Notes for
speech to be given when winning an honorary degree
(I'm not going to get an honorary degree,
but it's always good to be prepared.)
1. I have never regretted having learned
something. People who say they have had such
regrets usually mean they regret the thing exists, that they subsequently
learned or learned of, but not the knowledge itself. Sometimes they go through a lot of pain to
acquire it, after all; they hire detectives to discover things they say they would
rather not know. Well, even so, I cannot
be sure there are not some people who really do prefer ignorance to
knowledge. Yahoos.
2. We professors are condemned to teach for a
living before we have learned anything.
I don't know any cure for this, life being so short. In my case I had the advantage of serving 3.5
years in the army between my sophomore and junior years in college. I learned some useful things about human
nature and radar, though I don't think it advanced my knowledge of mathematics
particularly. Well, some; but
mathematics wasn't the only thing I was destined to teach, and anyhow, I didn't
even know then that mathematics was going to be my official trade. I thought it
would be physics, and I went so far as to get a Bachelor's degree in physics
before I discovered my mistake. That
mistake. I discovered other mistakes in
my life later, and they are still turning up.
3. When I came to the University of Rochester in
1952 I was appointed Instructor at a salary so shamefully small that I don't
want to embarrass the University by mentioning the figure here. On the other hand, there were items of what
economists used to call "psychic income". It cost no money at all to attend the
lectures of Howard Merritt on the history of Western art (painting, mainly)
from Sienese Madonnas to the Hudson River School (Howard's specialty); and I
attended and learned a lot. One time he
showed a slide of El Greco's Funeral of the Count of Orgasz, which is in
Toledo (the other Toledo). He knew I had
been there, and after he got done telling the class all he could think of that
made the painting a masterpiece he called on me, in the audience, to add
something. I was shocked into
silence. I thought Howard was supposed
to be the expert, not me. But he was
older, and knew more about the expert game than I realized.
I also attended some of Hayden White's
grandiose lectures on European history -- Hayden was an expert on the
grandiose, if not exactly on Europe -- and students flocked to his lectures.
Marvin Becker's Delphic lectures on medieval history led to a lifelong
friendship, after thirty years of which I began to understand what he was
thinking about. Becker was an expert,
but not the spellbinder our history department of that era most cherished. After a while he left us for Ann Arbor. And -- I would go to the occasional class of
some professor of English or physics. I
once tried to sit in on a quantum theory class, but didn't understand it any
better than I did when I was an undergraduate myself, imagining I was going to
be a physicist.
4. Then I got busy, too. I had to finish my PhD for Michigan, and did,
a year or so after the birth of my second daughter. I had to write papers in functional analysis
for the professional journals, and did.
Learned something there, but not clear what I taught the world with
that rather arcane literary output. My
professional work was well written but not of great importance. I had four PhD students, the first of whom
flunked out, but the other three were o.k., two of them still professors of
mathematics somewhere and one of them quite gratifyingly a better mathematician
than I ever was.
I got administrative jobs around here, and
for a while was a sort of chief judicial officer of the University, sometimes
in charge of student uprisings (as in the antiwar 60s and black power 70s),
sometimes in charge of academic dishonesty among undergraduates, which
flourishes in all decades. I was
Associate Dean for Graduate Studies for eight bleak years, and got to know all
the department heads and how none of them had nearly enough money for graduate
student fellowships and assistantships and what was I going to do about it, by
like yesterday. I was later made
Chairman of a bankrupt department named sociology, for three years, during
which I learned a lot of sociology, including the information that I should no
longer call myself “chairman”, but rather “chair”. They thought I was using the word
"chairman" from ignorance, or maybe misogyny. Well, that's sociology; my own language was
English.
Indeed, I taught English composition
(defiantly non-creative) three separate times, back in the days when my brand
of English was permitted. I also taught the
history of math. Sometimes I taught
nothing, or nothing much, though the course I gave had a name and number. One time I taught a course called Measure Theory – a graduate course
-- and fifteen or twenty years later I got a letter from a student who praised
me for that course. He had become a
computer softward designer, he wrote, and in a small way a business entrepreneur in his specialty. But his letter – the words he used – indicated
that his memory of the subject matter of the course was thin, if any. For one thing, he didn’t remember that it was
about measure theory (I looked him up); but he did say that he was grateful for
having learned from me the meaning of mutatis
mutandis, and he teaches that to his subordinates himself,
and with great satisfaction. You can never tell when a course in measure theory
will come in handy. One of my
undergraduate students here later became President of the University of
Chicago. He had taken Linear
Algebra from me. Got a B, I
think. I'm not quite sure if it was a B or a B+, though when he became famous I
looked it up and sent him a copy of that page of my class book. It had all the names of his classmates, and
the grades they had received, too. He
never said he was grateful, or quoted any Latin or Greek I might have taught
him. I'm not really sure about that
grade, either. I know I looked it up,
but my memory for these things is shaky.
I’m a bit shaky myself, or I’d climb on a chair to reach where those
classbooks are, and make sure for this speech.
Not worth it. Either a B or a B+;
that’s the best I can say right now.
5. Then I retired, and decided to devote my
declining years to learning something at last.
I took, over three successive semesters, the three main theoretical
undergraduate courses in economics: Micro,
Macro,
and International
Trade, all from professors who had earlier thought I knew all about
these things, because I sounded so confident in lunch table conversations with
them. And maybe also because I generally
agreed with them on public policy in discussions economical. Don't ever underestimate the power of
agreement, when it comes to persuading people you are wise.
In taking these courses, I learned all
over again the terror of sitting in an exam room wondering what the professor would think of
me when I displayed my ignorance. I did get
a handy A in Micro and a decent A in Macro (though the subject was a bit
fuzzy at the edges, I thought), but only a charitable A in International Trade from
my old friend Ron Jones, who probably simply didn't believe I was as ignorant
as my final exam paper indicated. I then
began a graduate course in equilibrium theory, which had been my purpose all
along when I began the road of recapitulating economics ab initio, general equilibrium being quite a mathematical
theory, and one I had long wanted to understand, but I dropped out after the
second session. It was too much, though
mainly (I told myself) because by then I had got into other things, i.e.
mathematics education in the schools. I
think this K-12 school math business (on the highest theoretical level, of
course; I'm too old and tired to actually teach) is the last racket I will ever profess. Most of it is politics, having little to do
with either teaching or mathematics, yet it is strangely interesting trying to
do something about it.
6. When you get old your mind doesn't work as
well as it used to. I haven't called
myself a mathematician in many years. I
used to be a mathematician, and I have to permit the newspapers, and the
outfits that still hire me to do this and that in connection with school exams
and curricula, to call me a mathematician when the title seems useful for persuading
people I'm an expert; but the truth is that the more you learn the more you
realize that the real experts are very few and usually very narrow. Me, I'm few
all right, but I'm not narrow; that’s not enough to prove me no “real
expert”, but it comes close. It's been fun, especially these last years of
learning things without really having to make a living or even face an exam;
but -- you know -- to accomplish something long-standing in the history of the
world, to be classed with Newton or Bach (their kind may never be seen again),
or with the ten thousand lesser giants of our culture, one is not also entitled
to have the kind of fun in learning that I have had. It takes all kinds to make a world. I've been another kind.
I've had my time, and I owe a lot of it to
the University that has given me a home for so many years, especially these
recent years when the cost of the office and other facilities that I am given
as Professor Emeritus probably
exceeds the debit they incurred in paying me those starvation wages of
1952. But I'm not sure; maybe I'll ask
Ron Jones. There's interest due, too,
you know: fifty-five years' worth.
Ralph A. Raimi
May 22, 2001
Slightly revised July 23, 2007