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 prefect 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, and 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. Art told me plenty of stories about that dean.
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. I had a good mentor in Art Hadley.
