Forty Years of Teaching Math, Computer Science and Engineering Science at a Community College- Part X - More Art

On Christmas Eve, 1981, I went in to the math department at SUNY Buffalo to get my paycheck. I earned $110 per week for roughly 10 hours of work. I taught 4 hours of recitation, did 2 hours in their math lab and had 4 office hours. It was a nice gig, considering I paid no tuition as well. 

In the commons were John Isbell and Stephen Schanuel, working some problem on the blackboard. It was 4:30 in the afternoon.  I would later pick my mom up, a recent widow, and take her to Church. Both Dr.Isbell and Dr. Schanuel were brilliant mathematicians. Their work is easy to find.  Along with F. William Levere, the three of them were part of a hiring binge in the 60's, where the push was to make U.B. the Berkeley of the east.  

Eventually these two would have a falling out, with one calling the other an "ineducable idiot."  Also later on, two other professors would get drunk at a party and come to blows over the definition of infinity. There are a lot of divisions in the foundations of math - constructivists, intuitionists, etc. -  with people staking their claims and willing to go to war over them. 

I would go on to really enjoy spending 16 hours per day, or more, doing theoretical math. I am sure Art did at one time as well. None the less, that image of these two geniuses going at it, while life passed them by, remained vivid in my mind.  There was a whole world of celebration going on a very short distance from Diefendorf Hall, down Main Street in Buffalo.  Stores were decorated, people were shopping, children were anticipating, and the taverns were full of Christmas cheer.  Yet, this was all these mathematicians had.  Right or wrong, I believed at the time that these professors' whole life had shrunk to a point, on which danced a few math problems that were of no more cosmic significance than the page of theorems about angels the Scholastics had proved, and that Erasmus spoke disparagingly  about in his seminal 1511 work, In Praise of Folly. 

G. K. Chesterton, in his magnificent work Orthodoxy, pointed out that it is always the logician who goes mad, and almost never the poet or the artist. Chesterton got that right. He went on to say that logicians (and mathematicians) live in a really small world, unlike the artists, who live in a much larger and wonderful world.  Logic does draw you in, with the prospect of certainty.  In the end the world of certainty is a very small one, indeed, and logicians often cannot escape that small confined space. I managed to escape. 

One professor I worked for in the department would lose their mind, and end up in a homeless shelter.  Another committed suicide a few short years after she taught me logic.  At the time I wondered if math made these people lose their minds, or if math attracted people who lost their minds.  Abstract math can be very isolating, especially when, if you are at the top of the field, there may be only a handful of people who fully understand and appreciate what it is you are doing.  Mathematicians can also be very arrogant.  It is not good for the soul to look down your nose at humanity, and especially the least among us.  

Art Hadley had a better life than these mathematicians. At one time he owned a Cessna.  And those who knew Art would agree that he often lived life to the fullest. 

It would not surprise me at all if by some metric, Art Hadley was brighter than both Dr. Isbell and Dr. Schanuel.  I also thought that if I did what Dr. Isbell and Dr. Schanuel did for 40 years, I might be a whole lot better at it than them - that is, if I did not go mad in the meantime.  Dr. Scott Williams, himself a well know topologist, told me I was by far the best graduate student he had in 20 years. 

Now, after 44 years, teaching at a community college worked out well for me. I certainly have no regrets.  There was a whole lot more to life than math. And many of the people who I trust the most, and respect  the most, and enjoy hanging out with the most, are the poets, the musicians and blue collar workers. All of these fine individuals know a lot about life. Teaching at a community college kept me in touch with humanity. 

More to come......

Forty Years of Teaching Math, Computer Science and Engineering Science at a Community College- Part IX - Tony Gullo

Tony Gullo came to NCCC in 1967, having a B.A. and M.A. in physical anthropology. From my student days all I remember is the name. Sometime later Tony told me of his involvement from the early days. His list was long, and from my recollection, Tony Gullo was omnipresent in college-wide affairs in the early stages of development of Nabisco Tech.

Certain things are a given when a college is formed. Other things are elective, like accreditations, union contracts, management domains, etc., and land wherever the people involved define the shape of things to come. Many of those things were formed inside Tony Gullo's brain and carried out by his will. 

I knew Tony as my Faculty Association President, from fall of 1985 to spring of 2006, when Tony retired.  In the fall of 1985, younger faculty were being impoverished by past circumstances that were beyond faculty control, and particularly beyond Tony's control.  By 2006 we had a faculty contract that was fair for all. It was not a perfect contract, but it was a herculean effort that took place, and was no doubt the best that anyone could have carried out.  In my case, that contract allowed me to support a family of 6 on one income and to earn an honest living doing what I truly enjoy.  My salary was on par with k-12 educators in the area, and that did not happen because of the good will of the county. 

Over 20 years ago I was the Chairman of the Board of Christian Education at St. John Lutheran School in Wheatfield. We went through a National Lutheran School accreditation at the time.  The benchmark for expenditures was that at least 70% of revenue was to be spent directly on instruction. If expenditures fell below 70%, our accreditation would not be renewed. Community colleges have similar benchmarks, nationally at about 40% and California having a state guideline of 50%.

The lower figure for CC's is to be expected. For one, most Lutheran schools are provided a building rent free, with capital expenditures being underwritten by a sponsoring congregation. And, CC's maintain a strong support staff that includes counselors and librarians, and more expenditures on lab/tech equipment than the average elementary school. 

Tony steadfastly made sure that funding from tuition, state and county was appropriately spent on faculty/instruction.  I don't have any hard figures from that era, but a good educated guess would be 40-50% being spent on instruction, perhaps more at times.  

Not too long ago, maybe 2018 or so,  one of our trustees complained that 30% of our budget was being spent on instruction. The complaint was that 30% is too high!  The true figure is probably below 30%, since many capital projects seem to be funded outside the budget. And, the senior faculty prosper while the new faculty do not. The gap is wide and growing, unimpeded. 

What the current state of affairs would be had Tony stayed on for another 20 years is anyone's guess, but the fact is that when Tony was on the job, money landed squarely where it was supposed to. I would guess there was constant pressure to do otherwise. 

My Lutheran theology tells me that all are sinful, and corrupt to a certain degree, but Tony's actions would seen to contradict that point. He was seemingly incorruptible, in steadfastly carrying out his duties as union boss.  There were a few disturbances in the early days of the Faculty Association, but they were quickly put down, and the honest edifice of union leadership allowed the whole faculty to prosper. He was surrounded by a few other bulldogs, who were as honest as the day is long - in particular Bryce McMichael and Randy Schultz - two  men who I thoroughly respect. 

Forty Years of Teaching Math, Computer Science and Engineering Science at a Community College- Part VIII - Arthur Hadley

 

There are certain difficult concepts in math that are fully comprehended by few. Calculus is difficult enough, but the field of Real Analysis is theoretical calculus, and Topology is theoretical Real Analysis. And there are further abstractions.

None of this was beyond the reach of Arthur Hadley. Art came to NCCC in the late 60's.  The exact date eludes me as I gave away all my old yearbooks, so I'll go with 1967.  Art is on my very short list of brilliant people I have known. 

Art came here from a Ph.D. program in theoretical math at SUNY Albany.  Art finished a couple years of his Ph.D. and could easily have finished the Ph.D., but told me the pay was better at NCCC than at SUNY Albany, and he enjoyed the culture and freedom that he had here. 

I knew Art well when I started in 1985.  I talked to him whenever I would stop by and he was interested in my progress, well into graduate school. Art was also my Calculus II teacher at NCCC in the spring of 1978 at night. Of course, I noticed immediately how intelligent he was. Every Calculus II class was followed by an optional lab in M-Building, also known as the Marlboro Inn. There was always plenty of beer involved, followed by a few games of pool. I lived down the street from M-Building so I could walk home from Calculus Lab.  

I really did live an idyllic life that year. Every day was a new adventure of learning - everything from Aristotle to Newton - and I had the freedom of an adult, had a good set of friends and all this happened in my hometown.  Most important of all, I was getting a much better education than my peers who had left town for "a real college".  My friends were going into debt and I always had plenty of cash to spend. Ironically, but not surprisingly, I was the only one in my circle of friends who graduated in 4 years.  I also was accepted into 3 Ph.D. programs for theoretical math, each with a full tuition scholarship and a generous assistantship. 

We also had a number of interesting speakers at NCCC, including Alan Zweibel, who was one of the original writers from SNL and a UB grad.  Cross Country was also going well.  Coach Jim Mezhir knew how to get us runners to respond, and he was the best coach I ever had. The whole XC team was close, with lots of comradery, and we all got along very well.  The following fall we would win our conference and finish near the front in some major invitationals. 

When I arrived in the fall of 1985,  during one of my first encounters with Art, he said, " I'll bet I scored higher on my GRE math than you did." I had my transcripts and GRE scores in a manila folder, which I happened to have handy, and showed him my perfect 800.  Art had scored 780, and had never met anyone with a higher score. He got such a kick out of that episode. Each year Art would return to our annual Ken Raymond Math Award ceremony, where I was always the MC, and Art would tell that story with a chuckle. 

Art was always a good friend and offered a lot of valuable career advice, all of which turned out to be sound. 

In my 4th, 5th and 6th year of teaching at NCCC I took over the main sequence in Computer Science - Programming Logic I & II, and Data Structures.  In doing so I updated the language from Pascal to Modula-2, and developed all my own projects, aligning students' work with ACM and IEEE standards. Freshman enrollment increased from 13 to 39. To keep current I learned  four more languages, including non-imperative (AI) languages of Prolog and LISP.  

To learn Modula-2 I developed a program where a user opened windows with various financial formulas.  In each window the user could enter 3 variables and solve for the 4th. Then the program could be prompted to print out a lesson on how to do the work with pencil and paper.  On top of that I built a macro language so the user could write a program to use the opened financial functions to build solutions to more complicated financial problems.  And, I developed a debugger for the macro programming  language.  This was all done on an MS-DOS platform, before Windows was widely used.  The next step would have been to generalize this program into other areas of applied math. It really was innovative, and I believe no one has done anything like this since. 

I had engaged my comp. sci. students, having them work on worthwhile projects.  SUNY Buffalo had students solve the Eight Queens problem, so I assigned the more difficult problem of the Knights Tour. Two transferred to U.B. and worked on their hand writing recognition project for the USPS. Another student named Jesse developed a relational database. And a Chinese student named Tom Wang did all our classes in one year, and then did another year at RIT, finishing his 4-year comp. sci. degree. in 2 years  I still have a gift Tom gave me. Tom already had a Ph.D. in physics from University of Beijing.  

When it came time for a promotion, Academic Affairs told me I was "not doing enough for the college".  I was not sure what "the college" was.  Perhaps there was another college that no one told me about.  This system did take some getting used to.  

Art gave me a lot pf practical advice during this period that kept my head screwed on straight.  Art very bluntly mentioned that what I teach does not matter, and how I teach it does not matter either. It is what happens outside the classroom, and how many favors I can do for the admin. 

During that era our remedial math and English teachers reached full professor in 11 or 12 years, while I took 20. It was not a level playing field. Why?

How can you compare teaching Data Structures, Programming Logic II, Calculus III, Linear Algebra and Calculus I to teaching 3 sections of Arithmetic and 2 sections or Precalc?  You can't because remedial arithmetic consisted of sitting in the front while students worked through their books and occasionally took a test, which was graded in class using a right-or-wrong answer key.  The remedial teachers had lots of time to burn.  One at ECC had so much time to burn that he worked for various publishers while his remedial students did their work.  Remedial teachers could serve on multiple committees, and do all the political lobbying required to climb the ladder, and still be out the door by 3, and not taking any work home with them. 

I stepped down from teaching Computer Science. I might have continued but the math department had hired me to take over all the advanced courses as senior members retired, which I did, and doing that along with comp. sci. was exhausting, especially when management was largely disinterested of what I was doing. 

Other significant figures in computer science were John Baldwin, Bart Nigro and Mark Constantino. The story I was told about Bart Nigro was he was brilliant, but was chased away by a heavy-handed dean who foisted a banking computer upon us, and a few other colleges across New York.  That banking computer did not even have a FORTRAN compiler, which was needed for teaching a few classes at NCCC.  Art told me plenty of stories about that dean, who pretended to have knowledge that superseded  anyone on the faculty. 

In 38.5 years of teaching at NCCC I can't think of a single administrator who was well versed in the hard sciences.  By hard sciences, I mean math, physics, chemistry or engineering science. That was definitely true with academic affairs.  There was a benefit to this.  No one seemed to know what I was doing, and I managed to stay out of harm's way for 38.5 years.  Art told me when to duck, and what not to step in. I had a good mentor in Art Hadley.