Posted by When I first read the news about the murder by Minneapolis Policemen of George Floyd, an African American, I could not believe it. The city I knew was peaceful, democratic, sensitive to the needs of citizens. What follows are reminiscences from my student years in Minneapolis.
I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Campus, and spent there two years, from 1980 to 1982.
My flat was on University Avenue SE, number 717.
Every morning I would walk to the campus, crossing the 10th Avenue Bridge, where taking into account the windchill factor, I have experienced temperatures well below 0 degress Fahrenheit.
During the two years of my stay in Minneapolis, I have never experienced any violent incident. The worst experience of almost violence was wen I was stopped at 10 in the middle of the night on the 10th Avenue Bridge, while driving my car, and was told that I was 2 miles over the limit of 40 miles per hour.
The policeman treated me as if I was some sort of a Mafia man.
Other than that, when it comes to friends’ experiences, the worst incident was the rape of the girlfriend of a colleague. They had a flat near the American Indian neighborhood, which had a very high rate of unemployment.
Both my colleague and his girlfriend, in spite of this awful incident, remained calm and did not press any charges.
The University of Minnesota is a state university and as such it had at the time policies regarding admission of Vietnam veterans.
To make a living, I was working as a Teaching Assistant (TA). One Semester I was helping Professor Lindgren in Statistics 101. One of the students enrolled in the course was a veteran and he had absolutely no clue about statistics. I felt it was my duty to give him extra help, and so I spent a lot of time tutoring him. It all ended well, and he eventually passed the course. When the course was over, summer had come, and my student invited me to go fishing with his friends in one of the lakes.
Minnesota is called the “10,000 lakes state” and this is for a good reason. There are lakes everywhere you turn. So I went fishing in a very hot and humid day, drank a lot of beer, and was the proud witness of my student fishing many walleyes,the most common local lake fish. Not in my taste though, it tasted like mud!
In another semester, I was the Teaching Assistant (TA) to Professor Ted Hoffmann, who was teaching the MBA Operations Management course.
The students in this course were mostly managers in the local industrial firms, like 3M and Honeywell. What an experience! I enjoyed it immensely, and will always remember Professor Hoffmann, who was incredibly supportive and an excellent teacher. One of the key lessons I learned being the TA in the MBA Course was that more than half of the effort to solve a problem should be spent trying to define it. The MBA students were good managers, but still they had to train themselves to properly define a problem prior to jumping in, with all guns blazing, trying to solve it.
One of my “students” in the MB Acourse was Virginia, who I knew from another friend, Theresa. Virginia is an accountant who became a top level executive in the famous Mayo Clinic. Theresa became a Professor in Child Psychology somewhere in the West Coast. We have lost touch, but in Minneapolis we were very close. As a matter of fact, I think that Thereza was the person who most appreciated my sense of humor. I confess I was very attracted to her, but at the time I was in a relationship with another woman, and somehow tied to the old school of monogamy.
This whole edifice came tumbling down one afternoon, when my girlfriend X came back home (we were living together) and told me that she had made love with a friend of hers. Thats life, I guess.
At least I did not have to suffer the experience of socializing with the new lover of X, something that happened to another friend who for a time was socializing with the lover of his wife, in spite of the fact that it was public knowledge that there was a new boy in the block.
I remember the Carlton School of Management faculty like a family, especially Roger Schroeder, who was the head of Operations Management at the time.
Life had its wildcards as well.
One of my Greek friends, who at the time was getting a PhD. in Engineering came to me one day and said that there was a Research Assistant opening in a project that was studying the way that experts solve physics problems. The project was headed by Professor Paul Johnson in Medical Scool and funded by the National Science Foundation. So I went for an interview and the next day I was on the team. Great fun, and a most welcome additional source of income.
My girlfriend X had a couple of Catholic friends of Irish descent. Tim and Susan. Tim was a student in Medical School. We were very close, and spent the summer of 1981 touring the Peloponnese. I hope they are well.
When I faced some serious money problems, I looked around campus and got a job in the University Archives Department. I was thrown in a room with stacks of files on the floor and was asked to archive them by name.
I visited Minneapolis again in April 1986, but it was a quick business trip and did not get to enjoy it very much.