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| A Halloween Day in early 1990s in my office at the Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health, Health Science Center at Brooklyn. Photo and mask: Mary Sears. |
“By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”
“[C]ircumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.”
—- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1845
As this essay will tell, I began my working life when I was nineteen years old and stopped working for a wage at age 59, forty years later. For most of us, these are the most productive years of our lives. I spent 30 of these years working in the academia. Most people who spent as much time at universities would consider themselves academics. Yet I never have and I hope this essay will explain why. And if someone insists, I would call myself an accidental academic. As the reader will find, my socialist convictions and love life played the central role in shaping of my employment history and the big chunk of it as an academic. Let me distinguish intellectual and scholarly interests from academic life. While academics typically need to tip their hat to intellectual and scholarly interests, they often are neither seriously intellectual nor scholarly. For the great majority, it has been largely a job, perhaps for some and at an earlier period in recent history, a cushy job.
As a student of Karl Marx and (eco)socialism since 1971, it seemed appropriate to open this essay with maxims from the theory of history of Marx and Engels and its focus on how our working life make us who we are and how circumstances and our lives interact. Marx and Engels considered humans to be the sum total of our social relations shaped by the dominant mode of production. Thus, followed their focus the importance of class relations in the study of history. But class formation has become a much more complicated issue than they envisioned. As we will see, in my individual case once I radicalized and became a socialist in 1971, my political life, circumestances, as well as my own personal life, abilities and perferences determined my working life.
In telling my story, I will follow a chronological order. To give the big picture, I was born on April 19, 1950 in Tehran, Iran. I arrived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on January 9, 1969, when I was 18 years old with the goal of studying physics. I retired from the University of California in April 2009, where I had worked nine years at UC Berkeley and three and half years at the UC Office of President. Currently, I live outside of Sebastopol, California. I began with dusting off my curriculum vitae (CV) which I also ordered chronologically (usually a CV begins with the present and go back in time). This CV includes some of my non-academic work especially after 2009 when I retired. But it focuses on my acadmic life. I plan to write a separate essay about my political life at a later date.
As a student of Karl Marx and (eco)socialism since 1971, it seemed appropriate to open this essay with maxims from the theory of history of Marx and Engels and its focus on how our working life make us who we are and how circumstances and our lives interact. Marx and Engels considered humans to be the sum total of our social relations shaped by the dominant mode of production. Thus, followed their focus the importance of class relations in the study of history. But class formation has become a much more complicated issue than they envisioned. As we will see, in my individual case once I radicalized and became a socialist in 1971, my political life, circumestances, as well as my own personal life, abilities and perferences determined my working life.
In telling my story, I will follow a chronological order. To give the big picture, I was born on April 19, 1950 in Tehran, Iran. I arrived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on January 9, 1969, when I was 18 years old with the goal of studying physics. I retired from the University of California in April 2009, where I had worked nine years at UC Berkeley and three and half years at the UC Office of President. Currently, I live outside of Sebastopol, California. I began with dusting off my curriculum vitae (CV) which I also ordered chronologically (usually a CV begins with the present and go back in time). This CV includes some of my non-academic work especially after 2009 when I retired. But it focuses on my acadmic life. I plan to write a separate essay about my political life at a later date.
There are four major periods in my employment history. From 1969 to 1982 when I took occasional part time and full time employment to put me through college and after college to support my political activism. From September 1977 to January 1979, I worked at the Department of Community Health, Downstate Medical Center, State University of New York, a medical school. Then I left for Iran to participate in the revolution. I returned to New York in August 1982. From December 1982, I began a sustained full time academic employment with some hiccups until April 2009.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Winter of 1969
Late at night on January 9, 1969, I arrived in a limousine from Baton Rouge’s airport at the campus visitors residence at the Louisiana State University (LSU) fresh from high school to take a semester long English as a Second Language (ELS) course. My admission to the undergraduate program in physics at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin for the fall semester of 1969 required me to score 450 or better on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOFEL). Although English was part of the curriculum in high schools in Iran, there was no standards and each year the teachers who themselves did not know English well enough to teach it assigned a text of their own choice. Because the quality of teaching and learning was very low, it was common that each year the English teacher would begin with the alphabet and then move on to vocabulary building, dictation, grammar, reading, comprehension, and writing. Also, English was taught entirely out of its cultural context. Thus, there was little gained and most students who could afford it, had to take private classes usually towards the end of high school years or even after to learn some English. Even though I had taken some private classes in Tehran right after finishing high school, upon arrival in the U.S. I knew I have a long road ahead to be comfortable with the language.
My self-sacrificing parents sold a small piece of land near Narmak Village on the outskirt of northeast Tehran, which was their life savings at the time, to purchase a oneway airline ticket from Tehran to Baton Rouge with stops in Beirut, London, New York, New Orleans and to provide me with $900 in cash. After that, I was supposed to be on my own.
My English was so poor when I arrived in the U.S. that after signing up for the cheapest dorm at the LSU, called the North Stadium as it was built under the football stadium, I stood by the stadium with my luggage asking the passerby in bad English and tick accent: “Where it is Nort Estadium?” I stood there for some time as nobody understood me my question!
I consider myself lucky because my room-mates John and Rick, who in retrospect I think probably were practicing Christians, both in ROTC, took me under their wing. They found me interesting and spent a fair amount of time socializing with me, which helped me to learn English by immersion. They also were fascinated with the game of backgammon that I introduced to them and was, as it turned out, very much in vogue in the U.S. in the 1960s.
After I paid for the tuition and board up front, it was easy to see that I needed to save money on my daily requirement. But that was easy because initially I did not find American food appealing. I remember the first day I walked into the Student Union cafeteria for breakfast, the smell of bacon and sausage nauseated me. There was a self-service kiosk near the dormitory where I went for hot dogs at fifty cents a meal. Of course, hotdogs I ate in Tehran were far superior, but at least, these were hotdogs! I also spent money on cigarettes at forty cents a pack. But I smoked only a few a day. I went through all the available brands and flavors offered by the cigarette vending machine but settled on Marlboros. When I found my way around, I started a Saturday nights habit of treating myself to a t-bone steak with baked potato with sour cream and coleslaw, served with a coke for $1.95 at a restaurant just off campus.
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| Standing in front of the LSU Student Union Building, Spring 1969. Photo: Khosrow |
While I spent many hours in ESL classes and comprehension and pronunciation laboratory, I spent much of my free time with fellow Iranian ESL students and a couple of Iranian students at the LSU, in particular, a second year architecture student named Khosrow. He had his own off-campus apartment decorated with monkey heads made of coconuts hanging from the ceiling by strings. Khosrow, was still homesick and in love with a young woman in his home town of Shiraz who had left behind. Our common homesickness and our romantic disposition towards women made us close friends. I spent a lot of my free time watching television at the Student Union which had three TV rooms for students. I watched comedy talk shows and sitcoms to help me train my ears to American English and to learn about the culture. It worked well and I began to understand what was being said on TV and get some of the joke. I did not begin to read newspapers until much later. Aside from my two room-mates, John and Rick, I had little contact with Americans on a personal basis. One brief episode was that somehow after accidentally meeting a beautiful young woman in a church just off campus, she gave me her phone number and subsequently, she invited me to have dinner wit her family. Lori was perhaps 17 or 18 years old at the time with long blonde hair. I dressed up for the occasion and took as present some pistachios and a finely decorated book of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in Farsi with English translation. The dinner conversation was challenging for me. I had to listen hard to understand. The dinner was not entirely to my taste. But Lori’s father turned out to be one of the American engineers who participated in the building parts of the Abadan refinery in Iran. He was glad to meet an Iranian student. On our way back to my dorm, Lori who was driving a Ford Mustang placed her hand on my knee. I froze! I did not know how to respond. I thank her for their hospitality and we said goodbye. I never saw her again.
Chicago, summer of 1969, a great work experience
In May, I finished my ELS course and took the TOFEL test. I scored 448, two points shy of what my admission letter had required. Luckily, the International Office at UT Austin accepted my TOFEL score as good enough when I arrived there for the fall semester.
My immediate concern after finishing the ESL program was earning enough money to carry me through the summer and the freshman year at UT Austin. Khosrow and a few other more experienced Iranian students suggested to me to try my luck at a large city and a few recommended Chicago. Together with another Iranian ELS student also named Kamran, we took the Greyhound bus to the Windy City.
As the Greyhound terminal in Chicago was in downtown, we happened to find a cheap hotel nearby that rented rooms for $2 a night: Cass Hotel on Wabash Avenue. (These days it appears, it is part of the Holiday Inn chain and renamed Hotel Cass). The guests at Cass Hotel seemed odd to me; heavily made up young women in skimpy dresses walked the hallways and disappeared in various rooms. The small hotel had a lounge and a large color TV. I soon learned that a group of Iranian workers gathered there at night. Whether they gathered there because of the young ladies I never asked. On July 24, with much amazement I watched the Apollo moon landing at the hotel lounge.
The first day Kamran and I walked the streets in downtown Chicago in search of work, he led the way as he spoke better English and was not shy. A native of Shiraz, he had a large and pointy nose, small deep-seated eyes with heavy eyebrows, and was smart. While on the State Street, Kamran walked into a steak house and stayed inside for a long time. When he came back his eyes were shining with delight. He was offered a job as a busboy and took it!
I asked if they needed a second worker? He replied he did not think they needed another worker.
Counterman
I summoned up my courage and walked into the steak house and asked for the manager. When I told the manager that my friend just got a job and I need one as well, he quickly offered me as a job as counterman to serve salad, coffee and tea. Kamran was furious that I got a “better” job as he did not like picking up dirty dishes and cleaning messy tables.
I found my job more challenging than his. He did not need to interact with the customers. I had to talk to each one! The steak house was self-service. The customer arrived at the beginning of the service counter, looked over the menu and ordered his/her steak and how it should be prepared, paid the cashier, and as part of the meal also received a small bowl of tossed salad and a cup of tea or coffee at the end of the line. My job was to ask what kind of salad dressing the customer wanted and whether they wanted tea or coffee. Those who ordered coffee also indicated how they wanted their coffee! The problem was that I had no knowledge of various salad dressings available (there were four I think) and different customers used different language to tell me how they wanted their coffee (tea was easy, a bag and a cup of hot water). Thus, it took me a while to understand that “Boston coffee” means coffee with cream!
But I quickly learned the ropes and over time, I was comfortable with my job whereas Kamran was increasingly uncomfortable with his even though from time to time he would get a small tip. I did not receive any tip.
The immediate problem was that we did not work enough hours. The steak house was open for lunch only. Our wages paid for room and food and we saved a little but we needed to make more money for school. Luckily, we had the small group of Iranians workers who gathered at the Cass Hotel, ate a cheap meal or some dessert and socialized. It was there that I learned about ice cream sundae and banana split! The Iranians who gathered were a caste of characters who mostly did not live in the hotel.
I recall a tall, big, and slightly older Iranian who spoke English well insofar as I could tell who had a career as a waiter in an upscale restaurant and bragged about large tips he received every night. There were other well paying jobs mentioned in those gathering. One was for grave diggers who worked at night in the graveyard! Not an appealing idea! Someone else was looking into becoming an operator of big earth moving machinery but that required a certification process. This was also out of reach for me as I was planning to go to college in September.
Iranians like to make up jokes for all occasions. A joke that was floating around then was about an Iranian student who took a job at the Chicago zoo to act as well-liked monkey who had suddenly died. He was asked to wear a monkey skin and act amusingly like the dead monkey until a real replacement monkey is found. The poor guy got so busy jumping up and down that the floor of the cage cracked and he fell into the lion cage below! The lion roared as if to pounce on him momentarily so the Iranian student in monkey skin cried out in Farsi “God save me!” Suddenly, the lion pulled back and responded: “So, you too are Iranian!”
I do not remember how long I stayed at the Cass Hotel. But at some point with three other Iranians students, we rented an efficiency apartment in the north-side. Two of us slept on the roll up bed and two of us slept on either side on the floor. This way we even paid less money for rent than in Cass Hotel and got away from its seedy atmosphere.
Gas station attendant
Somehow, I was alerted of a job at a gas station on the west-side accessible by the City Transit Authority’s L train. Although I had no experience and did not even know how to drive a car I got the job. It was for higher pay than the steak house and it offered many more hours of employment from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week promising a substantially higher income. I quit the steak house job and started working at the gas station. During the interview, the owner told me that he liked me because he too was a Muslim from Yugoslavia! Of course, I had thought of myself as an atheist since childhood but I did not want to argue with my new boss! In addition to running a full service gas station, the owner wanted me also to paint the exterior to give the place a fresh look! When a driver pulled in I had to pump gasoline, wash the windshield, and if asked, checked the air pressure in the tires and pumped in air as needed, check the oil level and add more oil as needed, and provide other such services as asked. Occasionally, someone would tip a quarter or leave me the change.
I worked three weeks without a break. I painted the entire exterior of the station and customers were generally happy with my work with one exception. One afternoon, a big fancy white American car drove in and when I approached the well-dressed driver for his order he asked me if I had serviced his car earlier that day. I told him I did not recall. He then got out and to show me red finger prints on the hood of the car. “Are these your finger prints?” he asked. I suddenly remembered that earlier, I had serviced the same car driven by a beautiful young woman for gas and full service. I must have been so distracted with her beauty that I did not wipe off red paint from my fingers while opening up the hood! Looking obviously defenseless and ashamed, I apologized. The man was most forgiving asking me to wipe it off which I did.
But like all good things, that job also ended abruptly. One morning three weeks after I started working at the gas station, I arrived as usual before 8 in the morning to open up the gas station. No matter how I tried, my key could not open the lock. I sat there waiting for the owner to arrive. Some time later another man arrived, opened the door to the office with a key and walked inside. When I expressed my confusion to him, he told me he is the new owner of the gas station. And when I told him that I am the attendant, he said: “No more.” I quickly understood that I was a victim of my “Muslim Brother” who used me to clean up the gas station to sell it without paying me a penny!
A graveyard shift laborer
Soon, however, I found a job at the Clow Valve Corporation warehouse. It was a temporary graveyard shift job hauling dismantled metal shelves from the warehouse to the yard to make room for new shelves to store valves for distribution. I was part of a small crew following a tall skinny welder who cut down the old metal shelves using a torch and three men that carried out the cut shelves on platform carts to the dump truck in the yard. The next day these would be hauled away to a junkyard. There was a half an hour break about 4 O’clock. Sometimes, I fell asleep during that brief break. The job was hard but it did pay well.
In retrospect, I think workers at Clow Corporation were probably unionized. At least, a foreman, named George, who I can still picture in mind, a stocky Polish man in his fifties with very tick prescription glasses who supervised me was a union man. George took me under his wing. For the Fourth of July, he invited me to join his family and friends for a lunch picnic at Lincoln Park. That was my second invitation to spend time with an American family.
Assembly line worker
I was on the look out for my next job as the work at Clow Corporation was coming to a close. Somehow, I found work at the Bit-O-Honey factory as the packaging machine operator. I was positioned at the end of the assembly line. Sheets of chocolate covered candy arrived at my station, cut into small individual size, wrapped in Bit-O-Honey covering, and these individually wrapped candies filled a box that was then sealed for shipping. There were a few places where this process failed from time to time. My job was to adjust the machines as necessary to get the process going properly. Sometimes, I had to stop the line for a very short time to do this. The line was supposed to keep moving. This job paid well and it was more interesting. My coworkers were mostly black and Latino. I held it until it was time to go to Austin, Texas, for my freshman year.
My freshman year at UT Austin (Fall 1969 - Spring 1970)
It now sounds amazing, but I did save up enough money in the summer of 1969 to pay for my first year expenses at UT Austin. What helped greatly was that UT Austin probably offered the best college education to a foreign student for the money. I only paid $300 a semester for as many courses as I wanted to register for (UT was free for the residence of Texas and out of state students who would become residents after six month). I also decided on living at the University House, a small family owned dormitory with its own small dinning room that served breakfast and dinner at $100 a month ($30 rent and $70 for meals)! I had little other expenses.
At the University House, my roommate James, a short, slender guy with shoulder-length blond hair, who played the guitar and sang folk and rock-n-roll songs, liked to argue as an atheist with Steve, a Christian student much bigger than James, who was usually much calmer than he was. Another notable resident was Nasser, a graduate engineering student from Egypt that lived upstairs, who talked to me, still naive politically, about the Arab revolution. When my Iran Air flight from Tehran on its way to London landed in Beirut on January 8, 1969, I saw scenes of devastation of the airport building and hangers caused by a recent Israeli bombing. Thus, I was receptive to Nasser’s criticism of Israel and his appeal for solidarity with Palestinians. Of course, under the Shah, there was no criticism of Israel in Iran or any solidarity with Palestinians or the Arab nationalist rising against Zionism and imperialism.
Finally, there was John Roach, a tall young man with acne face and black-rimmed glasses who was a sexually frustrated graduate student in mathematics. When I changed major in my junior year to mathematics and computer science, I saw John again in the mathematics department.
In the spring of 1970, James, my roommate, met Carole, a blonde somewhat chubby student. Carole began to sleep with James in our small square-shaped room with no window and two small beds on either side. Needless to say, it disturbed my sleep! By the end of the spring semester James and Carole quit college and moved back to Dallas where they were from. I later heard they became born-again Christians and married.
In the spring of 1970, James, my roommate, met Carole, a blonde somewhat chubby student. Carole began to sleep with James in our small square-shaped room with no window and two small beds on either side. Needless to say, it disturbed my sleep! By the end of the spring semester James and Carole quit college and moved back to Dallas where they were from. I later heard they became born-again Christians and married.
My freshman year was a period of internal upheaval and radicalization for me. Imagine a nineteen year old Iranian student who is just beginning to read and speak English enough to get by trying to take on a full load of college courses which required familiarity with specialized vocabulary, while assimilating a new culture itself in the midst of a great upheaval called youth radicalization of the 1960s. So, I went though some rapid and fundamental changes.
First, my academic interests changed. Although, I signed up as a physics major for the fall semester and even worked at the nuclear physics lab as an assistant for a while, soon I discovered the music room on the fourth floor of the Academic Center (the undergraduate library). By the spring semester, I was spending much of my time listening to classical music while “studying!” It was there that early in the spring semester, I saw a tall, thin young woman with lush long dark blonde hair sitting by a table looking at art books by the entrance to the audio library. I immediately had a crush on her! I had grown up as a romantic and while in high school had crushes on two girls my age (one after another). Of course, as I matured I grew out of this youthful romantic adoration of women who I knew nothing about except finding them outwardly attractive. Unlike most men my age, I was not looking for sex but for romance, to be in relationship with a woman I could adore.
By fall of 1970, my interests had changed enough to take a course in life drawing and a course in design!
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A depressing summer: 1970
As soon as the spring semester was over, I boarded the Greyhound bus for Chicago hoping to raise enough money for my sophomore year. Quickly, however, I learned that jobs were scarce. Later, I learned it was because of the Teamsters wildcat strike that arrived at the end of a mild recession. With my money running out fast, I returned to Austin, rented a shared room for a dollar a day with another Iranian student named Khalil Zare, and settled on a program of austerity as I found no jobs in Austin. I relied on chunky peanut butter sandwiches topped with honey on cheap Wonder bread! Although initially I liked these sandwiches, soon I was fantasizing about other food! My roommate Khalil, a very smart aerospace engineering student from Isfahan, lacked empathy. Fully aware that I was limited in my ability to feed myself, he would bring into our shared room fried chicken to eat without ever offering me a bite!
Still, I liked Khalil and in my senior year we became roommates again in a two bedroom apartment on Riverside, a desirable location for UT graduate students and faculty housing. Unlike other good students I knew, Khalil never carried a bunch of textbooks or even a notebook to his classes. He usually tucked in a pen in his shirt and a rolled up sheets of writing paper in his hand on his way to his classes! Khalil learned through listening to his professors in the classroom and when at home, thumbing through textbooks. In his junior year, he found a novel solution to the N-body problem that was published later in a journal and made him stand out among his aerospace engineering students cohort.
Although my situation was depressive, I was not depressed. Most days, I went swimming laps at the campus indoors pool and spent a few hours listening to classical music at the audio library. I also played cards at night with fellow Iranians at my residence. There were two graduate students among us who I had named shotor (camel) because of his big feet and Mohandes (engineer) and I used to tease them and others as we played card. This gang-like behavior I had learned from socializing with my neighborhood group in Narmak, Tehran, especially Zaadi who was the ringleader. (see, “The Two Times Zaadi Cried,” 2017)
My sophomore year (Fall 1970 and Spring 1971)
When it was time for registration for the fall semester of my sophomore year, I was fortunate to have a friend in the person of Homayoun Hashemi who offered to loan me $2,000. Homayoun was son of a well-to-do landed family in Tehran and a generous young man who consulted his father on all non-trivial decisions, including what courses to sign up for. No doubt, his father had also kindly approved of the loan Homayoun extended to me.
We first met at the International Office when we both had just arrived at UT Austin to register for our freshman year. He was highly intelligent, well-organized, and studious young man who had picked a major in electrical engineering. Homayoun dressed humbly, sometimes to an excess. He often wore the same clothing for days, not a great idea in a hot humid climate. When we went to the University Coop to purchase our textbooks, he bought himself a newly popular Texas Instrument calculator which cost something like the tuition we paid for a semester. Up to that point science and engineering students used a slide rule and I had in fact brought one with me from Iran.
Homayoun and I became good friends. In our freshman year we took the same sequence of calculus classes and studied together in the library. Homayoun helped me figure out homework problems I found difficult to do. We also socialized. Homayoun was shy and uncomfortable in social settings. I think perhaps I helped him get socially adjusted. When Mary and I became a couple, she also became friends with Homayoun and helped him adjust to the larger American culture and gently nudged him to dress better and cleaner. We were good enough friends that we become known to each other’s family.
Like thousands of other upper- and middle-class Iranian students studying in the United States in the 1970s, Homayoun was pursuing a college education to help him land a good job and live a materially rich life, except in his case (and a few others of my Iranian friends) he was genuinely interested and excelled in his chosen field of study.
As I radicalized politically, our paths diverged and our relationship suffered as Homayoun was a conservative at heart. The last time I saw him was in his house in Tehran in early summer of 1979. He lived in a large walled estate with multiple homes. The house at the center belonged to his parents and each of the children were given their own house. The arrangement recognized that the children are now adults with their own families yet it still maintained the Hashemi clan all inside one walled estate.
Like all deep going revolutions, the 1979 Iranian revolution overthrew a significant part of the ruling class who had clustered around the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. With the downfall of the old regime, not only its upper crust including the all powerful state bureaucracy fled the country, so did industrial and financial capitalists and their top managers. When the masses who overthrew the Shah regime handed the power to Ayatollah Khoemini who quickly moved to install an Islamic Republic in Iran, opportunities opened up for all political currents supporting him.
Homayoun’s brother in-law, Ali Sadeghi Tehrani, a disciple of Ibrahim Yazdi, a leader of the Islamic nationalist Freedom Movement headed by Mehdi Bazargan, became a high-level official in charge of a group of nationalized factories. In that position, he came into conflict with the militant labor movement that was organizing independent shoras (workers councils). Kargar (Worker), the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party that was forged after the February revolution and lasted until August 1979 to which I belonged, ran an article critical of Sadeghi-Tehrani’s role opposing the labor movement. Homayoun himself was a passive supporter of the Khomeini-Bazargan government. Clearly, our political positions were at odds. A supporter of the clerical capitalist government that was on a counter-revolutionary course since the day after the triumph of the revolution being friends with a revolutionary socialist sharply critical of the clerical capitalist regime was a liability for Homayoun and his family. This showed up in our last meeting at his house. It was a formal reception. I did not try to connect with him ever since and he neverhas tried to contact with me even after he too left Iran to live and work in California. We have gone our separate ways. I am sure he is still the same decent man I used to know and I will be forever grateful for his friendship and I am delighted to see him highly successful in his chosen profession.
After going into a $2000 debt, I wrote to my father for help with getting a student loan for me from the Iranian government. By my junior year, he had managed to file the paper work necessary to obtain a regular stipend from the Pahlavi Foundation (renamed and repurposed by the Islamic Republic as Alavi Foundation). Of course, he managed this in part because of his position at the Royal Investigation Bureau (Barresi-ye Shahanshahi) which was established in early 1970s as a “reform measure” to consider complaints by citizens against corruption and misdeed in government agencies. As soon as these funds began to arrive, I was able to pay off my debt to Homayoun. I was also freed from the compulsion to work to pay for my college expenses.
A romantic affair that changed my working life
In the spring of 1970, I learned about the audio library on the top floor of the Academic Center with its treasure throve of classical music. I started visiting it to listen to classical music which was entirely new to me as I studied. The audio library was at the Southwest corner walled off from the rest of the floor with glass walls. As I was entering it one late afternoon, I saw a tall, thin, and pretty young woman with long dark blonde hair with bangs covering much of her forehead that was flowing down her side like a gentle waterfall as she moved her head from one side to the other apparently to relax her long thin neck. I immediately had a crush on her!
As it turned out, she also visited the audio library and was friends with a couple of students who worked there; a man with Greek gods’ beard and thick prescription glasses whose name was Joe Ray and an intense man with short hair and a well-shaven face framed by round prescription glasses named Prince that turned out to be a graduate music student studying classical music composition. Joe Ray was the operator mounting and dismounting music tapes. Over time, I learned that the woman I had a crush on was Mary Suzanne Sears, an art history student who lived in Andrews dormitory on campus. I also learned that she was my age and her birthday was March 15. I mailed her a recording of Rimsky Korsakov's Scheherazade as a present without including a note, a romantic gesture in my own culture.
When the semester ended most of the students, including Mary, left the campus to spend the summer at home. The campus became very quiet and the audio library mostly empty.
I went through an internal upheaval. My intellectual focus on physics and science gave way to an intense desire for music and the arts. I signed up for two courses in art in fall of 1970—in design and in life drawing. These courses were offered in the Art Building where Mary also took her courses. Mr. Field was my life drawing professor and Mr. Walsh my design professor. As it turned out, I had mediocre abilities in life drawing but Prof. Walsh praised my sense of design.
One night when I was in the Music Library talking with Joe Ray in his operations room, Mary walked in. Joe Ray introduced us. Subsequently, Mary and I met at the Art Building and within a couple of months we began a romantic relationship as she broke off with her boyfriend she had dating since high school in Bellaire, Texas.
By the spring of 1971, Mary spent a lot of time in my apartment off campus. In my sophomore year, I shared a two bedroom apartment on the second floor of an apartment complex westside of the campus with two other Iranian students, Bahram and Jamsheed, both electrical engineering students. They took the larger bedroom facing courtyard and I took the second smaller one facing the next apartment complex. Both Bahram and Jamsheed were top students and hardworking. They were of quite different disposition. Bahram was an Azerbaijani from a well cultured Tabrizi family with a calm disposition. Jamsheed who was short and thin but thrived by acting tough was a son of a military general who at the time culturally very conservative. I called him “Jamsheed, the Monkey” as he would jump to grab and hang from tree branches as we walked the sidewalks and similar outrageous acts. He was utterly hostile to the hippies and to those who smoked pot. He liked to express his disdain for the counterculture by describing in graphic terms how he would like to punish those who he disapproved of by torturing them. Thus, it was with much surprise and delight that in later years I learned Jamsheed who was accepted in the electrical engineered graduate program at UC Berkeley had become a pot-smoking hippie himself. I never heard of him since. Neither do I know what happened to Bahram.
Mary became my teacher in many ways, showing me how to draw, how to speak English properly, introducing me to American cuisine (lobster tail was a discovery which I gave up years later after I saw how live lobster were thrown into pot of boiling water to prepare it for my dinner at in a fancy restaurant), and even teaching me how to drive so that I could get my driver’s license (something she has dreaded since).
In our junior year, Mary and I rented a one bedroom apartment on East 38th Street north of the campus. We had to take the shuttle bus to go to our classes. It was then that I began to rethink my academic career. Although I still enjoyed music, drawing, design, and the arts more generally, I felt the need to pursue a course of study would help me to be a provider if Mary and I ever married.
As the registration for spring semester of 1972 got underway, I decided on a major in computer science. However, at the time at UT Austin to study computer science required majoring either in mathematics or electrical engineering. I decided in favor of math. I signed up for the “Introduction to Computer Science” course (404G) offered by Mr. Pearson who held only an M.A. degree (In my senior year, I took a course in compiler writing with Mrs. Pearson who held a Ph.D.). In my last two years I took mostly math and computer science course and one electric engineering course on computer hardware logic design. Most other courses I took were non-science requirements such as history and government.
When the 1971-72 academic year was over, I decided to visit Iran and Mary decided not to return to her parents house in Bellaire, Texas (a town attached to Huston). When I returned form Iran just before the start of my senior year, I learned that Mary who housed with two other students, Nina and Fran, and spend the summer socializing with other young feminists, had met and started a relationship with a young man named Craig. She had not told me about this turn of events and had rented a dark inhospitable apartment with shaggy carpet that smelled like dog urine supposedly for us to live in. When the time to moved in arrived, she simply handed the key to me and left to live with her new boy friend.
Emotionally, this was a blow to me and sank me into depression. I cancelled the apartment lease and moved in with Iraj and Darius Vojdani, two brothers, who had rented a house north of the campus and had a room where I could live for a while. Darius, a handsome young man had a work study job as a computer operator. Iraj and I were pot smoking friends. We enjoyed talking about things when high. A fantasy of ours was to find a large piece of land away from civilization to live modestly with Mother Nature. We even entertained the idea of migrating to Costa Rica, an idea Iraj had. He even found a large piece of land for sale in Costa Rica for $10,000. Of course, that was a lot of money for two college students at the time. Nothing came of it. Years later, I visited Costa Rica in 2006 and fell in love with it and tried unsuccessfully to migrated there.
I spent my senior year at a nice apartment on Riverside Boulevard with Khalil Zare who was my roommate in the summer of 1970. My emotional state undermined my academic performance but I eventually pulled through and by December 1973 I graduated with double major in math and computer science.
The question was what to do next?
Becoming a socialist
When I was taking art courses in the fall of 1970, I came across an Iranian student named Massoud Avini who was also taking art courses. Massoud was thin with an outsized head due to his long black bushy unmanaged hair with large black eyebrows, beautiful large intelligent black eyes and a sligthly wide nose, large lips with an untrimmed jet black mustache and beard. We became good friends. Massoud liked to act crazy. As I was courting Mary, he was courting Terry, another art student. Terry was a highly talented student of life drawing and painting. She had her own style of oversized figures with sharp lines. Mary and I both had high hope for her future as an artist. The four of us socialized.
At the time, Massoud was taking a sociology class. One evening as I was crossing the Guadalupe Street from the University Coop to the Student Union, I saw Massoud hanging like a monkey from the scaffolding erected near the Architecture Building for a construction project. After acting like a monkey for a time, Massoud landed on the ground besides me. We talked for a while and somehow the conversation turned to a book he was reading for his sociology course: Erich Formm’s Marx’s Concept of Man (1961). He urged me to read it.
When I read Fromm’s book I was deeply moved by Marx’s social thought centered on the idea of alienation. By 1971, I was a closet socialist. I was also becoming radicalized around various political issues of the time. In my freshman year, I dated a woman who wanted us to see Easy Rider (1969), a counter-culture film of some significance. After the movie, we had a conversation about various topics. She became furious when I asked her why she does not shave her legs. She called me a male chauvinist pig! Needless to say, our relationship did not develop further. But she made me think about the reasons why I expected women to shave their body hair. Fortunately, I have always questioned traditional cultural mores that I was handed out. So, her criticism helped me realize that she had a valid point of view, I was a male chauvinist (but not a pig).
That is why I also joined other Iranian students at UC Austin who took offense at the Iranian Student Association that was run by a short, balding, chain smoking, older student named Mr. Massoudi (due to his age). Under his influence, the ISA was a cultural organization mostly to organize the Iranian Noruz celebration (Rite of Spring, the Iranian new year which begins on the first day of spring).
Unbeknown to me, the students who were leading this fight were socialists. A few were Maoists sent led one or two who were sent in by the Maoist leadership of the Iranian Student Association—The U.S. Organization, which was the leadership body of the growing leftist ISAs on the U.S. campuses. A few were local Iranian Trotskyists. I have recounted events that led me to become a Trotskyist and a member of the Sattar League, the Iranian section of the Fourth International elsewhere. But by the time I graduated from UT Austin, I was ready to become a “professional revolutionary,” that is, to organize my life around my socialist activities which at the time meant belonging to a socialist organization.
So, after I graduated in December 1973 in consultation with Babak Zahraie, a leader of the Iranian Trotskyist, I decided to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a small group of Iranian Trotskyists was active.
Cambridge, Massachusetts (Spring 1974-January 1975)
I packed my 1964 Opel Kadet mostly with books I had bought from the Young Socialist Alliance bookstore, inclduing 45-volume set of collected works of V. I. Lenin (which I had bought at $60), and set out for Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Before I set out, I learned that my cousin Fariborz, who had sent me the application for UT Austin in the summer of 1968, had a restaurant in Cambridge and found a phone number for him. When I arrived, I called him and finally met him after he left Iran in the early 1960s. Five years my senior, he had finished his undergraduate degree in business, married a Texan woman, had a son, divorced her, and left her and their very young son to move to Boston. Somehow, he had managed to start a restaurant in Cambridge named Hemisphere which had a roof-sitting area as well. He was now going with the name Fred G. Morgan!
Ice cream shop worker
Fred had recently started an ice cream shop he named Fred’s Ice Cream after he recruited a middle-aged Irish man named George who was making ice cream cake for a hotel in Boston. Fred had George work in his ice cream factory in Watertown about twenty minutes from Cambridge. The shop was a storefront so Fred immediately asked me if I wanted to work for him at the Watertown location. There was little sales there but I also drove the ice cream truck loaded with George’s daily ice cream and ice cream cake output and unloaded it at Fred’s Ice Cream shop, a corner storefront half-a-block from the Hemisphere restaurant. Fred also found me a room in the top floor of a walk-up apartment in Cambridge where Susie, the girl friend of Ken, a Chinese-American Harvard M.B.A. student and friend of Fred, lived. So, Susie and I became apartment mates. Susie was in love with Ken and each week a very large young woman climbed the stairs to our apartment to do Susie's horoscope, the advice she used to tie the knot with Ken. Fred paid me the minimum wage but it was sufficient to pay for rent, food, and other daily expenses.
The Sattar League
When I settled in Cambridge, I contacted Siamak Zahraie, the older brother of Babak, who lived in a house in Somerville with his wife Maureen and his high school age sister and brother, Faranak and Faramak. Siamak introduced me to Nasrin and Ali who I learned later were the other two members of the Sattar League in Boston region. Soon after I met the trio, one evening Siamak invited me to his house and took me upstairs to his study on the second floor. It was getting dark outside and the lights were dim and Siamak was acting as if he is about to disclose a deep secret. After some preliminary talk about the need for revolutionary socialists to build a party he disclosed to me that there is a nucleus of Iranian Trotskyists who is working towards building a Bolshevik-type party in Iran. It was called the Sattar League, after Sattar Khan, the plebeian Azerbaijani leader of the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11), a section of the Fourth International. He asked if I wanted to join it.
Of course, I was more than happy to accept. I asked him why they waited so long as I knew for sometime that the Iranian Trotskyists were organized and held meeting to which I was never invited. He explained that the problem was my marijuana use. The Sattar League, like its sister partym the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, banned its use in deference to the existing law. They did not want to give any excuse to the government to use against constitutionally guaranteed revolutionary socialist activities. He asked if I will abide by this decision. I agreed.
This transformed my relationship with the trio. Nasrin in particular who helped me find an affordable apartment on the second floor of a small house (the lower floor was also a rental) close to her own apartment on Magazine Street, became a friend of mine. Here the rent was cheaper, there was more space, and it was much easier to park my car. Soon, I found a roommate, a bearded Jewish Iranian who drank vodka excessively named Djam, who was sympathetic to Trotskyism.
My first task as a member of the Sattar Leage was to help lead the Iranian Student Association (I. S. A.) based at the M.I.T. campus. Ali himself was an M.I.T. engineering graduate and Trotskyism was viewed favorably by the political Iranian students on campus. So, I was easily elected for to serve as the Organizational Secretary of the I.S.A. I was involved in organizing its ongoing affairs, including a series of forums it sponsored as well as chapter meetings until I left for Texas in February 1975. Meanwhile, I was also active in the Boston school desegregation mobilizations in which the local chapters of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance played a key role.
Printshop for extra income
The Watertown ice cream factory was close to Ali’s house. Ali was from a wealthy family form Isfahan and like Siamak he also owned the house and was also married to Jane who was in the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA). As Ali and his wife were going on a vacation, he asked me to water their plants in their abscence. He told me to pick up the key to the house the day they left from his wife friend, another YSAer, who would meet me at the house and would show me around.
When I rang the bell at Ali’s house after work, a tall, thin, pale woman with rimless prescription glasses over her pretty blue eyes and short blonde hair opened the door, introducing herself as Randy, and invited me. There was an immediate sexual attraction between us and we quickly ended up in the bedroom. Thus, Randy and I started a fling (I later learned she was married). Randy visited me in my apartment a few times. When we decided it was time to end our passionate relationship, Randy brought me her guitar as a present. I still have it although I never had a chance to learn to play the guitar.
At the time, Randy was working once a week night shift at an owner-operated tiny printshop in Cambridge. She offered to groom me for the job. I accepted. The job was simple: to cut printed advertisements printed many on a single sheet and fix them in proper places on the advertisement page mock up using a wax machine. The printed supplement would later be distributed with the local paper. Randy showed me how to cut each ad with an exacto knife, run each piece through the wax machine, and lay them out in a predetermined position of mock up pages. As it was a once a week nightshift job so it did not interfere with my ice cream shop job. I held this job for a short time.
Laboratory driver
It was in the fall of 1974 that I found a better paying job as a driver for a laboratory in Brookline. The job was what I really liked. It required a driver’s license and ample time to drive across New England to pick up laboratory specimen from hospitals in all hours of the day and night and bring them in an ice chest to the lab! I loved driving and it was my first and regrettably only autumn season touring New England. I used to smoke then and I loved listening to rock-n-roll stations as I drove all over the New England enjoying the scenery and getting paid for it! When the snow fell, I was driving on country roads with the car sometimes sliding to one side or the other. I held this job until I found a job as a research assistant.
Research Assistant
In December, I found an advertisement for a research job with the Saguas General Hospital that fit my academic background. I applied and was hired. The job was to help design a questionnaire to collect data for hospital quality assessment. As it turned out, the physician who hired me had won a contract with the American Hospital Association to design and then test the instrument. My role was to assist the physician to ensure that the questionaire was so designed lend itself to quantification of data for computer-assisted statistical analysis. Needless to say, I was far from knowledgeable either in survey instrument design or statistical analysis of quantitative data. But my B.A. in mathematics and computer science made me a cheap candidate for a low budget low ambition project. The physician who hired me himself had some mathematical background. We managed to complete the project before I left in February of 1975.
Amarillo, Texas, February-July 1975
Getting married
At the time foreign students on a student visa were required to leave the United States within a year after their graduation unless their visa status changed. So, the pressure was on me to find a way to change my visa status. There were two practical options: to get a job in the field of specialization (mathematics/computer science) or to get married to an American citizen. Because of my political commitments, I did not want to work as a professional. We know from history that those who began working in computer science related fields (software and hardware) not only found many job opportunities but also made a ton of money. I was urged by my fellow socialists to find myself an American wife!
In the SWP national conference in Oberlin College in August of 1974, I had met a young petit woman with short blond hair during the registration. Her name was Ginny and she was in the YSA chapter in Pittsburg. We found an immediate mutual sexual attraction. When she came to visit my room, we ended up staying together in that room for the duration of the conference. I must admit that we did not catch much of political deliberation at the conference. It was a seductive and additive mutual attraction that made it hard for us to separate.
By the end of the conference, Ginny and I talked about what next. I was single and available. But Ginny was in a lesbian relationship with someone back in Pittsburg. She was leaning in the direction of moving to live with me in Cambridge. Of course, I discussed my visa situation and she herself suggested that may be we should get married as part of our move to live together and to take care of my residency issue.
Meanwhile, I was in touch with Mary who had left me for Craig in the summer of 1973. She had graduated with a B.A. in Art History and on my recommendation had enrolled in the master’s in library science as getting a job with a degree in art history was not practical. Mary had completed her master’s work and while doing it she also drove a school bus for income and met a young man named Jim who was a follower of a guru and attended meditation retreats. Mary also joined in. But after a while, they broke off, Mary found a job as a catalogue librarian at the public library in Amarillo, Texas and moved there. At the time, she no longer had a boy friend or any further plan for her life.
So, when I talked to Mary on the phone about my visa situation and my intention to marry someone to resolve the visa situation, she offered to marry me.
As it turned out, Ginny could not break up with her girl friend. So, I decided to move to Amarillo and the Sattar League leadership was entirely in favor of it. In February 1975, I packed my Opel Kadet and headed south to Texas.
Car wash attendant
May and I married in a civil court during her lunch break on April 9, 1975. Her friend, Patsy, a white woman working in the construction industry married to a black man, was our witness and she lent Mary wedding ring for use for the occasion. Tragically, Patsy died about a year later reportedly by falling from a construction bridge (I have always had a lingering dark thought that foul play by racist male chauvinist coworkers may have been responsible for her tragedy).
Mathematics substitute teacher
I also very briefly worked as a mathematics substitute teacher in a middle school in Amarillo. The most memorable day was when someone left a frog in the drawer of the desk where the students roll was placed. As I opened the drawer to get the notebook, the frog jumped out at me causing me to react by pulling back in surprise. That was what the students who orchestrated it were waiting for and they burst into laughter. My immediate reaction was to recompose myself, give the gigglers at hard look, turn my back to the students and began to write furiously in Farsi on the board while telling them what I was doing in Farsi as well. The classroom immediately became very quiet as nobody knew what was going on: did the teacher go mad?
Car wash
Meanwhile, I worked part time at a car wash in Amarillo. I also was the house-husband as Mary and I used to joke about it, grocery shopping, house cleaning, and cooking were my job.
Car wash
Meanwhile, I worked part time at a car wash in Amarillo. I also was the house-husband as Mary and I used to joke about it, grocery shopping, house cleaning, and cooking were my job.
In mid-summer soon after my mother arrived for her first visit to the United States to be with her “new bride,” Mary quit her job and we packed her white Datsun 510 station wagon and my red Opel Kadet and we relocated to Berkeley, California, with my mother and Shark (Mary's black male cat because of his suprise attack when the movie Jaws was hot).
The few months I spent in Amarillo were productive. I finished reading all the International Internal Discussion and Informations Bulletins of the Fourth International centered on the huge debate between the International Majority Tendency (IMT) and International Trotskyist Faction (LTF) to which I belonged. The IMT-led by Ernest Mandel, Pierre Frank, and Livio Maitan was influenced by the upsurge in the guerrilla movement in Latin America after the victorious Cuban revolution of 1959. The French French intellectual Régis Debray had already “theorized” the foco concept of the revolution. Thousands of radicalized youth were joining guerrilla groups and not just in Latin America (In Iran, an Islamic and a Socialist guerrilla groups were formed). The IMT viewed guerrilla warfare as the “strategy” for revolution in Latin America but even some in the Iranian Trotskyist movement were bending in the direction of “armed struggle.” The LTF was organized to oppose this adaptationist course of the IMT and keep in focus the strategy of Leninist party building which was the cornerstone of the Fourth International founded by Trotsky and Left Opposition parties in 1938.
I also read everything in the recent SWP Internal Discussion Bulletins, Education Bulletins, and other internal materials I could lay my hands on. During my few months in Amarillo, I also translated the SWP leader and Marxist philosopher George Novack’s “The Long View of History” (1974) into Farsi. As this was my first attempt to translate a substantial text into Farsi, when Nasser Khoshnevis edited it in New York in 1978, we had hearty laughters at some of my funny transliterations.
I also tried to maintain some activist life by driving to Lubbock, Texas, two hours away each way, to attend the Iranian Student Association meeting. I set up a literature table that included materials from Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI), and Payam-e Daneshjoo magazine and Fanus publications, the entire set of public activities of the Sattar League. These trips did not last long before the Maoist leadership “politely” told me that I should cease-and-decease them!
Berkeley-Oakland 1975-1977
We arrived in Berkeley at my aunt Raffaat’s apartment. They had recently moved from Baton Rouge, Louisiana where my cousins Kambiz and Ramin who were teenagers lived, to Berkeley and had stopped on their way in Amarillo to see me and Mary. My aunt’s apartment was on the second floor of a building complex two blocks south of Telegraph Avenue and a few blocks from the iconic Caffè Mediterraneum and Cody’s Books and Moe’s Books. Of the three, only the latter still exists. Within a short time, we found a second floor apartment only two blocks away from my aunt’s apartment in a two story four-unit apartment building on the south-side of Dana Street that runs parallel to Telegraph Avenue. It was a great location because of a short walking distance to the UC Berkeley campus where I anticipated to spend a lot of my time.
I took my mother to Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley for a check up and they discovered she had diabetes type II. She was 47 years old at the time. Soon after, she left for Iran.
Mr. Pick, the landlord who was a holocaust surviver, a short, gentle man with rimless tick prescription glasses, told us in strict language “No Pets!” when we signed the lease. We sneaked Shark up into the apartment and tried to hide him from Mr. Pick. Except being a cat, Shark liked to go to the ceiling window to look down at what was going on in Dana Street!
Mary soon found a job at the welfare office as a case worker. I got in contact with Nemat, Sattar League’s only member in the Northern California. There was also a sympathizer, a tall, thin but large framed young man named Daria, who wore his jet black tick hair shoulder length long. Nemat and Daria were roommates. So, I began working with them as a small fraction of Trotskyists in the UC Berkeley Iranian Student Association. However, Berkeley happened to house the headquarter of the ultra-leftist Maoist group, The Organization of Revolutionary Communists (Sazman-e enghlabion-e kumoonist). Within a short time, they organized our expulsion from the ISA. Because the Maoists had the great majority of the ISA at that time, “charges” against us did not really matter. The decision was already made in their political organization to expel the Trotskyists. But they “justified” it with such “charges” that we were “zed-de khalghi” (anti-people) because of our cultural habits. These were added to the usual slanders that supporters of CAIFI were agents of the Shah and the CIA, etc.
Although we lost the vote and had to quit the ISA, we continued to carry out tabling on UC Berkeley campus. We benefitted from the solidarity of and close collaboration with the SWP and YSA who were a considerable force on the left in northern California with a large storefront bookstore and lecture hall on Shattuck Avenue west of the UC Berkeley campus.
It was there that Mary heard Peter Camejo, the presidential candidate of the SWP, speak, and decided to join the SWP. She remained in the SWP until 1983.
Mailroom worker and dishwasher
To help pay the bills, I took two part-time jobs in the financial district of San Francisco. I became the lunch-time dishwasher in a sandwich shop on Market Street and worked at an advertising firm’s mailroom. I would go to the advertising firm in the midmorning to distribute the morning mail to each principal. Then I would go to the sandwich shop which served lunch from 11 to 2 and washed dishes. Then I would go back to the advertising firm and collect all the outgoing mail, stamp them, and take them to the post office.
I do not remember how much I was paid for either of these two small jobs. But they were sufficient for subsistence to allow me to dedicate all my free time to political activities.
Green card
Meanwhile, I had applied for a Green Card based on my marriage. Within a short time, Mary and I were called in for an interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in San Francisco. The interview was brief and mostly friendly. Within a month after the interview I received my Green Card in the mail. That helped me stay in the U.S. until January 1979 when I and others from the Sattar League relocated to Iran.
The Green Card also helped me return to New York in August of 1982. By 1996 I decided that I would probably be a lifetime resident of the United Sates. I applied for the U.S. citizenship. In April 2000, I was granted American citizenship.
Oakland Tribune distributor
Sometimes in 1976, Mary and I had relocated to a penthouse apartment in Oakland. It was a much larger apartment with a deck on top of a four story apartment building. The manager was a wiry working class-type Eastern European Jewish man who had migrated to Israel but then decided to come to the U.S. and married a somewhat obese very white American Jewish woman who wore oval-shaped prescription glasses. Soon, I noticed there was a black man living with a young very sexy looking white woman and a doberman on the second floor. Sometimes she would be riding the elevator with me. I was pretty sure she was a sex worker. One day, I heard a shutting match from the manager’s apartment. I later learned that the manager had an affair with the young woman who I thought was a sex worker. The couple and their dog left the building after that episode.
It was there that I was tipped off about a “job” distributing Oakland Tribune. It was a subcontracting arrangement. The distributor actually bought a number of monthly subscription of the Oakland Tribune from the company at $3 a month and sold it as subscription to a households in a given area for $5.20. The difference of $2.20 was the income earned from each subscriber. Of course, the distributor was contractually obligated to pay Oakland Tribute for the bundle he ordered even when customers did not pay. Thus, distributor subcontractors guaranteed a stable monthly income for the newspaper and a motivated salesforce for it. The distribution center also had a small army of regular “paper boys” who were paid a small wage for distributing a small number of papers.
Somehow that subcontracting arrangement worked for adults like me, there were several of us including another Iranian man who had a family. It provided me with about $400 a month in income which was sufficient to pay for my expenses (Mary’s salary from her welfare case management job was more and we have always shared according to the principle “to each according to her need and from each according to her ability). I distributed 220 papers to the West Oakland mostly African-American neighborhood. I used my Honda Civic which I had just bought for $1,800 (a two-year old model) for this job after I sold my Opel Kadet for about the same price as I had bought it. Each weekday afternoon, I would drive to the distribution center and pick up my bundle which came in sections and had to be assembled. I had to put each paper ogether and put a rubber band around it so I could toss the paper as I drove by houses. Then I would load the car with the rolled up papers and throw them at designated places for each house. Some houses were in the back of a building and I had to actually get out of the car and walk to them. The job took about an hour and half on weekdays. The weekend paper was delivered in early morning. The Saturday paper was small and manageable. But on Sundays, the paper was much bigger with more sections and advertisement supplements and heavy. It could not be thrown out of the window of a slowly moving car! Mary out of the kindness of her heart accompanied me on Sunday morning to help out. The two of us could do the job in two and half hours. We would then drive to Dunkin' Donuts on our way home, get a couple of doughnuts and coffee and go home to rest.
Brooklyn, New York: Spring 1977-January 1979
In the early 1976, the Political Committee of the Sattar League was in crisis. In the autumn when the crisis became common knowledge in the tiny organization, I sided with the minority and in early spring was enlisted to work with Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh and Nasser Khoshnevis who lived in Brooklyn, New York, as the Coordinating Committee for the Permanent Revolution Faction of the Sattar League. The faction which is an organized political grouping inside a revolutionary socialist party is a way to fight for the correction of the political course of it.
In early spring of 1977, I moved to Brooklyn for what turned out to be a “permanent relocation.” The Sattar League factional struggle seemingly ended with a convention that closed in the early days of November. Earlier, in August when the majority had finaly agreed to hold the convention, I began to look for a job as I had no means of supporting myself since I moved to Brooklyn. Since my arrival in Brooklyn, I had slept on sofas in Nasser/Marsha’s or Diane/Mahmoud’s apartments in 95 Easter Parkway, a boulevard situatated between Bedford–Stuyvesant and Flatbush districts.
One day, I found a tiny ad in The New York Times employment section for a scientific programmer with an address in Brooklyn. I applied and got an interview.
It turned out that the interview was with Dr. Joseph G. Feldman, an epidemiologist at the Department of Community Health at Downstate Medical Center at 450 Clarkson Avenue. Later, renamed Helath Science Center, and now expanded and renamed Health Science University, this was one of the three State University of New York medical schools located at the heart of the Caribbean immigrant communities, especially from Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago.
After a brief interview, Dr. Feldman asked me if I knew SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). I did not and told so. But I added that I was familiar with a number of computer languages and including Assembler, Fortran, LISP, Algol, and Pascal. I could program in any computer language if I had proper documentation for the language. Dr. Feldman gave me an SPSS manual and asked me to write code for a specific task that he wrote on a piece of paper and send me to the vacant office next to his. I wrote the code and returned within a short time. He looked at it and told me I was hired and sent me to Barbara Habenstreit, Executive Assistant to the Chairman, Dr. Duncan Clark, to do the paper work.
I began with my first salaried full time employment as a Technical Specialist. The pay was $21,000 a year. A hefty sum for a young man who never had a full time job before! I was 26 years.
I became the data manager for the Brooklyn Breast Self-Exam Project which was testing whether and how breast self-examination by women could help in early diagnosis of breast cancer. The data arrived on punched cards. I used the SPSS system to read in the data from the punch cards using a card reader and an IBM/360 computer on the first floor. I then cleaned the data, which meant to run the data through a screening program that detected punching or coding errors. After correcting them, I would run a program to properly label each variable and store the resulting data file as an SPSS database on magnetic tapes that could later be readily available for analytical use.
Once the database was completed, that is, after the end of a phase of data collection or the entire project, in conjunction with Dr. Feldman who was the biostatistical, I would run proper analytical routines and models, and give Dr. Feldman the final output. He in turn would write a report for the research team.
Soon after I began working, I looked for an apartment and found a second floor railroad apartment in Park Slope neighborhood just on the other side of the Prospect Park which bordered Eastern Parkway. The apartment was on Seventh Avenue just off the southwest corner of Garfield Place. Mary soon after arrived from Oakland and we were reunited until January 1979 when I left for Iran.
Life at the medical school
For the first time my work became a significant part of my life as I spent 40 hours a week with a regular group of people. I directly worked with some of them or socialized with others. This was entirely new in my life.
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| The main entrance to the Health Science Center at Brooklym at 450 Clarkson Avenue. Photo: Kamran Nayeri, date in early 1990s. |
I was given a desk in the office 4-40 (room 40 on the fourth floor) in the Basic Science Building. This particular office had private doors to adjacent offices. Dr. Feldman’s office was 4-41 and the office before mine was 4-39 which was vacant at the time. The medical school’s building had two wings. The main entry at 450 Clarkson Avenue was in the Basic Science Building which was an older structure probably built in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not only the architectural form was from that period, my office walls were made from sheet metal which I was told were refuse from the Brooklyn shipyard after the end of the war. The first floor of the Basic Science Building was for the administration. The administrative Computer Center occupied the far left corner of the first floor. The floors above it were given to different departments and there were lecture halls on the second, third, and fourth floors, each with a capacity of more than 200 persons. The teaching hospital was built later and was attached to the Basic Science Building with an L-shaped hallway. The Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health also occupied an L-shaped set of offices. Some, like mine, were in the Basic Science Building and some like the Chairman’s office were in the hospital wing. There was a small departmental library which housed medical journals. It was used for faculty meetings as well as samll group teaching as it had a somewhat oversized conference room table in the middle of it. I sometimes held my classes there. I also studied there on weekend when I was preparing for my doctoral comprehensive examinations in 1986-87.
Initially, I shared office 4-40 which was facing the hospital on the other side of the delivery yard. There was really no pleasing view from the window; all I could see was the row of windows of offices in the hospital across the yard. For a few months, I shared the office with Eunice, a tall, thin, African-American woman who was always immaculately groomed. Eunice was an often under-employed typist. Bored, she either filed her long always well polished bright red nails or talked to her friends on the phone for long time! Needless to say, it was rather annoying hearing her repeating “aha… aha…aha…” for a long time as she felt uneasy to use full sentences to respond to whatever her friend was saying. Eventually, Eunice was relocated to share an office in the hospital wing with Molly, an older Jewish woman who was an office assistant (she did not know how to type) who was resentful of younger African-American women who were hired later at a higher rank with more money. Molly too was underemployed. She used her free time to peddle wardrobes to other women on campus making extra money. Molly and I became good friends.
The Chairman’s secretary, Maureen, was a tall, thin, and beautiful red-haired Irish woman married to Ron, an engineer on the Staten Island ferry. She was so pretty that in her younger years was selected as the Subway Queen. Maureen was also very smart and accomplished. Besides managing the Chairman’s schedule and secretarial staff, in the 1980s she went to law school at night and eventually became a lawyer.
Most of all, I became friends with Barbara Habenstreait, a young pretty Jewish woman with jet black curly hair. She and her husband Abraham (Abe) had two grown children, David and Shelly, all of whom held deep liberal values. Almost every morning before I began my work, I would visit Barbara’s office and chat for a few minutes. Sometimes, we talked during the day on substantive political issues.
The faculty was small at that time. Beside Dr. Feldman, there was Dr. Allen Spiegel, who held a Ph.D. (I never found out in what field). Dr. Feldman and Dr. Spiegel were not on speaking terms and they never spoke to each other in the 17 years I eventually ended up working in that department. I eventually learned it was over a competitive campaign for the presidency of the United University Professions (UUP). According to the gossip I heard, Dr. Feldman wanted a more faculty oriented union and Dr. Spiegel wanted the union to emphasis the interests of professional staff. Feldman lost the vote. They never spoke with each other after that. As it is common in the U.S. unions, Spiegel remained the head of the UUP chapter for many years and was replaced in the 1990s with Rowena Blackman-Stroud, an abitious Carribean immigrant who rose in the union bureacracy in later years. There was also a hispanic young medical doctor, David Fernandez, whose office was next to Chairman’s office. Dr. Fernandez was liked by the students partly because he liked to entertain his students while teaching. One day, he wore a gorilla mask going to teach his seminar! I do not know the reason, but Dr. Fernandez left the department soon after I resumed working there after I returned from Iran in 1982.
Meanwhile, Duncan Clark, M.D. who was the chair when I was hired retired and Pascal James Imperato, M.D. a tropical disease specialist, a rare specialization in the U.S., who worked in Mali, Africa, for a number of years and returned as an African art specialists with a seizable collection of his own, became the new chair. Dr. Imperato, a Republican, was well connected. He was editor of two journals: Journal of Community Health and the New York State Journal of Medicine, the journal of the New York State Medical Association. Dr. Clark retained an office next to the Chairman’s office which he cluttered so much that he preferred to work in the department library. In the 17 years I eventually worked in the department, Dr. Clark and I exchanged few words even though we sat in the library doing our own respective tasks and we both lived on the same side of the same block on Gradfield Place in Park Slope a few doors apart!
Dr. Imperato changed a few things when he arrived including the name of the department to Preventative Medicine and Community Health. Because of his other professional obligations, he was in his office just two or three days a week.
Payam-e Daneshjoo (Student’s Message)
I used to work from 8 (summer) or 9 (winter) in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. After that I took the IRT number 5 train to go to Union Square in Manhattan to work as a staff writer for the magazine of the Sattar League, Payam-e Daneshjoo (Student’s Message). All others who had this assignment were “full time” meaning they had sufficient personal money not to have to work for a living so they could work at Payam-e Daneshjoo during the day. Still, my literary output was about the same and perhaps higher than some of the “full timers.” I was assigned to write on international topics for which I relied heavily on Intercontinental Press, the international magazine of the Socialist Workers Party edited by Joseph Hansen, one of my socialist teachers. I learned a lot from Hansen during the IMT-LTF debate in the Fourth International about the Leninist strategy of party building. These writings were later published by Pathfinder Press, the SWP’s publishing house, as The Leninist Strategy of Party Building (1979).
Meanwhile, Mary was well integrated in the SWP branch in Brooklyn. In February 1978, tens of thousands marched in Tabriz against the Shah’s regime. Some of us, myself included, concluded that the revolution was underway. By January 1979, the Sattar League leadership decided to relocated the entire organization to Iran and assigned small groups of three or four people to return together to Iran.
I discussed this with Mary and prepared to leave. She was clearly upset and cried on the day I left for the airport. We did not call it a definite rupture to our relationship. But my perspective was to go back and remain in Iran. Mary had never showed an interest in visiting Iran and I never asked her to do so.
I told Dr. Feldman and Dr. Imperato that I needed to go to Iran because my family is concerned about my younger brother who was drafted into the army at the time. They were most supportive and Dr. Imperato gave me a six month leave of absence. I left in late January with Ali (from my days in cambridge) and an older Gilaki couple Houshang and Goli for Frankfort on our way to Tehran. When we landed in Frankfort airport, we were told that the Tehran Mehrabad Airport has been closed down by the caretaker government of Shahpour Bakhtiar; a political move to stop Ayatollah Khomeini from returning to Iran from France. Lufthansa offered to take us to Paris where we could stay in Ali’s brother apartment until the Tehran airport opened up. The apartment was in Versailles. On February 1, Mehrabad airport was opened andwe flew the same day on a plane that took off right after the one that carried Ayatollah Khomeini and his entourage.
Tehran (February 1, 1979-July 1982)
I lived in Tehran from February 1, 1979 to July 22, 1982. These were the revolutionary years and my entire focus was on the fast moving events and how they would affect the working people’s struggles and how we could build our socialist current by intervening in them. There were mass mobilizations and grassroots organizations, a three-day armed insurrection that began in Tehran and swept the country, the imposition of the Islamic Republic and its unrelenting waves of bloody repression including mass imprisonments, torture, and executions, and there were coup attempts by the pro-imperialist forces, and terrorism by them and the Mujaheddin, and there was Saddam Hussein’s counter-revolutionary invasion of Iran, which in combination of reactionary policies of the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic lasted for eight years. In what follows, I just discuss my halting attempts to take a job or hold one for supporting myself or for political exigencies.
Teaching artificial intelligence
Soon after the February 11, 1979 revolution, I began looking for a job. As schools and colleges opened up, Hayedeh, my much older cousin’s daughter who was working at the Advanced School for Computer Programming and Applications, a four-year college in northern Tehran, told me of the possibility to teach there. After a brief discussion with the academic chair, I was offered to teach a senior-level course in artificial intelligence. Eight students signed up for the course.
Given that there were no Farsi books for that topic at that time, I had to rely on my own handouts and lectures about theoretical and conceptual basis for artificial intelligence such as Boolean algebra, the Turing machine, and a brief review of the fields of specialization in AI at the time. The students were also assigned to write a program to play the 15 puzzle game. The ideal progamming language for AI at the time was LISP. As there was no LISP compiler available at the college and students did not know it, I settled for FORTRAN which is really a scientific programing language.
That course turned out to be a lot of fun. Not only the students were motivated and interested, they were all members or sympathizers of leftist groups. The class ended at noon each time and we all went for lunch together talking politics! The pay was minimal. But it was still some money! When I visited the college the following spring to teach again, it coincided with the occupation of universities by the Muslim students following instigation by Khomeini to cleanse them of non-Islamic groups, students, faculty and staff and ideas! Subsequently, all universities and colleges were shut down for three years while the so-called Islamic Cultural Revolution was underway!
Interpreter and guide
Farhad Nouri who was one of my closest friends at the time was working as an interpreter and guide for the international news agencies after the occupation of the U.S. embassy. He was so successful that he had to turn down some offers. As he was working for UPI, a more long-term and lucrative job, he tipped me about a 10-day stint working for the CBS-affiliated television station in Philadelphia. This was a two-men crow, the reporter who was a young Chinese-American and a cameraman. The reporter was sympathetic both to the Chinese revolution and the Iranian revolution. So, it was delightful to work for him. He enjoyed the political background I was able to offer him and he readily took the tips I provided him for interviews. Was finished each working day in his suite in the Intercontinental Hotel late with caviar and vodka to celebrate.
A half-a-dozen years later when I was back in the U.S., I called his Philadelphia phone number only to learn that he had moved to another job in another city. When I finally found him in Denver, he told me he was fired upon his return because his reporting was deemed too friendly to the Iranian revolution.
English tutor
One day, Farhad Nouri asked me if I would like to take over a private English tutoring job he has been holding for a while. I accepted. There were four Islamic seminary students who lived in an architecturally traditonaly designed house in old Tehran near the great bazaar. As the clergy had just become the ruling elite, learning the English language had become important to them to manage the affairs of the Islamic Republic.
The class was once a week for two hours and it started at 1 p.m. The two-hour class was organized around Direct English, a franchise (here is a link to its current website), which was a widely used textbook in Iran at the time. Again, it was interesting how the revolution forced our English class into a political discussion! The students, all from Azerbaijan, were followers of the Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari. The ayatollah was one of the three grand ayatollahs who had conferred the title of ayatollah to Khomeini when his life was in danger in the aftermath of June 5 and 6, June 1963 protests against the White Revolution of the Shah, a set of modernization measure that included land reform and the extension of the right to vote to women. As a result, the Shah was forced to exile Khoemini to Najaf, Iraq, to avoid further unrest. Not only this saved Khoemini’s life, it also made him a hero in the eyes of many Iranians, especially practicing Muslims. But in winter-spring of 1980 there was much animosity between the two ayatollahs and the seminary students I taught were critical of Khomeini. This job lasted until the summer.
A side benefit of this job was that I would stop at the well-known chelo kababi in the bazaar for lunch, complete with doogh (Iranian yogurt drink) before going to my tutoring job.
Looking for an industrial job (spring of 1979)
The World Congress of the Fourth International in Rimini, Italy in October 1979 which I attended on my way from New York to Tehran after a short visit with Mary had adopted the view that a “turn to industry” was central immediate task for the movement. What that meant in practice quickly became a topic of contention among the leaders of the Fourth International and in its sections. It was no different with the Iranian Trotskyists, a topic in need a separate discussion.
The proposed orientation was based on Ernest Mandel’s analysis of the world economic and political situation after the 1973-75 world recession. He had argued, as it turned out quite correctly, that the Golden Age of capitalism that began in the aftermath of World War II had come to an end. As the average rate of profit began to fall in the advanced industrial capitalist countries, Mandel argued, the ruling classes would have to attack the standard of living of the working classes to shore up capitalist profitability. This, Mandel and the rest of the FI leaderships, including in the United States, argued, would result in the working class to respond in increasingly more militant fashion. In the words of the U.S. SWP leader Jack Barnes, the working class would “move to the center stage of world politics.” It followed that the FI sections, that have all grown in size or were even established as new organizations in the 1960s and early 1970s, like the Iranian section, thanks to youth radicalization, would need to be rooted in the strongest sections of the industrial working class to be in the midst of the political battles to come. But the anticipated working class resistance and radicalization by-an-large never materialized. This has posed important question for Marxists who have not seriously discussed it. Meanwhile the Fourth International and all its sections, like the bulk of the left have gone into a crisis that needs to be analyzed.
For the Iranian Trotskyist though the orientation had an entirely different, never seriously discussed meaning. The working class in Iran, especially the oil workers, did radicalize and it even began to organize unions and workplace councils (shoras). But the Iranian Trotskyist movement, a small organization of perhaps 200 in the spring of 1979, was made up almost entirely of children of well to do families who were sent to the U.S. and Europe to attain higher education and had become radicalized. When we relocated to Iran, there was even a geographic distance between where we lived and where the Iranian working class lived. Further, most Iranian workers did not even have a high school diploma and many were illiterate. Thus, the turn to industry was really a much more complicated orientation than it was in the industrial capitalist countries. My own experience in trying to get an industrial job gives a sense of the problems we faced.
After the merger of the two main currents of the Iranian Trotskyist movement soon after the February 1979 revolution (for a discussion, see, Nayeri, 2012), I was assigned to the East Tehran Branch where my parents lived and where I stayed most of the time. Soon, I was drawn into its leadership. When I tired to get an industrial job, I visited the employment office in East Tehran to get referrals to job openings in the factories in East Tehran (West Tehran was more industrial and the south had older industries like textiles). They required some documentations including evidence of completion of the draft or exemption from it. As I was already 29 years old and the army was in deep crisis after the February revolution, I was quickly issued an exemption certificate. Unfortunately, the exemption card included my latest degree which was a bachelor’s degree.
The only option was to forge the document. I did this by making a good copy of the original and then carefully whiting out the word “bachelor's degree” replacing it with “high school diploma.” I soon learned that it was unusual for most factory jobs to hire someone with high school diploma. I also had to rethink how I dressed as my clothing bought in the U.S. looked unusual for a factory worker. Even my prescription glasses looked fancy (of course, I had picked a fashionable pair). So, I wore a green army jacket which was in vogue those days and used my older prescription glasses with thicker looking lenses and make them look even older by taping the handle.
The only referral I received was for a pressman job in a shop on Jadeh Damavand (Damavand Road) that ran through East Tehran to eastern and northern parts of the country. It turned out that it was a small workshop with mechanical hand presses to shape soft metals. All three or four other workers there were Afghani refugees. The owner was entirely willing to hire me for cheap. But the question was whether this was where we wanted to built a fraction of the Socialist Workers Party. Upon discussions with others in the East Tehran Branch, it was decided that I should not accept employment there.
To improve my chances of getting an industrial job I tried learning some industrial skills. Kaveh, a young Trotskyist who used to live in London and lived near my parents' house, offered to have me trained as a welder in his uncle’s shop. So, I spent some time learning how to weld. As a result, my parents’ yard became the exhibition of my heavy metal sculptures made while practicing how to weld. After I left Iran in July 1982, my parents quickly got rid of those eyesores as well as my entire recent collection of books and my very valuable political notebooks which I could not mail or take with me on the plane for security reasons.
I was never able to get a welding job or any industrial job for that matter. That was in part because I was drawn into around-the-clock political work for the party as I became the de facto organizer of the East Tehran branch with more than 100 members (our movement grew to about 500 by the summer of 1979). This included managing the headquarters, helping to organize study groups, obtaining party literature, including the weekly Kargar and organizing its distribution. I actually used my brother’s Jian (Citroën 2CV) to take sales teams for Kargar to plant gates on Damavand Road (Mount Damavand is the highest peak of the Alborz mountain range north of Tehran). I also helped with meeting new contacts.
Looking for an industrial job (winter of 1981)
The Iranian Trotskyist movement went into a crisis and split into two parties after the summer of 1979, in part under intense repression unleashed by the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies began dismantling the gains of the 1979 revolution the day after its victory. Censorship was imposed on the just-liberated state-run radio and television that broadcast for the entire country. Two weeks later, Khomeini issued an edict that women must wear hejab (Islamic covering). By the arrival of spring, military attacks began against the oppressed nationalities in Trukmen Sahra and in Kurdistan. Meanwhile, Khomeini and his circle were busy organizing their repressive apparatus. They began with secret summary “trails” of the Shah’s hated military brass and provided the newspapers with gory photos of their bloodied corpses each morning in part to appease the public and in part to institutionalize “Islamic justice” system with its mass arrest, torture, and execution of opposition to the Islamic Republic in the years to come. They even executed civilians in the Shah’s service including former prime minister Amir Abas Hoveyda and Farokhroo Parsa with no due process. At the same time, the Islamic Republic refused to disclose the list of thousands of SAVAK agents despite popular demand. They reopened the prison houses of the Shah under new management. By spring 1979, 14 Trotskyists in Ahvaz providence were arrested, jailed, and eventually sentenced to death (two women among them sentenced to life terms) on the trumped up charges of conspiracy to blow up oil pipeline. A national and international defense campaign save their lives.
By the summer of 1979, much of the gains of the February 1979 revolutions were effectively destroyed by the Islamic Republic regime’s waves of repression cumulating in the denial of the freedom of the press, assembly, and expression won through massive waves of anti-Shah demonstrations. Women were forced to wear hejab (Islamic covering), forced out of their jobs or segregated as far as possible at their workplace. The newspapers carried the photograph of Kurdish fighters for self-determination, one of them laying on the ground due to injuries, being executed by the Islamic Republic forces. The government banned forty newspapers and headquarters of political parties ransacked by semi-fascist Hezbollah gangs, effectively driving even potentially dissident political parties into semi-illegality.
Our East Tehran Branch headquarters was ransacked. When I arrived at the alleyway where it was located the ground was covered by pages from Kargar which the mob had spread. Inside everything was destroyed in a hurry. Luckily, only one person was at the headquarters at the time, the Young Saeed, had escaped through a neighbor’s house.
What followed politically was a sharpening division of the left. In broad outline, one tendency held the view that the revolution was either dead or was only alive where the Islamic Republic was is in control. That was Kurdistan where the fight for national rights was ongoing. This section of the left focused their fire power on the Islamic Republic without any regard for the fact that it was still popular among millions of working people of Iran. Some such ultra-left sectarian groups even took up arm against the Islamic republic forces.
After the occupation of the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, which gave rise to a resurgence of the mass movement, now very much under the control of the Islamic Republic, a larger section of the left coalesced around the idea that Khomeini was indeed an anti-imperialist leader in the struggle against United States. The result was that social revolution was reduced to anti-imperialist struggle with different parties taking difference supportive stand towards the Islamic Republic. This tendency accelerated with the counter-revolutionary invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussein who was supported by imperialism. The pro-Moscow Tudeh Party and Fedayeen Majority politically supported the Islamic Republic, so much so that when the conflict between the regime and ultra-left groups erupted and some took up arms against the regime, they collaborated with the regime by identifying members and supporters of these groups to the repressive forces of the government resulting in their arrest, torture, and sometimes execution. The Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE) led by Babak Zahraie politically supported the Islamic Republic but not wholeheartedly as the Stalinists of the Tudeh party did. The Trotskyist Workers Unity Party (HVK) which I helped cofound defended the Islamic Republic materially in its struggle against imperialism and in the Saddam Hussein’s invasion of September 1980. However, being a tiny group isolated from the working class, the HVK also increasingly focused on the “anti-imperialist” struggle while discounting the advance of counter revolutionary course followed by the regime. All these groups, including the HVK, continued to count any advances in the war front as the sign of “advancing” and “deepening” of the revolution regardless of the open and increasingly successful attack by the regime against the grassroots movements of working and oppressed people. That tragic course continued until the end of 1982 when all such parties were forced to dissolve.
Another attempt at an industrial job
The HVK was established in January 1981 after a year long struggle against the rightward shift of the HKE and by the resistance to the ultra-leftist course of the HKS. I was elected to its National Committee and then its Political Committee of five. In addition to other assignments, I was assigned to take an industrial job. I got my forged papers together and dressed up as a “proletarian” again and headed to factories where we heard of job opening. After some false starts, I finally got a possibility to be hired as a guard at the Iran National car factory that made the iconic Paykan (British Hillman Hunter assembled in Iran under license). Once again, this job opportunity was not exactly what we were looking for. Upon consultation with the jobs fraction, we decided that I should decline this offer. At the same time, there was a need for me to work full time as staff writer at Hemmat, our newspaper. I was also assigned as the organizer of our headquarters and spent a fair amount of time as a Political Ccommittee member in a fluid and tense political situation. Thus, for the first time in my political life, I was put on full time with the monthly sustainer of 2,000 tomans (about $20) a month.
Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health, Brooklyn, December 1982-March 1997
On the SWP jobs committee in New York (fall of 1982)
On July 22, 1982, I left Iran to reside in the United States. As I had no funds of my own, so Mary helped by paying for the airline ticket. I arrived to stay with her who shared with Rachel Fruit a fifth floor railroad apartment in Lower East Side opposite of Tompkins Square Park on 311 10th Street between Avenue A and avenue B.
The city looked foreign to me and New Yorkers much changed in just four years! The new music style was in fashion (Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince thatI did not care for (when I had to pick something, I opted for the Traffic). Many young women and some men dyed their hair blond(e). Suddenly pale skin and blonde hair and black clothing were fashionable. Somehow, all the counter-culture wave of the 1960s and early 1970s were out of favor with the younger generation.
At the time, Rachel Fruit was the New York Branch organizer. When I arrived in New York, the SWP conference was taking place. But as soon as the New York branch resumed its routine I applied for membership and was admitted promptly.
I had no idea of the factional struggle that was tearing the SWP apart at the time. But I gradually, like someone who is waking up from a dream, learned that the New York branch had already expelled some of its leaders and members. Some others were expelled after I joined on various charges. I was in a daze. Some of my SWP friends from the 1970s were expelled. One even expected my to rise up against the existing leadership and when I was unmoved he shut at me a few unkind words. Somehow, he did not realize and honor the fact that I had just arrived from an intense three years and half of revolution, war, and counter revolution with my own shared of factional struggles which left me no time and no means of following up with the crisis of the SWP. The 1970s leadership around Jack Barnes, the National Secratary since 1972, which was ushered in by the previous leadership of Farrell Dobbs and Tom Kerry was largely intact.
Still, from early one I lost much of my respect for the Barnes leadership for handling the political crisis organizationally. A case that hit me hard was the expulsion of James Kutcher, the longtime SWP member from the New York Branch. Kutcher had lost his legs in World War II in German mortar attack in 1943 who was a defendent in the Cold War witchhunt. I was near him after a branch meeting when Kutcher, an at the time old man who was obviously distressed by what he viewed was a wholesome revision of the SWP’s historic program and tradition, was being challenged in a heated argument with a younger man. He was standing by the closet where he had his jacket as his challenger was carrying on. Agitated, Kutcher raised his cane and pressed with it againgt his challenger who was in his face, to push him away. The branch leadership used this incident to expel him. Regardless of whether Kutcher was at fault for physically threatening or hitting his challenger, to disregard his political criticism of the SWP leadership and use this incident to expel him was against all I had learned from James P. Cannon and other earlier leaders of the SWP.
Soon after joining the New York branch, I met with James Harris, the new organizer of the branch. I was assigned to head up the Headquarters Committee and to the Jobs Committee. The headquarters at Leonard Street in lower Manhattan had a good-size storefront which housed the Pathfinder Bookstore and a huge hall in the back. Upon entry to the headquarter there were two small office on the right and there was a bathroom and a broom closet and a dress closet on the left. At the entrance to the hallway was a stairway that led to a loft turned into a meeting room upstairs. It was also a big place to clean and keep clean.
I began my work in the Jobs Committee with preparing a job history and learning how to fill in a job application to enhance my chances of being given an interview. Following tips given to the committee about possible job openings, I did filled out a number of applications. My biggest hope was to become a UPS driver. But none of my attempts led to even and interview. I did not know it at the time, but the United States had entered in a recession in July 1981 which ended only in November 1982. Of course, the recession was not even discussed in the branch meetings or in the Jobs Committee. We just kept trying to get an industrial job even though nobody was hiring.
Technical specialist (December 1982-December 1987)
In late November, I decide to visit my former colleagues and friends at the Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health at SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn.
I went straight to the department’s main office. When Maureen, the office manager, saw me she reacted as if a ghost had appeared! I then went to visit Barbara Habenstreit, Executive Assistant to Chairman. Barbara was glad to see me and we had a long conversation in her office. She told me that someone named Jay Fleisher has taken over my old job. But then she added in a low voice that Jay is getting promoted to a higher position and my old job would be vacant. “Do you want it,” she whispered?
In debt and with no prospects for employment of any kind, I nodded that I would be in fact interested. She replied that she will discuss this with Dr. Feldman and Dr. Imperato. Dr. Imperato was out but I did go see Dr. Feldman who was also very happy to see me. He also told me about my old position becoming vacant.
I discussed this with Mary and also with James Harris. Both were supportive of me applying for the job.
Dr. Imperato was also supportive of rehiring me. To facilitate they rewrote the job announcement in a way that fit me perfectly! I applied and I was hired. Although it was for the same professional rank, the salary was higher at $28,000. I was given my old office 4-40 back with a nice large wooden desk. Soon, I brought in some plants making it look as if I am not living in an iron cage.
My tasks were similar to what I did in my initial employment in 1977-78 period. Except, Dr. Feldman now had other research projects.
I also already knew both the Administrative Computing staff who used an IBM/370 and the Scientific Computing staff who used an IBM/360. The former was a much larger department with half-a-dozen computer programmers who programmed mostly in COBAL, a highly popular computer language used in business and four systems programmer. John Warner, Robert Lozanski, Cal Bergen, and Tony Pagnoni. Cal was tall and big man who held conservative views who liked to hold long political conversations with me. Tony, I later learned, had a secret affair with Adrian Jackson, the department’s African-American secretary. They would go on vacation about the same time and were seen together in Atlantic City and in Las Vegas as Tony liked to gamble. Oddly enough, they never socialized at work! John was a grim midlle-aged man with smallish body, prescription glasses, tight narrow lips who seldom greeted anyone. He used to go to lunch with Charlie who was an operator because they were both gey. Robert was tall and soft-bodies with prescription glasses and a boyish face. He was shy and tried to avoid eye-contact. He still lived with his mother.
The operators were managed by a small framed body, prescription glasses and a full beard who often just sat in a small office inside the computer room stared out the rectangular window. They included Lincoln, a tall African-American man who seemed to be always running after tasks and Charlies, a White Italian-American. As I learned much later, John Warner and Charlies were gay and usually took lunch off together. John was the opposite of Charlie in his mannerism. He was thin and slight White man with prescription glasses who smoked cigarets and never smiled. Charlies, on the other hand, almost always smiled and was very friendly. After I left SUNY HSCB in 1997, I learned that Charlie was murdered right after he retired.
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| Charlie in the tape library. Date: early 1990s. |
There were the programmers who included Steven, a Jewish man with a of hair that often over-flowed his forehead, who wore tick glasses and had a dry sense of humor. He liked to me about Iranian culture. Steven who was in his mid-years still with his mother. Metin Takil who was Turkish whose brother worked in Wall Street. Matin liked to use his retirement money that was in an IRA account to do day trading taking tips from his brother.
The Scientific Computing Center which was tasked to serve the faculty was on the opposite corner of the Basic Science Building on fourth floor. Dr. Jack Labosky, a tall bespectacled, always joking Jewish man with prescription glasses who wore a white coat like medical doctors (but he had a Ph.D.) was its director. In addition to Jack, there were Mat Avitable and Ping (whose family names I do not remember), a Chinese immigrant. Mat and Ping offered study design and biostatistical advice to the faculty. Nellie, also Chinese, was the department secretary. Their computer operator was a middle-aged African-American named Fred Houston who was also under-employed. I often found Fred chasing younger Afro-American women who worked in the medical center. But Fred was married to a medical doctor from the Caribbean! Thus, Fred was happy to let me run the computer system as my own personal set up. I had the password to the lock to the computer room. I mounted tapes as I wished, operated the punch card reader, picked up my own print out, all the operator’s job. As I was friends with Jack and Mat, this did not bother them either.
There was a sense of competition between the Scientific Computing folks and what Dr. Feldman, Jay Fleisher, and I were doing in our department. Dr. Feldman was quite active in recruiting principle investigators who needed research design and biostatistical, and statistical programming help. This conflicted with the aim of the Scientific Computing to provide similar services. The problem was our team actually worked as part of the research team while the Scientific Computing folks gave ad hoc advice. They could not get involved in research project or take part of the grant money as Dr. Feldman did.
This became evident when I was assigned on recommendation from Dr. Imperato to the President’s Computing Advisory Committee which included Mat Avitable from the Scientific Computing Center as well. Of course, Mat and I worked well together on the committee and there was no friction between us. But this gave us an advantage both to advise the President of the computing needs of the faculty but also to keep the Scientific Computing Center more accountable to the faculty.
Becoming an Instructor
Initially, I worked closely with Jay Fleisher as he was handing over to me projects he was doing for Dr. Feldman. I had to reconquer my SPSS skills and go on to learn SAS (Statistical Analysis System) and BMDP (Biomedical Data Package). In 1983, I recommended to Dr. Feldman to acquire an IBM Personal Computer XT using a medical school equipment improvement grant. I pitched it as a potential teaching tool.
When the IBM PC arrived, I also had to arrange for it bolting-down to the wooden table it was sitting on. There were reports of these $2000 machines to be stolen!
Then, I proposed to Dr. Feldman to teach a course in using personal computers in medicine. Medical school education at the time was two years of basic science courses followed by two years of clinical education. The Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health offered lectures to the First and Second year students as well as two dozen or so seminars of eight to twelve students each. Most of them were taught by adjunct faculty who only showed up for their seminar sessions throughout the year. The department offered a biostatistics course for the entire First Year class taught by Dr.Murray Hochberg, a Brooklyn College mathematics professor. With Dr. Feldman’s input, I designed an alternative course entitled “Introduction to Computers in Medicine” for the First Year medical students who had taken a biostatistics course in college and wanted to learn something more. The course which I taught for a couple of years at the Department’s library, introduced the students to the theoretical underpinning of computing, how hardware and software worked, introduction to IBM-PC-XT, including how to use DOS and program in BASIC, and a final project to write a program to conduct Life Table survival analysis for a sample of cancer patients. There was also a final exam. The course was innovative and interesting for the students. However, it quickly ran its course as personal computers were adopted in high schools and colleges. So in a few year, there were a fair number of First Year students who were already able to use a personal computer and program in BASIC. Writing a program to simulate life table analysis did not require an entire course.
Thus, I developed a seminar for using dBase, a database package popular in the 1980s, Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet to enter, on how manage, and analyze epidemiological data.
When Dr. Imperato assigned me to teach First Year students, I was given a non-paying title of “Instructor” in addition to my salaried title of Technical Specialist. I was now a junior faculty member, the only one with just a B. A. degree!
Graduate studies at the New School
When I left Iran, it was after a period of personal crisis. After the January 1981 conventional that founded Workers Unity Party, a process that began with the founding of Faction for Trotskyist Unification (FTU) which I helped organize in April 1980 to fight off the adaptationist course of Babak Zahraie and his Revolutionary Workers Party (HKE) which resulted in my expulsion and 25 other leaders and members of that party, I sank into a deep depression that lasted for a few months. Mahmoud Sayrafizadeh who was a friend of mine at the time and who had been going to psychoanalysis for a long time suggested to me to see a Freudian and then a Jungian analyst which I did with good results. I pulled out of the depression (throughout I never did stop working on my political tasks). One result of this experience was that I became intellectually even more interested in psychoanalysis as a field of study. I had read some Freud before and continued reading biographies of Freud as well as his books and essays. This I continued when I arrived in New York as I experienced what turned out to be a three-year long mild depression. As soon as I began working at Health Science Center at Brooklyn, I spent much of my free time reading about psychoanalysis in its research library. Increasingly, I felt a desire to study it professionally. In fact, I even found a program in Chicago that provided for a close theoretical and practical study of psychoanalysis which I found attractive especially because it paid for tuition and board.
I was about to apply for the doctoral program in psychoanalysis there that I had lunch with Ismail Hossein-zade, a Kurdish Iranian who I was told considered himself a Trotskyist. It turned out that Ismael was a doctoral student of economics at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. I knew nothing about the New School or its graduate program in economics. Ismael was a rather unique Iranian student. Older than me by a few years, he was raised in a nomadic Kurdish tribe that was forcefully relocated to Khorasan, in northeastern Iran in the 1930s by Reza Shah, who had come to power as a strong man at moment of political crisis in 1925. Ismael was left with family members in Mashahd for his elementary schooling and ws sent to stay with family in Tehran for his high school and he excelled in his studies. He then passed the tough college entrance examination and studied economics at the University of Tehran. He had come to the U.S. for graduate studies and was supporting himself by waitering in New York upscale Italian restaurants.
Although Ismael missed the opportunity to be in Iran during the revolution, he was still radicalized by it and became interested in the SWP. Alas, the SWP was in a period of profound crisis and his SWP contacts were expelled! The main effect of his fling with Trotskyism was that he wrote a dissertation entitled the “Soviet Non-Capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt” in which he contrasted the course of the pro-Moscow Egyptian Communist Party in supporting Nasser to the alternative view presented by Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution.
Ismael and I maintained a friendship until after his retirement as a full professor from Drake University. He visited me for one-week in Sebastopol in 2012. By that time, Ismael’s political views had shifted so in 2009 he supported the presidential campaign of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the establishment candidate. This was a contested elections and hundreds of thousands protested Ahmadinejad’s winning it as a fraud. The other two presidential candidates—the former prime minster Mir-Hossein Moussavi and Medhi Karoubi the former speaker of the parliament--were eventually arrested and put under house arrest ever since. There was nothing progressive in Ahmadinejad’s presidency or his campaign for a second term. Ismael was also increasingly eyeing the Islamic Republic as progressive in two senses. He considered it as anti-imperialist regime and heconsidered some of its programs to benefit the rural population and Iranian poor. At any rate, after Ismael left me in the fall of 2012 he never again reached out to me. As I was writing this section of the essay I looked up his Wikipedia entry to find, much to my dismay, that he had died of cardiovascular disease in Iran on September 20, 2019 and buried in Boovanloo village, Shirvan, Iran.
Soon after I talked to Ismael, I applied for and was accepted into the doctoral program in economics at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. My motivation was simple. Since I radicalized I always wanted to study “Marxism” from the grounds up. Unfortunately, activism did not leave much time for serious indepth reading projects. The Sattar League I joined probably paid much more attention to serious education than other Iranian socialist groups as did Trotskyists compared to the pro-Moscow, pro-Beijing, and groups supporting the guerrilla movement in the 1970s. But even we did not read much beyond Marx’s and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party, and a few similarly short works by them, a few two books by Lenin like What Is to Be Done, the State and Revolution, some of Trotsky’s writings like The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where It is Going, The Third International After Lenin, and The History of the Russian Revolution, and some of James P. Cannon’s books, like The History of American Trotskyism and Socialism on Trial, as well as some pamphlets and Education for Socialists Bulletins. My own readings far exceeded these. But like everyone else, I never tackled Marx’s Capital even though it was one of the first books I had bought to study. There were neither people with more experience to lead me in such direction or anytime to do it even if I had everything else in place.
The New School doctoral program in economics included two two-semester series in reading Capital closely. There were also courses in specialized fields like economic development, history of economic thought, economic history, comparative systems and so on. In the post-World War II period, there was a large literature by nationalist and socialist writers theorizing economic backwardness and economic development of “The Third World.” I had also returned from Iran with a critiacl political balance sheet of the Iranian socialist currents, including the Trotskyist movement. I needed to sift through this rich if disappointing experience. I thought a rigorous study of Marx would help me figure these issues out better. I think my experience in the subsequent years vindicated my decision to devote nine years of my life to graduate studies.
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| Ross Thomson (Sept. 21, 1948-Feb. 12, 2015) |
I began my course work in fall of 1984. It was not an opportune timing in terms of taking courses with the best professors at the department. When with much enthusiasm I signed up for the two-semester courses in “Introduction to Political Economy” which was usually taught by the economic historian Ross Thomson, he was on sabbatical leave and a newly hired faculty member Ednaldo da Silva, a recent graduate from UC Berkeley who had studied with Alain De Janvry, was teaching the sequence as well as courses in Economic Development. Da Silva was a mathematical economist in that he liked to reduce Marx’s Capital as well as theories of economic development into a series of algebraic equations. This turned off the majority of his students who were mathematics adverse. While I was able to follow his mathematical models, I found his methodology lacking in historical context and attention to social relations of production which are key to economic theorizing and economic history, including the economic development of latecomers (countries of the Global South). In my second year, the two semester series “Advanced Political Economy” which was topical studies of Marx’s Capital usually taught by Anwar Shaikh’, he too was on sabbatical and Wili Semmler and a German visiting professor, Peter Flaschel, were teaching the sequence. Neither Semmler or Flaschel were good lecturers and they were both interested in Capital as a macroeconomics text and hence its mathematical reformulation. Shaikh, on the other hand, developed a methodology to translate National Accounts into Marxian categories (see, Shaik and Tonak, Measuring Wealth of Nations, 1994) and his lectures on Capital focused on a careful study of its theoretical and analytical aspects typically combined with presentation of empirical data which he and his students had collected and analyzed to show how Marx’s account of capitalist economic behavior holds. Shaikh was an excellent lecturer as well. Thus, I has to attend Shaikh’s lectures after I finished my course work.
Still there were good lecturers I took courses with including David Gordon who taught courses in socioeconomic formations and Robert Heilbroner who taught history of economic thought. Gordon who died prematurely of heart disease was a fair teacher as well. When he marked my essay off because of my critical comment about his counting Stalin as a theoretician of the materialist conception of history, I went to his office and argued with him that Stalin was never a theoretician of anything, let alone materialist conception of history. David was a Democratic Socialist and his reading of the history of Russian socialism was colored by this. But to his credit, he backed down and gave me full credit for my essay. By far, my best teacher was Ross Thomson who studied economic history at Yale. His hour-and-half lectures were amazingly rich with details that somehow he knew by heart. Economic history pays careful attention to institutional details of economies brining to life otherwise stripped down economic models which economic theorists largely rely on.
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| Anwar Shaikh (1945- ) |
After I completed my course work, in addition to Shaikh’s two course sequence of Advanced Political Economy, I sat in in courses taught by other great lecturers who visited New School such as course on the short 20th century by Eric Hobsbawm.
I became a student of Ross Thomson as I chose economic history as a field of concentration for my doctoral courses. These included Ross’s three semester long courses in economic history of capitalism in Western Europe with a focus on Britain. I also took Ross’s seminars on technological change, his field of specialization.
By 1987, I received my master’s degree in Political Economy en passant. There were two paths to a master’s degree. To write a master’s thesis or to pass written and oral doctoral comprehensive examinations. I picked the latter with concentration in economic history and economic development. Ednaldo da Silva was still there but left soon after for a research economist job before I began to work on my dissertation. He currently has his own consulting business.
Research Assistant Professor
Once I completed my master’s degree requirements, Dr. Imperato promoted me to Research Assistant Professorship. This was a non-tenure track line. But it made me a salaried full time faculty member. It also included a good raise.
Another welcome consequence was that I had begun getting credit for my contribution to the research projects I worked on. For a number of years, I did not even consider the question of why I do much of the data management and analysis work but never get included among the authors of papers that were published in medical journals. The thought never occurred to me. One summer, Dr. Feldman found a research assistantship job for his son David who would be senior in high school in the fall as a way for him to beef up his credentials for college admission. It happened that David was on the same research team as I was but was helping the principle investigator in some capacity. David and I became friends and he would hang out with me over lunch as we talked about various things. About a year later, one day Dr. Feldman and I were walking in the hallway toward our offices when he jubilantly mentioned that the research article that was published out of the project David and I both worked on included David as a co-author! I could appreciate how a father can be proud of his son’s achievement and I was also happy to know that David has received recognition for his work. But when I arrived in my office I thought about why Dr. Feldman has never asked me if I too liked co-authorship on research projects we had completed over the years! So, I brought up the subject with him. His response that he never thought I would be interested! I assured him that I was. In fact, my professional development in the department and my salary would have benefitted from it! Thus, my first professional publication appeared somewhat late: “Second Year Medical Students’ Opinions about Public Health and a Second Year Course in Preventative Medicine and Community Health,” Journal of Community Health, 1988, co-authored with Dr. Imperato and Dr. Feldman.
David and I remained friends. He even made a point of visiting me at my house in Montclair, Oakland, in 1998 when he was well on his way to be a pathologist.
I continued to work with Dr. Feldman, but it was a more equal relationship. I decided to phase out my computer-related seminars and begin teaching political economy of health care, a subject matter I had to teach myself! By 1992 when I completed my doctoral work I also published “Marital Status and Stage at Diagnosis in Cancer” in New York State Journal of Medicine in which I was the lead author with Greg Pitario, a medical student research assistant and Dr. Feldman.
I also had establish a collaborative relationship with Rachel G. Fruchter who was a faculty member in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology (OB/GYN) where she relied on my expertise for the research she led in the epidemiology of OB/GYN cancers in immigrant women. This collaboration led to a number of research publications. I was also appointed to the Cancer Committee and Cancer Registry Committee on campus.
Rachel was a British who was married to a local Democratic Party politician. Her father was a British diplomat and she had spent some of her childhood in Baghdad. She was one of the few people on campus who was outraged by the first Gulf War that began in August 2, 1990. She also lived in Park Slope. A year after I left New York for California, I learned that Rachel was killed in car accident as she rode her bicycle in Prospect Park on her way to work, much like I used to do when the weather allowed. It was a heart-wrenching tragedy. She was in her prime.
Teaching political economy of health care: 1987-96
To teach courses in political economy of health care, I had to teach myself first and to find a way to make the subject matter relevant and interesting to medical students. It turned out that in earlier years there were some failed attempts to teach health economics on the campus that failed due to a lack of student interest. Neoclassical economics is boring and health economics is even more so.
What I decided to do was instead was to identify actual problems in the U.S. health care system as discussed in prominent medical journals such as The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) which I read on regular basis and place them within the context of the historical evolution of medical care in the U.S. It was then possible to relate these to the historical development of U. S. capitalist economy. This approach helped students see the root causes of problems we faced.
The issues I was able to identify as being discussed and debated in medical journals included problems with coverage, access, costs, equity, and quality of health care. I also studied the history of medicine in the U.S. which included institutional transformation of the health care financing and delivery systems. Health care had gone from a cottage industry to a huge capitalist industry. Once I had the basics in place, I began with a seminar in political economy of health care for which I used medical journal articles and my own hand out dealing with the underlying political economy framework.
The seminars took place in my office once a week for two hours and were usually ten to 12 weeks long.
Dissertation (1987-1991)
At the same time, I had already decided that given the existing composition of the faculty of economics at the time, I wanted to focus my doctoral fields of concentrations in economic history which professor Ross Thomson very ably taught, including a seminars in technical change, and in economic development. The latter field of concentration was dictated not by the availability of capable faculty members but by my own long standing interest in the problem of economic backwardness of Iran. Like all socialists in the 1970s, I favored industrialization of countries like Iran to attain a similar high standard of living and cultural development as in the West.
With Ross's blessing, I decided to write a critical survey of the theories of economic development. The problem was how to do such a sweeping study? Thus, writing the dissertation proposal proved to be the most challenging and took me two years to do. During these two years, I read works of key theorists of economic development and took 5,000 pages of summary and notes. Meanwhile, I wrote multiple drafts of the two-dozen page proposal and had many discussions with Ross about them. He was both very scrutinizing and also very helpful until a crystal clear 24-page final version was achieved in two years! The tricky question was how to find an “organizing principle,” a method by which to make all theories commensurate. Ross and I finally settled on an assessment of theories of late capitalist development focusing on the role of competition in their construction. Competition is the organizing principle of most economic theories. We also settled on “late capitalist development” because it too made two things very clear from the outset. First, it recognized that the problem of “imperialism” so central to all theories of economic development put forward by nationalist and socialist theorists could be reimagined as the early or late capitalist development of nation states. Thus, it was “lateness” in entry to the capitalist world economy that mattered. We also decided to explicitly use the term “capitalist development” as opposed to “economic development” as all theorists really had problem of capitalist development in mind when theorizing about economic backwardness of latecomers. Meanwhile, I spent the bulk of the two years writing my proposal reading about almost all theories of economic development and with Ross’s input picking a limited representative sample of these theories for inclusion in the dissertation. The theorists we picked were: W. Arthur Lewis (economic growth with unlimited supply of labor), Raul Prebisch and Arghir Emmanuel (terms of trade and unequal exchanges theories), Paul Baran (monopoly capital thesis), Stephen Hymer (internationalization of capital and uneven development), Nicholas Kaldor (cumulative causation model), Alexander Gerschenkron (relative backwardness thesis), and Ernest Mandel (search for surplus profit and uneven and combined development). These writers included a spectrum of theoretical approaches to late development inclduing economic development, international trade, industrial organization, post-Keynesian theory, economic history, and Marxian theory. Their principal focus, where the problem of competition is encountered, include labor markets (Lewis, Prebisch, Emmanuel), commodity markets (Baran, Kaldor, Mandel), technology (Kaldor), managment and firm organization (Hymer), finance (Gerschenkron), and the state (Baran, Hymer, Gerschenkron, and Mandel).
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| Aside from a full time job and full time graduate school, I was also fully engaged in the SWP New York branch activities during the 1982-1992 period. This included Saturday sales campaigns and weekly "Plant-gate" sales. I never failed attending them unless when sick which was rare. |
Once the dissertation proposal was approved, I recruited Anwar Shaik and Gunseli Berik to be on my dissertation committee. Shaikh was recruited because of his expertise in Marxian economics and theories of competition. Berik, a newly hired Assistant Professor and a Turkish woman, was teaching courses in economic development at the time.
It took another three years before I was able to complete the dissertation and defend it before the dissertation committee that included a non-economist fourth member from the Graduate Faculty who happened to be Ferenc Fehér. Fehér, a philosopher who was an assistant to György Lukács was married to another Hungarian philosopher Ángus Heller qho was also a professor at the Department of Philosophy at the New School. The dissertation was approved by the committee and noted with “honor.” Surprisingly to me, Fehér was also impressed by the dissertation. (Here is a link to the dissertation: The Role of Competition in Theories of Late Capitalist Development, December 1991).
Ross and Anwar joined Mary and me for dinner in a restaurant in the village that evening to celebrate the completion of my doctoral study.
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| Mary Sears at work at the administratice computer center at Health Science Center at Booklyn, early 1990s. After a six-months course in computer programming (COBOL) at New York University, Mary was hired at HCSB in 1989. Photo: Kamran Nayeri |
Assistant professor (tenure-track)
In January 1992, I was promoted to a tenured tracked position of Assistant Professor at the Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health. I was also given a raise. Still, I was the lowest paid faculty member in the department (and probably in the medical school as a whole) because I was coopted into it originally with just a bachelor’s degree and even a Ph.D. was considered a lower status in a medical school dominated by those with an MD (medical doctor degree). The bulk of the faculty in a medical school are medical doctors and my expertise as a political economist was considered marginally relevant by the decision makers who viewed the mission the school to be medical research and education. When a biomedical ethicist arrived on campus in mid-1990, he and I used to talk about why the focus of medical education must be widened to enacompass the social and ethical components of medicine.
Still, the series of highly successful seminars in political economy of health that I offered to first and second year medical students was filling a gap in the medical school curriculum as became evident in the health care reform debate that engulfed U.S. politics after 1992 with the Clinton health care reform plan. Barbara who mamaged registration for two dozen or so seminars the department offered tiped me on how demand for my seminar has increased and it was second or third to be filled up.
I was in a good position to offer a seminar in the political economy of health care reform which resulted in a very well received 1995 article “Economic Boundaries of Health Care Reform: Factors 1993-94 Reform Proposals” published in the Review of Radical Political Economics. Within a few month Vicente Navarro, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Services contacted me with an offer to republish a slightly expanded version in his journal which I gladly accepted.
I was in a good position to offer a seminar in the political economy of health care reform which resulted in a very well received 1995 article “Economic Boundaries of Health Care Reform: Factors 1993-94 Reform Proposals” published in the Review of Radical Political Economics. Within a few month Vicente Navarro, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Services contacted me with an offer to republish a slightly expanded version in his journal which I gladly accepted.
In recognition of this, I was offered to lecture the second year class about the U.S. health care system and its problems. At the time, each year some 200 new medical students were admitted so every lecture was delivered to about 200 students.
Faculty of the Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health Yearbook photo, 1995
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| Seated from left to right: Joseph G. Feldman, Dr. P. H. Kamran Nayeri, Ph. D., Pascal James Imperato M.D.(Chairman), William B. Blesser, Ph.D.. Barbara Habenstreit, Ph.D., Standing from left to right: Jack DeHovitz, M.D. Gerald W. Deas, M.D., Allen D. Spiegel, Ph.D., Jay M. Fleisher, Ph.D., John S. Marr, M.D., Theodore Schussler, M.D., Mahfouz H. Zaki, M.D., Benjamin Wainfeld, M.D. Photo by Luis Hahn |
Meanwhile, I expanded the topics covered in my seminars to include a comparative health care system seminar. In this seminar, I used other health care systems in Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and Cuba to shine a light both on the problems in the U.S. health care system and alternative ways of addressing these problems by studying alternative models and experiences. All the while, I was making sure the students realized that in each and every case independent mass organization and action of working people mattered on how much the resulting system would be in accordance to our needs.
Research in Cuba (1994-2006)
In June 1994, I went to Cuba to study its health care system up close. This was thanks to a student of mine Melanie who was a socialist and had been to Cuba to visit its health care system up close. I used her slides for the seminar series when the Cuban health care system was discussed. My first trip to Cuba was also facilitated by the North American and Cuban Philosophers and Social Scientists Conference which in the U.S. was organized by Professor Cliff DuRand, of the Radical Philosophy Association. This became the first of my ten visits to Cuba, the last of which was in 2006 (that is, in twelve consecutive years I visited Cuba ten times all for research and writing as allowed under the general exemptions to travel to Cuba by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury that enforces inhumane U.S. sanctions).
In June 1994, I went to Cuba to study its health care system up close. This was thanks to a student of mine Melanie who was a socialist and had been to Cuba to visit its health care system up close. I used her slides for the seminar series when the Cuban health care system was discussed. My first trip to Cuba was also facilitated by the North American and Cuban Philosophers and Social Scientists Conference which in the U.S. was organized by Professor Cliff DuRand, of the Radical Philosophy Association. This became the first of my ten visits to Cuba, the last of which was in 2006 (that is, in twelve consecutive years I visited Cuba ten times all for research and writing as allowed under the general exemptions to travel to Cuba by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury that enforces inhumane U.S. sanctions).
As it turned out June 1994 coincided with the depth of the economic depression in Cuba caused by the collapse of the Soviet bloc countries which made up the bulk of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the main trade and financial partners of Cuba, as well as the tightening of the inhumane counter-revolutionary U.S. embargo. Cubans call it blockade because it is heavily political and backed by a constant threat of military attack. One study found that the U.S. embassies across the world were directed to press each and every government to cut off its relations with Cuba. As the result of my visit to health care facilities in Cuba and learning from health care professionals as well as ordinary Cubans, I was able to write “The Cuban Health Care System and Factors Currently Undermining It” that was published in Journal of Community Health (1995).
A decade in 2005, with Cándido M. López-Pardo, a professor of economics at the University of Havana, we published a sequel: “Economic Crisis and Access to Care: Cuba’s Health Care System Since the Collapse of the Soviet Union” (International Journal of Health Services, 2005).
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Second from left, I was presenting a paper on Che Guevara's theory of transition to socialism at the University of Havana, June 1994. I was still thinking of the Rectification Process which Fidel and Raul Castro initiated in the Third Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 1986. Soon, the leadership began a series of market reforms that have continued to this day and once again, Che Guevara's theory of transition to socialism has been sidelined.
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Doing research in Cuba is challenging especially for American citizens and permanent residents because of the U.S. embargo. But my experiences over the years taught me about some difficulties the researcher faces in Cuba as well. The brief account of the research I conducted with my colleague López-Pardo for the paper just mentioned illustrates the point. To do this, I move ahead a decade in this narrative to when I was a Political Economist and a Principal Investigator at UC DATA/Survey Research Center at UC Berkeley. I had forged an ongoing research partnership with Professor Jane Mauldon of the School of Public Policy and proposed to her that we submit a request for a small grant of $5000 to conduct research on whether and how the Special Period and U.S. sanctions might have impacted access to care in Cuba. There was some discussion that liberalization policies adopted in the Special Period by the Cuban government might have created a two tiered health care system in Cuba where those with dollars could get better treatment and those without faced problems in accessing needed care. The methodology we adopted was survey research, to interview a sample of Cubans about their access to care. We developed a survey instrument and submitted our proposal and were funded. We then submitted our survey instrument to the Committee for Protection of Human Subjects at UC Berkeley for approval as it is required in every case to protest the human subjects. It was approved.
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| Visiting a community in southern part of Havana where Fifi, the communiy leader I am talking toat the center of the photo, led an effort to build a three story health clinic. The second and third floors were for the resident physcian and the resident nurse. The clinic was on the first floor. The cement block machine in the photo was contributed by a Swiss solidarity group. This was part of the initial wave of community-led effort to institute the Family Physician program in Cuba. Eventually, every neighborhood had its own doctor and nurse. Let's remember this was done in the midst of a massive economic crisis Cubans called the Special Period at the Time of Peace. Havana, June 1994. |
Jane could not go. When I travelled to Havana to conduct the research I went directly to the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) and discussed our project with its Director of Research. I was cordially received and the director took the relevant materials including the survey instrument (questionnaire) for review. When I returned a couple of days later to get their permission to conduct a formal survey, he was most kind to me but explained politely that it is very difficult in Cuba to give foreigners permission to conduct survey research. Reading disappointment in my facial expression, he continued to suggest that it would be fine if would conduct an informal survey. Of course, this would not add up to the same thing in terms of the validity of the result obtained from a formal survey. Our research proposal was doomed. I thanked him and left to consider my options.
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| Relaxing with Patti Quick and another conference participant whose name I do not recall in Havana, June 1994. |
I was able to rescue the research trip by consulting with my friend Dr. Rosa Jimenez who was working at the time in the biostatistic office of Hermanos Almeijeiras Hospital. She suggested to me to contact Professor López-Pardo who was researching in health care in Cuba as well. I did and he agreed to collaborate with me. The details of how we conducted the research and its limitations can be found in the paper (see the link above). But after this experience, I decided I cannot really learn more in-depth about the Cuban reality unless I lived there for an extended period of time and gained the trust of the authorities to do in-depth research.
An unsuccessful job search
After obtaining my doctorate degree, the question was posed whether I should look for a job at an economics department in another university to teach and research in a field closer to my dissertation. However, just as I entered the graduate studies at the New School at an inopportune time, it was the most inopportune time to look for a job in my fields of specialization. Even before I finished my graduate studies the Soviet bloc had collapsed and a capitalist restorationist policies were underway in the former Soviet bloc countries. Neoliberalism, which proved to be the policy of choice of the world capitalist classes after the long cycle of post-World War prosperity ended in the early 1970s and was championed by Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. in the 1980s, was fast becoming the gospel even in the academia. Capitalist triumphalism was in the air, the “end of history” was proclaimed by the likes of Francis Fukuyama. George Herbert Walker Bush had declared an infinite extension to the American Century! Post-modernism which was a hodgepodge of ideas that shared a disdain for “grand narratives,” in particular, historical materialism and Marx, was in ascendency in the academia.
Job openings in fields such as economic development and economic history and even history of economic thought, let alone in Marxist economic theory (as inherently misleading label that it is) had become none existent. I interviewed for a job (perhaps the last available) to teach economic development at the University of Vermont where Ross Thomson was now an associate professor of economics. The interview went well but the department decided on a candidate that had an empirical focus (mine was theoretical). I had a second chance at a job in the economics department at Vermont to teach health economics. The interview went well and I was considered for the job. But the funding for the position dried up and so did the job!
Meanwhile, Routledge’s editor expressed an interest to publish my dissertation as a book. But he wanted me to cut its size in half, in retrospect a very reasonable demand. The dissertation is about 660 pages long. Nobody would want to read a theory book that long! I consulted with Ross who urged me to publish it with an academic publishing house. Neither Ross nor I at the time were thinking about what was happening to the fields of Marxian economics and economic development which was unfolding before our eyes. I rejected the Routledge’s offer! My dissertation was never published as I gave up trying soon after. In my opinion, it is still one of the best, if not the best, critical review of the theories of economic development of latecomers.
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| A spring day off with Mary in Manhattan, early the 1990s. |
Teaching at St. John’s University and St. Francis College (1995-97)
The last two years of my work at the Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health, I also taught economics courses as an adjunct-assistant professor at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, and at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. These appointments were rather informal as I knew Anthony Gabb, who was the Chair of Economics at the Division of Administration and Economics at St. John’s University and Patty Quick who was the Chair at the Department of Economics at St. Francis College. Tony who also had earned his doctorate from the New School Graduate Faculty in economics and his wife Maria, and their two wonderful daughters Vanessa and Daniela have been special friends to me for three decades now. Tony needed someone to teach survey courses in macroeconomics and economic history.
I knew Patty Quick from my first visit to Cuba in June 1994. A British immigrant who took a doctorate in economics from Harvard and was an early member the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE). URPE was founded in the summer of 1968, when graduate students and faculty from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Harvard University and Radcliffe College held a working meeting in Ann Arbor just a few weeks before the National Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. Patty and I kept in touch after our return from Cuba and in 1995, she offered me to teach microeconomics, macroeconomics, and a senior year course in history of economic thought at St. Francis College.
The St. Francis courses were taught usually in the mornings. But St. John’s courses were typically taught to evening students. While I did enjoy teaching these courses as a new challenge and a learning experience for me, I found the students taking these courses (except for the history of economic thought which was for senior year students majoring in economics) unprepared for taking these classes. For example, at St. Francis College in my macroeconomic course, I assigned students to read short articles dealing with real life macroeconomic issues in The New York Times and write a summary of what they understood from them. The results were discouraging. Most students could not read a graph or do simple calculations such as rate of growth and algebraic formulation frightened them. There was also a serious problem with students not showing up for their classes (both campuses required teachers to do a roll-call to force student attendance). But even when students come to the classroom, some simply did not pay attention. Very clearly, my students by-and-large had made it to college without being prepared for it and they had signed up for college without being really interested in learning.
Not only these undermined the most enthusiastic teachers effectiveness, it also created conflict. When I taught my first macroeconomic course at the Staten Island campus of St. John’s University, an evening class taught to about half dozen students all already in some career and in their late 20s and early 30s and most of them received poor grades at the end of the semester, one or two complained to Tony (who was the Chair) about my “unfair” exam or grading. At St. Francis College, when I failed a student Patty Quick became angry at me to have failed a “working class kid” making it difficult for him to advance in life. I did not argue with Patty and I am certain she meant well. But I did not and still do not think it helps “working class kids” to "advance in life" by simply receiving passing grades when they did not learn anything. My own brother, Kamyar, who was five years younger than me, was a poor student and he often graduated to the next level thanks to my parents lobbying on his behalf. He eventually received a high school diploma but remained dependent on my parents until he died of thyroid cancer at age 39. Later in life, I became convinced that Kamyar had learning disabilities, although in the 1960s in Iran nobody worried about children with learning disabilities. I tend to think that most my students at St. Francis College and St. John’s University were in need of some kind of help which was never given to them to prepare for college and for life.
The pay at those adjunct jobs was miserable, about $1,800 a semester course if I remember correctly. I took these opportunities up not for the money but for a chance to see how it would be if I took a job as an economics professor in a typical four-year liberal arts college. It proved to me that I rather do something else with my working life.
Review of Radical Political Economics
Towards the end of my graduate studies, I began to attend the URPE at Allied Social Sciences (ASSA) conferences held in early January of each year. One or twice, I also attended URPE at Eastern Economic Association meetings which were conveniently located in the East Coast.
In 1996, as I was looking for alternative jobs and source of income as my job at the medical school seemed to be in jeopardy, I applied to become the Managing Editor of the Review for Radical Political Economics, the journal of URPE, which had just published my article of economic boundaries of health care reform. This was a part time job. As it turned out, Hazel Dayton Gunn, was selected for the position. I was urged to run for the editorial board in the next elections. I did and I began my first term in 1997. I served three three-year terms.
This was an interesting experience as I was gradually discouraged by the RRPE editorial board and the journal. Although URPE has been advertised and perceived as “radical,” I found very little radical thinking among its members and authors. A better description of URPE and RRPE would be a loose coalition of left-Democratic Party supporters and people who feel comfortable working in close relationship with them. The organization and the editorial board were also dominated by rival cliques which reflected itself in an ongoing conflict between the leadership of URPE and RRPE editorial board as the former wanted to exert influence over the latter. The problem was dealt with around the time I decided not to run for a fourth term by some leaders of URPE running to be on the editorial board. The journal itself was mostly a vehicle for the URPE members and the like to beef up their credentials to get promotion and tenure. Of course, there are dedicated folks who have been in URPE for decades keeping it afloat. But it is very much another professional organization with "radical" trappings.
This was an interesting experience as I was gradually discouraged by the RRPE editorial board and the journal. Although URPE has been advertised and perceived as “radical,” I found very little radical thinking among its members and authors. A better description of URPE and RRPE would be a loose coalition of left-Democratic Party supporters and people who feel comfortable working in close relationship with them. The organization and the editorial board were also dominated by rival cliques which reflected itself in an ongoing conflict between the leadership of URPE and RRPE editorial board as the former wanted to exert influence over the latter. The problem was dealt with around the time I decided not to run for a fourth term by some leaders of URPE running to be on the editorial board. The journal itself was mostly a vehicle for the URPE members and the like to beef up their credentials to get promotion and tenure. Of course, there are dedicated folks who have been in URPE for decades keeping it afloat. But it is very much another professional organization with "radical" trappings.
Overall, I did not find the URPE panels at the ASSA scholarly fruitful. I presented papers in panels which I helped organize, presented at, chaired, or serve as a discussant. Still, I found little scholarly collaboration coming out of these meetings. My own reearch interests were not advanced by such participations. Towards the end of my doctoral studies, Ross Thomson and Ed Nell, also a professor at the New School, organized a small conference of a dozen people around the questions of the firm, technical change, and growth with an institutional economics flavor. Out of that small conference that was attended by pioneering economists like Nina Shapiro, Edward J. Nell, Ross Thomson, and their students, I was one of the two students of Ross, came out a few peer reviewed papers.
Of course, there are notable exceptions to this general assessment of mine. My own paper on health care reform proposal was substantially improved thanks to one of the reviewers, Fred Moseley, who pointed out the relevnace of William Baumol's cost disease theory. If one is interested in the economic studies, there is a fair number of mainstream theorists who have considerable insight. Among the "radical" economists there are only a few indeed. To make up for such difficiency, URPE folks include all currents of economic thought under the umbrella of "radical" economists, leaving out only the neoclassicals!
Of course, there are notable exceptions to this general assessment of mine. My own paper on health care reform proposal was substantially improved thanks to one of the reviewers, Fred Moseley, who pointed out the relevnace of William Baumol's cost disease theory. If one is interested in the economic studies, there is a fair number of mainstream theorists who have considerable insight. Among the "radical" economists there are only a few indeed. To make up for such difficiency, URPE folks include all currents of economic thought under the umbrella of "radical" economists, leaving out only the neoclassicals!
Some of my friends at SUNY-HCSB
As I noted earlier, working a full time job for an extended period of time creates opportunities to find new workplace relationships. I should note a few of those at SUNY-HSCB in the 17 years I worked there.
Barbara Habenstreit
One of the most important to me what my friendship with Barbara Habenstreit who was the Executive Assistant to the Chair, a highly intelligent, very liberal woman who was probably only a few years older than I was. As I have mentioned earlier, I had a habit of saying “hello” to her almost every morning before I began my daily work. We just talked about our daily lives and sometimes about political issues. Sometimes we had longer discussions in the afternoon “coffee break.” All these were in her office. Barbara was already in the doctoral program in medical anthropology at the New School when I began my own studies in economics there. She graduated a few years earlier. The reason Barbara enrolled in the New School was a combination of circumstances and her own desire to learn. Her husband Abe was the development officer at the New School (that is, to raise funds for the school) which made her eligible for tuition free education. She decided to study in a doctoral program and medical anthropology was closet to her interest and work. Barbara and I also had a running debate about liberal vs. socialist politics. Barbara was a liberal Democrat and my politics at the time defined by the Socialist Workers Party. We never discussed Zionism and Palestine so I am not sure what her views were on that question. But on many issues we agreed. Barbara became immersed in the United University Professions (UUP) of which we were all member (New York is a closed-shop state). Barbara tried hard to get me to become active in the union. I did go to some occasional membership meeting always held at lunch time. Sandwiches and soft drinks were served to entice membership to attend. But only a dozen or so were regulars. In general, the union leadership which was a small group of elected officials (Alan Spiegel and later Rowena Blackman-Stroud were President, and Barbara, Secretary). My criticism of the union policy was that it relied on “pro-labor” Democrats for its success and in turn it was a Democratic Party vote-gathering machine. I remember how Barbara and I argued over Sheldon Silver who was a New York City Democratic Party politician who served as Speaker of the New York State Assembly from 1994 until 2015. Barbara had high regards for Silver. In 2015, Silver was arrested on federal corruption charges, and resigned as Assembly Speaker shortly thereafter. I am sure Barbara was horrified to find out how corrupt Silver had been. My other argument was that reliance of the Democratic Party and a cozy relation with the management would leave the union impotent. The union mobilized its members to picket in front of the medical school on Clarkson Avenue only as a pressure tactic to win concession from management during contract negotiation times. I only recall one such action that lasted a couple of days. But when push came to shove, it was clear the management had all the powers it needed. When I was laid off, I was due for review for tenure and Associate Professorship. I filed a complaint with encouragement from the union officers. This resulted in a “hearing.” A friendly young man representing the management met with me and Hellen Sacket, an older, very slight, chain smoking union offcial who I thought was a member of the Communist Party U.S.A. The meeting was for the representative of the management who was also by union agreement the arbitrator (!) to review documents we had submitted for our case to make a determination. The young man simply took out the UUP contract to read a sentence: “At the time of financial crisis, the management can lay off any employees deemed unnecessary.” The case was closed! I looked at Helen who looked back at me with resignation in her face.
The decision to lay me off was made by Dr. Imperato. But it was Barbara who announced it to me. One day before I had any idea that my lay off was imminent, Barbra asked what I plan to do for dinner the next day. I told her I had no specific plans. She offered that we go for dinner to a restaurant in the Village (in Manhattan). After a nice dinner and conversation, Barbara with a grim look on her face told me that I have been laid off due to the financial crisis and handed me an envelope that contained a short note by Dr. Imperato announcing the decision without mentioning a cause. Now, Barbara was wearing her “administration” hat. She, of course, then quickly put on her “union hat” recommending to me to file a complaint. I have already stated how that went. In his brief letter, dated February 27, 1997, Dr. Imperato wrote:
"Dear Kamran:
"I want to thank you for your many years of devoted service to the department. You have been a valuable member of our facutly, and have made many important contributions to our teaching programs and the intellectual life of our department.
"We are all saddened by your departure from the full-time faculty, and hope you will maintain a relationship with the department in the future."
Anyone reading this short letter now may come away thinking I volunteerly left my job perhaps because of better opportunities! In fact, Dr. Imperato had made a cold-blooded decision of letting me go on the basis of "last hired, first fired" principle!
In recent weeks I thought of Barbara and looked her up on the web. To my pleasant surprise, she has yet reinvented herself as a professional photographer. I found her phone number and called her. We had a wonderful conversation. She remains in my mind as my good friend.
In recent weeks I thought of Barbara and looked her up on the web. To my pleasant surprise, she has yet reinvented herself as a professional photographer. I found her phone number and called her. We had a wonderful conversation. She remains in my mind as my good friend.
Jay Fleisher
After I left for Iran in January 1979, Dr. Feldman hired a tall, blue-eyed, blond hair man a bit older than me as my replacement. When I returned to the department, this man, Jay Fleisher, was promoted to a Research Assistant Professor position vacating my former position which I gladly retook. Jay held a Master's degree in enviromental health. He worked in office 4-30 next to my office and there was a private door between our offices. As Jay was familiar with the projects I inherited from him, and as he continued working for Dr. Feldman who had become more involved in epidemiological research on campus, we became colleagues and sometimes collaborators, and soon friends.
Initially, I found Jay a man in crisis. His marriage was in ruins and the couple were not in a cooperative mood. They had a daughter, Jenifer, and a son, Scott. Jay used to spend a lot of time at night drinking beer at a bar in Far Rockaway in Brooklyn where the family lived. I do not know whether this contributed to his marital crisis or was a result of it or both. But he would come to work late, usually late enough for him to go straight to the cafeteria on the ground floor, get a tray of lunch, and arrive in his office anytime between 11 and 1 O’clock. He also stayed behind when I left for home at 5 p.m. He said he worked until 8 or 9 and then headed for the bar at Far Rockaway. Jay also smoked which was at odd with his teaching a seminar in environmental health. His Master's thesis was on beach water quality. He told me that he initially picked stream water quality as his topic. But after taking repeated sample of the water for analysis, one day he returned to find that the stream had dried up! So his advisor suggested he turn his focus instead on beach water quality. This eventually worked well for him as I will exaplian in a moment. A year or two after after I began my doctoral work at the New School, Jay started in the doctoral program in epidemiology at Columbia University. When he was more secure in his academic studies he began traveling to Europe to attend conference in water quality. This was good for him professionally and personally. He told me how viewing the United States from the outside helped him appreciate my critical view of the United States.
Jay and I discussed politics, in particular Zionism. In fact, he was the only Jewish colleague with whom I discussed it. At first he was outraged by my criticism of Zionism. He knew almost nothing about the history of the conflict so his reaction was to “joke” with me instead. A favorite of his was to lower his voice and whisper something like “the microfilm is in pier 19!” This was to “jokingly” imply that people like me must be “the enemy’s agents,” that is, agent of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was held to be a terririst organization, not a liberation movement of the oppressed Palestinian people. Over, the years Jay mellowed out and became critical of the harsh Israeli policies. But I never felt he really appreciated the plight of the Palestinian people whose homeland was being gradually gobbled up turning them into refugees around the world and in refugee camps in neighboring countries, second class citizens in the Jewish State, or a people under occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Jay was too centered to pay any serious attention to the problems others faces in the U.S. or the rest of the world. Soon after he was divorced he was met Robin, a divorced Jewish woman with two small sons in the bar. They fell in love and married. Robin was a nurse and together with Jay they raised their four children in relative harmony. had two sons from her previous marriage and the couple raised their four children. Eventually, Jay also had to leave his job at the medical school (I do not know under what circumstances). He and Robin moved to Florida where Jay found a teaching job at a degree mill college. He got in touch with me via Facebook but we did not share common interests.
Jay and I were certainly friend, he invited me to his son, Scott, bar mitzvah. I met his parents, children, and Robin and her children, we did not really share any interests in common. Jay sometimes talked altruistically and about universal values. He liked to think of himself of at least interesed in Buddhism, although I am sure he did not know much about it and he never really acted accordingly. In many years we were in close contact not even once I heard him initiate a conversation that focused on improvement of some else’s lot who was not immediately part of his own family.
He also erred on the side of pro-business and pro-government views. In the 1980s and 1990s there was little doubt that Agent Orange was a toxic chemical that the U.S. used in Vietnam war from 1961 to 1971 as a tactical weapon. It is a mixture of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D with of dioxin (mainly TCDD, the most toxic of its type) that was known to cause major health problems for many individuals who were exposed. By 1994, the National Academy of Medicine began to issue reports every 2 years on the adverse health effects of Agent Orange and similar herbicides. These reports assess the risk of both cancer and non-cancer health effects. Each health effect is categorized by evidence of association based on available research data. Jay used have a session in his environmental health seminar which provided “both sides of the debate” on Agent Orange. Some of his students who were also my students complained about this to me. They had a valid criticism. When a scientific question is settled by consensus, which was the case about Agent Orange at the time, why present both sides of the “debate?” In recent years, as Jay contacted me on Facebook and we talked on the phone, he began to talk about the “two sides of the debate” of on climate change, I knew I do not want to renew an ongoing relationship with him.
Mark Brandys
Another Jewish friend at work was Mark Brandis who was the manager of the Tumor Registry. Mark was a shy, very intelligent man about my own age, who had a Ph.D. in political science but somehow ended up at his present administrative job. He read constantly, including literature, and he turned me on to African fiction. Mark also went to law school at night and became a lawyer, first in immigration law, and finally settled for family law. He is still practicing family law in New York.
I got to know Mark because of our jobs. I was working for Dr. Feldman’s cancer epidemiology projects and one day he introduced me to Mark who then followed me to my office and we had a long conversation. I soon learned thattalking with Mark cannot be a short term affair! He soon made it a habit to stop by my office "on his way to his office" (which was in the basement of the hospital wing!). These first-thing in the morning conversations lasted at least half and hour.
Mark was from a low-income Jewish family in the Bronx. His father was a short order cook and his mother was so obese and bed-bound. He had a brother in California who died of cancer in the 1980s. Mark was chronically depressed, had a low-self esteem, and very lonely. So, I became a sort of informal therapist for him. His morning visits to my office became largely complains about how women are not paying attention to him and this became a more serious issue when had a crush on one.
After a few years of acting as an involuntary talk-therapist, and after I found enough credibility with him, I gently suggested to Mark that he may have a problem with depression. Being a very intelligent man, he finally accepted my advice to talk to a profession. He was prescribed medication and he soon improved.
Despite being intelligent, academically accomplished, and even having a fondness for Middle Eastern culture and women (!), Mark was still a Zionist. This led him to harbor rightwing political views. When on April 15, 1986, on orders from President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. war planes bombed Libya and an infant daughter of Qaddafi was killed, Mark celebrated the attack in his morning visit to my office.
In 1996, I applied for citizenship. After some time, I was asked to go for an interview. From all appearances the interview went well. But nothing was communicated to me after the interview. Discussing this with Mark who was now a newly minted immigration lawyer trying to find his first clients, he kindly volunteered to look into this for me. Nothing came of it until I left Brooklyn to reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. I asked if Mark could help send my file from the Brooklyn Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) office to the one in San Francisco. He filled the paper work.
By 1999, I still had not heard a word from the INS. I hired a female Afro-American immigration lawyer in San Francisco who charged $500 to look into the problem. She soon found that my file was indeed in the San Francisco office. But the INS agents have been sitting on it for years because they found multiple Social Security Numbers for me in that folder! How that had happened, I have not idea. But once my lawyer was able to communicate to the INS officials that I have had only one SSN since 1969 and what that number was, the INS reviewed my file within weeks and I was given citizenship in April 2000.
Leftist friends at the medical school
The medical school and the nursing school next to it were unlike liberal arts college campuses where there are politically active student groups. The medical education is intense leaving students little room for extra curiculmn activities. There is also a problem of self-selection in that in the United States at least students choose medicine with prospect of a rich material life. The faculty being mostly medical doctors also are uninterested in political activism. But there were individual exception. Some of my seminar students were well-meaning liberal progressives who cared about the problems of the health care system, lack of access to care and poor quality, and differential poorer outomes for low-income people and minorities. There was a medical doctor at the hospital that was a member of the Progressive Labor Party and for a time tried recruiting me by giving me their literature. When I returned the favor by giving his some literature from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, he cooled off and I did not see him much again. Melanie McDonnald, a student of mine who was a socialist who had visited Cuba, was certainly political.
There was also Bob, an Afro-American lab technician whose last name I cannot recall. He was married to a Chinese medical student and harbored some kind of leftist views, except would never commit himself to any particular ideological point of view. He vaguely talked about his relationships with the Black Panthers. But he was obviously critical of the U.S. mainstream politics and held a bit of conspiracy theory baggage.
When the first Iraq war started, he and I began to talk about a campus-wide anti-war group. Soon we found Metin and Delik, a young Turkish and Turkish Cyprian husband and wife, as well as a new middle-aged Jewish woman named Collette Harris who was active with a certain group of non-party leftists in Manhattan. Metin and Collette were programmers at the Administrative Computing Center and Delik worked at the Office of the Dean at the medical school. Collette was the most political among the few I met with and was in the circle around Joel Kovel who was teaching in New York at the time. She even invite me to go meet Kovel (regrettably, I did not accept the invitation as I was totally immersed in the SWP work at the time). Our antiwar group managed to meet a few times but nothing came out of it except information sharing about anti-war activities in New York.
When the first Iraq war started, he and I began to talk about a campus-wide anti-war group. Soon we found Metin and Delik, a young Turkish and Turkish Cyprian husband and wife, as well as a new middle-aged Jewish woman named Collette Harris who was active with a certain group of non-party leftists in Manhattan. Metin and Collette were programmers at the Administrative Computing Center and Delik worked at the Office of the Dean at the medical school. Collette was the most political among the few I met with and was in the circle around Joel Kovel who was teaching in New York at the time. She even invite me to go meet Kovel (regrettably, I did not accept the invitation as I was totally immersed in the SWP work at the time). Our antiwar group managed to meet a few times but nothing came out of it except information sharing about anti-war activities in New York.
My most colorful leftist friend was Gabriel, the Haitian custodian assigned to my wing of the Basic Science Building. Gabriel was older than me and had come to New York after he was chased out of Haiti by the Jean-Claude Duvalier dictatorship. His shift began before I arrived so it was common that the two of us met earlier in the morning if he was in the hallway leading to my office and talk politics. Gabriel was the most political of all my friends at work. Before he left Haiti for the U.S. he was a leftist activist of a sort. He liked the Pathfinder books that I tried to sell at work and he bought a few as well as Perspectiva Mundial, the Spanish language paper of the Socialist Workers Party as he could read Spanish better. A few times, I invited Gabriel to come to The Militant Labor forums in Manhattan on Friday nights. When he finally accepted, he did not show up. It was not easy to make the trip at the end of a long day of work. But I also learned the Gabriel was alcoholic. In fact, he needed help as his work suffered.
Survey Research Center/UC DATA, UC Berkeley
(September 1998-November 2006)
(September 1998-November 2006)
In 1994, George Pataki, a fiscally conservative Republican, became governor of New York. By 1996, he had cut SUNY’s budget three times. In the third round of cuts my position was eliminated as Dr. Imperato, the chairman, had to abide by the school’s president's mandatory cuts for each department. Still, he gave me a half-time salary to give me some financial support as I looked for my next job. I voluntarily continued to work full time teaching my seminars. In May 1997, I moved to Moraga, in San Francisco Bay Area, where my sister Zhilla and her family lived. The main reason was my two young nieces, Maryam and Roxanne, with whom I had a very good relationship on the phone at the time. Maryam was in high school and had just visited me in Brooklyn for her summer vacation and Roxanne was in elementary school.
Zhilla and her husband, Mansour (Touraj) offered me much hospitality. In August, I found a small print advertisement (I do not recall where) that promised a research job at UC Berkeley analyzing very large databases for social programs with millions of observations! I applied and was given an interview.
It turned out that the job was at UC DATA (University of California Data Archive and Technical Assistance (UC DATA has been restructure into a social science data lab). UC DATA was part of Survey Research Center (SRC), which as the name implies was founded to use surveys in social science research. SRC was what is known at UC Berkeley as Organized Research Unit (ORU). ORUs have been organized around core interdisciplinary faculty with a specific mission. By their very nature, ORUs have a sunset review every so-often and when their original mission was deemed met or no longer relevant they would shut done. The SRC was shutdown a few years after I left in 2006.
In the 1990s, Henry Brady, a professor of public policy and political science had become the director of UC DATA which had won a large scale grant to collect, manage, and analyze Cal Learn program data. Cal-Learn is a statewide program for pregnant and parenting teens within the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) program, a welfare reform version of what President Clinton had initiated on the federal level. In the early years of the Cal-Learn research project, UC DATA hired many graduate students and a couple of full time research staff. The job I applied for was to work on the Cal-Learn project and other UC DATA projects.
To my surprise, the interview was with a room full of UC DATA staffers and graduate students who worked for it at the time! Dr. Brady himself was not present but key staff members including Dr. Fred Gey, a computer scientist who was considered Assistant Director was there as well Janet Malvin, Cal-Learn project director, and Ilona Einowski, Director of Users Services at UC DATA were there. The interview was friendly and went very well. I was offered the job by the director, Henry Brady, at an informal morning coffee break in a coffee shop down from SRC on Channing Way near Telegraph Avenue. Knowing that I was an Assistant Professor who was laid off just before being reviewed for promotion to tenured Associated Professorship at SUNY-Health Science Center at Brooklyn, Henry was apologetic to offer me a Technical Specialist position but hinted at a joint appointment with the Department of Economics. I envisioned the job as an applied research opportunity with a promise of teaching in the Department of Economics. The salary was lower than I made at SUNY-HSCB. But the promise was for it to increase quickly as well. Of course, I was thrilled to have a research job at UC Berkeley.
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| Survey Research Center/UC DATA were housed in the historic Anna Head Alumnae Hall Building off campus on Channing Way |
Technical Specialist
The neoliberal policy that derailed my professional career at Health Science Center at Brooklyn, was already in place at UC Berkeley, presumably the hotbed of liberalism. My new position was a professional line but not a faculty position, my annual salary was $15,000 less than my last job, and my office was more like a jazzed up broom closet. My job depended on the grant money that kept UC DATA afloat (except for the “essential workers” who ran the archive). At the beginning, I even had to share that small space with a South Korean visiting scholar, but within six months he returned to his country and university job.
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| Henry Brady at the UC DATA library. Photo: Peg Skorpinski, Februart 2009. |
Fred Gey, the information scientist with an interest in very large datasets was my supervisor. He assigned me to work on a part of the Cal-Lean project that was indeed a very difficult task; to find all children of a Cal-Learn teen mother by triangulating available administrative datasets. As I had mostly set aside programming in SPSS or SAS after 1992 when I focused on political economy of health, I was rusty in my programming skills. Also, the administrative datasets we worked with in the Cal-Lean project were very messy data collected for the CalWorks and Medi-Cal programs purposes. Important information were missing for our research project and we had to tease them out a combination of other variables often across two or more datasets. In brief, it was a methodological and programming challenge. Luckily, there were a number of highly qualified staff who I could consult. In particular, Jon Stiles, a man perhaps fifteen years younger and who was UC DATA assistant to Einowski, who was both highly intelligent and technically skilled. He was also very helpful in the way good librarians are.
The UNIX minicomputer system and conflict with Fred Gey
At the same time, Fred Gey had his own ideas about my career path; he wanted me to become the sidekick for him and the man in charge of UC DATA’s Unix mini computer system, Earl Simpson, who he really liked. Earl was a White South African whose real love was freelancing soccer referee. At the time, Earl’s had a family crisis. Earl had an able assistant in the person of Jason Megs. Jason was an anarchist and a leader of Critical Mass, a form of direct action in which people met at a set location and time and travelled as a group through their neighborhoods on bikes. From time to time, Jason and his fellow bikers rode on the Bay Bridge stopping the traffic. Both Earl and Jason had a spotty work schedule due to their real interests in life and the inability of Fred Gey as a manager.
Together, Earl and Jason, with some supervision by Fred Gey, had assembled a UNIX computer network for UC DATA on which we ran SAS and SPSS for our data cleaning and analysis projects. The system was so ad hoc, as neither Earl nor Jason nor Fred were qualified people to put together a computer system and maintain it. Fred Gey had theoretical conception for such a system but no hands on experience. Both Earl and Jason had picked up whatever skills they had in their previous jobs. Thus, the UNIX system was known by everyone at UC DATA as the “spaghetti” because of many wires and cables running in every direction in the basement room where the UNIX computer, hard disks and tape drives were housed and its spotty performance. This system broke down from time to time causing a mini crisis.
By the time Cal-Lean research project began to draw to a close, a few graduate student researchers at UC DATA, headed by Eva Seto who eventually dropped out of her graduate studies to become a full time adminstrator, backed by Jon Stiles and Ilona Einowski convinced Henry Brady to give up the UNIX mini-computer system in favor of new and powerful personal computers connected to the UNIX server in the basement. As a result, Earl and Jason moved on. Earl left UC DATA and moved away from the Bay Area with his family. Jason went to law school and became a lawyer.
One day soon after my arrival at UC DATA, Fred Gey asked me to stay behind after 5, when I and most full timers left for home, to learn how to run tapes on the UNIX system in the basement. When I did, Earl Simpson tutor me by example which was to watch him do his job. Running each tape took a fair amount of time. It was already 8 o’clock, the computer room freezing cold and I had not eaten dinner which I usually ate by 6. I told Fred Gey that I had to leave and left.
Some time later, he met with me telling me how he wants me to master the UNIX system and help run it. I told him I was not interested.
It did not sit well with him. When my review came up, Fred wrote a poor assessment of my work although I had manage to figure out a way to triangulate teenage mothers’ children which was my Cal-Lean project task for which I was hired for.
When Henry Brady met with me to review the assessment which in effect proposed not to keep me, I protested it on the grounds that what Fred Gey wanted me to do had nothing to do with the job description I had applied for and my qualification and it was in the opposite direction of what Brady himself had promised me. Of course, Fred Gey did not say he had written a poor assessment of me because I refused his pressure to become a computer operator. He stated I was not on par in my data management skills.
Henry Brady offered a three month extension period and put me under the supervision of Fred Gey and Janet Malvin, the director of Cal-Learn. Jan who worked in a rented office space on Channing Way near Telegraph Avenue, visit me from time to time and gradually began to confide in me that she too has been made promises which were not kept and that she felt isolated and alienated.
The was some intellectual context to our disagreements at UC DATA. Social and policy research at UC Berkeley has been notoriously data-driven. Thus, anyone with a more theoretically inclined approach to social and policy questions would must have been seen as deficient in their capability, of not being on par with the norm at UC Berkeley. Of course, that was especially true at SRC/UCD ATA driven by survey and administrative data. A key problem with the data-driven research is that it implicitly accept the existing social system as given and the purpose of research is to provided data-informed policy decisions to improve the system. A stark example, is the case of Carlos Dobkin, without a doubt the most intelligent, capable, and organized graduate research assistance who I had the pleasure of working with. An economics doctoral student, Carlos had superb econometric and SAS programming skills. But he differed from almost all other GSRs I worked with in that he would actually volunteered to go with me when I met with Medi-Cal county officers (he accompanied me to a meeting with Alameda County Medi-Cal eligibility experts). Medi-Cal is a complex program with over 100 subprograms designed by specific legislation to address particular needs. One of my achievements at SRC/UC DATA was to become a State of California Medi-Cal program expert who knew some of the most important Medi-Cal programs and knew of who to go to for deeper institutional knowledge. Carlos wrote a dissertation that was a few different data driven research articles published or slated to be published. One of these as I remember had to do with the question of whether sending the welfare benefit checks once a month or twice a month each with half of the monetary benefits would affect a more desirable behavior on the part of the recipient. Clearly, this was a challenging and useful study. But studies such as these assume the existing social system, never question it. Why are there people on welfare or Medi-Cal? Can there ever be a society where nobody would be poor or in such dire need of state support? Neoclassical and mathematical economics which UC Berkeley teaches ignores such questions. My interest in economic theory, on the other hand, was motivated exactly by such questions. My research and teaching were animated by them. Of course, social theories that cannot be tested are not really theories. Clearly, we need empirical research. But empirical research if not embedded in a well articulated theory at best will end up putting bandaids on the problems of the social system. Clearly, I was an outsider at the SRC/UC DATA. Carlos Dobkin went on to become a Professor of Economics at UC Santa Cruz. That is befitting his talent but also a great spot for him as I know he enjoyed surfing.
Becoming independent
By the end of the period, Jan and Fred wrote a review of my work that urged Henry to hire me “permanently.” But Fred Gey had lobbied Henry that I should be demoted one rank below what I was hired for and my salary be cut by $5000. Of course, these were mean spirited and demeaning acts of a man who lectured me one Sunday in the UC DATA library about his Quaker heritage. After 9/11 attacks, I learned later that Fred Gey was on grants from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). One grant he was working on was to scan the web for finding “terrorists.” He wanted to enlist me to help him with Arabic searches, a langauge I do not know. So he did not follow up. I also learned later that Fred Gey was not a popular man at the SRC/UC DATA. After, the conflict with Fred was resolved I made a point of going to his birthday at his home. He had invited everyone. I bought a small gift and went. To my surprise, nobody showed up while I was there. It was he and his wife only.
I decided to accept Henry Brady’s offer with a condition: That I would work as an independent researcher, a political economist. He agreed. It was a daring decision on my part because my salary was based on money raised through successful competitive grants. By becoming independent, I was loosely supervised by the UC DATA director, Henry Brady who reviewed me once a year to offer me a raise or promotion. No promotions ever came. But my salary was gradually increased. Still when I left SRC/UC DATA in November 2006, I was making less than I made when I was laid off at Health Science Center at Brooklyn.
A Medi-Cal research program
From then on I worked as a political economist and within a two year period was given a Principle Investigator (PI) status, meaning I could apply for a grant on my own. Meanwhile, I needed someone with the PI status to file grant proposals. That person was Professor Jane Mauldon, Associate Professor of Public Policy. A British implant at Berkeley, Jane was co-PI on the Cal-Learn project when I was working on it. During this work, I realized that many teen mothers who left welfare for work seem to lose their Medi-Cal status. However, the State policy was to offer them a temporary Medi-Cal to ease their transition to work which presumably provided them with health care (a highly doubtful scenario given the low skilled jobs such young women got). This temporary Medi-Cal program was called Transitional Medi-Cal where the recipient would be covered for up to one year depending on qualifications.
I discussed this with Carlos Dobkin who was supportive of the idea and provided me with back-of-the-envelop data that were suggestive that my hypothesis that many teens may be falling into administrative cracks. When Jane also consider the idea she was supportive and became the PI for a grant proposal which was funded. From there on Carlos and I spent about 18 months developing a proper dateset and analyzing it with occasional guidance from Jane. Our finding is summarized in the abstract for a paper we published in the journal Inquiry: “Welfare Leavers’ Use of Medicaid Transitional Medical Assistance in California, 1993–1997.” (TMA irefers to transitional Medi-Cal in the paper)
"Using administrative and survey data, we estimated participation rates in Transitional Medical Assistance (TMA) for the period 1993–97 by California welfare leavers during their first six months post-welfare. We found that although many welfare leavers were eligible for TMC (TMA nationwide) (35% to 47% of exiters), only 26% of eligible people were enrolled in the TMA program. Another 14% were covered by non-TMC Medi-Cal for the entire six months. Most TMC-eligible exiters had Medi-Cal coverage (all of it nonTMC) for less than six months (49%) or no Medi-Cal coverage at all (11%). Supplementary analyses using data from the National Survey of America’s Families indicated that if fully implemented, TMC could have substantially reduced uninsurance among welfare leavers."
This was an important finding about how the inadequacy of the process of evaluation of teenage mothers leaving welfare for work has been resulting in a failure in implementation of the law. But a few months before we were to report our findings to California legislature, they were actually in the process of acting to eliminate the administrative problems that caused poor implementation.
This experience also taught me yet another lesson varified by other policy research I was invlvoed in at SRC/UC DATA. Public policy research, including health policy research, often lags the legislative process. A key reason is that the legislative process routinely includes an implementation research budget item to access the outcome of policy. Grant making institutions either set up by states or are non-profits who get their money from states require progress reports from the policy researchers funded, the news of potential findings is shared with the legislature well before research is complete and its results published. I noticed the same pattern in most research efforts I was part of including the large grant Henry Brady received to study immigrants in California, a multi-year research program that used Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), Surveys of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and for native and immigrant families and their participation in major public-assistance programs, and changes in these characteristics and participation over time. The major public-assistance programs we considered were Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)/California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs), Food Stamps, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Medi-Cal. It was a large scale study done in part at the California Census Research Data Center (CCRDC) which at the time was managed by Richard Milby (They were two centers, one at Berkeley and another at UCLA—the Berkley site closed soon after I left SRC/UC DATA). This resulted in a number of publications including “California’s Immigrant Households and Public Assistance in the 1990s.” Still, the problem was that due to to the complexity of the research project it was not completed in time for its finding to be useful in policy making it was originally funded to support (Of course, the research remained useful for subsequent partisan debate about immigrants contributions to the U.S. economy vs. the benefits some immigrants receive from federal and state programs).
This experience also taught me yet another lesson varified by other policy research I was invlvoed in at SRC/UC DATA. Public policy research, including health policy research, often lags the legislative process. A key reason is that the legislative process routinely includes an implementation research budget item to access the outcome of policy. Grant making institutions either set up by states or are non-profits who get their money from states require progress reports from the policy researchers funded, the news of potential findings is shared with the legislature well before research is complete and its results published. I noticed the same pattern in most research efforts I was part of including the large grant Henry Brady received to study immigrants in California, a multi-year research program that used Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), Surveys of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and for native and immigrant families and their participation in major public-assistance programs, and changes in these characteristics and participation over time. The major public-assistance programs we considered were Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)/California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs), Food Stamps, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Medi-Cal. It was a large scale study done in part at the California Census Research Data Center (CCRDC) which at the time was managed by Richard Milby (They were two centers, one at Berkeley and another at UCLA—the Berkley site closed soon after I left SRC/UC DATA). This resulted in a number of publications including “California’s Immigrant Households and Public Assistance in the 1990s.” Still, the problem was that due to to the complexity of the research project it was not completed in time for its finding to be useful in policy making it was originally funded to support (Of course, the research remained useful for subsequent partisan debate about immigrants contributions to the U.S. economy vs. the benefits some immigrants receive from federal and state programs).
Together with Jane Mauldon we also studied tracking and improving immunization of preschool children on welfare in California and assessing the impact of proposition 54 on health care policy research. When we wrote up the latter report, Henry Brady called me into his office worried about whether my socialist views had colored our findings. Proposition 54 would have banned the State, county, and local authorities from collecting information on race and ethnicity. It was initiated by the former University of California Regent, Ward Connerly, a Black conservative political activist who argued affirmative action was reverse discrimination. He helped getting Proposition 209 on ballot which passed with 54.6% of the vote in 1996. Proposition 209 prohibits state governmental institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, specifically in the areas of public employment, public contracting, and public education. A Republican professor Political Science, a colleague of Henry Brady, who was himself right of center Democrat, had complained to him about my leading role in that study. I assured Henry that our methodology was beyond doubt no-partisan. In fact, it was a very clever methodology. We simply asked each manager of public dataset collection effort how barring them to collect data on race and ethnicity might impact the policy usefulness of these data. The answer was unanimous: it would render these dataset much less useful or useless for their intended purpose.
This episode revealed how being an open socialist in the academia can undermine one’s career. Nevertheless, I was an open socialist in my academic jobs and pressed on regardless.
Cuba research
In 2002, I won a small grant from Social Science Research Council to invite Nicholas Garriga Mendez and Caridad Lleana Escalona of Instituto de Información Cientifica y Tecnológica (IDICT) in Havana, to visit SRC/UC DATA and UC Berkeley for a week of lectures, meetings, and site visits. The visit included a lecture by Garriga Mendez, IDICT’s director at SRC/UC DATA that was well attended and attracted other technologists from elsewhere on campus. Garriga Mendez delivered an excellent lecture about what they were doing in the field of information in Cuba despite the U.S. embargo. Nicholas Garriga Mendez and Caridad Lleana Escalona site visited the Department of Computer Science and the information science section of the library among other points of interest. They also visited with with UC Berkeley professors, researchers, and technologists.
In 2003, I was awarded another small grant to conduct a workshop in Havana for the IDICT personnel from across Cuba. I asked Ilona EIona Einowski and Jon Stiles to go with me. They were electrified! They presented a workshop on digital libraries and I and Jon Stiles presented a worksop on “Uses of Administrative Date for Research.”
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| A group photograph at the end of the two-day workshop workshop for IDICT in Havana. The project was funded by the Social Science Research Council. November 2033, Photo: Kamran Nayeri. |
I also continued my annul academic and research visits to Cuba the last of which was in May 2006 to participate in the Third International Conference on the Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century in Havana where I presented two papers (one co-authored with Alireza Nassab).
In 2006, with Professor of Sociology Laura Enriquez and a half dozen others at UC Berkeley, we established the Cuba Working Group which continued functioning for half-doze years. In the same year, I was part of an initial group of UC Faculty and staff organized by Professor Raul Fernandez of UC Irvine who established University of California/Cuban Academic Initiative which organized Cuba scholars at eight UC campuses to work collaboratively and soon began to offer 10 annual scholarship to UC graduate students who wanted to do research in Cuba. Although, the organization has shrunk in its size and effort due to faculty and staff retirement, it is still providing annual scholarship to students, thanks in to Raul Fernandez. Although I have not traveled to Cuba since 2006 and retired form UC in April 2009, I am still been honored as a scholar and part of the UC/Cuba Academic Initiative.
Oral history of workers council leaders in the 1979 Iranian revolution
In 2002, I had the good fortune of meeting Professor Candida Smith who was the director of Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at UC Berkeley. Professor Candida Smith, who is a prominent oral historian in the United States and specializes in oral history of abstract painters in California, welcomed my idea of a large-scale oral history project of the former leaders of the workers council movement in the 1979 Iranian revolutione with great generosity of spirit. There is no authoritative history of the 1979 revolution from a working class perspective. A number of Iranian labor activists in recent years had published their memoir, granted interviews about their lives, or lectured about their experiences. Sometimes, these sources were called “oral history.” There was a dire need for a systematic and methodologically sound collection of oral histories from these aging men (I know of no woman labor leaders even though some industries like textiles and electronics had a predominantly female workforce). The idea was generated in my conversations with my friend Yadullah Khosroshai who was a central leader of the oil workers shoras.
The American Oral History Association was founded in 1969. Determination of sources (persons who were involved in the historical event of interest), recording, transcribing and interviewing techniques all followed a particular and increasingly well-defined methodology. Analysis of the raw event histories is the work of specialized historians. In other words, raw event histories (what is related by the interviewee) is not history itself. It is history as seen from one particular participant’s view. It is necessary to “listen” to what is related and what is not, to silences as well as words of the interviewee to penetrate deeper into the event in question. Oral history is a methodology most suitable for social groups in lower social hierarchy with little resources. Social classes that enjoy power and/or are economically dominant have ample access to historians some of whom make their career writing about them. But the lower echelons of society have little opportunity to leave their mark on historical writing.
Professor Candida Smith and I agreed to jointly pursue funding for the project. In the summer of 2002, I participated in the Oral History Institute that was taught by him. In the fall of the same year, with help from Professor Candida Smith and Yadullah, I drafted a 40-page proposal for funding for the prestigious the National Endowment for the Humanities (NIH). The proposal was to interview 30 former workers shora leaders who Yadullah had helped me to identify. During the summer, Professor Asef Bayat, whose research on the shora movement remains to this date the most comprehensive and authoritative, was in Berkeley. He graciously agreed to join us in this research. Thus, we had assembled an impressive research team. The UC Berkeley Office of Research approved a $50,000 commitment to the project if it were funded by the NIH.
Although the NEH review committee rated our proposal “excellent” it did not fund it. They cited two issues for this decision. First, they took the position that the ROHO’s cost per each interview was high. Second, one reviewer took the position that having no interviews with workers in Iran is a defect.
Next year, we resubmitted the proposal to the NEH. We increased the number of interviews from 30 to 40 persons with ten interviews inside Iran. ROHO also agreed to conduct the additional ten interviews at no costs, thereby addressing the concern that they charged higher than average costs for each interview. To improve the chance of getting funding from the NEH, I asked Yadullah to see if we can get some funding no matter how symbolic from the international trade unions that worked with the International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran. Yadullah agreed to talk to Mehdi Kohestani Nejad who was at that time the spokesperson for IASWI and held an official position in the University of Toronto’s employees union. Also, I approached Professor Touraj Atabaki of the International Institute of Social History for supplementary funding. With his help I discussed the matter with Professor Marcel van der Linden the Research Director at IISH. While the IISH could not offer any supporting funding, Professor van der Linden wrote a letter of support for the project and offered to include oral histories obtained from this project to be housed at the IISH. After several weeks, Yadullah told me that there was no hope of getting even a token financial support from the international unions. This time around, the NEH panel ranked our proposal “excellent” except for one reviewer who ranked it “very good” arguing this time that interviewing sources in Iran is not a good idea because there can be no guarantee that they can speak freely! It became clear that some in the NEH is not going to let this project get funded. Thus one Yadullah’s and my own key wishes remained unfulfilled.
Center for Health Research
In 2002, Professor Steven Shortell, Dean of the School of Public Health, invited me and a handful of other health researchers to establish the Center for Health Research to facilitate exchange of information across the campus as well as collaboration. I was included because of my health policy research and to represent SRC/UC DATA. I was part of its Coordinating Committee until I left UC Berkeley for the University of California Office of the President in November 2006.
The Institute for Food and Development Policy
In my last year at SRC/UC DATA, Karl Beitel of The Institute for Food and Development Policy (better known as Food First), visited me at my office to discuss becoming a Fellow, a volunteer three-year consulting position. Food First has been home socialist and activist minded people with an interest in Cuban revolution, especially Cuban agriculture. Some the invitation was tempting even though I was in an professionally unstable position at the time. I accepted. This resulted in a year-long occasional brainstorming meetings with Karl who had a research appointment at Food First to chart a research agenda for the organization. However, as it turned out Food First was itself in a leadership crisis itself. After I left for UCOP, Karl also left his job and no one replaced him for a while. My fellowship role did not go anywhere as the result.
Among those who I remember for their kindness from UC Berkeley
Of course, I am indebted to Jane Maudon who reached out to me when I needed a faculty member who would invest her trust in me. It turned out the our professional collaboration was fruitful and mutually rewarding. Jane and I also became friends, I visited her home and met her wife Randy, We went for coffee breaks to talk about our projects but also about our lives. Unfortunately for me, Jane’s personal life changed in ways that made it very difficult for her to manage her professorial job and our collaboration suffered as a result, so did our personal ties which were at any rate secondary to our professional work.
I am also grateful to my graduate research assistants (GSRs), in particular, Carlos Dobkin, Jeff Weinstein, and Sungman Cho, all economics doctoral students. I have already written about Carlos who was by far the most capable and enthusiastic GSR I had the good fortune to know and work with. Jeff Weinstein was notable because he was unlike most economics students. He had like to dance and spent a fair amount of time in his personal life. But he was also very smart and technically capable. He was a rare researcher who knew the importance of documenting his every step. He helped me documenting projects I had completed with other research assistant who did not document properly.
Sungman Cho was a South Korean economics doctoral student in search of a dissertation topic in econometrics. He thought the vast databases at UC DATA could provide him with materials for writing a couple of publishable econometrics papers that would be accepted as his dissertation. Being a South Korean, he was very polite and socially shy. We had shared interest in jazz and politics as he was critical of capitalism. We went for coffee breaks and invited to my house when I had small dinner parties once or twice. We also worked well together on dataset development and research as Sungman preferred to work at night and I came to work promptly at 8 every day. So, I would take up where he left and he picked up where I left our join work when he came to work at night.
Over the years, he worked with me off and on for a couple of years, I got a feeling that his advisor was not really proactive. I urged him to talk to Henry Brady as was both an econometrician and very familiar with the datasets Sungman was interested in. But Sungman could not approach Henry as Henry was always very busy and Sungman very shy. I think towards the end Henry introduced Sungman to a young economics professor who had just started to work at UC DATA who specialized in econometrics. But nothing came of it. Sungman eventually became demoralized and returned to South Korea without completing his doctoral work.
Another good friend at work was Tom Piazza, a sampling specialist statistician at the Survey Center. Born from a Fin mother and Italian father, Tom was initially interested in theology and wanted to become a Catholic monk. But he eventually settled in with being a statistician. Tom loved to travel and spent a couple of months a year traveling each year. Aside for professional conferences, he also visited Italy and Finland to keep up with family. Of all my SRC/UC DATA friends, I still maintain a friendship with Tom and his wife Mary.
I truly enjoyed UC Berkeley campus. I took a year-long course in statistics. I was a fellow at the Oral History Office and part of the campus wide coordinators of Health Research Center. With Professor Laura Enriquez, I helped establish and lead the Cuba Working Group. I loved the library and spent a lot of time researching topics of interest to me that over the years. The campus itself is a great place. I visited Strada Cafe and Cafe Mediterraneum each week day for my coffee break. I also spent time in Cody’s Books and Moe’s Bookstore.
Mooshi
The most precious gift of my years at SRC/UC DATA was Mooshi, a feral cat that lived under the Anna Head Buildings. My office was located in at Anna Head Alumnae Hall building. It is no exaggeration that Mooshi became my best friend, the one I loved most, and I longed to see ever since we met.
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| Mooshi (~2000-Nov. 13, 2016) |
I ran into Mooshi in the parking lot next to SRC/UC DATA one afternoon in 2003 as I was going for my coffee break and fell in love with her on the spot! I began to provide her with water and food daily and gradually we bonded. For the next three years, I served Mooshi each and everyday which meant that went to work everyday including during holidays! Of course, I stayed for a shorter time on the “off” days. But I still did go and did work some while Mooshi ate her food and hanged around. Everyday when I entered my car to drive home, I could see Mooshi sitting atop the balcony of the Alumnae Hall building (SRC/UC DATA offices) watching cars leaving the parking lot. I always asked her: “Mooshi, do you want to go home with me?” I am certain that some of the folks especially in the higher ups did not approve of me leaving my office to go out to see Mooshi and spend time with her. But that never stopped me.
About six month before I left SRC/UC DATA, I plotted with others to trap Mooshi and take her home with me. I could not leave her to fend off for herself. Finally, after three months of false starts I placed a raccoon trap in a quiet corner of the backyard close to some of the holes Mooshi used to get under the building. I did not feed Mooshi for days while leaving tuna fish in a dish inside the trap. Finally, one afternoon about 3 p.m. about a week later Mooshi walked into the trap. I immediately took her to a veterinarian office to have her examined. Luckily, they found her in good health except for some teeth that were damaged. They had to pull them. When I took Mooshi home she was still drugged. I prepared the master bathroom for her. She stayed there for a couple of weeks.
The transition for Mooshi was most difficult, especially since Nuppy, the very aggressive male cat who attacked all cats was in the house. But after about four months I let Mooshi outside. She went hiding under the neighbor’s house as was her habit. But after a few hours she emerged and allowed me to take her back into the house. From then on she learned to leave the house and come back in on her own. She moved with me to Sebastopol in 2011. I lost her on November 13, 2016.
University of California Office of the President
(November 2006-April 2009)
I was able to come up with research proposals that were awarded each and every year and used my PI status to collaborate with other researchers including some non-UC individuals and organizations. However, my large bet to get a quarter of a million dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to collect, analyze, and publish oral histories of the leaders of the workers council movement in the 1979 Iranian revolution was unsuccessful after two consecutive attempts. I had no grant money to sustain my salary beyond 2005. Henry Brady who as a director had discretionary funds for such situations never offered to provide me with a salary until the next opportunity to write a winning research proposal.
As I was never committed to an academic life and my central purpose in life since I was 21 years of age has been radical social change, my goal was to work enough years to reach a minimum of ten years service at the University of California to become eligible for its comparatively generous pension and health care benefits in retirement. I found no employment possibilities at UC Berkeley. But by October 2006, I was interviewed for a job at the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) in the Academic Planning and Budget division and was offered a job as senior graduate program analyst, a data-driven analyst position. UCOP’s headquarters is at 1111 Franklin Street in downtown Oakland. My office was on the 11th floor. In comparison to UC Berkeley’s informality, this was a business-like headquarters. While the job offered a higher salary than my SRC/UC DATA job it was certainly several steps down! I reported to Ami Zusman, who had a doctoral degree in education. The division was small, headed by Carol Copperud, who had a bachelor’s degree in history. As I quickly learned, UCOP was a bureaucracy where institutional knowledge and professsional and personal connections mattered most. Carol began working at the UC in 1975 which worked well in her favor. The other senior member of the division was Anne Machung, who held a doctorate in sociology.
Both Ami and Anne were on my interview committee as was James (Jim) Litrownik from Academic Personnel division. Jim had a master’s degree in educational psychology fro UC Berkeley and was a well-respected data analyst who managed all his data work in spreadsheets.
For the first time in my academic life, I was given a cubicle across from Ami Zusman’s office. Ami appeared as a graceful, cultured woman. She had a beautiful ornamental fig tree in her office which she gave me a cutting of towards the end of my stay at UCOP. My central task was to analyze how the many graduate and professional programs across the ten UC campuses were doing compared to their own past as well as to each other and to compared to four public and four private universities of the same standing in the country. The key outcome variable was average years to degree completition which made the analysis retrospective. Because doctoral programs often took many years to complete (10 years or so), the result of the analysis informed about policies in place a decade or so ago, not a terribly useful information. Still, the deans found the analysis of some values and I provided it for tenure attending annual deans meetings preseting the report and data. I began work in November 2006 and was laid off in April 2009.
My lay off was part of a massive wave of layoff at the depth of the Great Recession that began in 2008. About two-third of the UCOP 1,500 employees were laid off. While the Great Recession was certainly influential in the timing and wholesale layoff of employees, it was part of the strategy of the Board of Regents which was heavily stacked up with neoliberal members. When I arrived at UCOP, Robert C. Dynes was the President and Rory Hume was the Provost and their mantra was “10-campuses, one university.” This view gave UCOP a central role in orchestrating coordination of cooperation not competition among UC campuses each headed by a chancellor.
However, the Board of Regents was not convinced. So, by 2008 both President Dyne and Provost Hume left and Mark G. Yudof, a former Chancellor of the University of Texas System, was hired with a hefty salary of $800,000 with the mission to radically shrink the UCOP in accordance with plans drafted by a private consulting firm that the Board of Regents had hired during the President Dynes's tenure!
The bureaucratic mind set
The henchman for President Yudof’s layoff mission was Dan Greenstein, a former professor of history, with a personality of a tast talking businessman. When President Dynes and Provost Hume left and Yudof and his staff arrived, rumors circled at UCOP that layoffs are in the works.
When I arrived at UCOP one of my early tasks was to get to know the culture of UCOP. When I attended my Academic Planning and Budget meetings, everyone was talking about how great the idea of “10-campuses, one university" was. However, soon after the Yudof team arrived, the Dynes mantra was gone and nobody ever defended the idea! A feeling of hidden disgust by some (whispered in private), fear, and in some cases, cozying up to the Yudof crew became prevalent.
Ami Zusman was among those who really favored the One University vision and offered a bit of questioning of the about-face change in the direction of the UCOP leadership. Carol Copperud who had survived a number of similar abrupt shifts in the past, tried to accommodate the new leadership, in particular by brownnosing Greenstein who attended some of our division’s meeting. Anne Machung who in my early months at work went to lunch with me a few times and had confided in me that she felt isolated at the division, was discovered as a talent by Greenstein.
Soon, Greenstein took over from Coppreud the leadership of the division. Within a brief period, notices of layoff were given to most of us. I was the first, something I really appreciated. By the time it happened, I had 11 years of service with UC and more than ready to retire at age 59! (I had plans to retire at age 60, but a year earlier was even better as it turned out).
In preparation for my departure, I documented everything I had done and wrote clear instructions on how to generate annual reports based on analysis of graduate and professional programs across the entire system. I shared these with Zusman for her review and suggestions. She offered a fair number of edits which she wrote by hand on the printed documents. When I revised the documents to include her edits and comments and returned the “final” to her, to my surprise she angrily gave me another handwritten list of “corrections.” When I compared her new comments and the old, to my surprise I found that she has reversed some of her own earlier comments that I had dutifully included. I showed this to Jim Litrownik who was also amused at why Zusman is behaving so irrationally. It did not take more than a few days to find out that she too was given notice of lay off. Coppreud was also laid off within a week after Zusman. The only senior member who remained was Anne Machung.
In preparation for my departure, I documented everything I had done and wrote clear instructions on how to generate annual reports based on analysis of graduate and professional programs across the entire system. I shared these with Zusman for her review and suggestions. She offered a fair number of edits which she wrote by hand on the printed documents. When I revised the documents to include her edits and comments and returned the “final” to her, to my surprise she angrily gave me another handwritten list of “corrections.” When I compared her new comments and the old, to my surprise I found that she has reversed some of her own earlier comments that I had dutifully included. I showed this to Jim Litrownik who was also amused at why Zusman is behaving so irrationally. It did not take more than a few days to find out that she too was given notice of lay off. Coppreud was also laid off within a week after Zusman. The only senior member who remained was Anne Machung.
Jim and Mona Litrownik
I did have a number of coffee and lunch friends at UCOP. But Jim and Mona Litrownik were friends I found at UCOP with whom I socialized until 2014. As I noted earlier, Jim was on my interview committee. When I accepted the job offer and began work I learned that Jim is probably the most informed person about what I was going to be doing for the division. Also, I found out that there was a waiting list for the UCOP garage and I had to park my Honda Accord in private parking lots in Chinatown in downtown Oakland. When Jim found out, he kindly offered me I ride to work with them. Mona, who was a lawyer, also worked for UCOP but in its Kaiser Center offices at 3000 Lakeside Drive near Lake Merritt. Their house was also in Montclair, about five minutes downhill from my house on 6155 Chelton Drive. Gladly, I accepted Jim’s kind offer. Every morning I drove down the hill, parked my car in the street, and waited a block away from their house which was at the end of in a cul-de-sac. From there to UCOP was a 15-20 minutes drive. Jim drove their white Volvo with Mona in front and I in the back seat. Mona’s office was on our way so she got off first and I then moved into the front seat. This went on for about six weeks until a parking spot was opened for me at UCOP garage. To thank them for the ride (I had offered to pay for gas but they refused), I took the family to the Iranian restaurant in Berkeley. (Their son who lived in L.A., of course, could not come but their daughter did).
We became good friend and because we were neighbors we socialized frequently as Mary and I invited them to dinners. Eventually invited us for dinner to their house. Both Jim and I liked to cook. When I asked Simin, my freind since 1999 and my yoga teacher, to teach her class at our Montclair house, Jim and Mona soon joined us. It became a Sunday ritual, sometimes, they stayed for breakfast after yoga!
Jim and I became really good friends. Our jobs required similar skills and we used similar datasets. We consulted each other. Jim was from a liberal Los Angeles Jewish home and often talked to me about the “communists” who were their friends. Mona was from a Korean family and the only child in her large family to finish college and keeping a university job.
Jim and I became really good friends. Our jobs required similar skills and we used similar datasets. We consulted each other. Jim was from a liberal Los Angeles Jewish home and often talked to me about the “communists” who were their friends. Mona was from a Korean family and the only child in her large family to finish college and keeping a university job.
Neither Jim or Mona were laid off. But by 2011, they both retired after 65 years of combined service at University of California. That happened to be the same year I moved with Mooshi to Sebastopol on August 20, 2011. Jim came over twice to help me set up including my newly purchased glass topped L-shaped large desk.
It turned out that Jim and Mona did not have a plan for their retirement. Soon, Jim went back to working as a consultant as a data analyst for a friend who lived in Texas. We still met occasionally.
On 8 July 2014, Israel started a new war against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, known as the largest open-air prison in the world because of Israeli encirclement and sanctions. By August 27, Israeli forces had killed more than 2,100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. According to the United Nations, the vast majority were civilian, 504 of them children. 17,200 homes were destroyed as well as 244 schools, and 475,000 were forced to live in an emergency shelter or with relatives. The Gaza Strip is only 4,505 square kilometers but is home to 1.8 million Palestinians. In contrast, only 66 Israeli soldiers and seven civilians were killed by Hamas forces in this war unilateral war (Gaza has no air force or even a air defense system to protect it from the formidable Israeli air force). In a just world, Israeli actions in Gaza Strip would have been condemned and prosecuted as war crimes. No action against Israel has ever been taken. If fact the U.S. government resupplied Israeli air force during the Gaza campaign. In a short essay I named “Frankenstein in the Promised Land,” (August 1, 2014) I recounted these facts and condemned Israel and Zionism as a colonial-settler ideology.
Soon after I published the essay and sent my occasional “letter to friends” to my list of readers of Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism, which included Jim, I got an email from Mona which forwarded a few lines from an email Jim had sent to her denouncing me. There was no explanation for his rage. But he was definitely offended by my essay strongly condemning the Zionist State’s war against a largely unarmed ordinary Palestinians. That was a shocking surprise to me. I had no idea Jim was a Zionist. How else would he be ouraged by my short essay? Earlier that summer, I had received a protest email from a Jewish American woman who lived in Costa Rica. She had befriened me when I was in Costa Rica the previous year and introduced herself as a socialist asking me for information about visiting Cuba! She too was outraged by my criticism of Israel and Zionism! In the years that followed, I found out that the Socialist Workers Party that historically had supported the right of self-determination for Palestinian and opposed Zionism and was now supporting it as did a group of Jewish members and supporters some of who were my friends when I lived in New York. A retreat to the right was taking place among liberals (like Jim) and socialists (like the woman in Costa Rica and the SWP and its supporters). As for Jim, he loved his father very much. He did tell me that his father favored Israel as a “safe heaven” for Jews after the holocaust. But Jim was a good liberal who denounced all forms of oppression and exploitation, including the South African apartheid, the American Jim Crow laws, and Southern slavery and genocide of Native Americans. Further, my views on Israel was known to him. I had a bumper sticker on the back of my Honda Accord that read: “Free Palestine!” It meant all of Palestine! Jim never talked to me about the sticker or question the idea of Palestinian self-determination.
Thus, ended my friendship with Jim who I really liked. Mona was really never a close friend of mine.
Thus, ended my friendship with Jim who I really liked. Mona was really never a close friend of mine.
The long road to freedom
April 15, 2009 was my official last day of working for money. Unlike the bulk of those at UCOP who had nothing other than their job to look forward to, I had always seen my job as means to an end: to enable me to work for radical social change, for socialism. As I was preparing to be laid off, I began Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. The initial idea for the blog was to have an online “journal” in which I kept my own study of ecological socialism and related issues. As of this writing 11 years later, it has had more than 1,230,000 hits.
Reflecting on my working life
A central idea in Karl Marx’s theory of socialism is free (leisure) time. In all class societies since the dawn of civilization, the bulk of humanity, the working people, have toiled to provide an economic surplus that supports the leisure time for the ruling classes and their entourage who develop their own culture. In the capitalist society, the bourgeois culture is a key means of domination over the working people. In Marx’s theory of transition to socialism, a gradual increase in free time for working people for “free development, intellectual and social” is a key marker of progress (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p 667, Vintage edition, 1977).
In my working life in the United States from 1977-2009, I was fortunate to have worked in jobs that provided me with the flexibility to develop intellectually, socially, and politically, while earning a living. In the 17 years I worked at the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community, I had the opportunity to devote much of my attention and energy to the building socialist organizations in Iran and the United States, and to attend graduate school which enabled me to study Marx’s critique of political economy, economic history, and theories and experiences of capitalist development and industrialization, among other things.
My work made it easier for me to undertake a deeper study of the Cuban revolution, something I continued after I took a job at the University of California, Berkeley (1998-2006). I visited Cuba ten times in twelve years. These almost annual visits made it possible for me to develop friendships, and professional and political connections with Cubans. Over time, I was able to get beyond what the average visitor to Cuba observes in one or two visits.
I also developed skills in research design, data collection, and analysis with a focus of epidemiological problems and policy analysis hence I became a bit of epidemiologist and policy analyst by simply by self-study, learning by doing and from others. I also taught myself political economy of health care which I then used to teach and to conduct research.
Most important of all, I was able to spend three and half years participating in the Iranian revolution of 1979. Although, to do so I gave up my job at Health Science Center at Brooklyn, when I returned to New York and revisited the Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health, I was effortlessly reintegrated as if I had gone on an extended leave of absence for three and half year!
The experience of attending the graduate school was also highly rewarding for me. Not only it offered me a chance to study topics I wanted to study in depth, I also benefit from teachings of highly qualified scholars among them Ross Thomson, Anwar Shaikh, and Eric Hobsbawm. The writing of the dissertation taught me much more than developing and executing a large-scale scholarly and intellectual project. It made me a better thinker for the rest of my life. The mind is a formidable tool but it needs sharpening and discipline to be most effective. Writing the dissertation really helped me sharpen my mind and taught me intellectual discipline which I have put to use ever since.
In the eight years I was at SRC/UC DATA at UC Berkeley, my work provided me with free time to collaborate with the former leaders of the Iranian labor movement in exile and with the Iranian socialist journal Negah to which I contibuted many articles on the Cuban revolution, socialism, and the unfolding capitalist crisis. I also collaborated with labor and socialist journals that emerge in Iran when repression eased off from such as with Kar Mozd (Wages) and Andishe Jamehe (Social Thought). I continued in the same vein at UCOP.
What is more, I lived my working life as on openly socialist perosn. And I integrated my socialist theory not only in my life outside of my jon such as working in socialist organizations, but also at work in my teaching and research whenever that was possible. That is how I structured my seminars at the medical school, my annual lectures for the second year medical students, in my assessment of health care reform debate after 1992, and in my Cuba work that endured until I retired in 2006. Of course, my openly social presense in academia might have worked againt me. Did it play any role in Dr. Imperato's decision to lay me off or Dr. Brady to deny my financial support until the next winning research proposal I could have written? I do not know. But Dr. Imperato was a Republican and Dr. Brady a right of center Democrat. Dr. Imperato liked me professionally as he asked me to review for the two journals he edited, Journal of Community Health and New York State Journal of Medicine. But he also might have felt uncomfortable with an open socialist in his department's faculty. Being socialist turned into a positive quality when I taught a course in artifical intelligence in Tehran, Iran, in spring-summer of 1979. My students who were all leftists liked me very much. Most in the school administration were pro-revolution. Of course, these all change in just a year when the Islamic Cultural Revolution began to expell all non-Islamic student, faculty and staff and remake the university according to the Islamic Republic interests.
What is more, I lived my working life as on openly socialist perosn. And I integrated my socialist theory not only in my life outside of my jon such as working in socialist organizations, but also at work in my teaching and research whenever that was possible. That is how I structured my seminars at the medical school, my annual lectures for the second year medical students, in my assessment of health care reform debate after 1992, and in my Cuba work that endured until I retired in 2006. Of course, my openly social presense in academia might have worked againt me. Did it play any role in Dr. Imperato's decision to lay me off or Dr. Brady to deny my financial support until the next winning research proposal I could have written? I do not know. But Dr. Imperato was a Republican and Dr. Brady a right of center Democrat. Dr. Imperato liked me professionally as he asked me to review for the two journals he edited, Journal of Community Health and New York State Journal of Medicine. But he also might have felt uncomfortable with an open socialist in his department's faculty. Being socialist turned into a positive quality when I taught a course in artifical intelligence in Tehran, Iran, in spring-summer of 1979. My students who were all leftists liked me very much. Most in the school administration were pro-revolution. Of course, these all change in just a year when the Islamic Cultural Revolution began to expell all non-Islamic student, faculty and staff and remake the university according to the Islamic Republic interests.
* * *
Let me conclude by returning to Marx’s and Engels’ maxims quoted at the beginning of this essay. While particular jobs I held throughout 40 years of my working life impacted my immediate sense of self and my daily decisions, what matters more from the perspective of the theory of history is social classes and thei inevitable conflict. I owe my life-changing radicalization upon my arrival in the United States to exactly this kind of infuence. I am a product of the youth radicalization of the 1960s and early 1970s which itself was influenced by the freedom movement of Afro-Americans, the new wave of feminism, the Chicano movement, and, of course, the anti-war and the counter-culture movements. Although the U.S. labor movement itself remaind largely conservative, some important sections of it, as included in the Black Liberation movement and the Chicano movement, including the farm workers movement, impacted the larger society.
Of course, I was also radicalized by contrasting the political situation in Iran, where nobody spoke critically against the Shah's dictatorship in public and the outspokeness of the American youth who I had just joined as a young man.
Still, after I began working in professional jobs, I found a definite sense of class ambiguity. The bulk of those I knew thought of themselves as middle class. Thus, it was no surprise that many of my colleagues were liberal and centrist Democrats and generally supporting the U.S. government at least through their political silences.
Of course, I was also radicalized by contrasting the political situation in Iran, where nobody spoke critically against the Shah's dictatorship in public and the outspokeness of the American youth who I had just joined as a young man.
Still, after I began working in professional jobs, I found a definite sense of class ambiguity. The bulk of those I knew thought of themselves as middle class. Thus, it was no surprise that many of my colleagues were liberal and centrist Democrats and generally supporting the U.S. government at least through their political silences.
Let’s not forget that these decades were still decades of opportunities for some Americans. I have noted above that at least half dozen of my colleagues went to graduate or professional schools and received a doctorate or a law degrees. In the Socialist Workers Party in New York there were a couple of medical doctors, lawyers, and scientists. Two members were medical school students and became doctors.
At the same time, during the deep going 1979 Iranian revolution, white collar workers joined the revolution and some gave their lives in the process. The difference here was the massive participation of the Iranian working class and working people in the revolution which helped radicalize the middle classes.
The more relevant maxim I quoted from Marx and Engels is that “circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.”
There are two ways this proved to be the case for me in my working life as well as in my life more generally. Undoubtedly, becoming a lifelong socialist in 1971 decide my approach to life and work. Unlike my friends in college who did not radicalize and went on to pursue professional careers as I noted, I decided that I have no particular ambitions to pursue a professions (although I dearly wanted to become a physicist). Another defining event in my life was to fall in love with Mary in 1970 and she in turn falling in love with me. This made for my decision to study mathematics and computer science. As I have recounted the bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics became the mean for me to earn my bread and butter. I also entered the academic life, as it turned out for the duration of my working life, simply because I was really in need of some income to pay off my debt in 1977 and happened to notice a small advertisement in The New York Times.
If I were not laid off and therefore denied a promotion to Associate Professorship and a raise, I would have remained in New York and who knows how my life would have been different? For one thing, moving to California resulted in working at UC Berkeley (again after accidentally finding a small print newspaper advertisement for a job) a much more interesting place than the medical school in Brooklyn. Moreover, moving to California allowed me to step closer to less degraded nature. Together with meeting Nuppy (Mary’s cat who bonded with me and made me realize that cats are people too) and reading Daniel Quinn’s Ismael, I began my transition from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism which has made my view of ecological socialism radically different from the others.
Of course, my own headstrong personality helped along the way.
Thus, Marx and Engels proved right but only on the very large scale of social and cultural factors affecting individual lives. On the more concrete levels for an individual circumstances and personalities matter more.
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