NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/sci/math/15389

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-22 | 11.2 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!olivea!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!zurich.ai.mit.edu!ara
From: [e-mail] (Allan Adler)
Newsgroups: sci.math
Subject: Social Harassment
Summary: Stop socializing with mathematicians
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 23 Nov 92 02:06:28 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
Distribution: sci
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Lines: 180



There has been much concern about the issue of sexual harassment in recent
years. I agree with this concern. However, I see it not as a gender issue
but as a special case of a more general issue of separating one's professional
activities and obligations from one's personal life. Hence, I would coin
the more general term "social harassment", with "sexual harassment" being
an extreme special case with its own special features.

As I have mentioned on other occasions, mathematicians are conditioned
so as to be unable to distinguish between their personal lives and their
professional lives. An awful lot of business is transacted under
social conditions. People are encouraged to attend departmental parties,
sometimes opening up their homes for this purpose, and colloquium dinners.
Somehow it winds up that mathematicians are more prone to socialize with
other mathematicians than with people in other departments and to feel
free about proposing social activities to other mathematicians.

I suppose that
one reason for this is that no one outside of mathematics wants to socialize
with mathematicians, since mathematicians are perceived as geeks and nerds
and since people in other professions are already under pressure to socialize
in their own workplaces. But it seems to me that the deliberate policy of
encouraging socialization in the work group is also responsible. I would guess
that this is done for various reasons, such as:
(a) by opening up informal modes of communication, it is less stressful to
    inform superiors of problems one is having, possibly as a result of their
    policies.
(b) by introducing the "boss" into the social group, the "boss" is perceived
    as more human, as less of an authority figure and more as someone
    with his/her own job to do and his/her own problems arising from it.
(c) it coopts the anti-work ethic of some work groups and converts it to
    a work ethic.

Everyone knows this. For example, a book of Sinkankas on lapidary technique
remarks in the introduction that "many companies are beginning to realize the
importance of organizing the leisure activities of their employees." Here are
two examples:
(1) When a friend of mine began teaching at MIT, he was told the first day,
    "The topologists go out to lunch at 11 o'clock" (or whatever time it was).
(2) A visiting committee evaluating Brandeis University's math department for
    accreditation purposes asked, in a discussion of complaints about the
    department, "Isn't there enough social life in the department?"

However, make no mistake about it: it is work. Mathematicians socialize by
working. Talking about who might get hired is work. Talking about some
problem on the calculus exam and how the students did on it is work.
Talking about your research is work and listening to someone else's research
is work. Answering someone's question about bigraded flapdoodles (to borrow
Ken Hoffman's terminology) is work. Talking about grants is work.
And gossiping about mathematicians is work. It may be that one enjoys
pleasant conversation on other topics or one finds someone to crawl into
bed with or one has good clean fun at volleyball, but at any moment
the details of the workplace can make their appearance. All it takes is
for someone to want to know something.

Somebody discovered that if you offer a mathematician a few cookies and
some tea, he/she will endure the company of other mathematicians. And while
they are socializing, a lot of work gets done.

Many people cynically use these social
occasions to achieve specific political or professional objectives. For
example, I remember one professor at Stony Brook happily talking about
the time he had tried to get Ahlfors drunk so that he would reveal some
secret (apparently, he did get him drunk but he still wouldn't talk).
I remember another professor trying to find out whether the love he
suspected that a certain woman mathematician had for a certain well known
mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study was reciprocated. At first
he postured that he wanted to help her, because he imagined that she had
been wounded in love as a teenager and it was rare to see the spark of
true love rekindled after someone has been hurt like that. But later on,
he admitted that she had applied for a job at Stony Brook and that they
weren't going to give her the job, unless of course the well known
mathematician at the Institute in Princeton was in love with her, in which
case they would gladly give it to her in the hope that he would be there a lot
visiting her.

The other side of using social means to achieve professional and political
goals is that sometimes purely social conflicts assume professional
proportions, which are fought by professional means. For example, I used to
know a mathematician who had been married to another mathematician and then
divorced, with kids. The custody battle was ugly and a struggle took place
in which allies of the wife tried to find out the places the husband had
applied for jobs and to block the appointments. For another example, in Bombay
it is hard to find housing and as a result Tata Institute provides housing
for a lot of the researchers. One of the consequences is that personal
conflicts sometimes flare up into power struggles. Another example, of
course, is garden variety sexual harassment and discrimination, such as
when I received an unsolicited email message at the University of Kentucky
from someone in a government granting agency telling me that a certain female
had applied for a research grant and saying "Your mission, should you choose
to accept it, is to find out if she is cute."

Who are these boring people who go to a party and work? You and your
colleagues. Mathematicians lives are boring and the pitiful measure of this
is that they have nothing better to do than gossip about the equally boring
lives of their colleagues. (We are still hearing about the hole in Hilbert's
pants when he went on bicycle trips...)

The way you know it is work is that whatever you say on saturday night at
the party still counts when you show up at work on monday. And whoever you
climb into bed with will in all probability crawl into bed with another
mathematician later on (some people only sleep with mathematicians, and of
those, some only in accordance with the hypergamy-hypogamy rule), someone who
may not be in any way your friend, and  might even marry them, owing them
all of their loyalty and owing you nothing in the way of confidentiality.
That such personal information does circulate is shown by the fact that in grad
school,  I was  told at a faculty dinner that the wife of one faculty member at
Stony  Brook had a menage a trois with another faculty member and his wife,
none of the people at the dinner having been in any way parties to these
events. I did  call this boring and it is. If you think otherwise, you might
also find it exciting to teach yourself Sanskrit by trying to read the Kama
Sutra with a Sanskrit-English dictionary and a grammar, after no previous
knowledge of the language. But more to the point, it is intrusive. At some
places it cannot be otherwise, since, e.g. the Institute  for Advanced Study in
Princeton,  IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette and Tata Institute all provide housing for
visitors. This helps in many ways, but it also means that when you get home
from work, you are still at work.

In Russian, there are two words: "dryg" and "tovarich". The first means friend
and the second means comrade. The difference between the two, as a Russian
friend of mine explained to me, is that when the Party sends the police to
arrest you, dryg hides you and tovarich turns you in. It is the same with
"friend" versus "colleague". In both situations, it is the difference between
having a relationship with an individual directly and having one's relationship
with that individual as a corollary of one's relationship to the ambient
group and that individual's relationship to the ambient group.

It is in this context that one tries to make sense of the term "sexual
harassment", a context in which mathematicians and people in similar situations
are encouraged to socialize with each other. In other words, it is the
wider context of institutionalized "social harassment". Indeed, the fact that
mathematicians are supposed to make the profession their primary social
group makes it much harder to understand whether one is sexually
harassing someone else or not.

Some people actually believe, at least for part of their lives, that the
"mathematical community" really is a community. But a real community would
not accept with such complacency the arbitrary denial of income to individuals
who have been doing their jobs and with such indifference when those
individuals consequently disappear from sight. Indeed, I have never seen
anyone with a problem that the rest of the "community" could not live
with happily ever after. For those who still believe that there is a community,
get it straight: you are not among friends. The lion and the elephant, the
zebra and the crocodile all use the same water hole, sometimes under
appearance of a truce, but they are not friends.

When you get right down to it, mathematicians socialize with each other
because they think it is good for them professionally (yes I know there are
exceptions). Two examples that come immediately to mind:
(i) When I expressed some displeasure at pressure to go to semi-official
    parties at the homes of Brandeis faculty, one colleague explained to me
    that it was necessary for me to go and to let people see who I socialize
    with, so that they can determine my political context in the department. I
    guess that is called Party Politics.
(ii) When I was at the Max-Planck-Institut in Bonn (an experience I describe as
    "walking the Planck"), there was going to be a colloquium (I think MacLane
    was going to speak) and on the same afternoon, the Rektor of the
    University was giving a party. Hirzebruch circulated a memo to the members
    of the Institut explaining that it was important for the Institut to be
    well represented at the Rektor's party and urged that about half of the
    membership forsake MacLane's interesting lecture in order to attend the
    party.

The other side of that coin is that mathematicians feel that
they are under professional pressure to socialize. Now, in discussions of
sexual harassment, it is often pointed out that it doesn't matter whether
the victim is presented with a professional ultimatum or inducement to
endure the offending behavior. What matters is whether the victim
perceives that there is a professional link and whether the victim has
any professional recourse. So it is in the case of social harassment:
one does perceive a link (whether it is really there or not) and there
is no professional recourse.

Social harassment in turn is a manifestation of the lack of adequate
job definition and the failure of employers to guarantee that if one
does one's job (as defined), one can keep it.

Allan Adler
[e-mail]