Beer at the White House

The latest flap over the Harvard professor and the Cambridge, Mass., cop brings back a lot of memories of my life in the president’s office at the University of Hawaii. As most of you know, I was special assistant to the president and not only his speechwriter and aide-de-camp but also his troubleshooter and later vice president for university relations. Among my thorniest challenges and potential public relations disasters were those faculty members whom I shall charitably call prima donnas. This is what the Gates flap makes me remember.

Prima donnas then came in two types: those who had not yet slithered up the academic ladder to the point they felt they deserved to be and were, therefore, acting out of insecurity; and those who had slithered up the pole and were inclined to want to remind everyone of both their struggle and their achievement and were acting out of security. Both types were achingly sensitive to the least slight and since they were located in an absurdly conformist environment—a university—all they needed to do was claim violation of academic freedom or some injustice and all hell would break loose: faculty senators would call for administrative reviews, indignant letters would be written to the media, and aggrieved professors would stand up in various meetings and preach that the university should be setting the prime example of social and personal justice (particular emphasis on the personal).

All would be taken very seriously and sometimes mediation was called for to settle matters—if two professors had a major disagreement (like over whose office was larger) the president sometimes had to step in. Such is the way of universities where someone once said that the infighting is vicious because there is so little to fight over.

Given this background, I have a different take on the Gates/Harvard matter than our rabble-rousing media. I see it as a clash of cultures. The Harvard prof felt himself poorly treated for a man of his stature—worse, he wasn’t even recognized, no name cachet at all. Horrors. He spoke to the cop as he would complain to his dean, who has long ago figured out how to defuse him. The cop reacted as he would to any potential street criminal he thought was doing B/E.

Both were wrong: Gates for not realizing that professorial tantrums don’t work off campus. The cop for not realizing what it means to be working in Cambridge, Mass, where there a gazillion universities. He’s not in the streets of New York or LA. He’s in the mean streets of the most competitive, snobby higher-education capital of the US.

I once observed one of the English profs in my department start to work himself into a tantrum in the office of English Department secretary. She’d been there forever and was unimpressed. He had been given a parking assignment at an auxiliary lot rather than right next to the building. Horrors—he had to park with us junior faculty who were glad to get any parking at all. She looked at him with the most beautiful of smiles and said, “Why, Professor XXX, parking next to the building is for important people.” He had a choice: try to argue that he was important (very undignified) or just swallow it and walk away muttering (not good but not as bad). He chose the latter. If the cop had been there, he might have cuffed our good prof and what good would that have done?

So, I guess my advice to our prof and his cop—and to our peerless leader Obama—is get over it and use some common sense next time. And if there’s any room on the beer wagon, someone should invite me to the White House where I could bang a few heads together. I got pretty good at it in the president’s office.

A Knowing Universe

Every once in a while, I’m reminded of what George Wald said about life. He shared the Nobel Prize for working out the chemistry of vision and later became a mystic. I was privileged to know him in Hawaii when he spoke at a conference I organized. “We live,” he told me, “in a knowing universe that wishes to be known.”

I was thinking about this when I received a phone call from Ken, a close and dear friend in Canada, who has worked with me on matters and history pertaining to the Halifax bomber, in one of which my father lost his life during WWII. I’ve never been completely sure that Ken is sympathetic to my tendency to mysticism (coincidences meaning purpose etc.) but after what he had to share with me, I suspect he might be more inclined that way.

Ken recently came back from a cruise to Europe. It sounds as if he had a much better time that he was expecting before he left, but the whole idea of traveling is so fraught with inconvenience these days that he prefers to stay home and do startlingly beautiful photography of the various wildlife that cross his acreage. Anyway, this time he went. It was a large liner with several thousand others on board and he and his wife were seated with three other couples, complete strangers before this moment.

Hang with me—you need to know all this or there is no wonder, as Dickens would say.

The couples exchanged addresses and phone numbers, as couples do after a week of enforced intimacy and pledged to keep in touch. One of the couples came from a town not far from Ken, so he gave him a call the other day. They started talking about the restored Halifax bomber in Trenton, Ontario, for which I wrote my first book Extraordinary Things to raise money for the endowment fund. Ken soon found out that this fellow had an uncle in the RCAF, but he didn’t know very much about him except that he flew Halifaxes.

One thing led to another in the conversation and Ken thought he might see if he could help since the Halifax Families Association of which I am director and Ken is advisor exists to help families with research. “Which Squadron?” Ken asked. It turned out to be 640 Squadron, which those of you who follow my saga will know was my father’s squadron. Surprised and rather intrigued, Ken looked in his considerable air force library for this uncle and very quickly determined that the uncle in the RCAF was none other than the navigator on my father’s crew. I’d been searching for him without success for several years.

What were the chances of this, I wonder? Among thousands of passengers, among hundreds of dinner tables, that they should be there at the same moment on a cruise that Ken was reluctant to go on. An improbable coincidence? But this is the third similarly huge coincidence I’ve personally experienced in regard to the Halifax. Without those coincidences, I would never have found the wireless operator or my father’s family. If I stopped to question them, I guess I'd never believe them. I guess they've primed me to look for purpose and meaning.

Today, AOL is reporting the death of Henry Allington, who at 113 had been the world’s oldest man. He'd experienced the horrors of WWI and, despite being nearly blind, spent his later life urging the world not to forget those who gave their lives in the horror of war. I think the coincidences surrounding the Halifax Bomber that I’ve experienced give me the same message. The universe does not wish us to forget these young men. I know I will never forget the loss of a crew where the youngest member was 19 and the oldest 27, and I will not forget all the other crews on other aircraft and in other uniforms lost flying Ops.

Now if it's not asking too much, I'd like another coincidence please. I want to find the family I haven’t been able to find, that of the pilot, Doug Thomas of Toronto, Ontario, so I can bring him back to his squadron family.