Santa Barbara

In 1983 I was an Assistant Professor without tenure-track. At the time I had no prospects of a permanent job. I possessed a J-1 (temporary) visa to the United States, half an office at the University of Massachusetts, a fairly short curriculum vitae, and an optimism born of desperation. I was in America and there was no going back to Europe: my life in Italy, living off my savings, had been cut short by earthquake, while in Britain I had a sheaf of 319 job applications and 319 rejection letters: "Dear Dr Alexander, ...thank you for applying ... we regret to inform you ... hope you find an alternative position, etc. etc." How dreary it all seemed! But now I had a humble apartment in North Amherst and a heavy teaching load to keep me busy. Like good Assistant Professors everywhere I never said 'no' to anything my superiors told me to do.
In the meantime I looked around for a job. I applied for every position that was advertised in the academic press, and that I felt remotely qualified to do. Thus I ended up being invited for interview at the University of California at Santa Barbara, for a tenure-track Assistant Professorship.
A former student of mine, who came from the Los Angeles area, offered to pick me up at LAX airport. But then the hassles started. On Saturday it snowed so abundantly that there was no going anywhere. Fortunately, there was enough of a thaw that on the Sunday I could drop down to Hartford International Airport (proudly called 'international' because it had one flight to Canada per day and one to Mexico per week) and catch a rescheduled flight to the West Coast. There was considerable confusion in the terminal but I ended up on the plane and in a seat, which is more than half the passengers managed. In the end, a stewardess came along and asked: "for a bonus of $150 who will get off and travel tomorrow?" There was a tense silence. She went away, consulted with someone, came back and asked "For a bonus of $200 who'll get off?" There was another tense silence, which was eventually broken by a passenger from the back, who said in a level tone: "five hundred dollars". After some negotiation the matter was sorted out. Some passengers got off, to the sound of applause from the rest of us, and we began the journey to California.
Much of the journey across the great heartland of America offers little that is worth seeing: agribusiness farmland, a few homesteads and the occasional small town. But after Denver there is the great crevice of the Grand Canyon, and eventually one flies down Death Valley, very dry, dusty, eerie and deserted, with no roads or buildings anywhere to be seen.
I arrived in the evening and my obliging student and I spent most of the night driving around Hollywood (so that I could put my foot in the shoe-prints of the stars on the Boulevard pavement), walking along the sands of the Pacific shore at Santa Monica and otherwise soaking up the laid-back West Coast atmosphere. It took much driving to get around Los Angeles--twenty suburbs in search of a city.
At six in the morning I went back to LAX to catch a flight to Santa Barbara. I travelled on Golden West Airlines flight 2028. How Golden West managed to have such a high flight number is a mystery, as I am convinced that they only had one aircraft, or at the most two. I sat in a small waiting room with four middle-aged ladies and eventually a man in uniform came in, shook our hands and introduced himself as the pilot. We carried our luggage onto the runway and he produced a key, opened the baggage hold of a small turbo-prop aircraft and put the bags in. We climbed aboard and the plane took off, roaring furiously.
It was an interesting flight. The aircraft was piloted by a diminutive blond girl who appeared to be under instruction. The four middle-aged ladies, who were all travelling together, became very excited at the sights of southern California. When one said "Wow! Look at that!", they all scrambled over to one side and the aircraft tilted precariously as the pilot shouted above the roar of the engine "Left hand down a bit!" to the girl who was flying us. Our altitude was quite low and in the early morning light it was a good opportunity to see how landslides were eating away at urban subdivisions and how these were eating away at the chaparral vegetation.
We landed and I reclaimed my luggage in a very few minutes. It was almost 9 a.m. and a colleague was waiting to pick me up. The University at Santa Barbara is five minutes' drive from the airport and that was the amount of time it took between arriving and having my first brush with the hyperactive, competitive, exploitative culture of Southern California. We cruised into the parking lot behind one of the lecture theatres and I was ushered through the door into a room filled with 175 undergraduate students. I knew I was expected to give a demonstration lecture and was prepared, though I was not exactly ready to start lecturing within ten minutes of getting off the plane. Nevertheless, it went sufficiently well and after 50 minutes I stopped and the students asked a few questions and then all trouped out. Several of them left pieces of paper on the seats, and idly I picked one up. It said: "This candidate is (a) excellent, (b) good, (c) mediocre, (d) bad, (e) terrible". I never did find out what my average score was.
The University of California at Santa Barbara is an odd institution in an odd city. Santa Barbara is somewhat isolated from the rest of southern and central California. It is the playground of the rich and has sky-high property prices, which effectively exclude the vast urban proletariats of Los Angeles further to the south, the blacks and hispanics of Watts and Sherman Oaks. In the 1980s its most famous resident was Ronald Reagan, and one could go and admire the heavily guarded entrance to his ranch. In the late 1700s the Spanish settlers of the original California had built a mission, an imposing, whitewashed stone building in the style of Mexican adobe. However, this was the only man-made structure in Santa Barbara that predated 1935. Surprisingly, the city had a thriving Historical Society, though one that was forced to concentrate on the previous half century, as that was all the history there was.
The University is situated, in effect, on the beach: it is a University of surfing, a place of perpetual sunshine, the Beach Boys, dolphins, palm trees, and all the impedimenta of Pacific Coast recreation. At least, that was what it looked like. The reality was somewhat different. To begin with, there was a seismically active fault with a surface expression that ran diagonally across the campus, and it was slowly pulling apart the corner of the building that contained the Geology Department, which at any time it could have demolished in a high magnitude tremor. Moreover, the University was a place of ferocious competition. Throughout my two-day visit I found that most of my possible future colleagues were too harassed and under pressure to devote time to chatting with me. This formed an odd contrast with the air of slow, credulous hedonism that California likes to cultivate.
I finished the first day of my two-day visit without particular difficulties and retired to motel on a freeway somewhere outside the city to spend the night. I woke early with the sun streaming through the blinds of my room and the telephone on the bedside table monotonously ringing. Two colleagues (an elderly gay couple who shared a post in the Environmental Science Department) were waiting in the lobby to continue the interview. It was barely 6 a.m.
On the second day I was hosted by the late David Simonett, an Australian geographer who was Dean of the Faculty of Science. He had the classic antipodean brashness--or straight-talking manner if you prefer. Yet somehow the British colonial connection worked and we got on quite well together. At lunchtime I gave a research seminar and completely misjudged my audience. I also went on too long--the classic mistake of the neophyte. Worse still, I was not aware that I had to give up the seminar room to the next class until a professor barged in wearing an expression of high indignation and practically shouldered me out of the room. Afterwards, Simonett turned to me and said "Well, you blew it then!" So with that abrupt valediction I knew I would never get the job, and I must admit I was considerably relieved. I suspect that when a situation is not right a self-protection mechanism causes us to screw things up, and that is certainly what happened in this case.
The West Coast was not for me and after flirting for a while with the highly prestigious Johns Hopkins University I ended up being taken onto the permanent staff of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a good, capacious public "multi-versity" and one that has produced its share of Nobel Prizewinners.
After the visit of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain to Santa Barbara the red carpet she alighted onto at the airport was cut into small squares and sold to the Santa Barbarans. How tacky can you get! One of the last things I saw before I left the city was a bar, situated directly outside the gates of the University and called "The English Department". It was started by a British man who was denied tenure in the English Department, and that was his poetic revenge.