WHAT ARE YOUR FIRST MEMORIES OF RIVERDALE?
My first memories of Riverdale date back to my very first day.
One was taking Spanish, and everyone in the class spoke Spanish. I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. And so I felt like I was behind the eight ball right from the get go. That feeling of being poorly prepared lasted throughout my time at Riverdale.
The other experience, which turned out to be fine, was with Irene Guiney. She was a math teacher with a bark that was worse than her bite, but I didn’t know that at the time. After the first day I went home crying and thought, “This is not the school for me.” But her style of pedagogy was ahead of its time. The way she did things was you sat down and you worked on workbooks. She didn’t lecture. If you needed help, you went to the front of the classroom and she helped you. It was the first time I had encountered self-paced learning. She turned out to be one of the few bright spots in my life at Riverdale. She came to school every day at 7 a.m., right after her 6 a.m. Mass. So, if you got there early you could get extra help. It was incredible. She loved her students and she loved what she did. Hers was the only course that I excelled in for the six years I was at Riverdale.
So, except for math courses, I underperformed academically. In particular, I found it difficult to do my homework, partly because of living in an unhappy household (my mother was chronically ill with multiple sclerosis) and partly because I was not prepared for the challenging workload.
WHAT WAS YOUR PATH AFTER HIGH SCHOOL?
After Riverdale, I went to Northeastern University. I was intrigued by their cooperative education. You would go to school for three months, then you worked at a job that was related to your major for three months. You would go back to school again for three months and the cycle would continue. It takes five years to complete, but the terms are quick. I loved that. I was sort of a poster child for Northeastern because I ended up having a career that started with my co-op jobs.
I started my major in psychology and I was interested in being a clinical psychologist. I ended up working in a lab at Northeastern with a preeminent scholar whose principal line of research was in a field called psychoacoustics, but he also did work in visual perception. I worked in his visual perception lab, and vision research is what I did for the rest of my academic life.
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU FOUND YOUR PURPOSE IN COLLEGE?
I fell in love with learning as soon as I left home. As ill-prepared as I was getting into Riverdale, I was totally prepared going into college. While my classmates in college moaned and groaned about homework and the homework load, I thought it was relatively easy. I worked hard and did well academically.
My last co-op job was in a laboratory in Boston at a place called the Retina Foundation. It was associated with the Eye and Ear Infirmary at Mass General Hospital. I worked with a young German guy and he knew that I was graduating. He said, “Would you like to come to Germany with me and help me set up my lab?” Uncharacteristic of me, because I didn’t take chances, I said, “Yes, let’s do it.” I didn’t speak German, but that summer, off I went to Germany.
I spent a year in his lab, setting up his lab, doing vision research. As the year was coming to an end, I figured I’d go to graduate school, and I ended up going to Dartmouth. They had a history of good vision research in Dartmouth. I spent four years getting my degree and it’s where I met my future wife. Then I left Dartmouth and went to Brown for three years on an NIH post-doctoral fellowship.
At the end of my three years at Brown, a job opened up at UNH. I spent 30 years there as a professor of psychology, and I was chair of the department for eight years. One day, the dean approached me and said, “Your term is ending as chair, would you like to be my associate dean?” And again, I took a chance. She said, “Look, if it doesn’t work out, if you don’t like it, you can always go back.” So I thought, “Okay, I’ll do that.” Six months later, she retired. It was a total surprise to me.
So then I became a dean for eight years before I retired. I enjoyed it for the most part. You know, all jobs are mixed. Except maybe for my son’s, he’s living his dream. (Ken’s son is former Major League Baseball outfielder Sam Fuld.)
WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO THOSE PURSUING A CAREER IN ACADEMIA?
Do your homework!
WHEN YOU THINK BACK ON YOUR TIME AT RIVERDALE, COULD YOU HAVE IMAGINED ANY OF THIS?
None of this. I look back and think, as difficult as it was at the time, things worked out wonderfully.