Oral-History:Linda Katehi
About Linda Katehi
Born in Athens, Greece on 30 January 1954, IEEE Life Fellow and member of the National Academic of Engineering (2006), Linda P.B. Katehi (S'81–M'84–SM'89–F'95), holds a Diploma in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 1977; an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, 1981 and 1984 respectively. She became an IEEE Fellow in 1995 “for contributions to phased array packaging and high-frequency characterization of novel feeding networks for printed antennas and arrays.” Katehi is a member of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society, the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society, the IEEE Electron Devices Society, and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. She has authored or coauthored more than 600 papers published in refereed journals and symposia proceedings, as well as nine book chapters and holds at least nineteen U.S. patents.
After receiving her doctorate, for seventeen years, Katehi taught electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, rising from Assistant Professor to Professor and later an Associate Dean (1984-2002). She then spent four years as Dean of Engineering and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Perdue University (2002-2006); three years as Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2006-2009); and seven years as Chancellor and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis, 2009-2016. In 2016, Katehi resigned as Chancellor, but remained on faculty at the University of California, Davis, and since 2019, she has been Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University.
About the Interview
LINDA KATEHI: An Interview Conducted by Kate Kuisel and Allison Marsh, IEEE History Center, February 25, 2021
Interview #849 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
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Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Linda Katehi, an oral history conducted in 2021 by Kate Kuisel and Allison Marsh, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Linda Katehi
INTERVIEWER: Kate Kuisel & Allison Marsh
DATE: 25 February 2021
PLACE: Virtual
Early life and education
Marsh:
Today is February 25th, 2021. My name is Allison Marsh. I am an associate professor at the University of South Carolina in the history department. I am also a senior member of IEEE, and I am interested in the history of technology. On this call, we have not only our guest to be interviewed, but also my research assistant, Kate Kuisel, who is an undergraduate in the history department. I would like both of you to introduce yourselves first, so Linda, why do not you go first?
Katehi:
I am Linda Katehi. Last year, in the fall, I came to Texas A&M as a faculty member in electrical and computer engineering. After many years in administration, I came back fully to my teaching and research. While I did research as an administration, I have been truly enjoying the experience of being a faculty member again.
Marsh:
Wonderful, wonderful. Kate, can you quickly introduce yourself?
Kuisel:
My name is Kate Kuisel. I am an undergrad double major in history and philosophy, and I am working towards becoming my own professor of academia.
Katehi:
Nice.
Kuisel:
That is one day.
Marsh:
Wonderful. Kate's job here is to, in part, make sure that I stay on topic, and she has done a lot of the preliminary research and organized some of the questions for us.
Usually, oral histories are done in person and we are in the same room, but obviously, with the global pandemic that is not possible these days. I am in my home in Cayce, South Carolina. Linda, where are you?
Katehi:
I am in my home in Houston, north of Houston, the suburb of Houston in Texas.
Marsh:
Kate?
Kuisel:
I am in good old Columbia, South Carolina.
Marsh:
Well, thank you very much for getting those preliminaries out of the way.
We are going to begin by talking about your early life and your education. So, just for the record, can you please state your full name, date, and place of birth?
Katehi:
My name is Linda Katehi. Now a days I give also my husband's last name, which also always has been on my driver's license but professionally I only carry my own name. My husband's name is Tseregounis, so you may see me as Katehi-Tseregounis. I was born in Athens, [Greece], but I grew up on an island in Salamis. I was born on 30 January 1954. I was born in Athens because the island did not have a hospital at the time.
Marsh:
Can you say just a little bit about your parents: their occupation, education, and background? What type of a family were you born into?
Katehi:
Yes. In fact, I wanted to tell you that this spring, I am going to publish my first memoir.
Marsh:
Oh, wonderful.
Katehi:
It says a lot about my personal life, how I ended up in engineering, and my professional life. I want to say a few things about the book because you are going to find more information obviously that I could share with you. It took me five years to write it and I thought very carefully about writing it. It is a different book from what I would normally write as a previously university administrator or as a faculty member in engineering. I made the choice to make it different because I have not seen many books written by women in the sciences and engineering that is like an open window to their life, their challenges, and their successes. They never come by themselves; they all come together. I thought it was important for younger women to see exactly two things, how much progress has been made and how much more needs to be done. The two things, of course, one is to show that change has happened. The effort of so many women for so many years has not gone wasted. The second is to show that we have so much more to do really.
To give us courage in that regard. I want to say two things about my personal life and my family. I was born in Greece just a few years after the Second World War, the German occupation, and the civil war in Greece. In Greece, my parents entered in the 1940s as teenagers. My father was drafted into the military and my mom was much younger at the time. They entered the war as teenagers and came out as adults and both were deprived of formal education. –Both of parents did not graduate from high school. They were not old enough when they entered the war to graduate from high school. Then when they came out of the war, they were too old. Not only this, but the life that I lived I really experienced through their struggles, their experiences of the war. I think it just says so much about my generation having to bear the load of what this devastating war did to people.
My life as a kid, first of all there were two things. Greece was destroyed, that economically the families that were okay, it was always I grew up in a low middle class community, like what we call blue-collar community. On the island, there was only the naval base and then the best thing that people could do is to work for the naval base. Otherwise, the rest of the people were either fishermen or farmers.
It is a small island and there were only ten thousand people when I was born there. My mom's family was there for many generations, so they say they were there since the 1200s. They had moved from the north.
Marsh:
Wow.
Katehi:
When the Venetians had the area because of the wars that they had during that period, there were no people to pay taxes and take care of the land. They offered free land to people who came from the north, and that was my mom's family.
My father met my mom because he came to the naval base right after the war. He was in the navy on ships. That is where they met. They were both very young when they married. I lived in a fairly poor and fairly uneducated community, but the people were hard workers. They had a very strong culture that was characterized as a conservative culture.
People who come from the north, from the mountains, always tend to be conservative. They had their own language that was not written, in fact. It was oral, only an oral language. Then people who do research right now, they say there is--it has some elements of Polaskian, which is like pre-Hellenic and some elements of Italian because for many, many years the Venetians had the part of the land. It was south of what is known know as Albania but on the northern borders of Greece. They had their own culture.
I grew up in a family of females and I was the youngest female. In fact, I grew up in a family of females because all of the males had either died in the war, died from war or from sickness. It was my great-grandmother with all of her sisters and her daughters, my grandmother with all of her daughters, and me the last granddaughter, so we were from four generations. Yes, it was a family. The women were extremely strong and very principled. We had a very strong structure in the family, and my mom would always take me to visit her grandmother. She was a very strong person. Granted, all of them were uneducated. All of them married when they were in the teens as it was common at the time. They all had many children and suffered greatly, but they were very proud.
In fact, what is interesting even at my mom’s generation, with all of them uneducated, for us, the young generation of women, they wanted all of us to be educated. They forced all of us, the women of my generation, to not only graduate from high school, but to go to college. Graduating high school for them would have been a big thing since they were like sixth graders when they left school. There was a strong force in that regard.
They raised us with principles and that was very important in my life. I was the only child, and in fact, I was a single child in my family, so I grew up to be very close to my mom.
Marsh:
Thank you for pointing that out because that was one of my questions, in your family of women, if you had any siblings. You were an only child.
Katehi:
I was an only child. I grew up to be extremely close to my mom. In fact, my mother was mentor and my advisor, too. She did everything she could for me. In fact, my book is going to be devoted to her because without her. Really, in many ways I would not have been what I am today.
Marsh:
Wonderful.
Katehi:
That is a little bit about my family. My father suffered from serious PTSD from war [the Second World War and then a civil war in Greece]. When the war started, he was ten years. He entered military service at age nineteen and he came out of war when he was twenty-nine years old.
Now I know about how the brain functions. If you go under this stressful situation for too long, your brain suffers permanent damage, what we call PTSD. It makes you--. I remember there were nights that he would never sleep. I never felt that he really loved me until I saw how much he loved my children. Because I think at that point in his life and later, maybe he was unable to think that he could love somebody again or something. I do not know. In any case, my parents did the best they could for me at that point in time. I really owe it to them.
Marsh:
Oh, that is wonderful. Can you talk a little bit about your early education, beginning with your elementary school and secondary school? Can you talk about this before you move on to your more advanced work? How did you get started?
Katehi:
Since I was very young, I was very curious about things. The first thing I remember, even before going to school, we had a radio. It was a very old radio. I assume you have seen them lying in a museum. They were very simple, but I thought for the life of me that they were amazing. My mom would turn on the radio and every morning there was a program for young children.
The program had something like animals in the beginning. They were like singing cats. We had many cats at home, so somehow, I could hear the high pitch. I thought, well, these are not people or kids, because I could differentiate. I thought they were some kind of animal. Maybe this was before I went to school. I kept asking my mom whether there were cats living in the radio because I did not know how they could speak. They can speak. I insisted that somehow there were people in the radio, like tiny people. I thought they were small people. My mom obviously thought it was ridiculous, but who knows how intense I was when I was asking her. She said, "Well, yes, they are small people." Then I started throwing crumbs of food inside the radio through some openings.
I started throwing food inside the radio until my mom found that I was doing that, and she got really upset. She decided to open the radio to show me that there were no people inside. I opened the radio and I realized, I still remember it, something moved. I was trying to understand how that thing worked. You know when you turn the bottom, I found there was something that was moving. Now I know they were capacitors. At the time, I had no idea what they were, but I realized that these things were moving. I also realized there were no people inside, so I became so anxious about knowing where the voices were coming from.
My mom used to tell me when I was getting so focused on something I would not let go of the point and I was driving her crazy. That is what she said. She used to say that I was a bad kid when I was very young.
I went to school in a very small community. We had a great school that had only three grades, first and second grade together, third, fourth, fifth and sixth. I know that most small communities will have something like that. Right? We do not have enough kids to have separate grades. We had three teachers.
The school was built right after the war and the community was very proud because they built it with their own little hands that they were trying to put together. It was next to the church in the same yard. The school had one large hall that they divided into three rooms with wooden doors.
I was very good in math, I guess, because when I was in first grade, in the winter there was a major illness like flu and all of our teachers got sick. The school principal, a male, was also a teacher. He said, "I am not going to let the kids go home for two weeks, or whatever it is going to take for the other teachers to come, but I will teach everybody." We were all together. To get the sense of the school, all together we were maybe we are forty kids in all six grades. He opened all three doors, and all the kids were together. I remember it was a big thing and then he divided it. For example, he would do math with the first grade, then math with the second grade, and then the other grades. He managed to do that and when he was doing math with the other grades, I paid attention and participated. He allowed me to participate in the math of the higher grades. When the teacher returned, I remember that he took me during math to the other grades to do math with them. By the end of the first grade, I was practically in sixth grade math.
Marsh:
You must have been very good.
Katehi:
Obviously, I liked it. I do not remember that I liked anything else. It is interesting and I guess it has to do with how my brain worked because I was good in numbers and shapes. I could never forget numbers. I could never forget anything, but I could not remember text. Memorizing text was like an uphill battle. For example, I could not memorize a single poem, but I could not forget math in anything.
I remember that when I was in the first grade, he told my mom that I would need to go to the university. He spoke to my mom because he knew her. He knew everybody in the community. He was a person of the community. That is how it started. Now, how would I go to university? Nobody knew at the time because in Greece you had to pay the university. You had to pay for everything above high school and we did not have the money. It was another thing that impacted me tremendously. When I was like in fifth grade, and we moved around with my father. We went to different places because he was transferred from one naval base to another. When I was in fifth grade, the democratic government in Greece made education and higher education free for everyone and that was my key.
Marsh:
Oh, great.
Katehi:
That was my way, my ticket, to get educated because my family would not be able to afford sending me to any high school. I do not know where we would find the money to pay because you had to pay money in Greece to go to high school. Up until the war, a high school education was considered a higher-level education. Before the war, there was a lot of illiteracy in Greece. Women did not go beyond sixth grade. They learned how to do all kinds of other things at home. In fact, I was taught how to sew and how to use a sewing machine when I was six years old.
I was taught all of these things and that is great. I love it. Even now, I do stitch work because I learned those things. Women were expected to marry young, have a family, and provide for them. After the war, and especially in the mid-1960s, there was a huge thing that allowed everybody to go to school, including poor people. It changed within a few generations the literacy problem in Greece, and it allowed me to go to university
Marsh:
What a wonderful experience because, yes, that did set you on a path.
Katehi:
Yes.
Marsh:
Can you talk a little bit about other interests you had when you were a child? Just to give a sense of what your life was outside of school, did you have any hobbies or extracurricular activities?
Katehi:
Yes, life outside of school. First, I want to tell you at that time the only extracurricular activities were self-made. School was the only thing that girls of my generation who were taught in school was like--what we say--like how to sew, how to do things. How do they say it here in the U.S.? It is called--
Marsh:
I think they call it home economics.
Katehi:
Exactly, home economics. The boys would go and do exercises, run track, and those kinds of things, and we would have to sew things. The girls were not involved in sports. The best thing of sports that we did is to learn how to do the folk dances in Greece. It was good. It is a very good exercise, in fact, to learn those dances because you have to jump and do things and all the time and dance. It was a good exercise, that, but other than that, formal exercise, no. It was not part of our curriculum.
I loved playing with other kids. I was the only child in the family, so I needed the company from other kids. We lived in an area where everybody was a relative. We were all cousins. I guess three or four generations before me moved there and all of the kids started the families around there, so we were all cousins. In the summer specifically, we would all leave home, we would all group together, and we would play, like going from one place to another. It was extremely safe playing in the neighborhood with the kids. That was my extracurricular activities.
Marsh:
It sounds lovely being able to just go out and play with all of your cousins.
Katehi:
It was very nice. I was able to socialize quite a bit.
Kuisel:
Right.
Katehi:
Today, it is something that kids cannot do, considering--it is not even the same there anymore, I have to say. However, these were--the island had very little, so I did not get a liberal art education other than the one at school. The schools were liberal art schools because the Greek curriculum is a liberal arts curriculum. You learned a lot of history. We learned Latin at school. We always had ancient Greek to learn. In fact, we were taught how to even write in Hellenistic Greek at the time which now has changed, thank God, because I--it was not a language we were speaking at home. I have to tell you I read Xylophone and I was able to understand everything. I read the original. I thought, my god, the first time in my life-- I hated reading ancient things when I was young because it practically was a different language.
It was a great education because we learned many things. Now, when I wanted to go to college I had to change in high school and go to a science-based high school.
I was thirteen, fourteen years old when I chose—
I was always independent in my academic choices because my parents could not provide me with any advice. They were very happy that I graduated from high school, I have to tell you, for them it was a big gift and after that, everything else came as a bonus.
Marsh:
Sure.
Katehi:
I learned from my teachers in middle school that to go to--everybody knew that I was good in math. They would always give me extra lessons at school. They would do tutoring free for me when I was in grade school and then in middle school, all of the math teachers. That is very interesting because we lived in a small community, and they took interest in me. They did not think that I was a weird person, that I was good in person. They rather tried to help me, which was a good thing. Nobody told me that because it is--which is interesting. In a small community, people take you the way you are. But not a weird person if you are good in math.
There were no social norms in that regard that prevented me from thinking that I can go to the university, which is very interesting because here we know now that there are social norms developed which really make girls believe that they cannot be good in math, or it is not cool to be good at math. There was nothing like this in this small community. They knew me as my mom's daughter or my grandma's daughter, grandkid, and they accepted me that way with everything that I brought with me. I was a member of the community, and the community was very strong. They supported me and I have to tell you I owe them. I feel that the experience on the island helped to move forward. I was told that I have to go to a different high school that was science based. In all of Athens, there were only two high school schools for girls because in high school boys and girls were in different high schools at the time. There were only two for girls in all of Athens and the surrounding islands. We had to move to Athens to go to one of them. I moved--we moved. I told my parents when I was fifteen that we have to move and they were not very happy with that, obviously. My father was very upset. I remember he said, "Why do we have to move?" I said, "I want to go to the university." In fact, the university was called the Polytechnic. He said, "Why do you want to go to Polytechnic?"
My father was a musician in the navy. He was in the navy band. He knew how to play the clarinet. His father was also a musician. He did not know anything about engineering. He said, "Why do you want to go to the Polytechnic?" I said, "I want to become an engineer." He became so upset. He said, "If you become and engineer no one is going to hire you and no one is going to marry you. You are going to be old and without money, and your mother and I are not going to be there to support you."
There was no social security system. You know how it is in Greece. It was an old generation where there was infrastructure like that. At the time, did not exist. In any case, he was extremely supportive. We moved to Athens, and I went to the science high school. I got extra tutoring to prepare for university. They were able to give me free tutoring.
If you can believe that, yes. I was blessed in so many ways within our poverty. I think my community was probably one of the strongest pillars in my life.
Marsh:
That is just so amazing, so impressive.
You went to a special math and science high school. Did they offer other subjects within the liberal arts? Was it a comprehensive high school?
Katehi:
Yes, comprehensive, but with focus. We had many more hours. For example, in that other high school we did not have Latin anymore, but we replaced Latin with trigonometry, geometry, with algebra. We did not have some other social sciences, so they replaced those, but we had history. We had religion, which was nothing else but the history of religions. At the time, we had of course still ancient Greek that we were doing together with modern Greek. That was part. We had--and then we had all of the sciences, chemistry, physics, and that was every semester of the school, and it was every day of the week we had those subjects.
Marsh:
Did you have languages such as English? When did you first learn English?
Katehi:
Here is the interesting thing. Now they do, but at the time, they did not have a second language.
Marsh:
Okay. Your second language was ancient Greek?
Katehi:
Ancient Greek and Latin. The--so when my father was in the navy and when I was in second grade, we moved every year. First grade, second grade, third grade, over the various bases. The base in Crete was a naval base and in the--a NATO base rather. In the NATO base, we had primarily Greek families. All families in the base lived in the same community and they were a mix of Greek and Americans from NATO.
All of the kids, Greek kids and American kids went to the school. They had a school there. They had grade school on the base. We would go to the school and have Greek in the morning for all the kids and English, American English in the afternoon for all of the kids. The mothers of those kids on the base taught American English.
That is where I started. And then, because I was interested, now my mom could not afford--when we went back to the island there was one person who was teaching English but my--but we could not afford the money. My mom spoke with him and said, "My daughter started with English and so forth, but we cannot pay you. Is there a way she can come and just hear your lesson with other kids?" He said, "No, she can come any time. She does not have to pay."
I started that way but then later on I went to Athens and then I started doing tutoring myself, so I was able to get some extra money, I went to the American Union. I went to the American Union that was in Athens for every evening for English on my own. It was important for me because in electronics most of the books we had in the university were American books.
I had to print it in the U.S., so I had to learn to be able--and there were not translations. I had to learn English to be able to read them. I also went to the British council for some time. After I took all of the classes, I decided to go to the British council, but I took English since second grade. That is where I learned.
Marsh:
Wonderful. You talked a lot about how you had a natural gift for math and a natural curiosity for that. Did you have any particular mentors or role models from those fields or was it just the encouragement that you had from the community?
Katehi:
I believe it was that I knew that I was good in math and for me that was a good thing because I felt that I had something special. I never felt that we were anything special in anything else. In fact, we were very needy people in our family. I thought that I was special and that was important to me, for me. It was something that came naturally and of course, I love doing it because I did not have to struggle.
Since I was so good in math, people were very generous with me in the other subjects. They were not as serious, I think, but I was getting very grades. I liked to have very good grades. I was working as much as I had the number of hours in the day. People were looking very positively at what I was doing. I think the fact that I was so over the top in math gave me a free pass in many other areas. Seriously, I have to say that. In terms of role models, I did not have anybody to tell you the truth. The last year we stayed on the island was 1969 and then we moved to Athens so I could go to high school. I went, in fact, two years in high school in Athens. It was middle school and then high school four years. The first two years it was on the island, and then the last years I had to go to this other special high school.
In any case, there was this Apollo program. I remember we went to-- There were not too many TV's in the neighborhood but there was one person who had a TV nearby and I remember we went there. Many of the kids my age went there to see it.
You know what made me really excited? Not the fact that you go to the moon and everything. I was impressed to see that, but when I saw the control room in Houston I thought, "Oh my god. This is what I want to do." I did not know what it was. I saw all these people working on these screens, the old TV, the old computers. For me it was something unthinkable. I had never seen anything like this, as you can imagine. I had never seen anything like this, and I was so impressed by it. I asked around, what is this and who are these people? What do they know? Why are they doing this work? I think they told me that they were electrical engineers or something. I said, “that is what I want to do.” I had no idea what that meant.
Marsh:
Did you notice that all of those people in the control room at NASA, that they were all men? Did that register to you?
Katehi:
Not then at all. Living in my community I was accepted for who I was, and nobody told me, "Oh, you are a girl. You cannot do this." Nobody told me for some reason. Is it not strange? I am thinking now in retrospect, and I was thinking small communities, which accept you the way you are, that is what is nice about small communities that know each other. They accept you the way you are. They accept you if you are very smart. They accept you if you are not very smart. They accept you if you have a problem. They accept you if you have a disability. It is who you are, you are a member of that community, and you are part of them. That we have lost anymore because I do not think those small, strong communities that have known each other for generations are there anymore. People are not accepted unless they fit the norm.
Marsh:
Right.
National Technical University of Athens
Katehi:
In this community, there was no norm. There were just members of the community and everybody had a value. Right? So, I never felt discriminated in my own community. When I went how--then to high school, they were all women and were exceptionally good in math. I had to compete with them in math. I took it for granted that your gender is no problem. I never thought that it would be any problem until I went to the university. At the university, in Athens, where of course nobody knew anybody else, I lost that sense of community anymore. There was a class because the--it was one joint department, electrical and mechanical engineering at the time, and it was a five-year program. It was more like a German program. You would go electrical or mechanical in the third year. It will split. When we entered, there were 200 students in the entry class. You take an exam and then you go free, but there were limited positions. It is like on a merit basis at the time on the basis--merit--if merit means the exam taken, whatever exam, on the basis of your grades from high school and your exam. We were two girls in a class of 200.
Marsh:
Just for the record, what is the full name of the university you attended?
Katehi:
It is National Technical University of Athens or Polytechnic as we call it in Greece.
Marsh:
There were two women in a class of 200 men?
Katehi:
Yes. In fact, to be accurate, 189. Because I have the list where they still email me and everybody else. Well, two things. They looked at us as the oddball. They did not like us because it is so competitive to get into the university that they had friends, obviously their own male friends, who did not make it. They thought we took their opportunity away. In fact, the second week of the first year we were supposed to be in laboratories because there were many labs the first year. Everything was, there were no requirements. The old system is like it was a high school plus something where you do not have choices, but you take the courses. You take the labs. Everybody has to be there. In any case, I was supposed to be assigned to a lab and usually the way it was done is the student who entered with the highest grade will be the president of the class. It was a male student. I entered and I was in the top 10 or 15 percent of the class. I was not the first one. Then he was supposed to work with a faculty member to put us in teams and they would list the teams and the names. I did not see my name anywhere, on any team. The first week passed and I thought that maybe they are not done yet. There were many students in the first place, 200 students. I said maybe they are not done with all of the teams yet. Second week came back, nothing. All the other students that I would speak with were in teams.
I went to find him, and I said, "By the way, I do not see me in any teams. I need to start working because they take attendance and I need to be there." He said, "Yes, come and see me."
The president said, "Come and see me, so-and-so, after the class one day." I went to see him, and he was very dismissive. He said, "You know what? I was not able to place you in a team because nobody wants you in a team." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because they think you are going to be a load to them. You are not going to do anything, and they will have to do all of the work for you." I said, "Do you know what you are telling me, that I am not going to be in a team? What kind of grade am I going to take in this class?" I said, "I am going to go and speak with the faculty, with a professor." That is what I told him. He said, "No, I will try to find you." Then he said, "Okay, let me ask you this. Why did you come to the university in the first place?" I said, "What do you mean?" I was stunned. Nobody had asked me why I wanted to go to university. Then he did not even wait for me. I have to tell you I remember this so much. It is one of the most traumatic experiences in my young life. He said, "Do you know that by coming here you took away the opportunity from somebody who could put this degree into use?" He said, "You are going to take a degree. Then you are going to go out and get married. Then you are going to bury it. Then you took the opportunity from somebody else." That is what he told me.
That was the first. That really hit me. I have to tell you it hit me so badly that it took me days to realize. I internalized this by saying they do not want me. They really do not want me and I realized I did not want them either. I developed a tremendous adversity towards that class and the people. The only thing that kept me for a--the first year I decided I do not like this and but then I had no options. What would I do? I did not like the people. I did not like the classes. The first year I felt extremely tired after all of these years trying to study and go to the university. For what? You know, I was thinking.
Then I decided I did not like the classes we were taking. I had this whole--it is as if it was a revolution inside me even for so many years that I took it for granted that this was the love of my life to go there. Then I realized that I hated every part of it.
Then the only thing that kept me, it was two things that my parents have made so many sacrifices for me to be there. I thought I was going to let them down. The second year I asked myself--first year, I did not go to any of the classes. I passed the year by taking the exams and there was a passing grade. Like what is in the university a passing grade? Two out of four. Well, I got two the first year and I did not study anything. I passed because I just remember some of the topics. I was studying the last few days. I thought I was ready to leave. The second year I decided, okay, so what are my options. What are my options? Okay, if I leave, what do I do? Nothing really. Outside of the university, my opportunities were limited, and my parents had no money. They had already spent a lot moving to Athens, relocating to a more expensive place away from our community. I decided I did not have an option, that I will finish, and then I will drop it. I will take my grade, my degree, and then drop it.
Then eventually things moved forward. I made friends in architecture. The university, even if it was a technical at Polytechnic, for historic reasons had two very interesting departments, the departments of the fine arts and architecture, which was more of the fine arts thing. It is not like here, which is more--the architecture can be more like engineering type of thing. There architecture was more design. It was part of the fine arts. I made many friends in architecture and fine arts because there were many women, and I still have those friends from then.
Marsh:
Oh, that is wonderful.
Katehi:
I do not have friends from that time. The only friend I made later in the university was another young man from Australia. His name was Frank. We still email each other. He was an outsider like me. He was an outsider for other reasons because he was not speaking Greek very well. We had a class in philosophy in the university, I was translating the Greek texts to English, and he was my friend for that. We made extremely good friends. We still are in communication with him.
Marsh:
Oh, that is wonderful. I am conscious of the time, and I know that you have to go to your doctor's appointment. Why do not we pause here right now, and we will pick it up 6:00 my time tonight, 5:00 your time.
Katehi:
Thank you, very good. I am looking forward to it.
Marsh:
Oh, this was wonderful. This is wonderful. You have great, great stories and history.
Katehi:
Thank you, thank you. Goodbye.
Marsh:
Goodbye.
Kuisel:
Bye.
PART 2
Marsh:
This is part two of the oral history interview with Doctor--and I do not know how to pronounce your last name. Katehi?
Katehi:
Katehi.
Marsh:
Katehi? I put the accent on the wrong--
Katehi:
Yes, yes. No, that is good.
Marsh:
We are picking it up. It is still February 25th. It is just now 6:00 p.m. eastern time and 5:00 p.m. where you are in Texas. When we stopped, we were talking about your undergraduate education. You were talking about how your first year was a very difficult year because the president had told you that you had taken a man's spot. And just before we move on to how things worked out because we know it worked out positively in the end, I was just wondering because you had mentioned earlier in the conversation that you father had not initially supported you because he had also said that you needed to get married and have a family. When the student said this, did that, how did that affect you?
Katehi:
It made me angry. I have to tell you it did not change obviously in some ways. It did not make me sad I think at the time. It just made me very upset. I think it made me believe that. I did not like them. He was not the only one to express that. Many of my colleagues could see. You could see the environment was not very good. They would make fun of me in direct and indirect ways. The whole thing was not good. That is why the first year I decided, well, this is not going to work. I felt very unhappy. Let me just say that. At the same time and parallel with this, there was a lot of political upheaval in Greece because we had the dictatorship. Around the time when I was getting in, just in the university, they had started demonstrations. So, on top of this was the political thing.
It was very emotionally charged for me for both reasons and one that I did not feel that I was welcome in this new environment. I felt very lonely. Being only two women in a class of almost two hundred makes you feel very lonely.
Marsh:
Yes. Did you find support from your fellow female or were you in competition with her?
Katehi:
Oh, no, I would not see her. We were in very large classes, and I do not know, she probably had other friends or something. We would not cross paths very often.
Marsh:
You really were alone more as the only female, even if there was technically another one?
Katehi:
We just did not connect. I think probably she felt the same way herself. I do not know. We never became friends. She had other--she ended up connecting with other groups and so forth. My group was mostly outside of my department. So eventually we never really--I have to tell you probably I rarely spoke with her, maybe twice in five years.
It was a big university. It is not like--and then we got lost. It is not--and then we did not have--we did not know each other before. We did not have common interests, my guess is, and so we did not connect. I connected, however--later there was a transfer. The second year there was a transfer student from Cyprus, and she was a female student whom I got to know. We did not become friends, but we would talk to each other more often.
She is here in the U.S., and we talk occasionally. I still see her in some of our conferences and we say hi to each other through other friends and so forth.
Marsh:
Tell me a little bit about--a little bit more as you continued on with your education there. You said previously that in your second year, and things got better, you decided that you were going to take the degree but then you were just going to--
Katehi:
I was going to get the degree, but then I did not know whether I wanted to practice this profession. I did not think I was going to have many opportunities to practice it. I did not even know exactly at the time when I made that decision. Eventually, what happened is the following. During the second year, I met my husband.
Eventually he became my husband. We met. He was from another university, and we met at a party. One colleague of mine had--this is very interesting how things happen. One colleague of mine from the university had invited me, had invited many of us to go to a party and I decided not to go. I was not comfortable. I did not know--I knew him better the second year because we were playing chess together. Well, we had a class, chemistry, and we did not like it, either one of us. We were in a huge amphitheater. When we were getting bored, he had a little chessboard, he would get it out of his pocket, and we would play chess. He was sitting next to me. He was a nice person. He had come to Greece from Congo. I somehow got connected with students who were nontraditional.
Marsh:
I see this. Your friends come from Australia, Cyprus, and the Congo?
Katehi:
No, there was something to be said about not feeling part of the group. All of us who were not part of that group somehow managed to come together. Many were students who came from other countries. They had an accent, and I was a woman. We were great friends.
The interesting thing is that John, his name, invited us to go. He knew Frank very well, my other friend. I remember I was at home, it was night, and Frank called. He said, "What are you going to do this evening? Do you know John has a party?" I said, "Well, I am not coming." He said, "Are you crazy? Come to the party," and blah, blah, blah. This was during the dictatorship, so there was a 6 pm curfew. I was living at home and my mother overheard the discussion I had on the phone. She said, "Oh, you are not going to go to this party." Since she told me you are not going to go, I decided, well, I am going. How about that? I decided to go to the party to prove to her that I was an adult and capable of making my own decisions. Right?
Marsh:
Independent.
Katehi:
Independence. That is where I met my husband. Spyros was John's friend. It is very interesting. Obviously, Spyros and I met in 1973. He was a chemical engineering student from another university in Athens. We ended up staying together. We got married in the U.S. We have two children. We have one grandchild right now, two more to come. We have lived together say in three years--so in two years we are going to have our 50th anniversary from the day we met.
UCLA
Marsh:
That is so wonderful to hear about the longevity of that. Did meeting your husband change your career aspirations or give you--?
Katehi:
It is an interesting life. In some ways, I did not have career aspirations at the time. I think that it was a time when somehow, I think the dreams that I had as a little kid about what university could be and what I could do had been shattered in some ways. I was not necessarily excited about what I was doing. I was more involved in politics at the time. Anybody my age would do that. There were groups that were against the dictatorship. That was part of it until 1974. Then, after that, it was just about graduating.
Now, I never knew that there was a graduate school, to tell you the truth. I graduated in 1977. It was a five-year program. In 1976, people are applying and my colleagues [were] applying, so I asked them "What is this for?" They said, "We go to graduate school." Some of them were going to graduate school. In fact, at the end, the largest part, like 30 percent of my class came to graduate school either in the U.S. or in Europe because there was no graduate school in Greece.
When I was a junior, I did not pay attention. When they said they were going there, I thought they were crazy. I was so tired from the university. The last thing I wanted to do was to have more education. I wanted to work and make some money. I did not know what kind of work I was going to do, but I wanted to do something.
In 1976, a faculty member came to the university. I was a junior. This Greek-American came to the university from UCLA to do his sabbatical leave and he was looking for students to help him in the lab. I went there because it--we were encouraged to do extracurricular work in terms of technical work but outside of the course program.
Like the summer recess, for example. I went to work with him and eventually we did very good work. I learned how to--he was interested in things that I am not doing but still in that area. I ended up doing experiments for him and then we published a paper together. For the first time I went to Germany in 1976. I had never been outside of the country. I went to Germany to present this paper.
I was very excited about this, but I never thought that I was going to go to graduate school. So, when he left, at the end of 1976, he said, "Linda, if you are not--if you decide to go to graduate school, you may want to come to UCLA to work for me as a graduate student." I said, "You know what? I am not interested. Thank you. Thank you but no." He left. He said, "Think about it," and I was. He left and I graduated in 1977. In the meantime, Spyros and I were engaged. Then I was thinking, well, at some point we are going to get married and all of this. I was not thinking because Spyros had to go to the army to do his service. In 1977, we graduated. I ended up becoming a very good student again.
Marsh:
After that first year you reset back to your--
Katehi:
Yes. I used to take very nice notes. Many students in my class hated me in the beginning, in the third year because they were not showing up for lectures and I was one of the very few people who were showing up in lectures and I would write my notes. Then they would ask me whether I can share my notes with them and I said, "Yes, sure," so they became friends with me. Obviously, they wanted to become friends, so they can have access to my notes. They tell me they still have my notes some place. I do not think I made friends, but they were very polite to me at the time.
I remember there was a time when I was the only student in the class. I was sitting in the first row with my pens and everything. The faculty member comes and looks at me, and he said, "What are you doing here?" I said, "We have a class." He said, "Why are you by yourself? Where is everybody else?" I said, "I do not know." He said, "You know. You give them your notes and That is why they are not coming here. Why are you taking notes?" He was so upset at me. We did not have books or anything and this guy was just telling us stuff. In any case, it was funny.
One of my faculty members who was a director a naval research laboratory was doing work on radars.
Marsh:
What was his name?
Katehi:
His name?
Marsh:
It is okay if you do not remember.
Katehi:
I do not remember it. I am so sorry about this. Oh, yes, I do remember it. The name was Viamesus. You write it like Diamesus or Diamesus you would call it here in the U.S.
I was very good in his class. He was doing networks, communication networks, and I was very good in his class. He asked me at the end of the fifth year, “Would you be interested in a position in that laboratory?" I said, "What would I do there?" He said, "You are going to be doing measurements in the lab." I was doing good measurements. I was very good since I was working with the other faculty members. I said, "Yes, of course I will come in." It was a very good paying job.
I started at the research laboratory at the end of 1977. I was the only woman there besides the secretary. We were the only females and the group had about 120 people.
They were all engineers and the majority of them had graduate degrees from the U.S. and from Europe. It was that time when I realized how little I knew with my bachelor's degree.
Then they were telling me, and I could see how much more they knew. Of course, we were doing radar work, so I started learning things about Hughes Aircraft and the work that they were doing. I was paid and I was able to save some money. Then I thought maybe I could go for a master's degree in the U.S. and then come back.
All of this was in 1979, and in the Easter of 1979, Spyros and I were ready to get married. We were very young. We did not ask anybody whether we would get married, not even our parents. Then we told them we are going to get married, and they freaked out. In any case, in 1979, we were twenty-four years old.
It was Easter and I went to the university to visit some of my friends who were working there. I had a friend who was a very good friend of mine. He had helped me. He was like an engineer who was helping in the lab. I had worked with him quite a bit when I was doing measurements in the lab. I went to visit him, to see how he was doing. It was after work, so I went there, and I saw one of my colleagues who had left Greece in 1977 and had gone to UCLA to get his master's degree. He saw me and said, "How are you doing," and everything. He said--by the way, he was working for the faculty member who had visited Greece, for whom I was helping as a junior student. He said, "Professor Alexopoulos told me to remind you that if you want to go for graduate studies, he will offer you a graduate student assistantship."
I said, "What does that really mean?" He said, "It means that you will have to pay your tuition and everything but then after that you are not going to have--you are going to be paid something, like a research assistant."
I remember that evening Spyros was in the army. He was doing his service. That evening we went out somewhere. He was stationed in Athens. Therefore, we had a day to go somewhere. I do not remember. In addition, I remember I told him, "Spyros, Professor Alexopoulos told me that if we want to go for graduate studies we can go to UCLA."
We did not know UCLA and I did not know where Los Angeles was. I knew of Los Angeles, but I had no idea where it was. He had no idea, more or less, of what it was. I said, "Would you like to go?" He said yes. Of course, that is what happens when you are twenty-four years old and do not think very much. I said, "Okay." I wrote a letter to Professor Alexopoulos, and I said, and that was June by then, I am thinking of coming for graduate studies. Are you still interested? Do you still have a research assistance? He mailed me immediately with applications. He said, "Yes, fill out this form. Send them and I am ready for you to come." I said, "When?" He said, "In September."
I remember I told my mom. I was the only person in the family going to the U.S. and it was a long trip. It was 1979 and I remember I asked my mom. I said, "Mom, there is a possibility, they asked me to consider that. What do you think?" She said, "Go." She said go and she was crying because it was difficult. She said, "No, you do not even think about it."
Spyros and I left. Rather, I left because Spyros still had a few more months to finish his service. I came to UCLA on 9 September 1979 and Spyros mailed his application, his application. They accepted him in chemical engineering, and he came in February of 1980. Both of us thought that we would get a master’s degree and go. Eventually, we got our masters and said we are so close to getting a Ph.D., we should do that. Then, well, we got married.
The other funny thing was because our parents did not want us to get married very young. They thought we were too young, and Spyros was not done with his service. We wanted to get married right after school, but they said no, and we got very upset. We thought we are going to get married. We are not going to tell them. When we came to U.S., we got married.
When we got married, it was funny. We did not tell our parents because we--especially Spyros was very upset. When we came to the U.S., we were living together in an apartment. One day Spyros said, "You know something?" At the time, the apartment we were living in cost $500 each month. We were making $500 a month. That is how little we were making.
One day Spyros said, "You know what I have heard? There is a place called married student housing. If we get married, then we can go there, and we will pay like $150." This is very--it was subsidized. He said, "We should get married." I said, "Yes, that makes sense." The funny thing is we got married one day in the morning. We got my advisor and another person. We married at city hall and returned to classes. Then Spyros gets the application. He goes to the office for the married student housing, and he said, "We are married and here is the form that shows we got married." They said, "We do not need that. You need to have it only when you are going to be called and because there is a waiting list."
Marsh:
Oh no.
University of Michigan
Katehi:
We were laughing about this, but, in any case, they called us in about six months. That was very nice because we were able to go there.
Moving forward, in 1984 we finished our work, but in the summer of 1983, we found out that I was pregnant. It was unexpected and unplanned, and, in fact, our son was born when we were graduate students. Our daughter, who is like three years younger, was born in 1987 when I was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
We got so crazy when found out that we were expecting our first child because we had no options for work, and practically we were below poverty. We had no idea what we wanted to do, but eventually General Motors research labs recruited Spyros and he did amazing work there.
Since he got this job at General Motors, I decided, well, what am I going to do. I went to my advisor and said, "Is there any other work that I can get there?" He said, "Oh, yes. The University of Michigan." I had no idea about the university. I was never interested. It is very interesting how that went. He said, "Yes, the University of Michigan." He had graduated from the University of Michigan. He said, "You can apply and see what they say." I applied and they recruited me. It all happened, and I applied only to one university at the time. They recruited me because they were looking for somebody in my area.
Marsh:
What area was that in particular, for the record?
Katehi:
It was in the electromagnetics.
The place that recruited me was called the radiation laboratory. It was very famous from the second war because they were making radars. I was in that area they were interested in somebody at the time. The president at the time of the university was very keen into recruiting women in engineering. It was the beginning--if you remember late 1970s early 1980s, it was the beginning of a movement at looking at how few women there were in the sciences and engineering, practically not many, if any.
Marsh:
Right.
Katehi:
They had started a program. Jim Duderstadt, the new president of the university in 1984, 1983, started a program that he called the Michigan Mandate to recruit women into the university and in engineering. I have to tell you that I am still in contact with Jim Duderstadt and he has been a great mentor of mine.
Marsh:
Oh, wonderful.
Katehi:
We went to Michigan. It was a great move even if I was so terrified about the weather because they were telling me stories about the weather. There was a colleague of ours from--and of course none of them had been to Michigan but they were saying, "It snows so much that you will not be able to open your door to get out in the winter." I was freaking out because in Greece it is a very different.
Marsh:
Yes. From Greece to LA to Michigan. Those are very different weather patterns.
Katehi:
Very different. But I have to say, despite the difficulties I had there the first three years because the first three years were extremely difficult for me personally and I will explain why, because there are so many lessons somebody can take from that. Eventually we ended up staying and I have to say I ended up staying--we ended up staying there because of intervention.
Of all of the problems that I had. In any case, we went to Michigan at the time with Eric. My mom came when I was ready to have the baby and Eric was born in Los Angeles at the--at UCLA, to stay for a month and we kept her for a year. Because she asked me, "What are you going to do with the baby?" I said, "I have no idea." It was so in the middle of everything. The last thing, it came so unexpected. We were so unprepared for a baby. We were trying to focus on our studies to finish. I remember everything we got was donated. Like all of the students, we were barely making it.
Marsh:
Yes. I still see that today in--
Katehi:
We, the graduate students, did not have health insurance. This is what I am saying. Even now there is a great—
We were making so little, and Spyros and I had to pay out of state tuition. I was very lucky to get a fellowship, the Amelia Earhart fellowship that paid my tuition. We were able to make it and we saved $20,000 in the bank because we were living with the bare minimum.
We focused on our studies. All of the graduate students were there every day. Life is, you study. There is nothing around it. Besides, Los Angeles and Westwood were so expensive. The graduate students were together, Americans and foreign students, and we were living on very little. The graduate students in the chemical engineering department came together, raised money, and bought us a stroller. They donated many things. We got many donations from the secretaries to my advisor's wife. We got the crib donated, and even diapers. Could you imagine that? It was amazing. They were great people.
This is why I am saying that when I was a graduate student I lived in a bubble.
I thought this is amazing. I never thought there is this kind of world at all where you can be so free to do things, everybody respects you, and everybody is so nice. Personally, I think it was a bubble and I enjoyed living in it.
Kuisel:
I have a question.
Marsh:
Go ahead, Kate. I am sorry.
Kuisel:
Did you find this bubble of your graduate school community similar to your small community you mentioned back home, in Greece?
Katehi:
Yes, yes.
Marsh:
I am going to intervene with a technical question. Can you say just a little bit about the research that you were doing in your graduate school, your graduate studies?
Katehi:
When I was back in Greece as an undergrad and then I worked for two and a half years in this research lab, I was doing experimental work. I was very good in experimental work, and I thought my weakness was in theory, so I decided to do pure theoretical work in graduate school. It was probably the best thing that I did. I took many classes in electromagnetics and my work was to analyze high frequency phenomenon in printed circuits and antennas. It was a very new area because theoretically there was no software. There were no solvers. There was nothing available to do this. Today software is available to allow you to do all of this work. It is based on the work done by my advisor and others in our group. We developed solvers that were not available before.
I did a lot of theoretical work. I had, for that reason, to take math as a minor field. I took a lot of mathematical courses which of course I love math anyways, but it gave me the ability as a faculty then to do a very good, very well- balanced work between theory and experiment. Because the experiment is important to verify the results of your work, but theory and the understanding is what helps you start new things. Since you have the confidence and the deep understanding of the theory or the physics of the problem, you can take a leap.
I did this work and I got two awards as a graduate student from the society for best paper award. I think that contributed obviously. I did very well in graduate school. I am very thankful to my advisor, Dr. Alexopoulos. I had a second advisor, Dr. Bob Elliot, who passed away. He was a member of the academy, and he was the one who was designing face studies for Hughes Aircraft at the time. I think between the two of them I got a tremendous education
Marsh:
That is so wonderful. Just as an aside, that is what my uncle actually worked in. He always says that engineers do not know enough about the physics or the theory to understand the interactions on printed circuit board.
Katehi:
Yes. The interesting thing is that thanks to that work that I have done I got a tremendous insight about how things work. That was the foundation for all the work that I have done since then.
Marsh:
Thank you for bringing that up. I just wanted to make sure that we captured that again for the record on this. However, let us go back to your first few years at Michigan. You said that they were not good, so talk a little bit about the state of your first three years and then the intervention.
Katehi:
I have to tell you, for the life of me, I do not understand why the person who recruited me hated me so much afterwards. I think I have an idea, but it would not explain the extent to which he made my life miserable for the first three years.
When I was recruited, he was the director of the lab. He has passed away, so I can speak about this. His name was Tom Senior. He was a very old, old generation, old style, old school of thought I should say, British individual who believed that women should rather stay at home and then take care of the kids, or they would take care of the kids, whatever. I think at the time they needed to demonstrate--to tell you also the truth and I am very pleased that I was able to take advantage of it, but they were pressured by the president at the time to recruit women. I think they had an opportunity to recruit me at the time, so they recruited me.
The department had eighty-six faculty and we were three women. I and another colleague were young assistant professors. The third person was a woman, an amazing woman who had a very interesting career. She was an associate professor, but she was much older than we were. This woman, she had married her husband right after high school and they had five children. Her husband was a faculty member at the University of Chicago, but then he passed away very young. The youngest child was like in high school. Her husband had a heart attack or some sort. When her husband passed away this faculty member decided to go to school. After her son, the fifth kid, left home, she applied to universities, to computer science. She became an undergraduate. She got her undergraduate degree. She got her masters. She got her Ph.D., and then she became a faculty member at the University of Michigan. She was in her early fifties.
Well, that was amazing for me to see that, to tell you the truth. However, I saw the humiliation she was going through. People would humiliate her and then make fun of her for her age. I could hear it.
They would not be afraid to make those comments in front of me and who knows what comments they were making about me or the other colleague. My other friend, colleague, was a lesbian which at the time in the early 1980s nobody would say publicly that I am this, and she did not. She never did, but everybody knew and talked about it. They never gave her tenure. She did not get tenure and she was an excellent person, but she got a job somewhere else. In any case, she left. When I got there in 1984, we were three women. By the early 1990s, we were still three, but there was another person. There were changes.
Somehow, I was always in a very small group.
Now, what happened with this individual, when I got the university the first year I was working when I was a graduate student on a program for the army research office, research program. The person who was the program manager, who was a very--an amazing mentor too, he said, "Linda, when--you can continue your work when you go and become a faculty member and I will fund it. Just submit a proposal." Then I went to the University of Michigan.
The person who had hired me was in the same area in electromagnetics, but in a different field. The difference is like you are in--I am talking since I that--I had that--my operation, you go to orthopedics, and you have people who are specialists for hands. Other people are specialists for knees. You have specialties and a person who is a specialist for knees is not going to do a hand operation. Right? That is what people respect that in medicine. When I went there--and I knew exactly because he had given some hints what kind of work he would like to support me doing, my--this person from the army research office. I started writing a proposal. When the proposal was ready, I remember it was October of 1984. We did not have computers or software at the time, so the secretary typed the proposal. It was a different time.
When everything was ready to be mailed, the lab secretary, who was also the secretary for the director, called me and said, "Linda, I need to speak with you." I went to her, and she said, "Well, we have a problem." She was very good with me. Her name is Juanita. I remember her name very well. Juanita said, "We have a problem." I said, "What is the problem?" She said, "This proposal cannot go unless the principal investigator is Professor Senior." I said, "But Professor Senior has no idea what I am going to do. He has no idea how to do it. He never wrote one word in this proposal, and he never read anything about this proposal. Why am I going to make him the PI? What am I going to be, his graduate student?" She said, "No, this is the policy here." I told her, "Well, I cannot do that. This proposal is going to go out and it is going to be with my name as the PI. If he were in my area or if he could do work for the contract, I would definitely place him, but I wrote the proposal. I was going to do the work. I will be the PI."
Okay. He delayed the proposal. I spoke with a person in the army research office, and I said--I did not tell him what the problem was but he had given me a deadline and I told him that I had some issues, technical issues, technical meaning typing and stuff and other things, and I would be delayed.
What Juanita told me is that if the days when Professor Senior is present, if he does not sign anything it is not going to go out, but the days where he is on travel other people can sign it. She told me when he was going to travel and somebody else signed the proposal and the proposal went out in the morning. Obviously, I paid a terrible price. He hated me. He hated me so badly. He will never speak with me. He would refuse to acknowledge me.
Not only that, even if my work went extremely well, I got (inaudible). Every year, based on the work you do, he was responsible for making recommendations for salary increases. He gave me zero salary increase.
When I got my green card, I could apply for the Career Award. At the time, it was called the Presidential Young Investigator Award.
Marsh:
Right. Was this the same one that is through the National Science Foundation?
Katehi:
Eventually they called it the Career Award. President Ronald Reagan established it. I guess they called it the Presidential Young Investigator Award for some time, for a few years, and then they changed it. In two years, in 1986, I was then eligible because I needed to have permanent residency. I was eligible to apply for the award. I did not know that the award had been announced. Usually, at the time, we did not have internet. You would receive all of the announcements through the lab.
I never got an announcement that there was a deadline to submit this. All of the secretaries loved me as a matter of fact, so the secretary of the department head called me. Her name was Fam St. Louis. I remember them. I remember all the names of good people, but the bad people I do not remember them very well. In any case, Fam called me and said, "Linda, a lot of people have submitted to the department head the applications for this award, but I have not seen one from you." I said, "I did not know that there is a deadline for an award." She said, "Yes, there is a deadline, and you have to apply." She sent me the application material and told me the deadline, so I did it. It was only a few days before the deadline, but I sat down and wrote my thing, whatever.
Then I needed to get--according at that time, you needed to get an endorsement with your director of the lab or the department head. The director of the lab refused to give an endorsement. In fact, when the department head asked him for an endorsement, he came to my office the first time--the first only time after three years that he came to my office and said, "Who told you to apply for that? Did I tell you?" I said, "No, the department head told me to apply for it." That is what I told him, and he left. I got called back from Fam. Fam told me he refused to write the recommendation, but the department head will find somebody else to write the recommendation for me. However, he wrote the recommendation for other people.
I do not know, but guess what? From all of these people, I got it.
Marsh:
Good for you.
Katehi:
He never said anything. The only thing that happened to me after it was announced one of his mentees who was also an assistant professor, a man, an assistant professor who also had followed his boss's line and he was making my life difficult too even if he could not do the same things. He came to my office, and I remember that evening I was sitting in my desk. He just cracked the door a little bit and he said, "I guess I have to congratulate you for the award, but it seems that NSF right now gives this to women and blacks." That is what he said. I remember that. I did not respond. How can you respond to that?
Marsh:
No.
Katehi:
No, that was it.
Then the worst (inaudible). When I became pregnant with our daughter Eleanor who was born in the summer of 1987, they had a maternity leave for the staff, but they did not have maternity leave for faculty.
Marsh:
Right. There probably were not enough women to justify it.
Katehi:
Justify? I had a placenta previa at the time. I do not know if you know what it is. It is when the placenta is very close to the cervix, and you run a very high probability of losing the baby early.
When they found out then my doctor said that you would rather stay at home and stay on the bed. I said, "Forget about that." We had a three-year-old boy. It was like crazy going with a two-year-old. I said, "There's no way I can be at home and stay in bed. What else can I do?" He said, "Then try to not stand up for too long, and also raise your feet." Whatever it was, he was telling me. I had to go very often and take exams at the time. I went with all of this, and he said, "By the way, it might be good if you ask that you do not teach, especially this semester." It was like--all of this discussion was in the fall, like the fall. Eleanor was born in July of 1987. In fact, she was born two weeks late.
At the end, I was worrying every day. In any case, I went to him and said, "This is what happened. I am expecting a baby and the doctor said that could I..." He said, "Well, we do not have maternity leave." I said, "I understand that. Why do staff have maternity leaves and women faculty do not have them?" He said, "because we do not have a policy." In reality, you do not have a policy, but you do make something to help the faculty, but he would not do that. Then I said, "Okay, is it possible that I do not teach this semester, but I will teach two courses?" If you were doing research, young faculty taught one course each semester. I told him, "I am not going to teach this semester, but I can teach two courses in the fall." He said, "No, I do not have anybody to teach the course that you are supposed to teach, and I expect you to teach it." I taught the course sitting on a chair, and it was very humiliating I thought, even if the students were very nice to me, because I could not even write on the board. We did not have computers. The whole thing is writing on the board. That was that.
The other thing is one time when I went to ask his office about something, he threw me out of his office, and I was pregnant. Pushed me, yes. Not only that, but he also threw me out of his office. He pushed me out of the office, and he shut the door in my face. Practically, he could have hit me because my stomach was like this big. I got so upset that I went to my office and started crying. By then I had cried multiple times. I remember his assistant, Juanita, had already left. Another assistant called me. She was so upset that he did this. She called me and said, "Do not take it personally. He is in a bad mood today and he does not want to speak with anybody." I was thinking, "So why is that my problem?" Why is it my problem that he is in a bad mood?
Marsh:
Is this still Professor Senior or is this someone else?
Katehi:
Yes, the same person.
Marsh:
It is all the same person? Okay, I just want to make sure.
Katehi:
I learned a lot about intervention. One day I was in my office working and I remember I was pregnant also with Eleanor. I was very, very big, I guess, because it was in June. A person came to my office that I did not recognize, and he said, "I am Chuck Vest, and I am the dean." Chuck Vest, the person who became the president at MIT. He said, "May I speak with you?" I said, "Of course." I was thinking that I did not know what this is about. I thought that I had done something. I thought that the department, the lab director, had complained about something that I did. However, he said, "I have learned that you are leaving, and I wanted to find out what happened. Do you want to speak with me here? I can stay here, and we can discuss it in your office, or you can come to my office tomorrow?" I said, "I do not want people to see the dean in my office because they will say that I instigated the whole thing." I said, "No, I will come to your office tomorrow."
I went to his office the next day, and I told him everything from day one, everything that had happened. I said, "I just feel so unwelcome, and I feel so unhappy. I cry here most of the time. I feel that I work extremely hard, and I feel that I am not recognized but I am also humiliated, and in a way, I feel very unsafe," I told him. "And That is why I want to leave."
He said, "Would you give me two weeks to see whether I can do something?" I was thinking, well, what is he going to do in two weeks? Nobody did anything in three years. Is he going to do something in two weeks? However, I was polite. I said of course. "I am not leaving tomorrow. I am going to have the baby, first, so of course. I do not know what you will be able to do in two weeks but..." I left.
A week later, I was in my office working and I received a phone call from the same assistant of the department head. She said, "Linda, I have amazing news for you." I said, "What is it?" She said that Tom Senior has been asked to resign and there is a new director in the lab who was a close friend of mine, a senior faculty member. I have to tell you, I cried.
I still remember it and I feel very emotional about it.
Marsh:
Oh, yes.
Katehi:
We stayed for another seventeen years or something. I had a wonderful career after this. The new director of the lab, we are wonderful friends. He became an amazing mentor. His name is Fawaz Ulabi. He is going through retirement right now. He was an amazing person and that was the end of that problem and the problematic three-year period.
Marsh:
Oh, I am so glad that it had a happy ending.
Katehi:
It took somebody to take an interest and take action. I was thinking this person would have come, as it happens in most cases, and say, "Well, I am sorry to say but there is nothing I can do." In reality, he did something that politically could have cost him.
Marsh:
Right, right. So, but also to show the support for not only you and the work and the accomplishments that you have done but also to support the women.
Katehi:
Right.
Marsh:
I think That is a very--
Katehi:
It was an amazing thing. I will never forget that, to tell you the truth. In addition, it is very fortunate that Chuck Vest really stayed a very close friend. He passed away a number of years ago from cancer. It was a major loss for all of us. Yes.
Marsh:
Can you tell us a little bit about your research and your teaching over the next number of years before you move into administration? Because I do know That is where--
Katehi:
I think my best work happened in that period. Since then, I have done very good work. I was blessed to have amazing students and I think a foundation and a background, which allowed me to do some very interesting things.
I had a number of students that graduated. I started doing things in high frequencies. We did micromachining of some things not done before. We did un-waiver [phonetic] packaging. We did many things like systematic chip, things that you see now in every integrated circuit in the country.
My work really found much application and it was the work that made me a member of the academy. It was an amazing time. It was not easy. Of course, not easy because while the extreme environment, extremely bad environment that I faced the first three years of course changed overnight.
Everything that I felt and during that period was very explicit discrimination. After that the environment for women was like--it was not just discrimination against me personally, but against all of my female students.
I do not know how to go. There is much to be said. The only thing, two things. I had a colleague of mine who left the university. I do not want to talk about him specifically, he is a brilliant person, but he had something about women. When he was recruited at the University of Michigan, I brought him. He was much younger than I was. I brought him into my group. I shared with him my contracts. I practically gave him the lab that I was putting together. And he tried to damage me really badly so from targeting me and telling people left and right that my work was not good, to targeting all of my female students. One example, like two examples. I happen to have most of the female students, and I was going with them through the same horrible thing.
One of them, Rhonda Franklin, is now a faculty member at the University of Minnesota. She is an African American. She is amazing. She got major awards as a student. She did amazing work. This individual was on Rhonda's dissertation committee. When Rhonda was ready to graduate, there were problems. I have to tell you a little bit. He was telling his students not to allow Rhonda to go into the lab by herself because she would break all of the equipment, if you can imagine that. Rhonda was an experimentalist, and she still is an amazing person in terms of accuracy and all of this. In addition, Rhonda would put her experiments together and they would go and take her experiments apart, just take pieces of it, without telling her. She would go the next day into the lab and the experiment was not there. I was thinking this is horrible beyond belief. When Rhonda went--after many of these things going on, went to his office to give him a copy, as you normally need to do, you give a copy of your dissertation before it is finalized to all of the members of your committee.
Marsh:
Right.
Katehi:
While she was there, he took her dissertation, and he threw it in the garbage. He said, "This is the place for this junk."
After Rhonda left, she was very upset and came to my office. I went to him and I said, "Listen, you do not have to be on this committee. Obviously, I made a mistake that I placed you there. Now you have two options. Either I will remove you from the committee and explain to everybody why, or you are going to behave." That is what I told him. Eventually he did not read the dissertation. He refused to read it from what Rhonda told me, but at least he did not create a problem during her defense.
However, I had learned another female student who was a white student. She had--she ended up working in my lab and she was very young. She was so young, she looked so young when she was an undergrad that one time my husband came and he said, "When did you start working with high school students?" Now she is in a very high position within Raytheon.
She is like the top managers in Raytheon in what she does. In any case, when she was ready, similar problems and different and yet big problems arose with the same faculty member. She was giving her defense. The defense in engineering means you go in there and you give your presentation. It is like the last thing. Her family was there. Her father, mother, and sisters was there, and all of her graduate--the other graduate students. I was there and the other members of the committee. She had practiced. She had done amazing work. She also got awards when she was a student. She practiced.
Now she started. The faculty member I am talking about came late. He came five minutes late and we started on time. He came late. He sat in the front row and stopped her, saying "Now you start from the beginning because I have missed everything you said." She started from the beginning again. She would have forty slides for about an hour-long presentation. Before she went to slide ten, he stood up. I will not forget that he stood up with his back to her and facing the audience he said, "This is horrible. This is horrible work. This is crap. Everything that she had done is inaccurate and has no merit."
She started crying in front of people. Everybody looked and they could not believe what they heard. He sat down and we continued. We just assumed that that did not happen. She cried a little bit. She was able to compose herself and then we finished. She now is big in her field. She is one of the top program managers, almost at a vice president level at Raytheon. I observed all of this and it was horrifying. It was so horrifying. I was suffering with them.
I had another faculty member; so help me this is ridiculous. Isn't it? There was another faculty member, the one who came at the same time with me and was getting more money.
It was the morning, I had students who were working in the clean room and in those times, they worked from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. because it was very busy during specific parts of the year. I had students who go to the clean room like at 1:00 a.m., work until 5:00 a.m., go home, sleep, and then so forth. That was when they would find the equipment available. Otherwise, it can get very crowded and then your work slows down. They make integrated circuits in the clean room.
I had a student who is now a faculty member at Michigan State University. He is a department head. He was a graduate student. He sees me in the morning and said, "Professor, I need to tell you something." I said, "What was it?" He said, "At 5:30 in the morning I came by your office, and I saw light at the door. I did not know. I thought it was maybe you left the door. The door was just a little bit open and I thought you left the door and the lights on or somebody was in there. I opened the door and I saw this faculty member sitting in front of your computer, going through your stuff." I said, "What?" He said, "Yes." Then I said, "What did he say?" He said, "Oh, you promised to give him something and then you did not give it to him, so he was looking for it." I had not promised to give him anything.
What did I find? I thought, if he were doing something on my computer, obviously I would find something. I looked for it, but to tell you the truth I did not look immediately. I knew how this person was working. I did not tell him anything but as I was looking through the files. By then we had our own computers. That was sometime in mid-1990s, and I was a full professor. I found a letter from him. What did he do? He knew that I had a contract with Texas Instruments, and he had seen the person who was my program director from Texas Instruments. He had written a letter to him, telling him that he could do the work better me.
Marsh:
Right.
Katehi:
I did not do that. I did not do any of this.
Marsh:
Why not? Was it because they would not have believed you? Or was it not worth it?
Katehi:
At the end, I will tell you what happened.
When you start creating this, at the end becomes your problem. At the end, everybody believes the person who has been the perpetrator if you are a woman, at least at that time. Maybe not anymore.
Marsh:
No, I think that is still the case.
Katehi:
That is what it is. I had gone through so many things that nobody had taken action on, but could you imagine a faculty member standing up and doing this humiliating thing to a student, today?
Marsh:
Horrible.
Katehi:
Well, something would have happened. Nothing happened to him, nothing. There were other people in the room. It is not as if I told anybody. There were thirty other people who experienced the same thing, and nothing happened to him. Everybody was saying, "Oh, he is too young." Why is he too young? I was in my mid-forties. He was in mid-thirties.
Marsh:
Yes. We know what that means.
Katehi:
What part of it is young?
Marsh:
We know exactly what he was doing.
Katehi:
"Oh, you know him." That the worst thing, saying, “oh, you know him.” Well, okay, I know how horrible he is. Why do I have to deal with that? What does that mean? That is all, "Oh, you know him" or "do not take it personally. He is doing all crazy things for everybody else." That is what everybody was saying. Then I decided, why do you take that one more thing? There, I was just taking one thing after the other. In any case, I have to tell you, I was tired after so many years going through that.
Marsh:
Oh, I can imagine. I can imagine.
Katehi:
I was kind of tired. I was very vocal too, not about things that they would do to me, but in general, I was vocal about issues with women. I was vocal about the situation in the department, and everybody knew that I was a vocal person. In fact, because of what my graduate students had gone through I was extremely vocal about how horrible a life the graduate female students were experiencing.
Then the women in sciences at the office at the university had wrote a proposal, not because of me, but it was in parallel. I guess it was happening. It was not just me saying it obviously. It was happening across the board. They wrote a proposal to NSF at the time, and they got a contract to—it was called The Graduate Experience.
There were some good people in my life, I have to say, and many of them of course they were mostly men, obviously. I did not have any female mentors because there were not too many females that were older than I was.
By then I was the most senior person.
There was a person who was an associate dean in engineering, who took interest in me. George Karaka was a very senior person and a very good guy. He really asked me to participate with him in this project. It was about creating then we--what we did as part of the project was to create an organization for graduate women to have a network. It was fun. It was a time when we were trying to create a community for graduate women.
Since I did that, they also elected me and my colleagues to the executive committee at the college. I was kind of outspoken, which I still am on issues I care about, so they thought that I was going to do good things. In any case, I participated there.
A few years later, they nominated me to become the department chair of that department to participate. I did not have an interest, to tell you the truth. I was very heavy in my research. I had a lot of responsibility for my graduate students. I was writing proposals constantly and I had kids. We had kids who were teenagers. Our daughter [Helena] was in middle school and our son [Eric] was getting to high school, so I had no time to do both things and I did not want to give up my research.
They asked me "Do you want to participate in this. People have nominated you so many times to become the department chair." I thought in the beginning, okay. I had no idea even how to make a presentation as a department chair, but I thought, okay, then I would outline all of the problems. Then, if anything else, they will see what I consider to be problems and then whoever is going to be the department head is going to then take care of that.
There were some other very good colleagues, and I appreciated them, those who were also other candidates. I did that more or less not because I wanted to be a department chair, but I thought they asked me. It was kind of like let me do it and see what happens. They selected two individuals from a long list; myself and a colleague, whom I appreciate. He is an amazing person.
The dean invited me. Look at this, how they treat women. They invite--he invited me to his office like he would make a selection to select one of us. He asked me to go to his office and the first thing he asks me is, "Why do you want to do this job?" I was thinking, okay, I can explain to you but the way he asked me this, "Why do you want to do this job," for example. Like you ask somebody, "Why do you want to do this job? It is not for you," or something like that. Well, I decided that--I did not make a note of this to him, but I decided I will explain to him. Then he said--okay, he asked me different things. I left. He calls me in my office, and he said, "Can I speak with you?" So, I go back to his office. He said, "Well, your colleagues respect you tremendously," which was nice. Then he said, "You are too young to do this job. I think your colleague is more experienced. He has more years in this work and everything and blah, blah, blah."
I was very happy for the other person. I liked the other person very much, but I did not like what he told me, that I was younger. You know why? Because the other person physically was younger than I was. I would say, "Why do you say that to me?" Can you not even see when we were born? Do not say it. Do no tell me that I was younger than this other person. It made me really angry. I congratulated my colleague. He was very nice man. He has been very nice, and we have been very close friends. However, I hated the dean for some time. It was a different dean, not Chuck Vest. We are talking many years later now. Chuck Vest had already become a provost at the university and by then he had become a president at MIT.
I think it was also what happened is that the provost was Nancy Candor. Nancy was an amazing person who really was very strong in terms of women's issues. She was the first one who got the Advance Award for the--one of the first year of the Advance Awards, University of Michigan got on with Nancy. And I was a co-PI. Nancy found out that he did not select me. She got really angry, what I know from the backside information. I guess she got so anxious with the provost, being angry at him, that he created a position to put me in there. He calls me. He says, "Do you want to work in my office?" I said, "To do what? You have to tell me what it is to do, and I will tell you whether I am interested." I do not hear what--he said, "Well, we will find something." I said, "No. If it is for you to find something, I am not interested." Then he went away.
Then my colleague, George Kayagum said, "Steve really wants you to come to our office and work." I knew by then that he had other reasons for that. I said, "George, I am not interested in doing administrative work. I have my research and all of this." He said, "What if you were to do something you really care about?" I said, "What is that?" He said, "What if you were to create the first graduate office in the College of Engineering because we do not have an office. You know we have many problems with graduate female students and underrepresented minority students. We do not have any programs. We have nothing practically. What if you were to develop something like that?" I said, "Okay, I will do it, not because Steve asked me, but because I care about the cause. I will do it for two years at 50 percent of my time. I will establish something and then I am leaving." Now, the interesting thing is that Steve became such a great friend, if you can believe that. Is it not interesting really? I guess when he realized who I was that he was amazingly supportive.
Marsh:
Good.
Katehi:
I did this for two years and then Steve said, "I would like you to become my senior associate dean for academic affairs. Would you be able to do that?" I have to say what he used as bait. He said, "We really need to recruit more women faculty and I want you to help me do that."
I have to tell you, to brag a little bit, about being my age and having been in many places. You have the opportunity to do some good things eventually. So, one of the women we recruited was Christina Pollack. Now she is the president at Cornell University.
I was the one who recruited her. We have been very close. I have not spoken with her since (inaudible). She is very busy. She did amazing work in computer science, even became the provost at the University of Michigan.
Then she became the president at Cornell.
We could create. Women are so good when you recruit them but at the same time, it also showed me the conditions of other women. There was another colleague of mine. Her name is Linda Briolla. Linda and I were recruited at the same time. She was in a different department but very, very good. She was the director of the Environmental Center we had at Michigan. I was the associate dean for academic affairs at the time. When Linda was out of town, and without informing her, the new department chair called her group and said, "Linda Briolla is not your director anymore." Believe me; he removed her from her position in front of everybody without her knowing, while she was out of town.
Marsh:
The behaviors are terrible, like...
Katehi:
In fact, after that, Linda spoke with me. She was extremely good. I encouraged her to find other opportunities. She became the dean at Tufts University, and she did really well.
Marsh:
Oh, good for her.
Purdue
Katehi:
Oh, yes. All of the people they lost became extremely well after they left. It was these are the conditions on the ground.
When I left the university, I did not leave because of anybody. I have to tell you they recruited me at Purdue University. The provost was a female, at that time.
It was an opportunity for me because they gave me seventy-five new faculty positions to do something really good with. As the dean at Purdue, I had the best five years of my administrative life. Really, very nice. I went because I thought it was an amazing opportunity to build something.
Marsh:
If you have seventy-five positions to work with, that is an amazing opportunity.
Katehi:
Yes, we created the first School of Engineering Education in the country, among other things at the school. It was great, really.
Marsh:
Oh, good.
Katehi:
Then from there you are becoming the administrator and it becomes a one-way street really with all the pressure to move up. What happens with administration? You have to go all the way up because that is the system and the way it is, and it does not allow you to do your research. Even if it is a service and usually a faculty would do the service. You have to do your research somehow out of time you do not have. However, I was very glad to develop, and even create, a new program in our area at Purdue. They recruit faculty. You are not going to believe it, but from the students I recruited, they recruited three of my graduate students to be faculty.
Marsh:
Oh, great.
Katehi:
One of them is the head of the electrical engineering department at Purdue. The other person went to DARPA, and now, he is the senior vice president of Microsoft. Excellent people.
Marsh:
Very good.
University of Illinois, UC Davis
Katehi:
Yes. From there I went to the University of Illinois. Unfortunately, I did not stay there very long. In retrospect, I should have stayed longer but they recruited me to go to UC Davis.
I went from provost at the University of Illinois to chancellor at UC Davis. In retrospect, I made a mistake in my career. You learn that before you make the decision of where to go, you have to really assess all of the conditions on the ground.
You have to have the strength to say no even if there are many expectations on you to say yes. Women feel and underrepresented minorities feel tremendous pressure when they are in these positions to show that they are continually successful because the community needs that. Other women need to have you successful. The higher you go, the more difficult it becomes, and your position becomes more powerful.
When I went to UC Davis, first of all, they were very upset, I think, because I was a woman, and I was a woman with an accent. It did not blend well and not [that] anybody said that, I have to say, but here is what happened. When I was the provost at University of Illinois, if you remember, there were problems with the governor. The governor then was doing funny things. He was doing inappropriate things. He was trying to sell Obama's position [U.S. Senate seat]. Do you remember that?
Marsh:
I do.
Katehi:
Eventually, the governor ended up in jail for this. Of course, people who do these kinds of things are not only doing those things. They have done many other things before then.
Marsh:
Blagojevich?
Katehi:
What is that? Blagojevich did that before I went there because I went there in 2000.
Tell me when you want me to stop.
Marsh:
I am going to let you talk as long as you are willing to talk.
Katehi:
Yes, I am willing to continue.
In 2000, I went to Illinois. The only thing is it was 2006. I went there in April 2006 as a provost. Before then I was at Purdue. In 2003 and 2005, before I even got there, Blagojevich, through the chair of the board--so the university is a system. The University of Illinois is a system. They have the board, and it reports to the president of the system. The chancellor of each campus reports to the president. I was the provost of one of the campuses, so I reported to the chancellor. I was removed from the board; one, two, three--I was four positions down from the board. Okay, that is number one.
In 2003 and 2005, separately, Blagojevich had two nephews who wanted to be in the law school, so he called the chair of the board whom he knew. The chair of the board called the chancellor of the campus who then called the dean of the law school. They put these two people through the back door. I think that the board had also recruited other students in all the three campuses through the president and the various chancellors over time. Now, when those things happen, they happen under the table.
It is not a process that happens openly. Usually, every provost office has all of the undergraduate admissions; however, graduate admissions happen at their own schools. They do not come to the provost's office for graduate school. When they were doing an investigation of Blagojevich for whatever other things he had used money. He had whatever, all kinds of things. Then they found, in addition to this from searching through, that he had also violated the process that the university has to recruit students to the law school. He had put his two nephews into the law school.
All of this was coming out while I was going to UC Davis. One of the state senators, Leland Yee, who knew nothing about the University of Illinois, and who wanted to hurt the President Yudof because I was, myself and other chancellors of UCSF, which is the UC at San Francisco, we were two women, the first two recruits of President Yudof, and he was totally against the president of the UC system at the time, this individual, this state senator. So, what he did, because he saw somehow, somebody told him that admissions are under the provost, and without even paying attention to what was happening, that it was graduate admissions, it was before I even got there. He put on his website that I was responsible for that.
So, what happens is that nobody asked the question or go--went to see the--what happened, but immediately AFSCME which is the union and at the time there were a lot of politics in California. AFSCME was supporting him, and he was supporting AFSCME, and they were in negotiations with the university at the time for salaries, to put Yudof in a difficult position. They put on their website that I am involved in this, and I have to resign. I have not ever--I have not even gone to the university. Right? They were asking me to resign. Not only that, but at about that time the students, the student organization, and I do not know whether it was ASUCD, but it was a student organization who started collecting student signatures to tell me to leave the university. That was all before I had announced that I was going, but I had not even joined the university then.
Marsh:
Right.
Katehi:
When I was thinking about all of that, I thought, "Oh, my gosh; this is horrible." I was in Greece at the time for the summer. It was July. I joined the university in August. In July I was in Greece, and I got a phone call from the senate chair, Nick Barbolis, at the University of Illinois who said, "Linda, I am calling you to tell you do not go to UC Davis." I said, "Why?" He said, "Do not you see these people do not want you?" Then he said, "AFSCME has 15,000 employees. They are asking you to resign. The students are collecting signatures saying that you are corrupt, and you should not go. Therefore, why do you want to go there? Just come back to the university?" Well, Spyros said, "No, if you do not go, they are going to think that you have done those things," which of course a mistake. I should not have gone. I asked my mom, and my mom did not know. She said, "Have you done any of this?" She did not know. I said, "Are you kidding me, mom? I have not done anything." She said, "Well, I think you should go and then just demonstrate to people who you are."
Katehi:
That does not play. As you know, in today's environment, that does not play.
Marsh:
Yes.
Katehi:
I went there and it was a problem from the beginning. I have to tell you that. I do not know how many times the students took over.
There were two faculty members. There was a group of faculty, who were--it is. I do not blame people for having their own political views. I think that is important to have a political view but what is also important is to respect the environment. They were these two faculty [members] in the English department who were activists in the left, which is fine with me, but they were telling the students and others that I was corrupt. They were making up that I was taking double the salary from--they were making up stuff and I was thinking it was not like today that they know what is happening, that people make up whatever they want to make up and then everybody believes it. It was just the beginning, I guess, of that, of moving into that space. I was totally confused, to tell you the truth. I was extremely stressed out because people believe whatever comes and the newspaper was horrible.
The Sacramento Bee was totally disrespectful to me, and I have it in my book. I have two things to say. When I was in Washington, D.C., this person who was writing all of these articles about me in the summer of 2009 called me. It was two o’clock in the morning. She called me at two o’clock in the morning on my personal number. She was not supposed to have it, but somehow, she got my phone number. What do you do when you call somebody who is in a position like that? At least you say, "Dr. Katehi," but she called me Linda.
I was thinking, well, I was trying to think who is the person who knows me, right, to ask me whether I had done all of these things like the Senator Leland Yee was saying. She was asking me as if she was interrogating me. She was trying to prove that I was lying by saying that I did not--I was not involved in that. But why we are--every time I was trying to explain what are the things that happened under the provost and what is different between accepting students in the provost, by the provost in the office and accepting graduate students in there, she somehow either did not have an idea about how the university works, or she did not care. She wanted really to write something to make people accept or something.
After she was calling me that particular night, so many times in this session, I told her, I said, "I have a meeting tomorrow morning. It is 3 a.m. Could you please call me in the morning if you wanted more?" She wrote that night an article in the newspaper saying--and you know what the article said? "The woman that has been selected to be the chancellor claims that she had nothing to do with the--what was it--with the Illinois scandal." That was the title. The fact that I was a woman was the differentiator. That was my identity. It was not my name. It was not what I was doing. It was not that I was a faculty member or a former provost. Yes, that was important, and it started.
Marsh:
The person who, who had called you, was it a woman or a man who was--
Katehi:
Woman.
Marsh:
A woman? Oh.
Katehi:
Yes, a woman. She kept doing this for all of the years that I stayed at UC Davis. Every time, I was accused for getting a high salary. I was accused for--oh, the pepper-spray was another thing. Yes, we had a problem, and the big serious problem was that the police used pepper spray on students even if my guidance to them had been not to aggravate the students but trying to--we had--it was the time of the occupy movement and then we had all of the tents on our university campus. Many of the people in the tents were not students, were either homeless person who I do not have any problem with homeless people, but they do have guns. They do have knives and they have drugs. In addition, there were people from Woodland and other city nearby who were coming to sell them drugs. I was told by our university council and by the office of the president that it is illegal to allow them to stay. If anything happens and we violated university policy, then it is going to become my own problem. I was afraid, to tell you the truth, to allow people who have guns and who have (inaudible), and then who have knives to be on the campus. They stayed there for a couple of days, but we wanted them to leave. And so, we gave the police--now, the police at that time in the university was not controlled by the campuses. The police were controlled by the office of the president. So, there was the chiefs, all of the chiefs of the police had--were reporting to the chief of the--president of the University of California.
Whatever decisions they were making, what to use, how to dress up, where to go and how to go there, it was their decision. They would not ask me personally. When they went to disperse their tents or at least encourage the students to leave, one of the police-- of course you know what happens when you do that. There was a group of students. They were yelling at them. One of those police members used pepper-spray in appropriately and it was unacceptable.
First of all, they were dressed up in riot gear. Why would you go in a riot? Nobody is demonstrating there. You do not have that. Your goal is not to do this. In any case, they did that. We had this problem. Before even there was a--we did an investigation obviously. Before the investigation was even out there everybody was saying--The two faculty start saying that I gave specifically the--I asked specifically the police to use pepper spray against the students, that I was the one who asked it. And then, second--no, they just said that that it was my way of penalizing the students who were protesting against me. It did not matter that the report said no. It did not matter that the report said that they were guided by the policies of the university of the president. Obviously, for me I was totally taken down.
Now, after that we were--I thought that the following years after this there was tremendous work that I did in the university to be able--so in the time of a crisis you learn everything about what is going wrong in the universities. Like the door opens and you see everything inside, all of the worms that are going around, everything, all of the ills of the places. And I think it was important for me to understand what the issues were, but I also thought that these following two years were very productive years because obviously a lot of the faculty, not the outside, not the community, or at least a big part of the community and a lot of the faculty saw the kind of person I was.
The kind of work that I was doing, my interest in improving the university. In less than five years, we raised $1.2 billion and built seven buildings.
The interesting thing, though, is whatever I did the paper and the community, part of the community did not see well. For example, when I was raising in any other place raising $1.2 billion for the university, it would be considered a good thing. For me, they criticized me that I was selling the university to the donors. They were--they criticized me. So, Mars like that always was involved with the university because they do--they have a great School of Agriculture.
Marsh:
Right.
Katehi:
When I was chancellor, they gave the university $40 million. How many places, they have not given anybody $40 million since then. We were the only university that got this money to do fundamental research. Well, the newspaper accused me for giving into Mars and for doing this to do research for a company. The other thing that they did is that I created--so there was a lot in the newspapers about this and then they did investigation because they said that I did not know that I was getting money out of this, and all of that. That was aside. Everything that I was doing, it was like one--it was like carrying a cross. I have to say that. For those seven years I became the chancellor it was horrible. After this, we decided that it was things were going well obviously for the university. We had more students. We had more funds. We were able to build buildings, seven buildings, a number of them for classrooms and so forth. We wanted to build a campus, like a small campus, a very focused campus. We wanted to build a very small campus in Sacramento primarily to focus on nutrition.
We had a very good Department of Nutrition. It was the best place to have restaurants that will follow specific diets, where your students do internships, and all of this. That was important for the program. We had agreements with Kaiser to collaborate with us in nutrition and so forth. We were looking at a very nice location.
It is as if you show the red cloth to the bull. The city of Davis accused me of trying to move the university to Sacramento, even if they got legislators involved, even if I told them that it was not the university moving, that it was only creating like a tiny focused place for nutrition and for policy. Where are you going to create a center for policy? In Davis? No, you are going to create it next to where governance takes place and that was so. Anyway, it was so bad that--and they created such a big problem that eventually by then we had a new president, obviously, who before then the other thing is we had also created a major center. The World Food Center it was called because it was the number on School of Agriculture and we wanted to be-- we had also collaborations at the time not only with Mars but with other companies and so forth, and we wanted to be the center for food. It is not like an agriculture center. We wanted to be the center for food because food is something that people care about, is important to health and the whole thing. Well, as soon as the new president came, without even involving us, she decided to create a global food center.
You know what was the worst of all? I think she was either afraid or she was uninformed. Either of the two is bad. The new president was Janet Napolitano. She never had an idea about universities. She had never been in a university environment, and she had been a very good governor, my guess is, a Secretary of Homeland Security. She had never been an academic and never wanted to learn how universities are. She decided that She is going to run the system the same way she was running the Homeland Security Department, ICE, FBI, and all of the other places. It is not the same. When she decided something, she wanted, she thought that everybody is going to follow. She is like, "I am telling you what I am going to do. You figure out how we are going to do it." So even if we had spent years trying to put this world food together, she decided not only to not get us involved but get involved another of the campuses to run the global food center when that campus had the best School of Agriculture, number one in the world.
I told her that I was disappointed and that we wanted to be engaged. Not that we wanted to run it, but we would like to be engaged because we have the same. Not only that she did that but also, she stopped us. I do not know whether it was because of politics, because the city did not, but she did not allow us to proceed with a new campus, with a small campus in Sacramento. This was at the time when my relationship with her was not very good.
I noticed that she had a problem with me from the way we had the meetings. It is another woman. We had the meetings with the chancellors. I know by now how people want to dismiss you. You make a comment and they do not acknowledge you, but they acknowledge somebody else, or you try to speak and they do not allow you. She was doing all of these things in the meetings.
I do not know what her problem was. I only know that I was doing extremely well. They--the board was always telling me extremely good things and when they--she did the review as the chancellor she never told me anything about the review. In fact, we had like ten minutes meeting, but the chair of the University of California senate told me it was the best chancellor's review they ever had.
However, she never told me that, so obviously there was something there.
The only problem I have to tell you is from there things went really sideways.
Every step on the way she would create problems and the first problem started when I asked permission to be on the board of DeVry. I wanted to be on the board of DeVry. First of all, many other presidents have been on the board of DeVry and the reason I wanted to be on that is that DeVry is a for-profit, for sure, but they have managed to graduate their engineering students at 90 percent. I wanted to see exactly what they were doing. Now, I got the sense of what they were doing. They had people who were working with the students one-on-one practically, which is not something we have, but we were graduating engineering students with like 40 percent, 50 percent. There is a big difference between 50 percent four-year graduation rates, and 95 percent graduate rates. I wanted to see exactly what the reason was.
When I asked permission, I followed every single process, and I was always in communication with her office. My request was in her office for a long time. Her staff told me that she had seen the request and they had given me the okay to proceed.
Then when the newspaper found out that I was becoming on the board--you know how many chancellors and presidents are on boards of different organizations? When they found out, they said that I was doing--what did they say that I was doing? How did they use that? It was like night--how--what is the word? I forget even the word right now. That again, it was a person from--it was another state representative.
Who in fact the state representative had a problem with me. The problem was he did not like international students. He was against the idea. When I went to UC Davis, the university had less than 300 international students out of 30,000 students. You cannot call yourself a global university if you do not have international students, where your students graduate, and all four years they do not see one person that comes from another country. What kind of a global university is this? The university was never like that. It had eventually become like this for all kinds of unknown reasons. So, one of our goals is to go not to really bring 50 percent of international students but to bring 15 percent international students. We did a study and all of the universities that are called to be and are ranked as high international universities. They have about 20, 20 to 15, 15 to 20 or 25 percent. We did not want to go on the high end. We said 15 percent international students.
We developed a plan on how to do this. We created a new international center. We created all kinds of--like we brought the students--First of all, the newspaper said that I was going to bring the students and we are just bringing them like cash cows. No. The students are coming, and it is true that they are paying out of state tuition, but they said they get an excellent education. We created amazing courses and experiences for them and at the same time, yes, we got enough money to build the classrooms for our domestic students they did not have. Where is the bad, the wrong thing with that? It is not like that, we take advantage of anybody. We were giving the students, international students, an amazing education.
No, they went out and they said that was the worst thing that I did to the State of California because they said I was taking positions out of [those for the State of California students]. No, in fact, what happened, we did not limit the State of California students. We brought more in addition to what we had. We brought not only more international students, but we brought more domestic students as well. However, they said no. You are taking away positions. Of course, the line was that being an international person, I was working against the interest of the State [of California]. And there was a state politician who found the opportunity with the thing with DeVry to go out and say that I do these night--oh, moonlighting.
Marsh:
Moonlighting, yes.
Katehi:
I found the word, moonlighting. Somehow, I am taking away times of my day and I am using this time that I could use for my--even if there was a whole program and very well established program within the university on how to get into--how to become, to go on the member--on a board membership. In addition, there are all these kinds of processes. In any case, with him, he organized, if you can believe that, a group of students, which were called the Fire Katehi Group. The students camped outside of my office for like a month. Then the students left because they were thinking that I was going to bring the police and do something and go to the newspapers. We did not do anything like that. The students left. After the students left, what he did was to go and engage the local committees they had for the Democratic party that were preparing for the elections, if you remember 2016. And go and tell them they had--that some of the students from Fire Katehi, they go and told them that the faculty hate me, and the faculty are going to vote to have me leave the university. They had them vote for me to resign.
Because I was doing moonlight, because I was--then they found that I was on the Wiley Board. There were so many other faculty on all of these other boards. I never had a conflict of interest with any of them.
Now listen to this. I will not forget this day; it was around 22 April 2016 and, of course, the newspaper was writing crazy things.
If you can imagine, the newspaper was doing--we had 180--it was going like crazy. We had 180, oh, yes. They were saying that I had doubled the communications department to promote myself. We had not doubled the Communications department.
All of the money because were giving--we were less than we were before I went but people got an increase in their salaries over time and now all the growth. They were taking that increase in the salaries and the benefits for the staff and they were saying that I was growing the department. People believed it. They could say whatever.
Then they said that I--there was a--then they said that there was--listen to this. We--when we had the pepper spray incident, we did not have--our communications department was very small, and many people did not know the online stuff. We had a website. We had the Twitter and stuff, but we had only one person who knew how to do the website for the university. The website broke down because so many people were trying to get on it. Many people went on the university Facebook and wrote horrible comments. They did not have a policy on how to remove inappropriate language at that time. We are talking about some serious stuff that nobody will say.
Eventually, after the pepper spray incident, we said, okay, now we need to train our staff. We cannot get more staff. Of course, we tried to be very careful not growing but we need to bring somebody to train our staff on how to use the website, how to create a policy about who to write, how to remove inappropriate comments. Everybody has that. Okay. They brought, not I, they brought a couple of teams. Also, there were a number of things that they did to hacking. They hacked a lot of pictures from the university of faculty and staff, and my pictures as well, on the web. Instead of my picture, it was the face of the police person with the pepper spray. When you try to see my picture, all of a sudden, it would disappear and something else would happen. That would happen with other faculty and other students. Eventually we had to bring somebody to clean up this as well.
It is not wrong to try to remove hacking. To try to help the university. They said that all of these contracts were to cover the--were to erase, if you can imagine. Now with people who know about internet, nobody can erase anything.
But they said to people who did not know obviously, because that was for the people who are not educated and unfortunately who believe in everything because they do not have the technical understanding of how the internet works and so forth. Very few people do. They also said that I was bringing in these companies to fix my image.
Marsh:
Image?
Katehi:
My image, yes.
That is what they were saying. I think that was before the election. Since Napolitano is a politician, I think that also contributed to it. She is not an academic. Everything, all of the decisions she made at the time, were political decisions and based on her assessment of the politics and what was important for her to do. None of the groups she had for advice were academics, so whatever advice she was getting, it was on how to deal with the political aspects rather than how to address an issue with the university.
On 22 April, she was supposed to call me. She was very friendly over the phone the previous week. She was supposed to call me about something and then all of a sudden, my assistant said, "Well, the president wants to see you in person.” I said, "Okay, so what does she want to discuss with me?" My assistant said, "Well, she did not say." Okay. I would like to go and speak with the president, but I would like to know what we are going to talk about. Well, of course she never said. I went to her office, and she was there with her chief of staff who was another young arrogant lawyer. He was talking to the chancellors, who were at least twice his age, las if we were his servants. He came to the office with an attitude. He wanted to tell us how to run the universities, a guy, who other than the law school had never spent one day on a campus. In any case, I never made those comments to anybody, but that is how I saw him personally. He called me to the president’s office, so I knew that something was not going well. However, to tell you the truth, I never thought that she was going to threaten me.
Going to her office, I am writing everything in my book, obviously. I am going to her office, and she asked me to sit down. Then she said, "Linda, I have to tell you that I am a straightforward person. And I have to tell you that we have a whistleblower for nepotism with your son and your husband."
My husband was a faculty member and he--anyways, I am not going to--we have--so she said exactly that, nepotism. She also said, "We had another whistleblower that you used university funds for personal purposes, and we have--oh, and according to the newspaper you contracted"--or no. And then you--something totally undefined, something I could not understand what she was talking about, that I lied somehow to her on something exactly. That I lied to her. Then she said, "I want you to resign today" and leave the university. I said, "I am a faculty member. I am a distinguished faculty member. I have tenure. I do not have to leave the university." She said, "Well, it is your choice. If you leave the university today, I am not going to do anything. But, if you leave only the chancellor's position, I will have to investigate you publicly because of your position." I said, "Okay. So, what are you accusing me of?" While going through the papers she said, "Well, I do not have a letter right now, but if you want me, I will write one for you." All this without telling me what she was accusing me of.
Whistleblowers, I knew whistleblowers in the university especially because in UC Davis was opening it up for people to--only 90 percent—10 percent of the whistleblowers had any base. A lot of the whistleblowers were never--they would all--we would investigate all of them but whistleblower that I have nepotism? Like what kind of nepotism is that? Tell me.
Before you ask me to resign, you have to tell me what specific thing it is and I will tell you what you mention by nepotism. The other thing about using money from sports for personal use; well, there was this crazy guy.
Every year we had the from--because we eliminated some sports when we had the—
In 2010, we had a major budget cut, so we had to eliminate many things. We eliminated programs because the state cut our budget by 30 percent due to the economic crisis. We eliminated a part of a small program in the swimming program. However, there was a person whose daughter's boyfriend was part of this program. We eliminated the sport because there were not too many students, and he was one. He kept his scholarship, but this other guy went crazy. Every year he submitted a whistleblower complaint, claiming that we misused student fees, but he never said that I was using the funds for personal use.He said we were misusing student fees because student fees funded sports. We reviewed it every time, but nothing was happening.
Finally, I went to the university, the president, to her office. She had no idea. I went to her office like a year before then and I said, "Could you please do a very thorough investigation just so we put it aside because every year this guy comes and every year we go through the same thing. Every year we say that nothing was done, but I want you to do this."
They did it for us, they did a report, and there was nothing wrong with the way. Obviously, she had not looked at any of these things. She had no idea, or she did not care.
The only thing is that she wanted, I guess, to have me be scared and leave the university. Somehow, she thought I would leave the university. Maybe she did not even know that I had tenure. I do not know. That is the crazy thing.
So, to make things short, she places me on leave because of course I told her, oh, the thing--I said, "Okay. I understand you are asking me to leave and of course, it is up to you to ask me to leave even for no cause. I would like to go home. I am not going to resign now, especially since I do not know why I am resigning. I have to go home, speak with my husband, and I can promise you that I will come back tomorrow to discuss this." Obviously, I would have to resign because she Did not--she did not even have to tell me a reason to ask me to resign. She said, "No, you do not need to speak with your husband. You are going to resign right now."
That is when I got really anxious and upset. I said, "My husband has been part of my life for many, many years. He has a part in this whole thing and I, out of respect for him, I need to speak with him." Then she felt very uncomfortable and she said, "Okay, here is my office. Here is my phone. Call him and then resign." I said, "No, this is not the way I am going to do this." I stood up and I left, to tell you the truth. Then she placed me on leave two days later.
Then, of course, every like--she spent a million dollars to do an investigation and she was saying the following.
Listen to this. My husband was recruited as a faculty member before I was recruited as a chancellor. She did not even know that. She thought that I recruited my husband. On the other hand, maybe she did not even think about that. She thought, "Okay, put all of this and she is going to get scared, something. She has done something wrong. We will find something wrong no matter what. Everybody does something wrong. We will find it and she knows what she has done wrong. I do not need to care. She is going to leave." Alternatively, maybe, I do not know. I leave other people to make an assessment because every time I ask this question I just cannot understand. I do not think like her obviously, so my brain does not work that way.
In any case, the second thing they--so the nepotism was my husband, thinking that we--that in a day the senate corrected her, and the senate said that she cannot even touch my husband or my son. My son had applied as a graduate student. He never--he has a different last name. He never mentioned that I was his mother and then people in the program did not even know he was my son until she mentioned that, but she did not mention my son because of that. When my son came, he met his wife. His wife had come to--and I did not know her obviously--had come to the university. She was at UC Davis as a student, as a graduate student. She had worked at UC Davis and for the last five years she was somewhere at Illinois, Northern Illinois University. She came in 2000. I do not remember but she came to work in another office obviously as the chief of staff of one of my vice chancellors. They happened to meet in a football game from all places. They met. They fell in love. They got engaged. She had come before. I did not bring her, obviously. I never knew the woman. They got engaged in 2014. They got married in 2015. She claimed that I brought my daughter-in-law in, placed her in this position, and gave her all of the increases. Then, not only that, my daughter-in-law [Dr. Emily Prieto] is an administrator. Now she works as a vice president in a different university. She is an administrator in education. My son was an epidemiologist. He said--she said that my son was reporting to his wife. You cannot even make it up. I have to tell you, you cannot--now, you can go to people that have never been at a university and you can say that, but to say that the--by microbiologist, epidemiologist who is like in a medical school and that reports to a person in administration who has a degree in education, how is this working?
Marsh:
Yes. They clearly do not understand how the university system works.
Katehi:
Yes. However, she used that. At the end, of course, she was trying then to approach me. While she was finding out that things were not coming out, she kept saying, well then you misused funds for travel. She thought, okay, we will find something in travel, but every year they were doing an audit for my travel. It was part of the process. She did not even know that they were auditing my travel every year. They--every year they were auditing all the expenses I was making. Then of course, she realized there was nothing there. Then she said that I--you know what she said? Part of the--of the things she wanted me to leave is because I threatened somebody. Exactly, it was like I threatened somebody. I had asked who that somebody was that I threatened, and they said she was a person in communications from all the places, one I had not even spoken.
I do not know whether the person felt under stress. I know she made a mistake and she let some things. So, we had been given direction from her office not to let any information go out of the university unless she would approve it. My communication person made a mistake and she let something go out. I did not even know about that. Nobody knew about this but when she found out I think maybe her office went to this person and said, "Why did you do that?" She said--who knows what she said? I do not even know. The only thing I told them is that I am not--I have not even spoken with her after I left my office. How would I threaten somebody without speaking with him or her? They dismissed all of this. The bottom line is obviously I would not stay in this position. There is no way I could work with this woman anymore.
To tell you the truth, it was such a difficult time that I did not go back to that office. The only reason I stayed there for another three years is because I wanted to decide myself what I wanted to do. We also wanted to complete ten years because otherwise we would lose a lot of money for our retirement.
Marsh:
Retirement, yes.
Katehi:
My husband and I decided we would bite the bullet, and stay ten years, and then leave. It was a decision I had made a long time ago. It was also a decision that I really want to go back. The experience in this administrative period had been so bad that I thought no, I did not enjoy what I was doing. It created hell for me and my family.
I do not want to do this again, nothing close to it. I wanted to come back to my research that I enjoyed tremendously. I enjoyed teaching. I enjoyed doing research. The whole thing is wonderful, but I have to say in all of this it has been a very difficult path.
Marsh:
Yes.
Katehi:
Forward.
Marsh:
That is very clear you had many, many challenges.
Katehi:
Yes. Would I do this again? I would definitely become an engineer again. I would definitely do my research again. If I knew, if I had good mentors who knew how to help me, a good mentor would have told me not to go there in the first place. I would have solved--who knows what else would have come the way but obviously it was a very difficult experience and I think what I have learned is that it--the signs were very clear from the beginning that you--that we would have that kind of a problem, very clear, so.
Texas A&M
Marsh:
Oh, it is quite a journey. Now you are at Texas A&M, correct?
Katehi:
Oh, absolutely and I am extremely happy. I am very happy that my book is coming out. I thought it was important.
Marsh:
What is the name of your book?
Katehi:
The name of the book is--and I will show you a little bit if--can I show you?
Marsh:
Yes, please.
Katehi:
How it is going to look, I will show it to you from here. Here. I will show it to you like this.
It is called Higher Ground.
That is with that because I found one thing and then I--there is a subtitle. I found that when you go through this the best way is to hold your ground.
I really liked what Obama said, when they go low, you go high. There is nothing else. I do not think going low helps you. In fact, it takes you down to the same level they are. I always try to do that. You ask me why did you not do X, Y, and Z. I always decided to take a different path. So far, it has been very beneficial to me. That approach has been very beneficial. I think it does not help anybody when you try to go through a crisis like this To go down to the level where these people are.
Yes. So let us see. I have found a publisher who is excellent. Okay. So, okay, and call, let me find it here. It was very difficult to write a book. It was different. I have to say it took me five years to write it, which is a good thing. Here, this is it.
Marsh:
Oh, yes. A Woman's Journey Through the Mystical Walls of Academia.
Katehi:
Would you use it?
Marsh:
I am sorry. I did not hear you.
Kuisel:
Oh, I just said I like the title a lot.
Katehi:
Oh, you like the title. That is great. Thank you. That is a tryout.
Marsh:
I like it.
Katehi:
If I can find out how you guys think. What do you think about this little thing? I did--I wanted to be like it is going to be like this from white here. Down. Oh, let me see. What happened? Oh, there. You are not going to see that. It is going to be like this. It is going to be like this. White background. Do you see?
Marsh:
Yes. You have to show it to us. It will be the white background and then you will have the iconic column down there at the bottom. Is that a nod to your ancestry?
Katehi:
Yes. I thought, why not.
Marsh:
Yes, I like that.
Katehi:
It connects a little bit to where I come from. It also means the--so I decided to write it and I thought it was important not because I wanted to change anybody's opinion, obviously. That is not--to tell you the truth, I--while I did care and that is something that I--that it was part of my growth process in all of this, that it is very difficult not to care about what people think of you. It is only human. Do not you think?
Marsh:
Absolutely. No, just hearing your story over the last few hours, I feel like it has just been so difficult for you, so long. There is a part of me that just wants to give you a hug and say thank for everything that you have done just as a woman, as an engineer, and to help other women.
I know we have been talking for a long time. You have been talking, but the IEEE History Center has some sets of questions and there are two more sections if you could talk about them. One you have really talked a lot throughout the whole thing, but it is a specific section on family; if there are any other aspects that you want to talk about, your relationship with your family, whether or not you have had any additional pressure to balance your professional and your personal life. Just I know you have talked about it throughout the partnership with your husband, your children. It already come up, but any last things about that?
Katehi:
I just wanted to say that having a family was probably the most wonderful thing that happened. I would not necessarily say to have your own children but having a partner and having--if I could not have my own children, I think I would have adopted. It gives you a balance that you do not have otherwise. I was so happy every day after these horrible days to go home and then spend time with the kids, and then focus on that. It gives you something; it helps you keep going. I always wanted to have a family. I was an only child and I wanted to have more than one kid. I was the only child in my family, and it was not a good thing, to tell you the truth. Many times, even the way I was talking with my colleague, I do not know how other people think. How do you think, when you think? When I think, I have a conversation. It is very interesting. So, my colleague was telling me because I always think--every time I have a conversation. It is as if I talk to somebody here.
Marsh:
Right.
Katehi:
It is and I do not know whether other people think that way. I was asking my colleague. I was asking, "How do you think? Do you converse with somebody?" She said, "No." I said, "Well, I do that." She said, "Maybe because you were the only kid." Yes, that is what she said. She is an anthropologist. "Maybe," she said, "because you were the only kid and then you had to converse with someone. And maybe you were conversing with yourself."
Since I was playing by myself. I did not want to; I felt lonely many times.
I had difficulty sharing things at school.
I thought that I wanted to have more than one child. I am so happy we had--I have to tell you I--and having said that, I did not care a bit what I would have to do in life to be able to balance it. It was something that made me happy.
Marsh:
Oh, good.
Katehi:
I wanted to do it. I never felt that I had to select something. I never felt pressure that I have to make a choice. I wanted to have everything that made me happy, and I had decided I would find the time to do it.
Marsh:
Oh, great, great.
Katehi:
My relationship with the family is wonderful.
Marsh:
That is wonderful to hear.
Katehi:
We are a very happy family. The person who called me was my daughter-in-law with a granddaughter. She is expecting a second daughter in about a month and a half, and our daughter is expecting a daughter. This year we are going to have three little granddaughters.
Marsh:
Oh, wonderful.
Katehi:
They are and we are so happy, really. We are so blessed.
Marsh:
That is an exciting time, an exciting time.
Katehi:
This really is probably one of the happiest times that I have been.
Marsh:
Right. I am glad that you are in a space where you can enjoy that, too.
Another set of questions is about the IEEE itself and your relationship to the IEEE. When did you first become a member?
Katehi:
I was a graduate student. No, first of all, I became a member I think when I was an undergrad. I continued being a member because then I was getting the magazines. Then I started becoming involved in IEEE chapter when I was a graduate student at UCLA. Then I became very involved with IEEE, especially with both the Antennas and Propagation Society and the Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.
I am still involved. Unfortunately, during the last few years, things have been only online. I always see my friends. My friends, my students, it is like a big family for me. This is what IEEE really has created for me, a big family here in the U.S.
IEEE
Marsh:
You are a fellow of IEEE, correct?
Katehi:
Yes. I am a fellow of IEEE.
Marsh:
Did that change you? How did you react when you were elevated to fellow?
Katehi:
It was very important. I was an associate professor when I became a fellow and yes, Professor Islanki nominated me. Now he is retired.
I also have to tell you something which is so funny. I was so lucky to have been trained as a graduate student by my advisor and even coming to the University of Michigan, if you put everything aside, it was probably a great thing for me and my professional life. In fact, living in Michigan with our family was wonderful.
Marsh:
Oh, good.
Katehi:
Away from California. It was really wonderful. We were able to afford a nice house. We met with friends. The kids went to good schools and all of this. What I wanted to say is that with--I became a fellow of IEEE primarily because of the connections, my work of course, but the connections I had very early with people, with good people. Like Professor Islanki, who now has retired from the University of Illinois, he was an amazing person and still is. In fact, he considers me to be his grand graduate student, great graduate student, excuse me, because he was the advisor of my advisor.
As a matter of fact, the interesting thing, you know what it is? There is in chemistry or in sciences there is a tree. You know in [the] sciences they create those trees? In my tree, I come from Einstein and from Maxwell. That is because Professor Islanki was the graduate student of one individual who was trained directly by Einstein and then by another faculty member who came up. I was thinking that myself. I never knew that that existed. They told me this and they said, "Oh, this is where you come from." Professor Islanki was the one who nominated me and then really opened doors for me in many ways. Being a fellow of IEEE is an extremely important thing.
Marsh:
I can imagine that.
Katehi:
Now I am a Life Fellow of IEEE.
Marsh:
Yes. That means you have been a member a long time.
Katehi:
Yes, exactly. My husband asked me, "What is this about a life?" I said, "I am old. That is what it means."
Marsh:
I joined IEEE as an undergrad and I am still a ways before getting to a life membership, but it is good. IEEE has been very good for me as well. I actually would like to turn the chat over to Kate for a minute. She prepared several questions from her background research.
Katehi:
Sure.
Marsh:
Kate, if you want to ask a few of those questions?
Katehi:
Yes.
Reflections, career advice, closing remarks
Kuisel:
Yes, of course. What I really wanted to talk to you about was the importance of your students. You had, I think, 90 plus students that you mentored. Did they teach you anything that you used later in life?
Katehi:
Oh, yes, yes. Students teach. My students and my children taught me how to appreciate human nature and how to take it not as a problem but rather as a major advantage. If you appreciate who we are and you accept it, and then you build on it, I think it changed me as a faculty member and how I interact with my students. I think they made me a better faculty member, definitely. They made me a better researcher. I am very close with them, especially with my Ph.D. students. I do not think you have that in any other profession and being a faculty member creates a family for you.
IEEE has been the organization that has invited me. I have been treated so well at IEEE. I have to tell you the organization has been so fair to me and they have treated me so well. However, of course, it is not the organization treats you in different ways, but I think the organization has been extremely fair to me and it has given me tremendous opportunities.
As a faculty member, I have a professional family, which is, for example, my students. Fifty percent of my students became faculty members and I work with them. I do research with them. We do activities together. It is like working with your family, which makes it really fun. One of my graduate students, one female graduate student who is now at the University of Minnesota, Rhonda Franklin, my mom--when my mom was alive and she was my graduate student now in the beginning of 1989, in the beginning, 1990, she would call me because we always talk with her on the phone. My mom used to say, "Your older daughter is calling you." They are my family and they have taught me so many things. They have taught me how to have more humility. They have given me strength. I also have to tell you that when I was going through those difficult times as a chancellor at UC Davis, they were the ones who tried to hold me strong, and it was really amazing. In any case, I am so thankful that I had them.
Kuisel:
How would you compare the discrimination you faced in Greece and the US like in the workplace and then at your undergraduate university?
Katehi:
In some ways different, in some ways the same. You have to remember that biases are impacted by culture as well. The biggest problem when it comes to discrimination is fear from the people, that the people have, those who act, who practice discrimination against others. They have some kind of fear that they are going to lose something if you gain something. The zero-sum game is horrible. They do not see your success as an opportunity to grow the pie. They see your success as them losing something. The problem in Greece was true sexism and I faced discrimination. My problem in the U.S. was more complex. It was untold discrimination because of gender, but also it was discrimination because of ethnicity. I have to tell you; I saw that specifically at UC Davis.
When you start moving up in positions where you do not see as many of them, both--and this is true both for women, for underrepresented minorities, for people who are--who come from different cultures and so forth. When the majority culture or the majority that historically has had access to these positions and they see you taking one of them, they do not feel that it was a privilege for them that they had access to these positions. They think that you take away something that they had always the right to have. When they see that, it is the fear of losing that makes them hate you. The more different you are from them, the more fearful they get about the impact you are going to have on them and their way of life. They want to get you out of there. That is what I think is happening.
It is not unique to the U.S. You see it in every single culture. It is just a human thing. You see it with gender discrimination. I was talking to my daughter who is a lawyer, and she was telling me how bad the discrimination is in that profession. We were saying that especially for women it has become the norm to treat women differently.
Unless something happens like the Me Too movement and then it starts, things happen and then it goes down and things go back to where they were. There are all these points in time.
Now, progress has happened. Do not take me wrong, there are times where progress accelerates when something happens and then it goes down and then it goes slowly up. I saw recently an article that I really hated. It was an article from the Economist, and I am so disappointed, who said those two individuals, one from--a social scientist, one from Canada, another from Australia, they found out that if a family has a girl as the first child, they have a higher probability of getting a divorce. This sounds so crazy to me. It was okay to say it even without even a critique. And without even saying, yes, that these are opinions, somebody's--they presented it like a scientific paper. I was thinking, okay, what does it say? Do you have to make sure that you have a son first to you keep your family together? Where is the argument about that?
In any case, talking about the differences, in some ways, yes. As I said to go back and say that in Greece I am--they consider me to be Greek. So, the only reason for discrimination would be on my--the basis of my gender. Here, in the U.S., it is more complex.
Kuisel:
What advice would you give young women going into the engineering field today?
Katehi:
Well, it would have been to go there with their eyes open, to still try to do what they want. I think it is extremely important for them considering how good they are to make sure that they achieve what they are dreaming of.
It is extremely important but be prepared. I think for me it would have been much easier if I knew what I was stepping on, if I had advice on what to avoid. Right? If I had a community of people because I always felt alone, to tell me the truth. It is amazing how alone you feel when problems happen. That starts from the beginning. For example, when I had the problems with my director in the lab, I was alone. Nobody gave me a hand to say, "Linda," because everybody was experiencing what I was experiencing. They could see it.
Except of the secretaries here and there who were trying to support me, and they were like--they had no power. I would--I did not expect them even to step up and try but everybody is on the sidelines observing. We need to do two things. Those who blaze the trail need to make sure that they help everybody else behind them. I hate people who make it and then they ignore everybody else, expecting everyone else to blaze the same trail. No, you do it not for yourself; you do it for everybody else as well. Trying to support others is extremely important.
I would tell young women that it is important to do what you always are dreaming because you can. Many of changes have happened which will allow women to go to the highest levels of governance, of science, of however they want to see it. Will it be easy? No. Should you take it personally? No, because it has nothing to do with you as a person.
Keep in mind when you make it then you help everybody else come and stay connected with people. Be part of a network. We need the network. Women need support from other women, and I do not think that always happens, to tell you the truth. In any case, that is the advice that I would give them.
Kuisel:
Going back to like your technical work, what would you say was like your hardest project that you worked on and like what did--what helped you get through it?
Katehi:
Okay. Every project I do is the hardest problem. And after I write it down. I would have to say it was probably what I am doing right now is the hardest. Well, every problem because it is a new problem. In engineering you have to--at least in my area the expectation is that you are going to do something new that others have not done before. Every time you do that, it is difficult. What I was always telling my students was the following. I said, "Listen; there is a difference between engineers and mathematicians or scientists. Mathematicians have to prove a theorem. Either you are going to prove it or you are not going to prove it. Scientists have to explain a phenomenon. Engineers have to make something work. There is more than one way to make something work." I was telling them do not worry; we are going to find the solution. We are going to always find a solution because many of the problems we are solving are open- ended problems. They have more than one possibility. I was always in the process. I keep remembering this, that we always find a solution to our problem and that has always been true. I always try to tell myself that it is important to do something new and new things always excite me. I have to tell you; I am not the person who likes to do the same old thing. The moment I know how to do something, it is the moment to move to something different.
But I kept telling my students, when they were students and they were afraid, "Oh, this may not work. I may never get a degree," or something. I used to tell them, "That is not true because engineers always make things work. We will find a way to get to where we want to go." This is the kind of advice I would give.
Kuisel:
In your career, is there anything you would have done differently?
Katehi:
Yes. I would not have gone to UC Davis. That I know very well, but that is okay. I have learned things. I have met good people that I like very much. My son met his wife, and they are extremely happy together. I have learned so many things. I do not know what my career would have been without UC Davis. I am not sure if it would have been better or worse.
You go into these positions and not too many people succeed. In my mind, I did the things that I wanted to do. By the way, when I left UC Davis close to 750 faculty emailed me, thanking me for being the chancellor. That meant a lot.
I have been in a number of universities. I have learned a lot. I have met so many people. My life has been filled with friendships and with excitement definitely, good and bad. It has not been boring. How can I say that? I think it has always been something new to do and exciting and has kept me going. Has made me and kept me feeling young in many ways.
Kuisel:
Cool. I do not know if I have any more questions. We covered a lot.
Marsh:
I think we did. It is about time to wrap up because we have taken so much time. As you know, this is the first oral history in a series that Peter Segal [phonetic] has asked me to start. When he talked to me, he proposed an article in his new journal. I said, "Well, if we are going to do the research, why do not we make it as a documentary process?"
Katehi:
Of course, yes. That is very nice.
Marsh:
We are, in fact, starting this project and partnering with the IEEE History Center. They are going to archive these oral histories. I have sent you a copy of a consent form. Can you please sign that and send it back to me.
Katehi:
Oh, yes. Absolutely, thank you. I will do this tomorrow.
Marsh:
When you send that back to me if you could think about women that you would like to--you think would be good to be part of this series.
There are a couple of people that you have mentioned. I feel like I would like to reach out to Rhonda Franklin.
Katehi:
Absolutely. You should.
Katehi:
Rhonda is probably the first African American woman who got a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Michigan.
Marsh:
I will definitely reach out to her. In addition, I do not think you actually gave her name but the woman who is now a vice president at Raytheon.
Katehi:
Katherine Herrick.
Marsh:
Anyone else? You said Katherine Herrick?
Katehi:
Yes, exactly.
Marsh:
Okay. Anyone else that if you can think of that when you sign the consent form and email it back to me, it would be great if you nominate several other women, so that we can--
Katehi:
Of course, I can tell you whom I would like to nominate. Her name is Ruzena Bajcsy. She is a faculty member at Berkeley and her field is robotics. She is amazing. She also has a very interesting career. She came to the U.S. and then she went back to school. She had a kid. It is one of those old, very interesting. She will tell you much more. She is a little older than I am. She is an amazing person.
Marsh:
Excellent, excellent. That sounds wonderful.
Katehi:
I thank you so much for thinking of me.
Marsh:
Oh, this has just been wonderful, and this has just been great. It is a great way to start the series.
Katehi:
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Marsh:
Thank you. If you have any follow-up thoughts that you want to get back to me, just let me know.
Katehi:
Absolutely I will do that, and I will send you the forms.
Marsh:
Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much.
Katehi:
Thank you so much for staying with me this late. Thank you so much.
Marsh:
Thank you.
