1 - The Professor

Summary

This chapter is an account of my experiences as a member of the faculty in different universities. I taught at Caltech where I was a member of an interdisciplinary group of faculty in the humanities and social sciences and came to know prominent humanists in other fields as well as scientists such as Richard Feynman, Murray Gel Man, and Max Delbruck. I then moved to the University of Michigan where I joined an active group of interdisciplinary scholars, encountered the attractions and problems of cultural studies, and then began to do institutional work by creating a new interdepartmental PhD program in Anthropology and History. Because of the success of that program, I was invited to Columbia University to chair the Anthropology Department and become the Franz Boas Professor at Columbia.