A few years before I left UC Berkeley, I was at a memorial service for a colleague, an older man who was part of the team that had interviewed me for a tenure-track position in Berkeley’s Department of Bioengineering a dozen years earlier. That day of interviews had been both exhilarating and exhausting, with back-to-back meetings with faculty in their offices and a research talk attended by scientists and faculty from numerous departments: Bioengineering, Molecular and Cell Biology, Computer Science, Plant and Microbial Biology. But of the many people I met during that long day, it was the forty-five minutes or so that I spent talking with Stan that changed my mind about where I’d rather be a professor. I had a written offer from UC Davis and a promised offer from Stanford University, but that meeting with Stan had shifted the calculus.
Stan was from Brooklyn, and Jewish; he had a gentle and genuine warmth that felt like family. He reminded me of my Uncle Phil, and perhaps my Uncle Jack, both of whom were also Jewish and from Brooklyn. (One Jewish Brooklyn man Stan did not remind me of was my father; my father’s story is more complicated.)
A week or so after that day of interviews I got a phone call from the chair of the department saying the department had voted, the Dean had approved, and I would be receiving a written offer shortly. As part of the package he was putting together for me, I would have an affiliation with Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Would I be willing, he asked, to come give another talk to scientists at LBL? I would not be the only one speaking; the event was a celebration of the Bioengineering department, focusing on its achievements thus far, and also on its future.
In contrast to my talk on campus, which was followed by a number of probing questions on technical points from faculty in the audience, my talk at LBL was followed by applause and then silence. Not a single hand went up. I felt discouraged and confused as I walked down from the podium. Certainly, all the other talks were all about bioengineering – devices and so on -- and my talk was the only one with a lot of machine learning and theories of evolution. Was my work so foreign that people weren’t interested? Or had I completely bombed my talk? I was heading up the aisle towards my seat feeling totally glum when a hand reached out towards me and I looked to see Stan’s smiling face. “Great talk, Kimmen,” he said.
“Thanks, Stan,” I answered. And then I couldn’t help myself and added, “But why didn’t you ask a question?”
He looked at me for a second — deciding, I assume, how much he wanted to reveal. He must have decided I was safe. “I didn’t want to look stupid.”
It wasn’t actually my first exposure to what the linguist Deborah Tannen (author of That’s Not What I Meant, You Just Don’t Understand, and many other popular books on socio-linguistics) called the agonism of academic discourse. But it was the first time I’d seen a full professor at a top university express a fear of being shamed by the posing of a simple question at the end of a talk.
In brief: academia is, like much of human society, about establishing dominance. Knights jousted in medieval days, boys have fist fights in schoolyards and grown men in boxing rinks, but academic scientists duel with words, and almost nowhere is this more apparent than in the questions after a talk. This is where the gloves come off. “Nice talk,” a questioner might begin, before she or he proceeds to point out a fundamental flaw in the experimental design, or in the theory, or that another scientist had already made that same discovery, which the speaker hadn’t cited. The objective of this kind of scientific sparring is to show off who’s on top: who is smarter, more knowledgeable, more worthy of respect. If you’re a scientist sitting in a lecture hall listening to someone talk on a subject that you only partly understand, whether because it’s not your exact field, or because it’s interdisciplinary, you can’t ask a question that exposes your lack of expertise in that area without having your colleagues think less of you. Hence, the silence after my talk.
My offer letter arrived some time after that talk, and I joined the faculty at Berkeley in the fall of 2001. Stan and I were friendly colleagues, and I was always glad to see his face at faculty meetings. Stan retired a few years after I started – he was already in his seventies — but he continued to attend faculty meetings. And then he just stopped coming. I sent a few emails, saying hi, offering to get together for coffee, but got no replies. It didn’t make sense. One afternoon, while I stood in line at a little Greek café on the north side of campus, I got to talking with another professor who knew Stan. Jim admitted that he’d also tried to reach Stan, with no success.
A few weeks later, we heard that Stan had died, of pneumonia. His widow told me that he’d had a stroke some months before and it had affected his speech. He didn’t want to see people from campus; it was too embarrassing to him.
Stan’s memorial service (which is to say, the one organized by campus) was held shortly after his death in a wood-panelled room near a tree-lined stream on campus. A dozen professors and former students stood at the podium to talk about Stan’s contributions to science and engineering, and what a friend he’d been to them. I did, too, telling the story of my first meeting with Stan. One of Stan’s children came up at the end and said he finally understood why his father had spent so much time in the lab (instead of at home, with them): we, his colleagues and his students, were his family.
Afterwards, while I stood by the refreshments table at the back of the room, another professor came up to me and we began to chat. Alex was just short of his 80th birthday, but still actively involved in research. We’d met at some campus event my first year at Berkeley, during which I confessed that I’d been a great tree-climber in my youth and he’d chided me for apologizing for my affection for trees. After that, he used to come over to my office carrying papers on horizontal gene transfer between microbes and we’d talk, and he and his wife had my husband and me over for dinner. I mentioned to Alex that I was thinking of retiring early to have time to write. Alex was surprised. What was I thinking of writing? Fiction, I said. I’d started writing three novels in the last several years and not had the time to finish a single first draft.
“That’s totally irrational,” Alex said.
I was puzzled. To me, it was a totally rational choice. I’d had two cancer scares already, and I knew I wasn’t immortal. I’d wanted to be a writer when I was a young girl growing up in New York, and although I had no regrets about going into science, there was another part of me that I wanted to explore.
“Why is it irrational?” I asked.
“Just look at the best-seller lists,” Alex said. “Most of the authors are women. There are thousands of women writers, and very few women scientists. And there are certainly very few women scientists of your stature. Why would you want to leave a position of such importance?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Firstly, I was fairly certain that most of the authors on the best-seller list were men. But more importantly, I didn’t agree with the premise that being at the top was so important. What was important to me, at that time, was getting away from a world in which being at the top was so important. I’d begun to see the price that I was paying in my personal life by not having time for things like going to the gym, or impromptu dinners with friends, or for creative pursuits. I didn’t want my children to go to a memorial service for me and tell people that they understood why I was absent so much, that my work had been my life and my colleagues and my students had been my family.
I’d begun telling other people I knew about this idea I had, that I’d take early retirement from Berkeley and have time to write. The responses were mixed. Friends and family who were not academics were generally supportive. But academics typically had a different response. The most frequent, by far, was that they wouldn’t know what to do with their time if they weren’t pursuing their field of research. If they thought they could be really great at something else, they might drop what they were doing. But to walk away from their work for something in which they would not be at the top was unthinkable.
The problem, of course, was that one does not start off at the top. No amount of talent or drive or passion is going to transform a beginner into an expert. Great artists, writers, musicians and other creative types don’t emerge fully formed like the goddess Athena from her father’s head.
I’d known this when I left my husband at thirty-two and went back to school. I’d completed one year of college fifteen years earlier, and I had a dream: of getting a PhD and becoming a professor at a major research university. Back then, people told me I was too old, but I’d done the math and figured out that it would take me three years to complete my bachelor’s and another four or five to complete a doctorate, and I figured that I’d be forty or forty-one at some point in any case, and I might as well have a doctorate and a chance of interesting work.
At the time of Stan’s memorial service, I was already fifty-eight. I would be starting off at the bottom, and the likelihood of living up to my own standards was low. I had to embrace the significant possibility that whatever work I produced would never progress far beyond a B+.
It wasn’t until three years after Stan’s memorial service that I handed in the paperwork that formally ended my position as an active professor at Berkeley. It turns out to not be so easy for me to become comfortable with the idea of giving up the work I loved, or with the possibility that my best efforts as a creative writer wouldn’t deliver much. In the thirty-something years I spent in science, beginning as a student and ending as a professor, I’d grown to identify with my work. And if my own evaluation of my new work – the poetry, essays and fiction I would try to produce – was that it was meh, how would I face myself? What would that say about me?
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, the great Renaissance French writer and thinker (and the inventor of the essay), seemed comfortable – or at least, aspired to the concept of being comfortable – with the possibility of just being average.
“Je veux…que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux, mais nonchalant d’elle, et encore plus de mon jardin imparfait.” (I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but caring little for it, and even less about the imperfections of my garden.)
And here I am now, living in Amsterdam, planting my cabbages. They may not be the largest cabbages at the farmer’s market, but they’re still cabbages.
