
And now, in 1996, I think that in terms of real earning power
I am probably doing slightly better than I was
when I first began teaching at Humboldt State University
in 1969.
(Of course Hawaii is a lot more expensive place to live.)
It's not great, but it's certainly comfortable.
But by the time things got better,
I had already made some decisions
which irrevocably changed the direction of my life.
Furthermore, when I started graduate school
it was a fact of life that anyone with a Ph.D. (in the sciences at least)
who, by choice or otherwise, did not become part of the academic world
could easily get a very high-paying job in industry.
Furthermore, if one was really good
in academic research,
one could count on finding jobs at high salaries at major universities,
and if one wished one could have a high degree of mobility,
changing universities either to improve one's salary
or to find a more enticing environment.
(In my case, one of my main reasons for choosing to be an academic
was a desire to be part of a university where there was
an exciting intellectual life and bright, interesting students.
The University of Kansas met this requirement
only to a modest extent,
the University of Hawaii meets it not at all.)
Finally, when I started in the academic world
I of course noticed that associate professors and full professors,
and even assistant professors with more seniority than myself,
were paid quite a bit better than I was.
So it was only natural to assume that as time went by
and I was promoted to higher ranks,
then my own salary would steadily improve accordingly.
(I had certainly never expected that, on the contrary,
I would find it steadily going down in terms of real purchasing power,
as was the case for the first seven or eight years
while I was in Hawaii.)
By the time I got my Ph.D., most of these things were
definitely untrue.
By the time I arrived in Hawaii,
it was clear that none of them at all were true for me.
It seemed more and more clear
that I would never be able to move to another university,
and that by staying at the University of Hawaii
I would soon be living a life of virtual poverty.
And nobody in industry was going to automatically hire me
just because I had a Ph.D.
If I wanted a job in the non-academic world
(which would apparently soon not be a matter of choice),
I'd better start learning some kinds of mathematics
that were more useful than abelian group theory.
During my first year at the University of Hawaii,
I had applied for, and was awarded, an NSF grant for three years.
Aside from the fact that it gave me money,
it was also quite apparent that this would be a wise move
as far as getting tenure and promotion,
since UH seemed to place a lot more emphasis on getting grants
than the University of Kansas had.
As far as I was concerned,
having this grant committed me to writing at least
one paper every summer.
(A wise move in any case, at least until I got tenure.)
And since I've never been any good at finding easy problems to work on,
this involved an all-out effort
which took up my entire summer and a fair amount of time
during the rest of the year.
(The grant paid my salary for two of the three summer months.)
In my opinion, the research I did during these first few years
at the University of Hawaii
was the most important mathematics I've ever accomplished.
Unfortunately, however, for quite a while almost nobody else seemed
to be able to read these papers.
In any case, after a few years of getting 2% or 0% raises
in times of drastic inflation,
I started thinking more and more about the important aspects of myself
that I'd given up in becoming a mathematician.
I was no longer willing to go on in the same way.
For one thing, I started once again trying to write fiction
(with enormous difficulty and not a lot of success).
I made what was almost a perverse decision:
not to ask for a renewal of my NSF grant.
Although this was an expensive decision
(costing me an additional two months salary every year),
the mathematics I was doing was simply not paying off for me
in terms of the things I really valued in life,
and I knew that I had to find another path.
And, as a start, I wanted my summers back for myself.
1981 was the first summer where I had no grant money,
and I took the opportunity to go to Michigan State University
for six weeks to the
Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop,
something I had dreamed of doing for a long time.
Another important consideration
(which I hadn't really given much thought to at the time),
was that without an NSF grant I no longer had an automatic source
of travel money.
And although the University of Hawaii is comparatively liberal
in funding faculty travel (there are indeed some good things about UH),
getting money from the University to go to the conferences
that were really important to me involved conditions
which were awkward for me to meet.
So the net result was that I stopped going to conferences
(except one in Colorado Springs in 1988).
And attending conferences had been one of the major things
that reinforced my self-concept as a mathematician.
The other thing I did was to start teaching courses
in applicable mathematics:
Numerical Analysis, Probability and Statistics
(which was almost completely foreign territory for me),
Partial Differential Equations, Combinatorics,
Operations Research, and Transform Methods.
(See the
list of courses I have taught at the University of Hawaii.)
Constantly teaching new courses in this
required a huge expenditure of time on my part.
Between this and attempting to write fiction,
I probably wouldn't have had much time for research
even if I'd had an incentive to do it.
And yet in another way,
I have to realize that this hardship was a positive factor in my life
as a whole, because it made me stop
and re-evaluate my relationship to the university
and to academic life as a whole.
The thing is,
throughout my whole life people have been wanting me to join
some army or other.
After my freshman year at Johns Hopkins,
I decided that I didn't want to work try to part of the system,
so I dropped out of college for a year.
But I didn't seem to be able to make it on my own,
so I went back to college in defeat.
But when I was ready to graduate
and my professors tried to get me to go to graduate school,
I declined.
I didn't want to have a Ph.D., I didn't want to be part of the
academic system.
But once again, I found that I just didn't know how to find
my own way.
I got a job in the aerospace industry,
and after a couple of years my boss wanted to make me a supervisor.
I tried that for a month or so.
Sylvania was about to promote me to being a Chief Engineer,
and I would have had a quite good salary.
But that role didn't work out for me at all --
to my great relief.
I didn't want to be a supervisor,
I didn't want to actually be a part of the company:
I just wanted to work there forty hours a week.
At that point I started working with a different group at
Sylvania, doing work that seemed more challenging
than computer programming.
It was pretty clear, though, that I was soon going to have
to apply to get my security clearance upgraded to Top Secret,
and I didn't much like that idea.
Because of various reasons, I left the aerospace industry then.
And once again, I found that I didn't know how to make it on my own.
Some religions talk about the broad paved highway that leads to Hell,
as contrasted with the steep and stony path that leads to Heaven.
Trying to make it outside the system in our culture
is certainly a very difficult and stony path,
and I had to accept the fact that it was more than I could cope with,
especially with a wife and child to support.
Going to graduate school seemed like the only way out.
I thought I'd get a Masters degree and teach at a small college
somewhere or maybe a progressive high school.
But everyone took it for granted that I would want to get a Ph.D.
And then the whole job market for mathematicians
(and other academics) drastically changed,
so that getting a teaching job even at a junior college
with only a Masters degree seemed no longer feasible.
(I tried, by taking the job at Humboldt State,
but they wouldn't give me a permanent job.)
It became clear that going against the system
just wasn't working -- at least not for me.
I was going to have to give in and join somebody's army.
And the academic world seemed like a pretty reasonable army to belong to.
I don't know what would have happened if I'd got tenure
at the University of Kansas and
I don't know what would have happened
if the University of Hawaii
had been willing to pay me a decent salary.
When I look back at the possibility
that I might have spent my whole life in Kansas,
or even here in Hawaii,
writing more and more mathematical papers that at best a couple of dozen
people in the world would read,
I realize how grateful I should be
to the University of Kansas and the University of Hawaii
for making me realize that the army of the academic world
was not all as wonderful as I had been led to believe,
and making me realize that
I was no longer very thrilled to be marching in step with it.
I had chosen the broad paved highway
as opposed to the narrow, stony path,
but now was learning that this highway
was not as wonderful as I had been led to believe,
and it was certainly not taking me to the places
where I had hoped to go.
And so I went on to other things:
learning
NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming),
doing
suicide prevention work
on a volunteer basis, going to the
Clarion Science Fiction Writer's Workshop,
attending courses at the Institute for Advanced Study of
Human Sexuality in San Francisco,
going through the training for the
San Francisco Sex Information telephone hotline,
and becoming a regular participant in Dr. Milton Diamond's
seminar on human sexuality here at UH.
But that's getting ahead of the story.
Within a year or two of coming to Hawaii,
I started reassessing where I was in life.
I had gone to graduate school in the first place
somewhat reluctantly,
based on a number of facts which I had assumed immutable.
Namely, when I started graduate school it was clear
that it was easy for anyone with a Ph.D. to get a job
in the academic world, if one wasn't looking for an extremely
prestigious position.
(On the bulletin board at the University of Maryland
there were a number of ads from four-year colleges
looking for assistant professors
with ``at least a Masters degree.'')
Since my ideal at the time was to teach at some small four year college
-- preferable someplace progressive and experimental such as
Swarthmore, or Bard, or Goddard, or Reed --
that seemed very promising.
If I had been slightly less disgusted with the University
in 1980 and had applied for a three-year renewal of my NSF grant,
my life now would be considerably different.
For one thing, I would have written many more papers,
because I would have had a tangible incentive for doing so.
It is quite possible that as a result,
my research would have led me to a point
where I would have been quite reluctant not to pursue
it further.
(In any case, that grant would have lasted until 1983,
just about two years before my financial situation
started looking less hopeless.)
Even now, when my salary has become pretty good
(although still considerably below the standard
at many Mainland universities),
I still have a lot of resentment toward the University of Hawaii
because of the financial hardship I endured
during my first seven or eight years here.