Lady Professor

by Switzer, Robert L. ;

  Both of her new colleagues were now shaking their heads and frowning.

  “Ah, don’t you think you are . . . perhaps, um, a bit overly ambitious? These are expensive renovations,” Foster said.

  “I don’t want to seem presumptuous, but we should ask for what we need. I realize that it may take a year or so to get the work done. If you will support me in this, I can promise modern, well-taught courses in biology. And that would reflect well on all of us, don’t you think?”

  “Um, yes, of course. I’ll support your requests to the Dean. Um, perhaps if we all three take the petition to him, he will, uh, be more receptive.” There was an awkward pause. “Well, we’ll let you get to it. You have quite a lot to do.”

  Emma needed three trips to bring her boxes of books, papers, and research materials from the rooming house to her office. She would have liked to ask her new colleagues to help her carry them, but a bite of stubborn pride forbade her from asking. She was about the take a box of research supplies to the room that would become her lab, when she realized that Foster and Rothermel were inside. Perhaps they were preparing a list of the renovations she had requested.

  “She seems rather pushy, don’t you think? Somewhat full of herself. I’d bet nothing will come of this ‘research’ pipe dream. What is she working on, anyway?” Rothermel’s nasal voice.

  “The genetics of some obscure fungus, I think it was. Let’s see how she handles her classes,” Foster rumbled. “That’ll take the wind out of her sails, I’d wager. You have to admit that she’ll take a big burden off of us. And if she pushes old Woodrow into modernizing the labs, well, I’m all for that.”

  WHEN CLASSES BEGAN in September, Emma started taking her main meal of the day at noon in the main dining hall in the faculty dining room adjacent to two, much larger, noisier rooms where the students ate. The first time she entered, heads—all male—turned.

  An older man approached her with a kind smile. “Excuse me, young lady. You must be new here. This is the faculty dining room. The students take their meals in the next room.”

  “But, but . . .” she stammered. “I am on the faculty.”

  Fortunately, Professor Foster, who was seated at a nearby table, stood up and announced in a loud voice. “I’d like to introduce our new assistant professor of biology, Dr. Emma Hansen, recently of Cornell University.”

  Emma smiled in gratitude. He might be a bit stuffy, but not unkind.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” the professor who had intercepted her said. “My goodness, you are so . . . um, youthful.”

  Emma’s lunchtime conversations with her colleagues were cordial, but a little stiff. After a few polite questions, the men generally returned to their own conversations. Two days later she noticed two women seated at a table by themselves and she approached them.

  “May I join you, ladies? I’m Emma Hansen. New in the Biology Department.”

  “Oh, yes, we’ve heard all about the new lady professor. I’m Rosalee Bendix and this is my colleague Miss Erica Jameson. Please join us.” Both women appeared to be in their fifties and were dressed in a rather old-fashioned manner with long skirts and full-sleeved blouses, hair piled on their heads, rather than cut short and bobbed as Emma’s was.

  “Thank you. My goodness, are we the only women on the Harrington faculty?”

  “I’m afraid so, dear.”

  “Have you found that to be . . . ah . . . difficult?”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say so. Would you, Miss Bendix?”

  “No. You see, we’re both in the Domestic Science Department. The men have always been content to leave that to us ladies. They don’t know anything about cooking, sewing, homemaking, or child care, and all of our students are co-eds.”

  “How are you getting on, Dr. Hansen?” Miss Jameson asked.

  “Oh, please, call me Emma. Well, I’m nearly swamped, I admit. I only arrived four weeks ago, and I’m teaching three courses for the first time. Courses that have been rather . . . let go, if I may speak frankly. I have begun asking for improvements, but I suspect that my colleagues think I am too pushy.”

  “Well, I’d encourage you to be patient. Try not to antagonize them. You are a bit of a pioneer, you know,” Miss Jameson replied. “Where are you living, dear?”

  “Rooming house for the moment. Mrs. Stockdale’s. I haven’t had time to look for an apartment of my own. One I could afford.”

  “I take it you aren’t married then?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps we can help you. The building where we live has some small apartments. One-room efficiencies with a little kitchen and bathroom. Close enough to walk to campus.”

  “Oh, that would be a great help. Thank you.”

  “Shall we arrange to meet this weekend? I’ll talk to the landlord.”

  They settled into small talk over their meals. Delicate questioning revealed that neither Miss Jameson nor Miss Bendix held doctorate degrees or had any interest in biology or research. When Emma brought up new research on the discovery of vitamins, which she thought would connect to their teaching about foods and nutrition, her two new friends did not express much interest, so she retreated to questions about the college and campus life.

  At the end of the lunch, Miss Jameson softly clearly her throat. “Um, Miss Hansen, if I may make a suggestion? I could show you a way to do your hair that would be . . . um . . . would make you appear a bit more . . . mature. My goodness, you look like one of the co-eds. Perhaps the students would . . . take you more seriously . . . ? If you don’t mind my suggesting it?”

  Emma stifled a little flash of irritation. It was kindly intended, and she would need all the friends she could find. “Yes, yes, of course, if it doesn’t require too much fussing in the mornings.”

  CHAPTER 11

  1930

  AS EMMA SURVEYED the assembled students in the lecture hall, she experienced a surge of nervous excitement, a feeling like she had experienced when she waited to begin the oral defense of her Ph.D. thesis before a panel of professors at Cornell. Even though this was the start of her third year of teaching at Harrington College, she still felt this way at the beginning of a new semester, the first time she faced a new class. She had learned to accept the edgy feeling, learned that it actually made her more articulate, more quick-thinking, more intellectually alive—not a nervous teacher, but a better one.

  Emma stood at a lectern in front of a large blackboard and demonstration table. The students sat expectantly in four raised tiers on benches with wooden writing desks curving in front of them. Fifty-two students this fall, the most ever. Enrollments had increased each term as word spread across the campus: there was a new lady professor of biology who was really good.

  Emma had learned much about teaching in the past two years. Her first year had been stiff and clumsy in spite of her experience teaching high school and at Cornell. At the beginning she had felt as though she were a fraud to stand as a professor in front of a college class. But by now she had gained confidence. She had learned not to open the class with a review of the course requirements and objectives, but to start by sharing her excitement about biology, to invite her students to join her on a journey of discovery.

  “This term we are going to explore the living world together,” Emma began. “And we are going find wonderful things, sometimes scarcely believable things, about how living organisms solve their problems of finding food, reproduction, and avoiding predators; how they adapt to their environment; how they have evolved throughout great periods of time. As we take this adventure, I want you to constantly ask questions. What is it made of? How is it put together? What is the function of each organ, tissue, and cell? How do the organisms function in groups? Because that is a question that always makes sense in biology—what is its function? In the nonliving world, you wouldn’t ask ‘what is the function of a cloud, of a rock?’, but in biology you must ask it. And then a deeper question: how does it work? Sometimes we don’t know. Not yet, but we must always
ask. And, finally, you should demand to know: why do we think so? What is the evidence that leads the scientific community to conclude what it does and for your textbook to state as though it were certain fact. What is the evidence? What observations and experiments led to the conclusion? Could it be wrong?”

  Emma stood back from the lectern for a moment. The nervousness she had felt moments ago was replaced by quiet joy. This, yes, this was what she had dreamed of doing for so long.

  “And if you develop these habits of critical thought, you will not only obtain a deep appreciation for biology, you will understand the nature of science itself, and you will have learned skills that you can apply fruitfully to most of life’s problems.”

  The students’ eyes followed her, wide with attention. She had them. It was almost like the spell cast by the traveling evangelist preachers who set up their tents in small towns. Well, perhaps she was an evangelist, an evangelist for science.

  She beamed at the students. “Shall we begin?”

  WITH THE HELP of Bernard Dodge, Emma had been able to secure a five-hundred-dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which she had used carefully to purchase equipment and supplies to begin her studies with Neurospora genetics. She was not yet in a position to invite advanced undergraduates to work with her in the little laboratory. The few students who had accepted her invitation to do independent studies did work in more traditional areas of field biology, such as collecting and analyzing specimens, searching for ecological relationships, and she helped them with such projects as Dr. Weatherbee had helped her.

  A recurring criticism of Emma’s work at Cornell had been that there were so few readily identified genetic variants of Neurospora to use in her studies. The famous T. H. Morgan had a large collection of fruit fly strains that had hereditable variants in body morphology or eye color that allowed his coworkers to conduct crosses and genetic mapping. Emma had to concede that she was limited by her lack of an equivalent collection. Then she read a paper in which Morgan reported using x-rays to obtain new strains, mutant strains, with a much higher frequency than was possible by simply hunting through a huge number of individuals hoping to find such variants arising by chance. Somehow, by an unknown mechanism, x-rays increased the frequency of mutation.

  Emma decided to try this method with her pet fungus. But where would she get a source of x-rays? No one in the physics department had an x-ray tube; there was not one on the campus. So Emma approached the local hospital. They used x-rays for diagnostic purposes all the time. Would they permit her to expose her little cultures to x-rays? The physicians were skeptical and amused, but when she convinced them that her fungus presented no danger of disease to patients, they gave consent.

  The first exposures to x-rays killed all the cells; Emma concluded that lower doses were needed. Lower doses seemed to have no effect. The critical question was: how would Emma know if mutations were occurring? Unlike fruit flies, the fungal colonies had no readily observable anatomy in which changes could be detected. What was she looking for?

  On a Saturday afternoon in May of 1929 Emma sat on a lab stool in her basement lab poring over a collection of Petri dishes on which colonies of fungal cells that had been exposed to x-rays had been grown and stimulated by heating to differentiate into colored ascospores. Some colonies failed to sporulate and just grew as thread-like mats. Those probably arose from mutations, which was encouraging, but they weren’t useful to Emma because spore formation was essential for subsequent genetic analysis. Then she noticed on one of the dishes that a single colony of cells differed in color from the others. It formed white spores. Normal Neurospora cells produce a bright red-orange pigment during ascospore formation.

  Excitedly, Emma replaced the cap on the Petri dish and ran out from her lab. She had to show this to someone. But on a Saturday afternoon the Science Hall was quiet as an abandoned graveyard. On the second floor she found a janitor pushing a broom down the hall.

  “Look!” she exclaimed. “What do you see?”

  Puzzled, the man peered into the glass dish that Emma uncovered and presented to him. “Well, a lot of orange spots, I guess.”

  “Yes, yes, and what else?”

  “There’s a white one, just one that I can see.”

  “Yes. I think it’s a mutant. It can’t make the color that the others do. Like an albino. That’s what I’ll call them: albino mutants.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But I’ll have to subculture it. Make sure all its progeny are white too.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  In the coming weeks Emma found that subcultures derived from the original white colony always gave rise to more white colonies: the albino characteristic was inherited; it must have resulted from a genetic mutation. Delighted, Emma screened dozens of irradiated cultures for more albino mutants and eventually found a few more. Better still, over the following months she eventually found colonies that had other alterations in their color: some were pale yellow; some were bright yellow. Emma carefully collected and stored those that consistently inherited the mutant characteristic (called “phenotype” in genetic jargon). It was just a beginning, but she now had some tools to work with. She could now begin serious research on the genetics of Neurospora!

  THESE WERE HAPPY years for Emma, the happiest in a long time, but there were shadows across her sunny fields. She longed for male companionship, not only the open, cheerful sensuality she had enjoyed with Herschel, and especially with Victor—both of whom had disappeared from her life—but a deeper, more committed friendship with a man who understood and respected her passions for teaching and science and who brought his own passions to the relationship. An equal. The prospect of finding such a man at Harrington College or in the surrounding community seemed depressingly remote.

  Emma had not communicated with her sister Kirstin since she had received her resentful letter after their mother died. She wrote, but not often, to her father, her brother Bjorn and his wife Susan, and they replied infrequently with spare descriptions of farm and family activities. Although they did not say so, Emma deduced that the Hansen farm was struggling with low milk and pork prices brought on by last year’s stock market crash, a worsening of a decade of low farm prices that followed the Great War.

  Emma had a more lively correspondence with Hannah Oosterfeld, who kept her entertained with news of Stanton Mills and occasional insights into Emma’s family that she gleaned from their visits to the grocery store. Hannah and Piet expressed more interest in Emma’s professional activities than her family did, and their letters glowed with praise and pride at her accomplishments, even if they had little understanding of the science involved.

  What remained of Emma’s connection to her family? It was with a mixture of anticipation, guilt, curiosity, and hope that Emma planned a trip to Stanton Mills in July of 1930, two years after she had moved to Harrington College. It would be a tiresome journey with a change of trains in Columbus and an overnight stay in Chicago because of infrequent connections to Stanton Mills. She arranged to be met at the station by Piet Oosterfeld so she could visit with him and Hannah before Bjorn drove the truck into town to pick her up. Like their neighbors, the Hansens still had no telephone service, so the arrangements were made by mail and confirmed by telephone to the Oosterfeld’s store.

  Emma trembled with nervous excitement as she stepped with her small suitcase from the passenger car onto the little Stanton Mills station platform. She was the only person to get off the train, but freight and bags of mail were quickly hustled off the next car. Piet walked toward her, much more gray and bent than she remembered him.

  “Ah, Emma, our own lady professor! How good to see you again after so long,” he called out. A warm handshake, but no hug in public. “Come, Hannah is so eager to see you. Won’t you have some coffee with us while we wait for Bjorn.”

  The sights and smells of the grocery store were so familiar, so rich in memories, that Emma had to blink back tears as she entered and e
mbraced Hannah, now a tiny old lady—when had that happened? The store was little changed from the days when Emma had lived upstairs and worked there, but the shelves and counters were somewhat depleted of stock, and surfaces were dusty. That would never have been allowed in the old days.

  It was Monday—washday—so there were no customers in the store. Piet hung a “Closed” sign on the front door, and they climbed the stairs to the upper level apartment for coffee. It was so unchanged that Emma felt a rush of sentimental nostalgia, as though she were suddenly transported back to her days as a high school girl, first liberated from the farm.

  “Emma, you look so well,” Hannah said. “Let me just look at you. So pretty. Surely some man will want to marry you soon. Do you have a beau?”

  “Oh, no. I haven’t had much time for that, I’m afraid.”

  “No, I suppose not. You’ve been so busy. Accomplished so much. Doctor Hansen, no, Professor Hansen. Just think of it. But you mustn’t neglect your personal life. Tell us, dear, are you happy?”

  “Oh, yes. I love teaching in college. And I’m getting my research going well now too.”

  “That’s wonderful, dear.”

  “But how about you two? How are you getting along? Has this depression made things difficult for you?”

  Piet cleared his throat and replied carefully. “Well, yes, I’m afraid it is starting to. Most of our customers are farm folks. We’ve always carried them on credit, as you remember, but with farm prices so low, well, some of them can’t pay their bills. And, of course, they spend less than they used to. I hear rumors that some are facing bankruptcy because the banks may foreclose on their mortgages. These are hard times.”

  “Oh, my, I’m sorry.”

  “Hannah and I aren’t getting any younger. We’d like to sell the store and retire, but who wants to buy it with a depression going on? Seems as though we just have to hang on until things get better. Surely this can’t go on for too long. ”