Coming to America (III): Bad Habits

Troy, New York, 1968-1971.

It did not take me long after arriving in Troy in 1968, to start developing misgivings about the hegemonistic views of my growing set of “American” friends. After all, I was an American too; just a South American, yet their self-descriptions seemed to monopolize the whole continent. But that was not my biggest culture shock. The greatest jolt I received was from Rensselaer Polytechnic itself.

The ‘Tute, as we called it, was good, and not just when compared with the sorry place Exactas had become after the 1966 coup, the one that had led to the exile of most of its great professors.  It wasn't only that I could take a test without armed soldiers in the classroom. What struck me was that my RPI teachers actually wanted us to do well. They did not feel like the enemy.

Let me explain.

Even in the best of times, even before the coup of '66 that brought that hijo de p… Profesor Guerrero into my life, going to Exactas had been an act of defiance. While it was hard to get admitted, and only possible after tough entrance exams, the school accepted many more first-years than there were jobs in the forever anemic Argentine economy. The feeling among the student body at the University of Buenos Aires was that the faculty was out to get us; to be precise, to get us out of there. So, even before Guerrero and we met in his introductory Chem 101 class, we started perceiving each other as enemies.

The sense I had was that the main aim of UBA academic life was to cause as much attrition as possible, at least in the early years. Exams were tricky, full of questions aimed at flunking the largest possible number of students. Only the wiliest survived. That meant preparing for tests by studying everything remotely related to a topic, not just what was in the text chapters followed by the professors. It meant reading other texts, reading ahead of chapters, and spending endless hours in discussions with fellow students to guess and counter-guess how the professors might trap us. Studying for exams at Exactas was a collaborative enterprise: All of us against all of them. Even at test time we weren't alone. A study team would sometimes sit in a group and, while the professor or TA were not looking, we would consult with our neighbors. It wasn't cheating; it was surviving. 

This adversarial system had not prepared me for the North American . . . well, I soon gave up and accepted calling it the “American” . . . way. The first exam I took, I think it was Calculus 101, was a shocker of major proportions. We sat at our desks and the professor handed out the blue books and the exam. And then . . . he left. Dios mío, I thought, he left! I was unready for this act of trust. I thought that my classmates would pull out their notebooks and copy the answers. I thought that we would start talking to each other. That’s what would have happened in Argentina.

I turned to one of my neighbors, a guy with whom I had been studying, and said, sotto voce, "John, what about question three? . . .  John? . . . John . . .?" John looked at me like murder and whispered, “Shut the f… up!” At the end of the hour, the prof returned, collected the blue books, and bade us farewell. Outside, a furious John came over, grabbed my elbow, and hissed,  "What the hell were you doing in there? Are you trying to get us both thrown out? Don’t you ever do that again, understand?"

I sure learned about the honor code that day. I learned that certain habits I had brought with me from BA might get me in serious trouble if I did not shed them, and quickly. I will tell you more about Argentine habits another day.

During those first months, I also learned something else that confused me: the RPI profs followed the textbooks closely. I recall the first time I heard one of my classmates in Organic Chemistry ask Professor James Ferris if we would be "responsible" for the material in pages 35-36 of our textbook for the upcoming exam, or if we could stop reading at page 34. Responsible? . . . I thought.  Stop reading? . . .  What does that mean? 

"No," said Ferris, "I won’t test you on that material until next time."

I was stunned. Is Ferris trying to trick us?  It didn't look like RPI was trying to get us thrown out; they were interested in our learning. What a strange concept! My exhaustive training at Exactas had over-prepared me for America, so that studying for exams at RPI was a more relaxed proposition, no matter how difficult the stuff. I could stop at page 34 and not worry about a devious ambush at exam time.

I signed up for a steady dose of hard science: not just chemistry in its myriad forms, but physics, biology, calculus, quantum mechanics. I took a course on computer languages that forced me to stay up all night at room-size mainframes, hole-punching stacks of IBM cards, and debugging programs for several days afterward. I didn’t mind. It was all “hard,” all the time, with an occasional soft course for variety: like the music survey I took from Herr Professor Livingstone (née Levinstein) where I discovered Wagner. I was in heaven. It took me quite a while to get used to how good the American way was.

I remember one RPI professor fondly: the late Jim Moore. He taught us the chemistry of polymers, those long molecules that, like never-ending necklaces, make up the intrusive plastics of our modern lives: our phones, our Styrofoam cups, and our increasingly polluted oceans. I wanted to become a polymer specialist, invent biodegradable plastics, and save the environment.

Jim was a young Brooklyn-born professor who had recently arrived at the Institute from a post-doc stint in Germany. My interest in polymers and his wish to talk German made us a good fit. He invited me to do research under his supervision during my senior year, and gave me a small, cramped lab no bigger than a coatroom. I spent there many a day and night honing my skills as a budding research scientist. The work became my Senior Thesis. Jim submitted it to a top journal, and it got published. He also submitted it to RPI’s faculty, which, upon graduation, gave me an Institute-wide research prize. Jim’s mentorship at RPI and the results that came of it, were no doubt the biggest factors in my getting into Harvard’s Chemistry Department in 1971 for my PhD.

Jim Moore and, later, several other wonderful mentors, were more than teachers to me. To this day, they remain my ersatz fathers. At a time in my life when, long after Dad had died and I was still fighting him over unresolved teenage struggles, these men were able to see me and praise me. They gave me what I needed when Dad was no longer there.

Throughout my life, I have looked for good fathers where I could find them, at least until my adult years, when, with the help of a good shrink, I finally made peace with Dad. Although sadly belated for him, I was then able to love him for the mensch that he was.

I am in good company, however. I have yet to meet a driven, ambitious, and overachieving grown-up man who did not have some trouble with his Dad when he was young.

***

Here's Jim, a few years before his unfortunate passing in 2019. The fingers on his left shoulder are mine.