weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Matthew P. Wiener) (03/09/86)
>>When I was an undergraduate (CS) at Berkeley, there was a flap over hiring a >>woman professor in mathematics. They decided against her, ostensibly because >>she could not speak English well enough (forgive me, the details are hazy, it >>was, uh, quite a few years ago--I think she was Eastern European or Russian). >>Anyway, I remember being somewhat incensed at that line of reasoning, as I had >>just suffered through a math class given by a tenured professor who spoke such >>broken English it was painful. But that hadn't stopped them hiring HIM. >> [Linda Mundy] > >An optimist might say that the reason they didn't hire her was because they >learned their lesson about professors who can't speak from the very guy you >mention having as a math professor. Maybe they sort of got stuck with him, >not realizing there was a problem until he had been there a long time. >Now if there were already several professors there with this problem, then >this excuse gets weaker. [Dave Richards] This is all rather humorous because the woman under question is none other than Marina Ratner, who WAS hired by the Berkeley Math Department. She has a heavy but clearly understandable and even pleasant accent. The flap was something as follows: the department has room for two more tenured faculty, say. Six candidates are under consideration. One's a topologist, and all the topologists want to hire him. One's an algebraic geometer, and all the algebraic geometers want to hire him. One's an ergodic theorist, and all the ergodic theorists want to hire her. And so on. Exactly one of the six is a woman. None of them are superstars, but all of them are better than adequate mathematicians. It is impossible to call any of them better or worse than any of the others. For one thing, the topologists don't know any algebraic geometry, etc. Guess what happens? Bargaining, politics, name calling, etc. And someone is bound to throw in the affirmative action angle. And then someone hits back with the we hire them because they're good, not because we have a quota, etc. And then someone says "but she is good", to which the reply is, "but we need another dynamical systems person", etc. It's ugly and I know of no other method. But none of the debate is supposed to leak out. Apparently that happened with MR. Perhaps some of those who wanted to hire her wanted to embarrass their opponents? I don't know. I would guess her age was more of an issue than her sex. Mathematicians are stereotypically considered burnt out by 40, and the usual preference is to hire straight out of grad school/post doc, not some other universities' old- timers, even if they were trapped all these years behind the Iron Curtain. It is certainly false that language barriers had anything to do with her hiring question. Only recently has there been a crackdown on graduate student TAs who can't speak English. But faculty? No way. A somewhat different problem came up with the hiring of the late Julia Robinson. Her husband was already on the faculty, and the state of Calif- ornia has laws concerning nepotism, and Berkeley is a state University. It was a major legal/bureaucratic hassle to get her even a part-time position. Considering her reknown--she was a McArthur fellow and recently president of the AMS--her position was mostly an embarrassment to Berkeley. She herself did not mind--she rarely had to teach!--and everyone, certainly herself, knew her value as a mathematician. (This nepotism problem is an extreme nuisance to grad student TAs whose fathers are already on the faculty. Their TA position takes a little bit longer to clear than normal, and quite often their checks are late etc. And if they withdraw a year and come back, they get hassled afresh.) ucbvax!brahms!weemba Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720