As I read it over, it makes it sound like I have an extremely depressing life. That's actually not the case at all. It is true that I am impatient to get out of the academic world, and frustrated at the economic factors that prevent me from doing that for the next year or two, but I've reached an accomodation that works reasonably well for me.

Besides, unless something unexpected goes wrong, I'll be in San Francisco on sabbatical for a year starting in August!

I received the following email from jupiterbowl (quoted with permission):
>
>In article <5iqjom$ahf@news.Hawaii.Edu> you write:

I have only one piece of advice to give you. GET OUT NOW! If you are miserable in school, get out!

I say this fully realizing that for some people, school is the dues that have to be paid in order to do what you really want.

I remember, for instance, a student I had in one of the classes I taught for prospective elementary school teachers. God, the guy was so stupid! He put every working hour into trying to learn the material in the course, and it just never made any sense to him. But he was fully aware that he would never be competent to teach mathematics and never intended to try. He liked kids, he liked sports, and he really wanted to be a physical education specialist in elementary school. But in order to do this, the world required him to qualify himself as a full-blown elementary school teacher. (I finally gave him a charity D, which was all he needed.)

This guy certainly did not enjoy school, but I don't think he would have described himself as miserable in it. School was worthwhile for him, despite all the frustration, because he was working toward a meaningful goal.

Ask yourself what the things are that make life worthwhile for you, and how much of those things your present life and the future life you can envision offers.

It's important to realize that people are incredibly different from each other and people's experiences are very different from each other. I suspect that if in the Math Dept coffee room I were to state that my years in graduate school were in many ways among the best ones of my life, almost everyone would disagree. And in fact, some would disagree in a tone suggesting that not only were their years in graduate school not the best in their life, but that I must be actually mistaken in my valuation about my own experience. They would even present arguments to try and convince me that my life in graduate school could not have been as satisfying as my life since.

Something I find it important to do once in a while (and I wish I'd done this more when I was younger) is to occasionally take a moment to ask myself just what it is that makes this whole damned business of life worth the struggle. What is it that gives me satisfaction/enjoyment in life, and what proportion of my life is devoted to these things, as opposed to all the crap?

For instance I have a few friends who are really into having fun, and constantly doing new things. (They're not academics!) I love having these people in my life (although only on an occasional basis) because they bring something into it that I don't naturally generate for myself. And yet I will never be like them, and never want to be. My values are very different.

Anyway, since you ask let me tell you about my own life.

Having a rich variety of experiences is something I value highly. For me the important thing is experiencing things that are new, even when they are not necessarily pleasurable. Living in a lot of different places has been very important in my life. From the time I left home at age 18 until I got my Ph.D., I never lived more than three years in the same town -- seldom more than two. Now, I look back at the fact that I've lived here in Honolulu for twenty years (except for summers and two sabbaticals) and think with horror, "My God! What kind of person have I become?"

Something else that's very important to me is having people in my life who are interesting and intelligent (although not necessarily well educated). And it's a particular kind of intelligence I look for. Intelligence about people and about emotions is a very important criterion for me in my friends, but I also really like people who have very wide-ranging interests, and especially people who are knowledgeable about literature and the arts.

If someone were to offer me a job, the number one thing they could say to attract me is that I'd have really interesting co-workers. (I think for one year in my life I had a job like that -- the year I spend as a lecturer at the University of Illinois. The two years I taught at Humboldt State University were also not overly bad in that respect.)

When I look back at my life now, one of the most depressing things I see is an almost steady decline in the quality of the people who I'm friendly with, starting from the time I was in high school.

On the whole, I don't like people in science and engineering. The best way to ensure that I will not enjoy your company is to insist on talking to me about mathematics. (Except that sometimes I find it interesting to listen to people who don't understand mathematics very well talk about their difficulties with it.)

Mostly I much prefer the company of women to that of men. I am especially uninterested in the sort of males who almost never talk about anything except sports and cars (or mathematics or departmental politics!). And here I am in a field where women are very scarce.

Something else that's very important to me is learning new things. Explaining the things I know to other people also gives me a lot of satisfaction. This made me believe that I would like teaching, but teaching turned out to be very different from this. Forcing students to learn things that they have no interest in is no joy for me.

In some ways, though, my job as a professor is ideal for me. It gives me a lot of personal freedom, which is one of the things that most consistently gives me pleasure. To a large extent, it allows me to choose my own projects to work on, even when some of these projects (like my web page, not to mention the English courses I take, or my articles on usenet) seem to my colleagues to be virtually evidence of insanity.

And my job gives me lots of chance to spend time alone and read and learn things and have lots of thoughts, which has always been one of the main things I've wanted in life since I was about six years old.

Another thing that's very important to my sense of having a worthwhile life is feeling that I'm accomplishing things and doing something worthwhile -- making a difference in the world. Unfortunately I'm not very good at this. When I do manage to do it, such as in the creation of my NLP archive, it often comes about almost by accident.

This is a criterion that my job as a mathematics professor definitely does not fulfill. Certainly if there's one thing that makes me think that I'm completely wasting my life and wasting my potential and might just as well jump off my 17th floor lanai, it's the idea that I've let myself become the sort of person who has been teaching the same calculus courses for well over twenty years now to students who show no indication that they find anything of value in what I'm teaching them.

(I do teach upper-level courses as well, of course. In fact, at this point I've taught almost every undergraduate course the department offers, and a few graduate courses as well. The main satisfaction in teaching upper division courses, especially outside my own specialty, is that at least I get to learn something new even if my students don't. For many years I taught a new course every semester. This at least kept me from being bored, but eventually I realized that I was expending an enormous amount of time and energy with very little payoff for myself. Right now I'd rather devote that time and energy to learning literature or writing fiction or doing something else that matters to me.)

If the course of my life had gone somewhat differently, it might have been that I would have found satisfaction in being a mathematician and publishing lots of new theorems. I was certainly very good at it (although I can't say that I ever really enjoyed doing research). As it was, though, I reached a point where I made a deliberate decision to withdraw from the world of serious mathematics, primarily because it became clear that the university here in Hawaii was never going to pay me a decent salary and there seemed to be almost no opportunity to get a job at another university. (Universities are overstocked with senior tenured people. When they hire, mostly they're looking for assistant professors.)

So I decided I'd better do something to make myself marketable to the non-academic world. In fact, the reason that I taught our undergraduate probability and statistics courses was to learn enough about the subject to be able to take the actuary exams, although I never actually did take them. (The salary situation here did eventually improve considerably, although it's still not wonderful, but by that time it was too late for me to start being a serious mathematician again.)

When I look back over my life, though, I almost feel that in a way I should be thankful to the University of Hawaii for having provoked a crisis in my life by paying me such a pitiful salary for so many years. Because when I try to imagine what it would have been like to have been a serious mathematician all those years, which for me would mean being totally obsessed with my research, I find myself looking at that alternative history almost with horror. I am very very glad that I stepped off that path and am not that kind of person.

Furthermore, withdrawing from that life and no longer applying for grants, with the result that my summers were now my own, gave me the opportunity to have a number of extremely important experiences which I consider to have been the most noteworthy things in my life -- certainly more worthwhile than any of the theorems I got so much acclaim for proving. For instance going to the Clarion summer science fiction workshop for six weeks in 1981, going through a lot of NLP training, doing volunteer suicide-prevention work, taking courses at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, and taking the training for the San Francisco Sex Information hotline.

Now that's me. It's not your average academic. In fact, I don't think there is any such thing as the average academic. Certainly a lot of academics love being professors. A lot of them are pompous assholes, as far as I'm concerned, but that's the sort of person they enjoy being. Some (including several in the Math Dept here) are perfectly reasonable human beings, although when I was an undergraduate I would have considered most of them too limited (i.e. boring) to have a lunch-time conversation with. And some faculty in mathematics and the sciences are nerds (although mostly they've learn a few more social skills than Bill Gates). As far as they're concerned, the academic world is Nerd Heaven, and they find it completely inconceivable that anybody could not want to be in Nerd Heaven.

And then there are a lot of academics who are totally crazy and if they weren't professors would be in asylums.

--
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life, and that is why we adore them. But life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
-- Iris Murdoch

(Continued from previous article.)

I received the following email from jupiterbowl (quoted with permission):
>
>In article <5iqjom$ahf@news.Hawaii.Edu> you write:
...
>>When I write that my time as a graduate student was among the best days
>>>>of my life, I don't say it at all lightly.

Well, it's hard to compare prestigious Eastern universities (my original plan had been to go to Brown or Harvard, and I actually spent my freshman year at Johns Hopkins, where I was thoroughly miserable) with the University of Hawaii -- a commuter college in a small agricultural state with virtually no entrance requirements. But I just don't see any indication from students any more that they find any value in what they get in college.

And as far as jobs go, there seems to be a general attitude of futility. Over the past thirty years, we have come closer and closer to fulfilling the dream of the Industrial Revolution -- a self-operating world -- and we are more and more confronted with the implications of that success: of living in a world where most people are simply not needed. There is now a tremendous scramble to get into what once would have been considered fringe occupations -- psychotherapy, academic positions, media -- since they are almost the only ones left where there is still a need for human abilities. But we can't invent new kinds of careers nearly fast enough.

But as far as the difference between my experience in grad school and yours, there are other considerations. Even at any given time, different people's experiences in education are very different. And my own experiences at the three different universities where I did graduate work were very different.

I started graduate study at your school, the University of Maryland. I spent a horrible year and a half there.

Mathematically it was great. I had an opportunity to take some really good advanced courses that were not offered at the other two universities I subsequently attended. (I did not take the typical first-year math grad student's curriculum.)

But I was living with my wife and five-year-old daughter in my mother's house. My wife insisted that if I was going to school, then she was going to also go to school, to work on finishing her bachelors degree. (I later realized that her real consideration was that she was understandably not about to be left sitting at home with my young daughter in suburbia all day.) So we set off at seven every morning, dropped my daughter off at day care, and got back home at five-thirty. I had no social life with the other graduate students and there were almost none of them that I much liked.

The math grad students had one party during the time I was there -- at Christmas. It was a quite dismal affair. Everyone sat alone or with their date, pouring liquor into a paper cup out of the bottle they'd brought, and making unsuccessful attempts at conversation.

(My wife, however, got invited to some really good parties given in a big house by some undergraduates from one of her classes. For me, though, the trouble with those parties was that what everybody did was dance. They were all having tremendous fun, but I didn't know how to dance -- or, to be more honest, was too inhibited -- so I just stood on the edges and watched.)

At Maryland, I spent a lot of time in the library. (Despite being a graduate assistant, I didn't get an office, only a library carrel. I had the use of a shared office three hours a week to meet with my students.)

I learned an incredible amount of off-beat and important mathematics reading library books. Essentially it was the only thing I had to do on campus, aside from going to classes and studying for them.

I decided to transfer to UC San Diego (in La Jolla) purely because one of my fellow students had been there and said that it was an incredibly friendly place: all the graduate students were friends, and many of the faculty were very friendly with the students. I looked at the UCSD catalog, saw that they listed some really exciting courses (most of which I subsequently discovered were never actually offered), and sent them an application, not applying anywhere else. (I didn't even apply to Berkeley, although going to Berkeley had been my dream for several years, because I foolishly took it for granted that they wouldn't accept me.)

I haven't got around to writing much about those two years in La Jolla on my web page, but they were paradise. A woman who had been a fellow computer programmer at Sylvania was now a student there, so I arrived with an instant friend. She, as a personable and attractive woman in a mathematics department (I think there were two other women students at the time), was a big center of attention not only from the graduate students but from a lot of the faculty. So pretty soon I knew everybody. (It's quite essential that I have friends in my life who are outgoing and know how to have fun, since I am not and do not.)

Furthermore, the students at UCSD were bright, and mostly pretty likeable. (One of them, incidentally, was Vernor Vinge, who had already published his first science fiction novel.)

Whereas most of the students at Maryland struggled to get passing grades in the basic courses, the students at UCSD were not satisfied just to pass their courses. They wanted to really understand everything. And consequently, although there was not the diversity in course offerings that there had been at Maryland where the program was much larger, the level of the courses was a step up. At Maryland, category theory -- which was then the big new fashionable thing in mathematics -- had been rather hesitantly mentioned in a couple of my courses. Mostly I had learned about it from books in the library. But at UCSD, even some of the most basic courses were completely organized around category theory. (Partly this was because of a brand new textbook on abstract algebra by a guy at Columbia named Lang that was to become, as it were, the industry standard.) I felt that I was really learning things on the cutting edge, and this was very exciting for me.

And whereas the few good students at Maryland had been mostly pretty nerdy, the math grad students at UCSD gave a big party every month, where there'd be a keg of beer and a powerful sound system playing the Beatles and Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane and the Doors (this was 1967), and everybody danced. I danced. I had never danced at parties before. I said I didn't know how, but women would drag me onto the dance floor anyway. After a while I became a very popular dance partner at these parties.

Faculty came to these parties and danced to rock and roll. One time a professor brought a dancer he'd picked up at a strip club.

The married students had pretty wives, and the unmarried ones had even prettier girl friends.

My wife also became quite popular with the grad students, and this was a big help in enhancing my own social life. If it hadn't been for her, I don't know that people would have invited me to half the events they did. (People did like me, without question. It's just that, unlike my wife, I wasn't the sort of person one thought to go out and have fun with.)

I was in the middle of the Youth Revolution, the Psychodelic Revolution, the Love Generation, all of which were things that in Maryland I had known about only from reading Newsweek. Many of the male graduate students had hair flowing down below their shoulders, some students walked around campus and around town all day barefoot.

My new friend David, who lived in a garage a block away from me, had an incredible collection of rock and roll records, and was very much a devotee of the Beach Boys and the Kinks. I, who had always considered rock and roll as low class music that only illiterates would listen to, was now listening to the new "underground" FM rock station in Los Angeles. Up till now, my record collection had consisted of jazz, classic unamplified blues (Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Dave von Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliot) and music from France (Yves Montand, Juliette Greco, Georges Brassens) and other European countries. Now I was buying records by obscure rock and roll bands such as the Bonzo Dog, the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, and Elephant's Memory.

Although I never took LSD (something I now sometimes regret), I did find out what it was like to smoke pot -- something which was especially exotic then, because possession of a single joint at that time was still a major felony.

We marched against the war. We campaigned for Eugene McCarthy. (Well, I never did, but several of my friends did. And I did cast my write-in ballot for McCarthy in the general election.)

The People's Park riots happened in Berkeley, and we had big sympathy demonstrations on campus. Hubert Humphrey (then running against Nixon) came to speak on campus and we went and booed and hissed him for refusing to take a stand against the war.

The University lecture series brought people like Harry Partch, Alan Kaprow, and David Riesman (who had been one of my heros in high school) to campus. I actually got to be part of a dinner party of about twenty people with David Riesman, who I found appallingly conservative. I took part in staging a Happening at Scripps Beach with Alan Kaprow. (Nothing controversial, really. I seem to remember a lot of candles floating in the ocean.)

For me, it was truly like being born again. (But if that's so, then becoming Professor Lady must later have been like dying a premature death.)

For me, if I were to go back and do things over again, the moral is quite obvious: Don't choose a school on the basis of their course offerings or their program or their prestigious faculty (although the math faculty at UCSD was extremely prestigious). Go someplace where there are really good students, and everything else is almost sure to also be good.

The only thing was, the money situation was getting a little scary. La Jolla is an expensive place to live and my fellowship didn't give me as much as we needed. I had a few thousand dollars (1967 dollars) in the bank from when I'd been a computer programmer, but that was dwindling. And then my wife and I noticed that one of my daughter's teeth was growing in really crooked, and the orthodontist assured as that it was absolutely essential that she have braces.

And although the courses at UCSD were good, there weren't really any good faculty to direct a dissertation in the area where I wanted to work -- abstract algebra.

So I got my Masters degree and got myself a temporary position at Humboldt State College (now Humboldt State University) in Arcata, 300 miles up the California coast from San Francisco. There I became part of a group of young, bright faculty who I found very likable.

At Humboldt State, I probably did some of the best teaching of my lifetime. It was certainly the most ambitious teaching I ever did (except for two graduate courses I later taught at Kansas) and I had a real sense of accomplishment about it. The students were not superbright by any means, but they were way above the level of the students I have now in Hawaii, both in ability and in attitude. (To be admitted as a freshman to one of the California State Universities, students have to be in the upper half of their high school class.) They were real troopers, which was fortunate, because many of the things I demanded of them were quite unreasonable.

At Humboldt State I was treated as absolutely equal to the other faculty. There was only one respect in which my status was inferior -- without a Ph.D., I could never be given a permanent position. Furthermore, since I didn't have a permanent position, I couldn't even take an unpaid leave of absence to go back and get my Ph.D.

So I had to leave Humboldt State. I looked through a lot of catalogs and applied to four universities which seemed to have some reasonable faculty in algebra and where it would be at least technically feasible for me to get my degree in one year. New Mexico State University was my first choice. For one thing, I'd never lived in New Mexico. (I'd gone to Arizona as an undergraduate, though, and liked it.) And one of the older professors at Humboldt State had family in Las Cruces and told me that the faculty at NMSU were reasonable human beings, even if a little on the crazy side. (I rated the latter as a plus.)

NMSU turned out to be a cow college, but the science departments -- especially mathematics -- were excellent. I immediately hooked up with a dissertation adviser who quickly made me realize that by comparison nobody at UCSD had really had a clue as to what algebra is about. The course offerings were pretty limited, but there was a course in my dissertation specialty (which, in anticipation, I'd pretty thoroughly studied on my own anyway). It was taken for granted that everyone in the course would write their dissertation in that specialty, and although the course started with the basics, it was very much directed toward current research. Other than that, I didn't really need much in the way of courses at that point.

The graduate students at New Mexico State were not exceptionally good -- maybe comparable to those at Maryland. They didn't take mathematics seriously the way students at UCSD had, but they were reasonably okay people. They were certainly not socially challenged.

As far as I was concerned, the city of Las Cruces sucked. (My values are highly urban and bohemian.) There was no real bookstore in town. (The campus bookstore was a joke.) The movie theatres showed films that were six months to a year out of date, and the idea that anybody might actually want to watch a movie with subtitles was totally beyond their ken. But people in the Mathematics Department didn't pay much attention to the rest of the town.

Whereas at San Diego it had been the graduate students that drove the social life, at New Mexico State it was the faculty. At the end of every week there would be a "Friday Afternoon Seminar." This "seminar" consisted of one of the faculty members having a keg of beer at his house and welcoming everyone -- faculty and graduate students -- as of about four or five in the afternoon. The party might last a few hours or, depending on whose house it was at, might go on till past midnight.

I did manage to write a dissertation and get my degree after one year at New Mexico State. And then I sent out 400 letters applying for jobs at every conceivable kind of college, and initially got three favorable responses. One was from Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX, and another was from someplace in Florida. The third was from Kansas, which was not a state I'd ever imagined being willing to live in -- Wizard of Oz territory -- but after seeing what the other choices were, it started looking a little more reasonable. (After I accepted the offer at Kansas, two other universities expressed interest in hiring me. I don't remember what they were anymore, but they didn't make me regret agreeing to go to Kansas.)

My original idea, when I'd started graduate school, was that I wanted to teach at an elite four year college like Swarthmore, Goddard, Bard, or Reed. Nobody was offering me that kind of choice, though. Apparently I had a talent for doing mathematical research. The faculty at NMSU were simply taking it for granted that of course I wanted a job at a major research university. And in any case nobody was offering me any other possibilities. So I became a mathematician.

--
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life, and that is why we adore them. But life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
-- Iris Murdoch