Where There is a Will: 22. Back to Full Time Teaching: Settled Finally?
Good start:
After a few hours’ break at Seattle, we caught the next train to go from Seattle King Street Station to Portland Union Station. We were met by Dr. Cy Cook, Chairman of Civil Engineering At the University of Portland (UP) at the station. He took us to the UP where we were given temporary accommodation. Our car was waiting there having been delivered safely by the two voluntary drivers.
Seattle to Portland by Amtrak: 3hr 25 min about 175 miles
Next day Cy took us to see apartments in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland and helped us find one at 5th Street, which was good. It was a 3 bedroom apartment on the second floor (first floor in British terminology)!
Compared to West Lafayette (and Platteville), Portland, Oregon is a much bigger city. It is the largest city in Oregon and lies close to the coast and the border of Washington. This part of the country, though much further in the North, never gets too cold and rarely sees snowfall. Grocery shopping and children’s schools were close by. My work (UP) was about 14 miles mostly through freeways and it was a commute of about 30 minutes either way.
Daily commute from 5th Street Apartment to University of Portland
I started working with H-1 visa. UP was a small, private Catholic University. It offered undergraduate degrees only at that time. The School of Engineering offered Civil, Electrical, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering programs. It had a total faculty strength of 17 including the Dean of Engineering. There were two secretaries and one technician to serve all the departments.
Shiley School of Engineering - University of Portland: Courtesy: Google Maps
The Civil Engineering Department had 4 faculty members including me; two “locals”, one from Turkey beside me. The gentleman from Turkey, Mehmet Inan, was on leave in Turkey to fulfill his country's military service requirements. I was assigned Statics, Highway Engineering, Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering besides Engineering Graphics. I was also assigned Statics and Strength of Materials (combined course) for Electrical Engineering students.
Irony:
I moved away from Civil Engineering in November 1960 when I joined the Department of Town Planning in Madras. Having spent several years teaching and specialising in Urban and Transportation Planning, I found myself assigned to teach Statics and Strength of Materials (which I had never used since 1960.
After my B.E. degree I wanted to pursue higher studies. One night I got a telegram inviting me to the interview at the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) where I had applied for Masters in Soil Mechanics. I went with my bag and baggage by train. It used to take 2 days and one night of travel. At the interview I was asked if I had a course in Soil Mechanics in my undergraduate program. I said "No; but I have done some laboratory experiments as a part of my coursework." After a few more questions another member of the committee asked me again "Did you take courses in soil mechanics in your undergraduate program". I replied again what I had just said few minutes ago. This fact was abundantly clear in my transcript! I was rejected admission based on that fact. I returned by the next available train! I felt really sorry for my father as it cost nearly Rs. 160 (equivalent to may be Rs. 16,000.00 in 2023)!
Now I found myself having to teach Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering!
Statics was totally different from the way we learned. It was all using vectors. I had to learn cross product and dot product in order to teach Statics. Dean Nelson casually mentioned that Statics for Civil Engineering and Statics and Strength of Materials for Electricals were essentially the same. What I found was that there were totally different text books prescribed by a senior faculty member of Mechanical Engineering. It turned out later that the entire batch of Electrical Engineering class was failed by the teacher in the previous semester. That teacher was removed. Electrical Engineering here does not require drawing or statics and strength of materials. Thus I had quite a challenge.
What I found over the years is that Statics and Drawing (Engineering Graphics) are “filter” courses. Especially in the US, particularly lately, anybody fulfilling the minimum requirements of eligibility will be admitted to the branch of his/her choice. Statics and Drawing will filter out the unprepared or uninterested and thus the senior classes will be easier to teach. These are also courses assigned to the newest faculty. Thus, these courses are also used for filtering the new member at the time of getting tenured.
Three years at Portland
Teaching Statics helped me in clearing the Professional Engineering examination. Soon after starting teaching at UP I took the P.E. examination. This was also an 8-hour open book examination. I met another engineer of India origin coming for thePE examination at the same center along with me. He literally brought a cart load of books. It was not his first attempt! I had just one book - the Handbook that I got free from McGraw Hill Book Club which I again bought back from the local book store at West Lafayette.
The P.E. examination is easier in the sense that it was more oriented towards the engineering profession and practice and not so much the theory as the F.E. exam. The idea of making it Open-Book is just so that one can refer to some equations and formulas. I passed the exam and got my P.E. license. (Our friend with a cartload of books failed again). Many in the academic circles never bother about the P.E. licensing.
Bought my First House in the US
Things seemed to be going well. I enjoyed the teaching and the treatment in the department. Also, I felt (and was perhaps told by some) that buying a house shows the intention to stay and will help in getting immigration. I found a house in Beaverton “for sale by owner.” The house was a 3 bed room house in S.W. Taralyn Boulevard, not too far from the apartment where we were living. The owner who was selling was an auto mechanic by name Val Vitek from Czechoslovakia. He was a simple old fashioned individual and the process was simple. I got the house for $60000 (today it is still there and goes for over $400000). We agreed on the terms and I had to just send him the monthly installments.
My first own house - 1982 to 1984
Buying My 4th and 5th Cars
As I had to drive daily about 26 miles each way through freeways I did not want to depend on the old car I had brought from West Lafayette. Also it was not very fuel efficient. So I started shopping for a better car.
In those days there were no Japanese or Korean cars in the market. The only foreign makes were Volkswagon. People were generally reluctant to go for “foreign” cars as the parts would be costly and it would be difficult to find an auto shop to fix them in case of problems. A friend who was a longtime resident of Beaverton suggested a local car dealer and referred to Bob Fredeen, a sales person there. I went there to meet him. Also I had driven only automatic cars. So I told Bob my criteria: American make, Automatic, 4 cylinder, 4 door car is what I am looking for. He showed a few cars. There was a blue car which looked nice. So I asked him about it and showed my interest. “It is a Volkswagon - Rabbit. It is a standard (stick) shift model”. Then he went on to say “It is easy to drive. I can teach you right here”. So I bought that car and learned the tricks of shifting using my right leg to press the brake and left leg to press the clutch pedal and shift gears. It took hardly 15 minutes for him to teach and for me to learn.
My first Standard Shift Car: Volkswagon Rabbit - My 4th car
I drove that car home. Lo and behold, there was a railroad crossing and I had to bring the car to a stop. It was on a hump. Now, when I wanted to move, I was not able to shift to first gear as the car started rolling back as I remove my right leg from the brake pedal to accelerator pedal. I somehow managed and reached home and called Bob to tell what happened. “Oh. I forgot to tell you how to do that. You use the hand brake when shifting to first gear”. It was quite a challenge to get that coordination, but after a while I found it not much different from driving an autoshift car. Within a month or so we visited San Francisco on that Rabbit. I was driving around and went up the famous “Most Crookedest Street”. Near the top of the winding uphill road, I had to stop. It was quite scary to again shift to first gear with cars standing behind and my car starting to roll back! Thanks to the trick I had learned and mastered by then, I was able to move on without any incident!
That car was very good, very convenient and I enjoyed it. One day it stopped and would not start! Fortunately it was at home. Val Vitek, the auto mechanic from whom I bought the house, helped me by fixing it. I decided to sell the rabbit. I found a used Mazda for sale by its owner. He had driven that from Tenessee. It was well kept. It was also a standard shift car. Thus I got my 5th car in as many years! This Mazda GLC was to stay with me for the next ten years and I drove it with my family all the way from Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas about a year later.
Mazda GLC - Early 1980s Model
Getting the Green Card and First Return Trip Home
University started the process of sponsoring my immigration by the end of the first year. I sought the help of an immigration attorney (which, I learnt later, was not really needed). The attorney will get any official correspondence from the immigration department directed to him and will forward them to me and charge attorney fee for that service!
The university had to advertise my position. Of course nobody with my qualifications and experience would apply for that post in a small, private, undergraduate institution. So I was selected and sponsored by the University.
I got the green card sometime in early 1983.
Now that we got the green card, we as a family, went to India to visit our parents and folks. We spent about a month in Madras (Chennai) traveling to Madurai where my in-laws and parents were living at that time.
I visited IIT-Madras. My classmate, Dr. N. Rajagopalan, who had joined IIT as a faculty member soon after graduating from Guindy in 1960, suggested that I get into IIT. I thought it would not be fair to UP and Dean Nelson who had taken the trouble to sponsor me for the green card. So, I did not give much thought to that idea.
Another Rude Awakening
Things seemed to be going fine. It is usual for teachers in Universities to get some research projects or consultancy/employment locally during Summer months. I could not find any and I got one course to teach and got paid for that. As an urban university, UP also offered courses off campus. One such was to teach at Techtronics, a local company. This was to enable working persons to get a degree by taking courses part-time in the evenings. Every semester, the students will give their evaluation. I was getting fairly good ratings though there will be some students expressing their dissatisfaction.
As I had completed 3 years at UP I applied for Tenure and Promotion. Tenure is what ensures permanency of the job in Universities. I was denied tenure and promotion. The president of the University, Father Otto, personally called me to inform me of the decision. He said I was teaching in areas unrelated to my specialty and also my English was getting better (meaning that my English is not up to the mark!). When I related this to the Dean, he did not like it because he was the one to decide what courses I teach. He went and talked to the President and came back to tell me that the reason for my not being tenured or promoted was that some students were not happy with my teaching.
The whole game for me was to prove that I can get a Ph.D. and get promoted based on my work and qualifications, which was not possible at the School of Architecture and Planning.
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