Maverick Academic
For a long time, I had no good answer to the annoying question well-meaning adults like to ask kids: what do you want to be when you grow up? Surely these inquisitors would not deem my childhood passions—puzzle-solving and game-playing—a valid career ambition. Then I read a popular account of Albert Einstein’s adventures decoding the mysteries of the universe. Although the ideas were obscure, the message was clear: Nature is the best puzzle! Science is the best game! I had my answer: I wanted to be a theoretical physicist.
Mr. Harold Corbin, physics teacher extraordinaire, and himself a force of nature, showed me how to play the game of science. A world-class fencer, Mr. Corbin began his tenure at North Hollywood High School after representing the US at the 1932 Olympics. Short and blunt, like the épée he wielded, he was devoted resolutely to conveying the beauty and power of physics to his benighted students. His uncompromising rigor and demanding expectations made him a polarizing figure on campus. Science-bound students venerated him, but others resented his difficult courses and stringent grading curves.
Mr. Corbin’s stern demeanor sported a bushy mustache that would twitch excitedly when he lectured on, say, the everyday consequences of a law of physics. To this day, I picture it jiggling as I wipe my car windshield horizontally to diffract light from oncoming headlights into clear vertical lines. Years later, when an elderly Mr. Corbin appeared at a class reunion, I took the opportunity to thank him for motivating me to become a physicist. A tear rolled down his craggy face as he slowly rose to give me a feeble embrace, his gray mustache atwitch.
Inspired by Einstein and galvanized by Corbin, I was a highly motivated aspiring physicist when I arrived at Berkeley in 1960. I sailed through four years of course work with a near perfect GPA; the main blemish—and badge of honor—was that well-earned D in ROTC. I carried a second major in philosophy, which led to my fateful encounter with the charismatic Paul Feyerabend, my undergraduate mentor. The iconoclastic philosopher, by opening my eyes to the profound flaws at the foundations of quantum mechanics, started me on a path of research that diverged from orthodox physics.
I soared in that special time in Berkeley when “to be young was very heaven,” but in a heartbeat my four years were winding down. Graduate school seemed the preordained next step, although I did harbor the fantasy of becoming a full-time folk guitarist. Fortunately, General Lewis Hershey, Director of the Selective Service System, squashed that pipe dream. The good general’s life-or-death prod—“go to school or go to Vietnam”—decisively spared me a career as a struggling folksinger.
Choosing a graduate school was a no-brainer since I was hell-bent on moving to New York City. I applied to Columbia University, which boasted the strongest physics department in Manhattan, got accepted, and won a National Science Foundation fellowship. My ill-fated plan was to experience NYC for a few years, then settle permanently in my beloved Bay Area. Who knew that life’s complexities would strand me on the East Coast for six decades and counting?
I was looking forward to my NYC adventure when a kindly Berkeley professor gave me second thoughts. Prof. Frederick Reif, who taught my statistical mechanics and thermodynamics courses, was a lucid lecturer, prominent physicist, and warm human being. After hearing about my plans for graduate school, he took me aside for a confidential chat. He felt an ethical responsibility, he explained, to alert me to Columbia’s woeful reputation for neglecting its graduate students. He left me with a chilling indictment of the place: “The corpses of many promising young physicists lie scattered along its trail.”
Prof. Reif urged me to reconsider my backup schools, Harvard and Wisconsin. But the Big Apple exerted a powerful psychological pull, and how bad could it be at Columbia? As I would soon discover, worse than the prophetic professor feared. If aloof and inaccessible in the past, the Columbia physics faculty was AWOL during the student revolt of the late Sixties. It didn’t help that the department became a primary target when Students for a Democratic Society revealed that several professors were conducting secret Vietnam War research for the Defense Department, as noted earlier
In the thick of the mayhem, graduate students fell off the radar of embattled and distracted professors. The negligence was particularly severe for those of us studying theoretical physics. Physicists come in two flavors—theorist and experimentalist—with graduate students sorted into one or the other. Getting on the highly competitive theory track required acing onerous exams administered at the beginning of the second year. Desperate to do theory (and inept in the lab), I spent the summer of 1965 prepping, and made the cut.
The challenge then became finding an attentive, helpful thesis advisor. (Students on the experiment track, as valued lab workhorses, were better mentored.) Some discouraged classmates fell by the roadside, confirming Professor Reif’s doleful warning. Eventually, I was assigned a blue-ribbon thesis committee comprised of Giancarlo Wick, T. D. Lee, and Robert Serber. These eminent theoreticians—Lee had a Nobel Prize, Serber was Oppenheimer’s star student, and Wick was Fermi’s—were eminently derelict in their duties.
In the spring of 1968, the time of the infamous Columbia student revolt, I had been at it four years with still no clear path to the doctorate. Lest I join my fallen comrades, I resolved to take matters into my own hands. That summer, Pamela and I decamped to Berkeley, where we rented the beautiful hillside house of philosopher-architect Christopher Alexander. I set up shop in the study with a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay and went to work.
Still adrenalized by the Columbia Strike, my brain was bubbling with speculative ideas on the dynamics of elementary particles. Che’s observation—“the more I make revolution the more I make love”—seemed to apply to making theory, as well. For weeks, my theoretical conjectures either petered out or lost their pot-fueled luster by the light of day. Finally, I hit on a keeper: a novel way of explaining the patterns formed when a kaon, a kind of subatomic particle, collides with an atom’s nucleus. I filled a stack of pages with equations, did the math, and teased out some new predictions. By summer’s end, I had a draft dissertation. Back in New York, I submitted the manuscript to my astonished and skeptical committee. They quibbled and delayed, then accepted the dissertation unaltered. I got out alive!
With PhD in hand, a wife with a Master’s in English, and a baby on the way, I entered the dismal job market of 1969. Tenure-track jobs elicited scores of applicants at backwater colleges and hundreds in New York City, to which I had restricted my search. The Sputnik generation, channeled into the scientific careers in the 1950s, were coming of age in a society reneging on its promises.
Fortunately, I landed a plum position in the physics department of City College of New York (CCNY). (Ironically, I also received an unsolicited offer from the University at Buffalo through a professor I met protesting war research at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society.) Known as the “Harvard of the proletariat,” CCNY boasted a long list of illustrious graduates, including several Nobel Prize winners.
As a rookie professor, I taught introductory physics courses to throngs of students in large lecture halls. I honed these lectures-cum-performances, reading the room well enough to reap favorable student evaluations. On the research front, I resurrected my work on quantum foundations inspired by Feyerabend back in Berkeley, then lain dormant as I navigated my way out of orthodox Columbia. I was strongly committed to teaching and research, but also to child-rearing, music, anti-war action, and a community center on the Upper West Side. It was a rich, multidimensional life, but incompatible with excelling in theoretical physics, which required single-minded devotion. Colleagues lived and breathed physics while I demonstrated, jammed, and cared for my infant daughter.
To pile it on, “open admissions” came to CCNY in 1970. The policy of admitting any graduating high schooler was laudable in intent, but ill-conceived in design. Notably, the program lacked the resources needed to bring open admissions students up to speed in basic math and science skills. To help fill the gap, several physics colleagues and I volunteered to tutor underprepared freshmen. It was gratifying to see some tutees attain college-level proficiency, but for many others, it was a leap too far. College is late in the game for many students to overcome a lifetime of educational disadvantage and for society to compensate for deep structural inequality.
Spread thin, I was eager to streamline my activities. Ideally, I’d find a career path that blended my passions for science and social change. But in an academic landscape partitioned into distinct disciplines and siloed departments, was such interdisciplinarity even possible? Astonishingly, an opportunity suddenly materialized in my own back yard, and I seized it. Educational thought leaders had been promoting innovative curricula for bridging C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” of science and humanities, and my department was just the place for such pedagogic experimentation.
Among my colleagues was a coterie of aging radicals who had joined the CCNY faculty decades earlier to bring science to the working class. In their eyes, science and socialism were hitched together like a pair of oxen pulling the heavy wagon of history toward an enlightened future. Hearing the call to “humanize the science and engineering curriculum,” the old-timers went to work. Before long, the department issued a memo inviting faculty to develop courses on the theme of the reciprocal influences of science and society.
Working with fellow physicist and dear friend Steve Bernow and historian of science Ted Brown, I developed an ambitious “science and society” syllabus heavily influenced by J.D. Bernal’s monumental Science in History. The Old Leftists, elated by my proposed course, secured formal departmental approval, and from then on, I offered “science and society” every semester. To stay ahead of the students (and the sheriff), I digested shelves of literature drawn from the spectrum of nonscientific disciplines. I was spreading my pedagogic and intellectual wings on a one-way trip from theoretical physics to the terra incognita of interdisciplinary education.
In the spring of 1973, an intriguing position announcement came to my attention. The Allen Center, a new interdisciplinary college at the State University of New York (SUNY) Albany, was looking for a PhD scientist with college-level experience teaching courses on the interplay of science and society. Bingo! Normally, the downside of the job—relocating from the Big City to the upstate hinterlands—would have been disqualifying. But this one-of-a-kind opportunity had my name on it.
Established in 1972 as a degree-granting unit, The Allen Center was SUNY’s response to an upwelling of demands for innovative undergraduate options. Unlike the handful of colleges that had cobbled together “interdisciplinary programs” from department-based classes, the Center was an autonomous college. Its remit was to design a novel curriculum on Man and His Institutions (the gendered formulation an artifact of the time). Notably, the Center was allocated 30 dedicated faculty lines, a generous administrative budget, and its own campus. This budgetary largesse pleased campus progressives but left enraged traditionalists to bide their time.
In April of 1973, with my science and society syllabi in hand, I traveled north for interviews. Over two days of presentations, discussions, and mingling with faculty and students, I felt a growing resonance with the energy and enthusiasm of the place. Administrators assured me that the Allen Center had secure multiyear funding, and that I would be expected to help shape the evolving enterprise. A less persuasive selling point was the claim that Albany had the “perfect location, only three-hours from Boston, Montreal, and New York.”
I was delighted to be offered the job. However, Pamela, a diehard New Yorker, did not welcome exile to Albany, but she’d be game if we were able to find a beautiful place to live in the countryside. Her proof of concept was our soon-to-be close friends, Peter Cocks, a political scientist at the Allen Center, and his wife Joan, who lived in the stunning Berkshires. Pam found a pre-Civil War colonial style house in New Lebanon, on the New York side of the Berkshires, some 30 miles southeast of the capital.
The house was an architectural gem surrounded by 45 acres of farmland and woods. It sported a New York State landmark plaque: “House Built in 1800 by Col. Jonathan Murdock, revolutionary soldier.” We moved on August 26, 1973, but our introduction to country life was rocky. Two days after our arrival, the most powerful tornado ever recorded in the area upended vehicles at a nearby truck stop, killing three people, and cut a swath of destruction near our new home. In October the OPEC embargo quadrupled oil prices, forcing us to close off a wing of our huge house, turn the thermostat down toward meat locker territory, and trim our discretionary expenditures. Then, a steady stream of visitors brought The City’s pulse (and cockroaches) to our rural hideaway.
The Allen Center faculty was a quirky bunch of smart, highly credentialed academics from diverse disciplines. Under the watchful eye of Dean Seth Spellman, the chain-smoking former chair of the Department of African Studies, our little campus was abuzz with healthy intellectual ferment and pedagogic debate, but also riddled with the interpersonal conflicts and inappropriate peccadillos endemic to university life. Dr. Spellman had the task of shielding the Center from a strident conservative backlash gaining momentum in the 1970s. As the voice of caution, he tried to mute the faculty’s political and educational radicalism in the mistaken belief that a patina of conventional legitimacy would pacify detractors.
Before I joined the Center, Dean Spellman had recruited political philosopher Stanley Russell to serve as faculty chair. Pompous and narcissistic, Russell was temperamentally ill-suited for nurturing esprit de corps and intellectual discourse among a diverse faculty. As his fey manner and nebulous ideas alienated the staff, he became surly and defensive.
Unaware of the seething discontent, I arrived on the scene suggesting a Marxist-inflected curriculum in the spirit of my City College courses. Colleagues supported my ideas, which was the last straw for the horrified Russell, who fled back to McGill University to reclaim his sinecure. Dean Spellman’s instinct was to mount another external search for a new chair, but the faculty, reeling from the previous one, demanded an internal appointment. Spellman and the central SUNY administration were resistant initially, then relented to restore harmony (and save money).
We agreed that the faculty would vote on a new chair at a meeting to be held in a fortnight. Three colleagues announced their candidacy and began politicking for the post. In my judgement, none among this motley threesome—a hard-drinking mathematician, a genteel historian, and a conservative anthropologist (the administration’s choice)—had requisite leadership qualities. As it turned out, I wasn’t alone.
Surreptitiously, a group of restive colleagues had been deliberating on whom to put forth as an alternative candidate, and they soon had their man. The plotters filed into my small office and, standing cheek to jowl, presented their startling proposal: Raskin for chair. I was taken aback to hear that I was perceived as a “natural leader,” which was not my self-image at the time, but I agreed to consider their flattering proposition. After much soul-searching, I concluded that throwing my hat in the ring would be in both the Center’s and my best interest. I won the vote handily, and eventually gained the support of the disgruntled losers and unpersuaded dean.
As chair, I led the faculty and student representatives in a co-creative process that yielded an enriched program and refreshed camaraderie. I was learning executive skills on the job, while gaining confidence as an organizational strategist and manager. I needed that self-assurance to handle such day-to-day aggravations as committee meetings, administrative trivia, interpersonal flare-ups, and a priapic senior professor who wouldn’t have lasted a week under today’s harassment standards. The leadership competence I developed at the Allen Center would be essential to the success of the Tellus Institute in the subsequent chapter of my career.
Our pedagogic challenge was to find a viable way to balance the desiderata of systemic integration (“the whole”) and bottom-up knowledge (“the parts”). The solution was to structure the curriculum into modules comprised of several interrelated courses. As an example, one module spotlighted seventeenth-century England, a time of synergistic scientific, social, and literary transformations. Science, history, and literature classes introduced, respectively, Newton’s laws, the Interregnum, and the metaphysical poets. Then, in co-taught integration sessions, we explored mutual influences that bound these distinct dimensions into a holistic process of historical change. Processing such heady material was not easy for undergraduates, but the flashes of comprehension around a classroom attested to the power of integrated learning.
As the Center’s learning curve turned sharply upward, it suffered a fatal blow. SUNY Albany President Louis T. Benezet, citing budget constraints and university priorities, announced that we would be “retrenched.” The proximate trigger was the “fiscal crisis of the state” that struck New York in the mid-1970s, prompting budget-slashing across the SUNY system and beyond. Programs lacking political clout and income-generating potential—the corporatization of the university was underway—were on the chopping block. For the campus revanchists, fiscal austerity served as an ideal cover for uprooting nontraditional upstarts. The experimental tide of the Sixties had ebbed, leaving its progeny gasping on the beach.
The Allen Center was axed in June 1975 with a year to phase out. We appealed our case, mounting hard data and scholarly passion that elicited only kind words and empty sympathy. Reluctantly, I turned to the sad task of assisting students with transitioning to conventional majors and faculty to conventional departments (many became prominent scholars and public intellectuals). For my part, I was offered a professorship in the physics department of a college in New Jersey, which would have been attractive a few years earlier, but now felt like putting life in reverse. Bizarrely, an upstate SUNY campus recruited me for a deanship, but as an accidental administrator, I had no interest.
My past choices had left me out on an academic limb. When I was a newly minted theoretical physicist, I bolted from the research and pedagogic mainstream. Strategic young scientists advance by inculcating and defending the reigning paradigm, whereas my research resolutely questioned the entrenched interpretation of quantum mechanics. As an educator, I diverged from the expeditious path by making socially relevant, interdisciplinary courses my central focus. I got away with it under cover of the surging heterodox subculture in those bygone years.
From an early age, I thought myself destined to be a university professor. But I no longer felt at home in an academia drifting inexorably in an uncongenial direction. Subsequent developments—campus culture wars, identity politics, corporate influence—corroborated these pessimistic premonitions, leaving me grateful I stepped aside when I did. In 1975, I was ready to move on, but to what? I found the answer and came to look back at the demise of my academic career as a well-disguised blessing.