University of Florida 03

Bill McGuire, an improper Bostonian if ever I met one, was one of the most interesting grad students in the Geography Department. A leftist like me, he had a ribald sense of humor and was always involved on our outrageous practical jokes, like the one with the slides. Although we were the same age, he was prematurely gray and as a result was always being mistaken for a professor. Naturally, having quite an eye for the fairer sex, he took great advantage of that mistaken identity with attractive coeds. He also was the most disorganized student I have ever met. Not one of his research papers was turned in on time. Luckily, he was seldom penalized for that tardiness since his reputation for being a brilliant analyst was known by the department’s professors.

Late one summer, three or four weeks before the end of the summer session, several of us were having a couple beers at Bill’s apartment when I asked why he looked so glum, a big change since he always had an easy smile on his face and a laugh in his voice. He admitted that he wouldn’t be graduating with a Master’s at semester’s end and therefore wouldn’t be able tostart working on the doctorate in the fall.

We were stunned. When someone asked why he showed us a bill from the University Library for books he had checked out as long as two years ago and never returned. Even if he returned them immediately the fines added to slightly more than $275 because several of the fines had been converted into the book’s purchase price since the librarian had determined they had been lost. Which was way more money than our always impecunious friend had in the bank. If he didn’t pay the total amount within the next two weeks he couldn’t graduate. He had told the Head Librarian that he had returned the books but the guy gave him the fish eye and didn’t buy a word of it.

I thought about it for a few minutes and came up with a suggestion. Each of us would take back four or five books every time we went into the Library and put them back on the shelves instead of returning them to the front desk until they were all back in the stacks, something we could do that Saturday and Sunday if we were well-organized. Then, on Monday morning we could start checking them out, two or three at a time. All the grad students would be involved so it wouldn’t look like it was only one or two of us.

Bill didn’t think it would work but we agreed to give it a try. We attacked the problem with gusto. All the overdue books were back in the stacks by Sunday evening. We started checking them out at 8:30 Monday morning. What happened was that when we would try checking them out at the front desk, the librarian on duty would discover the books were already checked out and would ask where we found them. On the shelves, we would reply innocently. The books would then be duly checked back in and then checked out in our names. It took us five full days to run them all through the system. Two weeks later Bill received a revised invoice from the Library totaling less than $7.00 He paid the fine and graduated on time, thanking all of us profusely. Sometimes scams are for the good. The library got its books back and Bill graduated on time.

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Preliminary exams for grad students in the Geography doctoral program were scheduled sometime in early spring 1970. Several weeks before taking the exam while on a short break from studying in one of the libraries I read a short article in the New York Times about a PhD mathematics student at Penn State University who had failed his initial prelim exam. The student was a foreign national from some unremembered country, perhaps Middle Eastern or Asian. The article was on the stress of either passing the exam or being booted unceremoniously out of academe.

It caught my attention for obvious reasons. The article detailed the efforts of the grad student to prepare for the second prelim exam (at Penn State and many other universities you had two chances to pass). When he failed the second exam the chairman of the math department told him right there he was dis-enrolled from the grad program and was no longer a grad student at the University. Apparently, it was too much for the student. He went back to his apartment, got a pistol he had purchased earlier, and returned to the University where he shot the department chairman and his advisor to death and then killed himself.

After thinking about that awful situation I began to see other possibilities and Xeroxed the article. About 1:30 that night, after my wife was asleep, I snuck from our married student housing unit and bicycled through a heavy fog that I couldn’t have planned for to Bryan Hall, where our department was located. Checking carefully to make sure no one was around, I tacked the cut-out article to the official departmental bulletin board outside the chairman’s office. And ghosted away through the fog. I saw no one coming or going.

Of course, the shit hit the fan the next morning. Several profs were extremely upset and informed the chairman the act of putting the article on the board was a direct threat to their safety. An official hunt for the guilty by campus police was hotly debated at an emergency faculty meeting. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and the furor gradually died away. Several fellow grad students suspiciously asked me if I knew anything about the incident but I was convincingly innocent, telling them I had been up all night with our 20-month-old son, who had been sick for the last couple days, a fact I had previously told them about.

Nothing more was said. Until this day I have kept my mouth shut. My original assessment is still the one I have today: the actions of the math grad student were horrific; my posting the article on the bulletin board was on the edge but fairly harmless. Actually, I had briefly considered adding a note to the article, As a Warning to You All, but had rejected that idea as far too incendiary. Yes, I have a twisted sense of humor. Sue me.