Adrift in the great sea of university life, the author found an academic anchor—and much more—studying the history and sociology of science.
By Beth Kephart | Illustration by Sibylle Schwartz
Sidebar | A Place at the Table
The University of Pennsylvania was always my father’s Alma Mater, the stage against which he set the choicest stories of his youth: sock-sliding races down polished corridors; football games in foulest weather. If it is true that my father got his degree in chemical engineering from Penn, it is also more significantly true that he forged true friendships in campus classes and dormitories. That he had a good time there, and that he still has the stowed-up wealth of memories.
Penn was my father’s school, the nascency for what became and still remains a vibrant career in industry, familyhood, good works. By the time I arrived on campus in the fall of 1978, I saw myself first as the daughter of an alumnus and second as one obsessed with inconsequential, slightly purple-tainted pastimes: bad poetry (my own), and all things F. Scott Fitzgerald. On behalf of what I naively concluded was my own best interest, my brave if obfuscated future, I relegated my inchoate scribbles to the shadows beneath my dorm-room bed and signed up—with legions upon legions of prepossessed pre-meds—for Biology, Chemistry, and some advanced state of Calculus. Somehow not a single one of these proved any kinder than they’d been during high school.
My freshman year, then, was dominated by huge, intimidating classes, by vast theater-style environments where one chose one’s seat like one chose one’s politics: with absolutely stalwart care. Front-row seats seemed reserved for teachers’ pets or subject-matter strugglers. The netherlands were for the confident of mind, the laid-back, note-passing, smart-enough-not-to-study types, of which there was an overwhelming majority. I was a struggler far to the right in the front rows, until finally (I remember the day), I gave up and slunk down in the back. In the float of my life that was my freshman year at Penn, I managed, I strained, I muddled through. It was a big place. I was a small person. I vaguely understood, as I faced the morning vats of granola and raisins, that if I could name or declare or just plain cling to the chain of an academic anchor, I’d be safer than I was, and also happier.
Memory, my memory, is a sensory affair: chemically unreliable and inherently unstable, predisposed toward the irrelevant detail, the out-of-context truth. The shape of the window in my first dorm room. The emptiness of Locust Walk after an evening storm. The Quad at dawn on the day of my first Spring Fling. The fruit vendor on the bookstore side of the bridge who sold apples large as grapefruits and disappeared on weekends. I remember Billy Joel in airwave battle with Bruce Springsteen. I remember catering fancy dinners among mummies in the University Museum. I remember working the library desk, the sound of so many returned books as they tumbled into the carts. But in my mind I have lost much of what I wish I’d saved. The names of characters in books I read. The face of my lab partner. The wise if somewhat ironic counsel of my freshman year RA.
Among the many things I can’t remember is the month, day, hour, reason, even, that the book that finally opened a door to me at Penn came into my possession. The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas. I have it still. A hefty paperback that fills the hand. An author—Charles Coulston Gillispie—whose name screams pedigree. Why did I buy it? Where was I when I did? How did I think that it would succor or inspire the poetry that I still hid beneath my bed? As much as I sit and arduously sift through my memories, I don’t find the answers to these questions. I have to believe that it doesn’t much matter, that what is significant here is this: between my freshman and sophomore year at Penn, Edge was my tome, my instructor, my provocateur, my friend, my companion of choice on a quiet South Carolina beach.
I remember sitting with my feet in the warm salt bath of tide pools, reading how Aristotle’s physics, however “congenial” and beautiful, however certain of “common sense arrangements,” was, like so much of science has been, wrong. Nature, so said Gillispie, “is more elusive, more coquettish perhaps and infinitely more subtle, hiding her ways from the merely dogged or the worthy, and only occasionally yielding to the truly curious those glimpses of great order and altogether inhuman beauty.” I loved that sentence, the anthropomorphism of nature as she flirted, hid her ways. I loved the talk about William Harvey’s careful anatomical drawings; the speculation on the “kind of agony of penetration” that marked Pascal’s career; the surmising that Einstein’s “relation to particle physics begins in piquancy and ends in pathos.” If many of the book’s algebraic equations slipped by uncomprehended, if too many of its illustrations—of earth movements or quaternary chemical elements—did as well, if today I’d fail even the most basic of exams on Gillispie’s classic, back then it didn’t matter. By August, I had concluded that I had a passion, maybe even a predilection, for the history of science. That it was a vessel in which my mind could be contained.
Imagine my relief, then, when, upon returning to the campus, I discovered the enclave of classes and professors and thought that was Penn’s unique program in the history and sociology of science. Housed in a tiny old-fashioned building beside the massive chemistry fortress, Penn’s HSS department was not even 10 years old in the fall of 1979; it palpably incorporated all the enthusiasms and possibilities of something organic, a being still dividing, coiling, growing. There was an energy in the place that appealed right from the start. There was a cramped quality to the corridors and classrooms, the conference-room tables where students and teachers sat elbow to elbow. Here there could be no disappearing into the perimeter chairs of lecture halls. Here the mere arrangement of furniture suggested democracy.
I have a vague image in my head of the secretary I encountered on my first visit to Smith Hall, the stack of papers I was handed. I have a clearer, more emphatic memory of Dr. Robert Kohler, the diminutive man with the slight wisping beard who was chairing the undergraduate department at that time. He was carrying a heavy metal bike down or up steps when I first saw him, his shirt sleeves pushed up, his jeans baggy, well worn. He was hurrying somewhere and yet he stopped, on those steps, to say hello to me, nothing patronizing, nothing insincere, a simple human greeting. Dr. Kohler had a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard, it was rumored. But it was the history of science that he’d taught himself and was now teaching others.
I got enrolled. I got included in a conversation Dr. Kohler was leading about the influences of technology on the city. I read the hand-outs, bought the books, took fastidious notes through class time, then went off, down Locust Walk, across the bridge, and up into the high-rises, where I recopied my notes neatly on a fresh pad to the sighs and rolled eyes of my three roommates. There were no favorites, as far as I could tell, in a Dr. Kohler classroom. There weren’t strugglers and there weren’t stragglers, only the dynamism of conversation, the opportunity to get involved. Dr. Kohler let us think that we were learning not from, but with, him. It’s empowering, it’s liberating, to love the class you take.
So I took more, packing my roster with classes on the history of Russian science and the American medical system, on ethics and the infamously paradigmatic Thomas Kuhn. I encountered historic personalities, philosophies, machines; wallowed around in timelines; sought out ambiguities and hard connections. Semesters yielded to new semesters. The seasons changed: Fall, Spring. Fall, Spring. Around the same conference table, over the same hand-outs and books, there gathered an increasingly familiar cast of characters. Through the corridors hurried a flight of teachers who knew their students’ names, who generated a breeze, a squall, the cinquant glitter of academic fervor. This was a home. This was my place. Smith Hall was the roost of my college years.
By the spring of 1982 it was time for me to find a piece of history for myself, a topic for my senior thesis. Here again my memory fails me as I try to recall how I hunted down my research purpose. For what I remember best is the smell of the stacks up in Van Pelt, the way the sun squeezed through the miserly windows, how otherworldly the music was that crept in from the street. I remember how the shelf of books felt against my back as I leaned into it, how I filled so many spiral-bound notebooks with my notes, then tore them free. How I got up early and stayed up late, and thought myself magnificently engaged in a project that had merit.
“Cooperative Engineering Education: A Study in Institutional Change” was the title I finally settled on for my senior paper, proof that I had, at long last, learned to set my purple prose aside. “What is the mechanism of institutional modernization?” I ask the reader, in the introduction. “Who perceives the need for change? Redefines organizational purpose? Encourages public and political support? Against which standards or norms may reforms be evaluated?” Well, I hinted boldly, I’d located the slice of history to manipulate the answers through. I’d found a turn-of-the-century engineer and educator named Herman Schneider who had founded an industrial training scheme designed to give America the skilled labor the new technologies and city forms demanded. “I have chosen to retrieve Schneider from the dusty shelves of history because I find him to be a potent and imaginative thinker,” I wrote, “a wonderful man, whose ideology of community cooperation and social unity is as powerful and meaningful to us today as it was to his contemporaries over eighty years ago.” And the onion skin rolled through my typewriter for days, and the clack-clack-clack of the keys was my music, and I was full of verve and sweet ambition.
What is the point of a university education? What remains of the experience after we’ve let go of the data points, the hard-won facts, the strands of disparate particulars from which we wove our fragile fabrics? What does it mean, after all the neatly recopied notes are gone, and after we, shaking the dust off of our thesis just now, cannot be persuaded by our own ancient self-importance? Why did I work so hard, over the course of those 80 pages, to win over a reader of one, a fleet-footed, not-to-be-easily-persuaded Dr. Kohler, who thought best while stroking his wispy beard and refused to patronize?
I did it, and on this matter my mind is very clear, because I was given a chance to belong. Because even now, as I read Dr. Kohler’s critique of my senior thesis, I feel the warm, wet rush of appreciation. I feel taken care of, listened to, on equal footing in a small community of people I respected. “This is a very fine piece of work,” Dr. Kohler’s typewritten response begins. “It is well thought-out, well organized, and gracefully written … That is how history should be done. Personal, but accessible to readers who may not have shared, at first, your particular passion.”
That is how Dr. Kohler’s assessment begins, but indeed, the most important words come later: the education, the teaching, the insight, the goading to do better work next time. “I think you missed an opportunity to follow up with an analysis of why some engineering schools adopted the program and others did not,” he suggests, x’ing out his own typewriter mistakes and keeping the analysis coming. Likewise: “In general, I am glad you decided to do cooperative training programs at both the college and high school levels, but I do think it got you into a structural problem that you did not quite resolve.” And on and on, but most tellingly of all, most life changing, most catapulting: “You tend to stop with description and could have let yourself go a bit more with interpretation. Don’t be shy about shaping the past.”
Don’t be shy about shaping the past. Don’t be shy … These words written to the student with the poems beneath her bed, to the almost-graduate who still didn’t know what she would make of the life that stretched before her.
What does one do with a history and sociology of science degree? What does one get from all the semesters spent sitting around a battered conference table? One gets one’s footing, as I understand it now. One begins to take some faith in one’s self. One learns to settle in with the books she loves—the biographies of scientists, the histories of machines, the marvelous stuff that keeps getting written about dirt, about wind, about ocean swells and snails. One looks about and dares to shape what she can see. One retrieves the poetry from beneath her bed.
A few years after I graduated from Penn, after I’d found myself a small career writing about architecture and engineering, I was taking a walk down Walnut Street, observing the sun as it played against the storefront windows. I was in my own thoughts, as I tend to be, and the crowd was just a blur, but then it happened. I caught sight of a familiar figure in a rumpled, sleeve-turned shirt, a man in baggy faded jeans, guiding a heavy metal bike up the populous sidewalk. The wind was in his wispy hair, his hand was in his beard. He was headed west, toward the campus that lay beyond the bridge.
Hey, I almost called after him. Hey. For he was on the north slab of sidewalk and I on the south, and there were two lanes of cars coughing between us. I wanted to yell out, Thank you, wanted to stop him and say that I was still learning how to think things through, learning how to take my mind beyond description. But it seemed to me that there were other students waiting, other theses to be graded, other conversations he’d soon be starting with those who’d somehow found the place that they were calling home.
Beth Kephart C’82 is the author of A Slant of Sun: One Child’s Courage and a journalist whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the Gazette. Her new book, Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things That Matter, was published in September.
SIDEBAR
A Place at the Table
In her widely praised first book,A Slant of Sun: One Child’s Courage, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1998, Beth Kephart C’82 told the story of her son Jeremy and his gradual emergence from “pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified,” a condition related to autism. Jeremy, now an active 11-year old, also figures in Kephart’s new book, published by Houghton-Mifflin in September, Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things that Matter. Watching her son form his first friendships was one of several sparks for the book, a moving, clear-eyed and inspiring meditation on what it means to be a friend and to have, lose and keep the friendship of others.
Kephart’s prose, at once lyrical and thoughtful, emotional and intelligent, illuminates a subject often relegated to greeting-card sentimentality. She interweaves observations of Jeremy and his friend James with her own reunion with a lost “best” friend of her youth; her husband’s timeless, sustaining bond with his boyhood friends, despite vastly divergent adult lives; the deep, trusting friendship between husband and wife. (“We have little in common … but who would I be without him?” she writes.) Other, darker threads include Kephart’s description of her comfortless yet profoundly necessary vigil with a friend whose husband is dying, and the cautionary tale of a caring woman ultimately overwhelmed by the burden of one-sided friendships. In early reviews, The Baltimore Sun praised the book’s “grace and quiet wisdom” and Salon.com called it “invigorating and odd, earnest and endearing.” According to The New York Times Book Review, Kephart “neatly evokes friendship’s delicate balancing act.”
Kephart has written for the Gazette before [“Haunted by an Heiress,” May/June], and our first thought, on learning about the book, was to publish an excerpt—preferably, one with a Penn connection. However, while “there are so many Penn friendships and people who will always have an important place in my heart,” Kephart says, the book does not deal directly with that phase of her life. “Thematically and emotionally, [those] relationships did not help me tell the more universal story about friendship that the book sets out to tell,” she explains. “The truths divined from my college experience in many ways were redundant to those learned in high school and during the early stages of my career. For the reader’s sake, I winnowed the stories about me down so as to make room for a larger discussion of friendship.”
But there was a Penn story that Kephart did want to share, on a closely related subject, and we are happy to present it in the accompanying original essay. “Coming Home” tells how she managed to find her own niche at the University through an apparently—but only apparently—unlikely choice of major. Among other things, the essay is an eloquent response to the perennial question: “What do you do with that after graduation?”
“Friendship is, at the end of the day, about the way we make room for others, and about how others make room for us,” Kephart says. “People listening, people caring, people remembering—these are the essential prerequisites to friendship. In the History and Sociology of Science Department, under Dr. Kohler’s care, I felt as if someone had pulled an empty chair up to a table and said, ‘This is your place. You belong here.’” —Ed.
