Math Department (History)

The Seiken Years: 1967 - 1979

The Morse era was over. During Palmer's acting chairmanship, a search was conducted for a new chairman, and the process yielded, in a stroke of good luck for the College, Arnold Seiken. Seiken had come to Union from the University of Rhode Island in 1967, where he had suffered under the reign of an autocrat not unlike Morse. He was shrewd enough to realize that among his other duties, he had to heal the serious wounds which the department had just endured. Stone was still in the department, as was his good friend Ingo Maddaus, himself an excellent teacher whose mathematical career had been harmed by Morse perhaps more than anyone else's. Bick remained from the overthrow group. So Seiken developed a recruiting strategy which, it turned out, served the College well. He sought people who gave evidence of interest in both teaching and mathematical activity, but who would also not subvert the delicate truce which kept the department together. This last requirement was in no way subsidiary to the other two: there would be, if the new chairman could achieve it, harmony. One of Seiken's early recruits, John Roulier, who arrived in 1969, personified this philosophy. An excellent teacher, Roulier quickly established himself as the most active researcher in the history of the department up to that point, publishing one or two papers each year.

Not that Seiken was universally successful; another early recruit, despite several warnings, elected to do no research, but concentrated on teaching alone, and he was very good. The result was predictable: the young man became very popular with the students, so that when he was denied tenure (on the grounds of no publications and no program under way), several of the best students demanded an explanation. These included, by the way, James Saxe, who had won the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad as a high school student, and who finished in the first five (these by tradition being listed in alphabetical order) in the prestigious Putnam mathematical competition open to all U.S. college and university mathematics students. Seiken's performance in the meeting with the students was a masterpiece. He brought four calculus books, one from each of the preceding four decades, to the meeting, and he used them to make it clear that since a tenure offer commits the College to perhaps forty years, someone who had crystallized four decades earlier could have serious trouble being either an effective teacher or a successful researcher. The students, to their credit, were convinced. After Edwin Gillette (a veteran of the Morse era) served in 1973-74 as acting chairman while Seiken was on leave, Roulier left to accept a position at North Carolina State University, which had a medical facility which could provide the care which his daughter required.

Math Department web pages
Created: 06 Mar 1997
Last modified: 09 Oct 1999 16:22:05
Comments to: math@union.edu