> Why did you stop doing mathematical research
after doing such
> ground-breaking work in abelian group theory?
> Do you not
have mathematical questions which you want to find answers to?
This question is answered in some detail elsewhere on my personal web site, but now I find thoughts once more rattling around in my brain, and the only way to get rid of them out is to once more write the whole account down. I guess I'll never really get over my resentment, and yet in retrospect I realize that the end result was that my life moved in a direction which now seems much more satisfying to me.
The brief answer is that within a year of arriving at the University of Hawaii, it became apparent to me that continuing to be a mathematician was no longer financially feasible, and that I would soon need to find another way of earning a living.
Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to be brief in talking about this. There are too many things that need to be said and too much resentment. The whole thing was, in the words of Lemony Snickett, a sequence of very unfortunate events.
It had not been not a matter of choice that I left Kansas. I was put up for mandatory consideration for tenure at the University of Kansas having been actually on campus only two and a half years, and was refused because of a mixture of a comedy of errors, a vendetta (partial justified) against the Mathematics Departments by some of other parts of the faculty, an overconfidence both on my part and on the part of the mathematics department resulting in a sloppiness in the way the application was presented, as well as some pigheadedness by a number of crucial people, including myself. The mathematics department had been slightly concerned that on a purely quantitative basis, my research might not be sufficiently impressive; I think that I had about ten papers at that point which were either already published or had been accepted for publication. We took it for granted that teaching would not be an issue, since the graduate students in the department had given me their annual teaching award for the course in homological algebra which I had taught the year before. I myself had thought it a major point in my favor that I had made a point of twice teaching the course in mathematics for non-science majors, a course which most mathematicians do everything possible to avoid teaching. Many of the students in that course have forgotten even their basic high-school algebra. Managing to teach them even a little real mathematics can be a major challenge, and it is one I had always enjoyed.
But the University-wide committee on promotions and tenure clearly didn't see it that way. I was shocked when they gave a report that said that my research was outstanding but my teaching was substandard.
Well, there's no point in re-arguing all that. The Mathematics Department very much wanted to keep me and they made a heroic attempt to rectify the situation. In retrospect I realize that just a small amount of cooperation on my part would probably have been sufficient. All the University committee wanted was some token fig leaf that would enable them to say, "Well, of course we didn't make a mistake. But we see now that you've improved." But didn't realize this at the time and furthermore, I was too outraged to give them this.
I can't say that I had ever been thrilled by the thought of spending the rest of my life in Kansas (although I was in fact starting to make a number of good friends there outside the university community). My first thought on being informed that there was a possible problem with my tenure application was that this was a very good opportunity for me to get a job at a university in a place that really appealed to me. I knew that there had been several recent cases where mathematics departments at several universities had lured a mathematician from another institution using the inducement of a truly enormous salary.
I didn't need such a strong offer as that. All I wanted was an offer of a position at a moderately good instution in a place where I would like to live at a salary that I could live on. And based on my experiences at Kansas, I pretty much took it for granted that salary would not be a major issue.
But when I wrote to several of the algebraists who had so showered me with compliments for my research, the answers were all the same: "We would absolutely love to have you come here. Unfortunately, our budget situation is very difficult and we have no openings at all."
This was the point where I had the first suspicion that maybe my choice of career had not been such a smart one after all.
But finally the University of Hawaii did come through with the offer I needed. I knew very little about Hawaii at that time, but I was intrigued by the possibility of living in a place that seemed so exotic. I knew that two quite well known mathematicians had once been chairmen in the department there --- Paul Halmos and Richard S. Pierce. They had subsequently moved on to other institutions, but still, it seemed like a good sign.
Furthermore, I was impressed by the fact that a number of quite eminant scholars in other fields had recently been part of the University of Hawaii. In particular, there was Leon Edel in the English Department, the nation's leading scholar on Henry James, and Terence Knapp in the Theatre Department, one of the world's leading experts on Shakespeare. These faculty had recently retired or otherwise left the University (although Knapp remained associated with the university theatre until 2005), and there were hints that that had been a certain amount of anger involved in their departures, but didn't think that I needed to be overly concerned about that.
(As a footnote, I should add here that I would discover that, from my point of view at least, the Mathematics Department at Hawaii was better than the one at Kansas had been, despite the fact that it had a considerably lower ranking. The reputation of Kansas was primarily due to three prima donnas and much of the rest of the department, at least as far as I could tell, was only average. Hawaii had a very lively group working in universal algebra and while this wasn't relevant to my own specialty, it seemed to add energy to the whole department. Furthermore Hawaii, at least in the first few years I was there, attracted a number of excellent visiting faculty, whereas very few mathematicians had much interest in visiting Kansas.)
The one thing I did know about Hawaii was that it was very expensive, and I noticed that the salary I was offered was roughly the same as my salary at Kansas had been. But beggars can't be choosers, of course, and besides, I thought that this would only be important for the first year or two. Based on my experience at Kansas, I thought that if I did good research, my salary would very quickly go up quite a bit.
Nobody had bothered to tell me that the University of Hawaii had a very different paradigm than the other universities I had been familiar with. At Hawaii, faculty were seen in terms of a civil service paradigm. The academic departments had no control at all over the salaries of their faculty members. Every year, there would be some negotiated across-the-board step increase for the faculty as a whole, and otherwise (at that time, and to a large extent still now) there were no financial rewards. Thus a faculty member's starting salary would determine his salary for the rest of his/her life.
Coming to Hawaii in 1977, I was coming from a very favorable financial situation to one that was disastrous, and I was hit by a triple-whammy (or maybe quadruple-whammy) that there seemed to be no way to deal with.
The income tax laws at that time meant that if I did not buy a place to live in very soon, I would face a substantial income tax penalty. In Kansas, I had managed to save a considerable amount of money and when I left, my wife and I were able to sell our house for twice what we had paid for it. But the reality of the real estate market in Hawaii was that all that money in the bank was barely adequate for a down payment on a condomiunium apartment in Honolulu.
My daughter, graduating from high school that year, decided that the only acceptable place for her to go to college was the University of Kansas, where she could be with her old friends from high school and where, now, she would be attending as a non-resident. She was awarded a National Merit Scholarship. But the scholarship people looked at our situation and saw that I had a sizable chunk of money in the bank, and so awarded her only a token amount.
It seemed to me that, realistically, the only feasible possibility was for my daughter to either enroll in the University of Hawaii, which would have been a total waste of her ability, or to stay out of college altogether for at least a year.
But fortunately, a completely unexpected lucky break occurred that enabled my daughter to attend the University of Kansas and pay in-state tuition for two and a half years. And we talked to a local realtor who showed us how to use "creative financing" to get a temporary loan to buy a very cheap condominium (at least cheap by Hawaii standards, but costing about twice what we had sold our house in Kansas for) which I would normally have been unable to qualify for. And my wife and I sold our car, figuring that we could manage to get around on the bus. This helped our situation quite a bit. (And in fact, my first two years in Honolulu were the last time in my life that I owned a car.)
I had managed to postpone disaster. In fact, the deal we had made for our apartment meant that I still had about $20,000 left of our saving from Kansas, which seemed like it would be adequate to get my daughter through college and enable me to survive until the necessity arose to get a conventional mortgage.
But the nation was now in the early days of the Reagan administration. The inflation rate was over ten percent, and would soon be 14%. When it came time for the faculty to negotiate a new contract with the state, the new two-year agreement provided for no raise at all for the first year and a 2% raise the second.
This was bad enough, but what made me realize that the situation was completely hopeless was that the two losers in charge of the University's flagship campus at that time (Durward Long and Fujio Matsuda) stood up in front of a meeting of faculty and said that although they realized that of course we were not happy about the situation, nonetheless things were actually okay. And then the representation of the faculty union stood up and tried to tell us that the new contract was very good. (Somehow I was reminded of Richard Nixon's attempts to convince the nation that he was a great president.)
I guess that this was one of my first introductions to what in Hawaii is called "local style."
For a few years, I subscribed regularly to Employment Information for Mathematicians, but I found that almost all the ads were for young mathematicians who had just recently got their Ph.D. I also noticed that no universities seemed to be looking for algebraists; almost all the advertisements were for applied mathematicians, numerical analysts, or statisticians.
At the time, it seemed that continuing to do research into abelian groups would just be throwing good efforts after bad. And for me, doing research was just too difficult for it to be worthwhile as a hobby.
Over the next few years, I did get promoted twice, to associate professor and to full professor. Both these promotions came with significant raises. And the faculty would finally get some step increases of about 5%, which was certainly better than 0%, but which didn't look all that great in comparison to double-digit inflation.
Three of my colleagues took leaves of absence to take jobs in the defense industry (one never came back) and one took the first four exams to become an actuary, although he did eventually wind up staying at UH after things got a little better. One very good topologist in the department who had an bachelor's degree in Engineering now took a number of graduate courses and got a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, with the idea of either doing consulting work on the side or eventually becoming a full-time engineer.
I myself made a point of teaching the undergraduate courses in probability and statistics and numerical analysis, simply in order to learn the material, with the thought that I too might one day take some of the actuary exams. (I also taught such courses as partial differential equations and operations research.)
I seriously considered become a technical translator from Russian. At Kansas, I had taken several courses to improve my Russian, and had taken fourth-year Russian at Indiana University's intense summer program, and had taken a course in translating taught by Galina Bismuth, a Russian emigree who was the head of the translation department for Occidental Petroleum and who was at the time Armand Hammer's personal translator. She had tried to talk me into coming to work for her as a translator, but I wasn't convinced that my Russian was that good. And at that point I got the offer from the University of Hawaii and foolishly thought that the way was now clear for me to become a mathematician again.
But after coming to Hawaii and seeing how bleak my future looked, I joined the American Translators Association and translated a number of journal articles for the American Mathematical Society in order to establish a track record for myself as a translator.
As soon as I realized that financial catastrophe was still a few years down the road, I started putting some effort into something I had always wanted to devote myself to, namely writing fiction. And when it came time to renew my three-year National Science Foundation grant, which paid me two months salary in exchange for three months of intense effort doing research in the summer, I let the contract lapse. That meant the I was using money in savings accounts in order to survive, but it seemed preferable to continuing to put all my efforts into research in algebra, which clearly seemed to be in the long term financially disastrous. And it enabled me in the summer of 1981 to attend the six-week Clarion science fiction writing workshop at Michigan State University, which turned out to be one of the most important experiences of my life.
Probably the main thing that kept me from leaving the university was that I had a sabbatical coming up. I planned to spend that sabbatical at the University of California in Berkeley, learning some more numerical analysis and some computer science, which I hoped would make me more employable outside the academic system. And, most of all, doing some non-academic job hunting. With reasonable luck, I thought, I would be able to get a decent job before my savings ran out.
The other thing that discouraged me from seeking another academic job was tenure. People outside the academic world tend to think of tenure as a wonderful privilege that academics have. And certain in many ways it is. But it's also a very attractive academic trap.
Very few universities are willing to offer a new faculty member instant tenure before he has been campus at least a year or two. And very few academics are brave enough to give up their tenured position at one university to move to another university where tenure is not guaranteed. Certainly I was not.
There are ways around this dilemma, usually through the use of visiting positions. In a way, there's a certain amount of slight dishonesty involved. A professor tells his university, "I wanted to take a leave of absence to spend two years at More Desirable University, where I can learn new things and do some very productive research." And all along, the plan is to give More Desirable U a chance to look the professor over, so that they will be willing to offer him a permanent position with instant tenure along with a 20% raise.
It was more wheeling and dealing than I thought myself capable of. And, as I've mentioned, nobody seemed to have any openings for algebraists anyway.
The paradox of my first seven or eight years at the University of Hawaii was that the Mathematics Department was doing everything possible to make things good for me. At the time, I didn't really appreciate the extent to which the department had considered me a real prize. But at the same time, the University as a whole and the State of Hawaii seemed to be doing their very best to convince me that there was no future for me there.
During those first years, there were several distinguished visiting algebraists who spent a semester or a year at Hawaii. I don't know to what extent those visitors had been hired because of me, or to what extent in some cases it was just a concidence that they came at that time, but certainly I had some very good interactions with them and their presence resulted in some very exciting seminars and gave me an incentive to develop some of my own most important ideas.
In particular, during a year which Richard Pierce spent in Hawaii on sabbatical, I gave an extensive seminar in my specialty which took up most of a semester. In this, I presented not only my own body of work. but a great deal of the other research in the area, reshaping what had previously seemed like a collection of disparate results into a new landscape for the subject of torsion free abelian groups. Later on, I would be able to publish this seminar in the proceedings of the conference on abelian group theory held later in Honolulu.
What I didn't tell anybody was that I was thinking of this seminar as a testament, something to leave behind after what seemed to be my imminent death as an algebraist.
As I look back on it now, I realize that the math department really hoped that I would exercise the leadership role which I had wanted to exercise at Kansas, but been frustrated at.
At Kansas, after the success of my course in homological algebra, which most of the algebra faculty had sat in on, I had been wildly ambitious, undoubtedly foolishly so. I wanted to offer several more courses ostensibly for graduate students as a way of educating the algebraists on the faculty beyond the level of the rather old-fashioned commutative ring theory they then specialized in by teaching courses in commutative rings, modern algebraic number theory, algebraic geometry, and category theory. But the attitude of the facultry was, more or less, "Well, that homological algebra course was very nice, and it was good to learn those things. But we have our own agendas, you know."
On the other hand, while at Hawaii there wasn't a sufficiently large graduate program to support the sort of courses I had taught at Kansas, the faculty were totally willing to learn anything I could teach them in non-credit seminars.
And then the year before I took my sabbatical, Adolf Mader, one of the other algebraists in the department, organized a week-long very large conference in my own specialty, abelian group theory, promising me that I wouldn't have to do any work (a promise I held him to). And at my suggestion, we invited a young German ring theorist who had done some of the most exciting work in the field, which I used to great effect in my own research.
This German mathematician (who spoke perfect English of course) was very interested in my work and suggested that maybe I'd like to come to Germany for a year for a visiting position at his university.
If this had happened while I was still at Kansas, I would have thought it was a dream come true. Even if it had happened a few years later than it did, after my financial situation started to seem not so completely hopeless, I would have eagerly accepted his offer. But at that moment, being so completely convinced that it was imperative to find something other than algebra to devote my life to, I gave him a lukewarm response, and nothing every came of the idea.
In 1983, my daughter graduated from the University of Kansas, so I now longer had to provide money for her. I went to UC Berkeley for a year's sabbatical on half salary, with the intention of taking advantage of my time in the Bay Area to look for a non-academic job there. I took computer-related courses at Berkeley and also devoted a fair effort of work to writing fiction, although not very successfully.
And then in Berkeley I discovered NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) which seemed incredibly exciting to me. I wound up taking a several courses in it. I was able to resolve a number of long-standing problems in my life and to my surprise and delight, I found that I was actually quite good at helping some of my fellow students make major changes. I was now spending the last of my savings, but I convinced myself that it was a gamble that that somehow or other it would all turn out to be worth it.
Foolishly, I hadn't done any job hunting in Berkeley, but I was still sure that with my Ph.D. in mathematics, I wouldn't have that much trouble finding a job in industry.
When I came back to Honolulu in 1984, I was able to find a number of people interested in having me do NLP for them. And I started working as a telephone volunteer once a week at the Suicide and Crisis Center. And although I'd never in my life taken an academic psychology course, I started thinking about the possibility of become a credentialed psychotherapist or counselor.
I had no money left in the bank, and in fact had a few thousands owing on my credit card, but what with one thing or another, my income was now enough to survive on. I was still thinking that it was imperative for me to leave the University, although I really had no idea where I would be going next. My wife had not come back to Honolulu with me. I listed our apartment with a local realtor.
It was at about this point that paradoxically, now that I was no longer seriously devoted to doing academic research, the State finally acknowledged the disastrous state of the university and over the next few years gave us all some substantial pay raises. Furthermore, by now I had been promoted twice, first to associate professor and then to full professor, and each of these promotions came with a 8% pay raise.
The main reason I hadn't left UH was simply that I had never developed a coherent plan of finding somewhere else to go. But looking back on it now, I think that if it hadn't been for the dramatic improvement in the salary situation, I would have found a way to leave within the next few years. Simply by continuing to let people know that I was strongly interested in finding another university to move to, I would eventually have come across another good opportunity.
But in the short term, none of the other possibilities seemed very promising. I talked to one of the former math department faculty who had left to get a job in the aerospace industry, and what he told me about the current job situation there was not encouraging. And the prospect of going back to that world of security clearances and cubicles was quite depressing. I was disappointed with the offers I got for our apartment, and with my ex-wife's agreement, decided to take it off the market.
Gradually I was starting to realize that it was no longer a financial necessity for me to leave the academic world. Although I was certainly not enthusiastic about staying in Honolulu and staying at the university, that did seem to be the path of least resistance.
At this point, there was no reason why I could not have started once again devoting myself to serious and ambitious mathematical research. But the thought now scarcely crossed my mind. There no longer seemed to be any point in it. I had had the experience in the past of being the equivalent in the mathematics world of a rock star, or at least someone who was well on his way. Maybe I could have achieved that status again or maybe not. But it didn't really interest me any more.
I did write a few more mathematical papers, not completely bad, over the next few years. In fact, in 1988 I wrote what in my own opinion was the most brilliant paper of my career. But now I didn't let my research take over my life the way it once had. A lot of my effort was now devoted to auditing writing workshops and other courses in the English Department, doing my Suicide and Crisis volunteer work, participating in on a sexuality seminar conducted by Milton Diamond in the medical school, and taking courses at the Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
I certainly did not have the life that I had once imagined a full professor would have. I was certainly not nowhere near as well off as I would have been if I'd been able to stay at the University of Kansas. I was still taking the bus to get places, but certainly I could have bought a car if I had really wanted one. I realized that what was more important to me was my freedom. I never went back to getting NSF grants for my summers, and could afford to spend time each summer in San Francisco, sometimes staying with friends and sometimes in cheap hotels which at that time might cost me maybe $150 a week.
In 1990 I sold the apartment which my ex-wife and I still owned, and made a substantial profit on it (splitting it with her, of course; it had turned out to be a very good investment for both of us). Because of the tax laws, I knew that I would soon have to re-invest a large portion of that profit in buying another place to live, but even so, there was enough money to enable me take another year's sabbatical at half salary at Berkeley.
And then my mother died, leaving me a very large inheritance.
Because of inflation, salaries were once again slipping downwards in terms of real purchasing power. But now I knew that I could survive, and even eventually retire. I had never really wanted to be rich in any case.
Gradually I had slipped into being a "local style" professor. Someone who enjoys life and who works, but not too hard. Someone who may talk a lot about "excellence," but who is really satisfied with routine accomplishments.
And then, after the world-wide web came into being, I started putting all my efforts into creating my mathematical web site, trying to make various topics in mathematics accessible to a much larger audience.
It was not what mathematicians consider serious research, but fortunately I had reached the point where I no longer had to give a fuck for what anybody else thought about what I did.
--Lee Lady
Footnote: My own situation at the University of Hawaii was especially difficult, but as I've indicated, most of the faculty during that time, especially younger faculty, were having a pretty hard time.
Academics can often be not very bright when it comes to things outside the academic realm. It took the UH faculty years and years to finally catch on to the fact that the state of Hawaii simply did not find much value the possibility in having an excellent university, although this was made more than clear not only be the steady decline of faculty salaries in terms of real purchasing power, but also by the drastic cutbacks in other academic resources, most especially the library.
Most of the legislators and other elected officials in Hawaii had received their entire education from UH and thus had no experience of a real university.
To some extent there was a recognition in the state of the practical advantages of having a university with a good reputation. Many people did realize that there would be an advantage for students in being able to graduate from a prestigious university. But for the most part there was for no awareness in Hawaii of the intrinsic value of a university. In the other universities I had become familiar with, talented faculty were seen as valuable resources that should be nurtured and encouraged. At UH, this was certainly the attitude of the Mathematics Department and, most likely, other academic departments as well. But the higher levels of the administration and even more so the state government made it quite clear in many different ways that they considered university faculty to be a bunch of parasites who were always trying to get more than they deserved.
In particular, during the time I was at UH, the state government started being obsessed with the idea of faculty workload, several times implementing various ideas (none completely successful) for ensuring that faculty were working at least a 40-hour week.
To me, at least, this idea that the value of faculty members should be judged in terms of the hours they put in rather than the results they achieve was a very convenient justification for my decision to no longer be concerned with producing important research. The fact is that, for me, at least, during the time when I am actively caught up in deriving a major mathematical result, I am putting in an almost 24/7 effort. But now it was easy for me to say, "Why break my balls coming up with important theorems? As long as I put in my 40 hours per week, I've fulfilled my obligation to the university."
In Hawaii, there is the mystique that one is living in a "special place," with its own special values that are not appreciated by most people who come from the outside and try to impose Mainland values. (This is very similar to what one finds in states in the deep south, such as Mississippi and Georgia.)
There is a tendancy in Hawaii to think of the university as only an expensive playground for faculty and graduate students from outside the state.
Certainly state officials as well as the University administration are quick to brag when some faculty members did some spectacular piece of research that made newspaper headlines, such as cloning a mouse. But for the most part, the concept of academic research is alien to most people living in Hawaii, including most people in the state government.
Hawaii knows that it needs what the Mainland has to offer. Certainly after the demise of the sugar and pineapple plantations, there was a desperate search for new clean industries that would bring prosperity to the islands. People thought of the film industry, for which Hawaii would seem ideally suited. And then, like most of the rest of the world, Hawaii decided that the perfect thing would be to bring high tech industry to the state.
But Hawaii has never been willing to do what it takes to be competitive in attracting such industries. There was a very popular television series based in Hawaii, viz. Magnum PI, starring Tom Selleck. But the state government and the unions made life so unpleasant for that production company that after many years it finally gave up in disgust. Later, other film companies occasionally came, but never stayed very long.
And as to high tech, it was a great idea but what Hawaii was willing to offer was, as usual, more than a day late and a dollar short. And how do you convince highly educated high tech people to come to a place with an atrocious public school system and a mediocre university?
Yes, Hawaii is indeed a special place, with wonderful local values. The same is true of many other underdeveloped parts of the world.
But can Hawaii be satisfied to remain one of those impoverished underdeveloped parts of the world that survive by attracting lots of tourists with money?