Adleberto's Fatal Mistake(s)

The story of Adelberto López is sad. There, but for the grace of God, go I. If this is (fair & balanced) melancholy, so be it.

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The Professor Who Lost His Classroom
In the depths of depression, a historian gave up tenure. Now he wishes he hadn't.
By Robin Wilson

Binghamton, N.Y.
The low point came for Adalberto López one day in the spring of 2001, when he sat on the edge of his bed with a .22-caliber rifle pointed at his temple. He had already separated from his wife, left his tenured job in history at the State University of New York here, and burned 25 years' worth of research notes in his fireplace.

But he couldn't pull the trigger. Instead he put the rifle down, got up off his bed, and drove himself to Binghamton General Hospital.

Since then Mr. López has gradually emerged from the depression he says engulfed him for more than a decade. At 61 he feels he's been "reborn." But although he may seem like a new person, he still has one serious problem. Seven years ago -- in the depths of his depression -- he gave up his academic career. Now he desperately wants it back.

"Before I began my descent into the darkness, I was one of the most engaged and visible members of the faculty," Mr. López wrote in a memorandum to members of the history department a year ago. He had risen from a meager background as a Puerto Rican immigrant to earn his Ph.D. from Harvard University and create the Latin American-studies program at Binghamton. "As I now look back at the last 10 years of my life, all I see is a wasteland of broken relationships, lost opportunities, and a wasted potential."

Regaining his full-time position would save his career from being entirely derailed by mental illness, he says.

SUNY administrators, however, say a professor cannot simply give up a tenured job and years later decide to reclaim it. The university has allowed Mr. López to teach courses in Mexican and Spanish history part time for the seven years since he retired -- an arrangement that Binghamton officials consider more than generous. Now, they insist, it is time for him to go. "We wish to redirect these resources to other priorities," says Mary Ann Swain, the provost. "We're moving in different directions."

Alone in the Big City

Mr. López arrived at Binghamton in 1970 before even completing his Ph.D. At the time, minority students were struggling to gain a voice on campuses. "I was invited here because of them," he says. "I fit the prescription perfectly."

When he was 12, Mr. López moved to Manhattan from Puerto Rico with his parents and younger brother. His family decided to return to Puerto Rico a couple of years later, but Mr. López stayed in New York.

Although he eventually graduated third in his class at Stuyvesant High School, his personal life was precarious. He bounced from a charity home to a friend's house to an aunt's tiny apartment. For about a month, when he was a senior in high school, he was homeless and slept in the subway before his school alerted a social worker who arranged for free school lunches and a room at the 23rd Street YMCA. That wasn't much better. "A couple of times I was approached by homosexuals in the communal showers," he says. "That scared me."

His years alone in New York "marred me," he says. "In a sense it crippled me and made me very distrustful of the world." He adds: "I had to go from place to place pleading for assistance. I learned the techniques of telling people what they wanted to hear -- and that didn't make me feel good about myself."

When it was clear that Mr. López would rank in the top of his high-school class, his social worker encouraged him to apply to some of the country's best universities, and Harvard accepted him.

"For a while, I didn't think I would make it" in Cambridge, he recalls. But he developed a strong attachment to the campus. "Harvard fed me and housed me and educated me and civilized me," he says. "It gave me a sense of self-worth." He stayed on for graduate school and met Mariam Habib, a fellow student who became his wife.

Within a few years of landing at Binghamton, Mr. López had earned his doctorate and founded the university's Latin American and Caribbean area-studies program, which he directed for 13 years. He also became known as a gifted teacher, winning the campus's first-ever Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1974. A 1981 article in the university publication SUNY-B Inside said, "Professor López is adored by his students, who call him the best professor they've ever had."

He also published three books -- two on Puerto Rican history and culture and another on the colonial history of Paraguay, based on his Harvard dissertation. "I did all of the things that I knew were expected of me as a member of the academy," he says.

Gradually Mr. López moved into administrative jobs at SUNY. For one semester, in 1981, he simultaneously served as chairman of the history department, director of the Latin American-studies program, director of the university's international student-exchange program, and director of its summer school. "I had four offices on campus," he says. "I was really on top of the hill." His goal: to become a dean. "I thought I had it in me."

He was also busy off campus, helping raise his two sons -- both of whom eventually enrolled at Harvard themselves. With his family's help, Mr. López built two homes from the ground up, hiring only an excavator to dig the basements. At each house he planted an elaborate garden of tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and lettuce.

Despite his early success at Binghamton, by the 1980s Mr. López was feeling that his career had stalled out. He was in his 40s -- at the top of his game, he believed -- yet administrators were passing him over for higher-level positions. He never became a dean. "There came a time when I began to feel very alienated," he recalls. "No one was encouraging me to move up, and I kept seeing other people moving up."

He wonders now if he simply wasn't politic enough to to be a top administrator. "I'm not very good at diplomacy," he says. "Somebody serves a platter of vomit, and I'm going to say, What the hell is this platter of vomit doing on the table?"

Unraveling

Some professors at Binghamton recall Mr. López blowing up over seemingly inconsequential issues -- something he now acknowledges. "People would come in to talk to me and I'd say, 'Get out of my office!'" he recalls. But these days Mr. López is calm, speaking smoothly and lyrically with his Puerto Rican accent. What he has been unable to answer, he says, is whether "my feelings of alienation precipitated the depression, or whether the depression caused my feelings of alienation."

Either way, by 1990 Mr. López began withdrawing from life. He quit going to department meetings and resigned his administrative positions one by one. By 1993 he had "disappeared into the periphery of university life, into the realm of the dead," he recalls. He taught his classes, but "there was no joy in it."

He now realizes that many of his colleagues must have seen him as simply unproductive. He never told anyone about his mental state and, in fact, didn't even recognize what was wrong himself. "Given my cultural background, and because I'm a Harvard man, I'm by definition arrogant," he says. "I thought I could handle this myself."

By 1997, however, going to work had become such a struggle that Mr. López became convinced that he needed to quit his job in order to get better. At age 55, he requested early retirement, offering to give up his associate professorship and his $70,000 annual salary in exchange for an agreement that would allow him to teach three courses every fall semester for seven more years, at $27,500 a year. With the money it saved, the history department hired a young Latin Americanist to replace him.

Even with a lighter workload, Mr. López continued to struggle. "I thought that the retirement would take care of my problems, but it didn't," he recalls. In the fall of 1999 he was so depressed that he canceled his classes for that semester and didn't get paid. By 2000 he was back teaching but his wife had moved out, and he was plotting to kill himself.

When, in 2001, Mr. López found himself on the edge of his bed, unable to pull the trigger on his .22, "I saw that this was a no-exit situation and I really broke down," he says. That's when he began taking antidepressants. His doctors experimented with combinations of drugs and finally hit on the right one in 2002. "Within a few weeks, I was kind of breathing again," Mr. López says. He reconciled with his wife and began to enjoy work once more. "My teaching had come back, and I was having a great time," he says.

It was then that he realized he never should have given up his tenured position. "Anybody who resigns from this type of work at 55 has either won the lottery or has some problems," he says. "This is not a factory job where you get up in the wee hours of the morning. It's a very comfortable job, with enormous amounts of free time. We get very hefty salaries for things that are very enjoyable: reading and thinking and writing."

Mr. López says now he should simply have taken a medical leave. But no one suggested that at the time, and he didn't ask. According to Sylvia M. Hall, director of human resources at Binghamton, administrators take professors at their word when they say they want to retire. "I don't see it as our job to challenge their thinking," she says. If Mr. López had requested sick leave, she notes, he probably would have qualified for a whole year's worth.

In the fall of 2003, with a year left on his part-time teaching agreement, Mr. López asked the history department to extend it. "I feel alive again, energetic, enthusiastic, at times almost giddy with excitement," he wrote in a letter to his fellow history professors that December, in which he revealed his depression and subsequent recovery.

Although the history department apparently discussed his request, the professors never acted on it. In March 2003, Mr. López received a curt letter from Jean-Pierre Mileur, dean of arts and science at Binghamton, telling him that he would have to leave the university, as scheduled, in December 2004. Mr. López appealed the decision, but the provost, the president, and the system's chancellor have all reiterated it. Ms. Swain, the provost, says it is unclear whether the university will continue offering Mr. López's classes, which include courses in the history of Mexico and Spain. "Some of his courses, I don't believe we need," she says, although she won't say which ones.

Mr. López says he is stunned that after his more than 30 years on the faculty, the university will not allow him to continue teaching, even as an adjunct. "They turned me down so brutally and arrogantly, without explanation, it just took me aback," he says. He is so angry that last month he changed his tactics and began asking not just for a part-time position but for the return of his tenured job. A couple of former students who are now lawyers have urged him to sue the university on the basis that his early-retirement contract is not legally binding because he was mentally ill when he signed it.

A Stranger To His Department

Not many historians at Binghamton have stepped up to support Mr. López. For years he has been absent from department functions; many on the faculty today barely know him. "On the one hand, I'm very sympathetic to people who have psychological problems," says Donald Quataert, a history professor who says Mr. López has been virtually invisible for the past 15 years. "But on the other hand, he got a fair deal."

Bonnie Effros, who became chairwoman of the history department last fall, declined to speak to The Chronicle. But in a memorandum she wrote last semester to professors in the department, she said she did not consider the refusal to extend Mr. López's agreement as an "injustice." She wrote: "He entered into a seven-year contract that has been honored by the administration and was implemented in quite favorable terms for Professor López. ... The administration has every right not to extend that agreement."

Melvin C. Shefftz, an associate professor of history who has been at Binghamton for more than 40 years, says that in the past year or so he has seen Mr. López return "to the person I remember from way back." Although he believes that his colleague received a favorable retirement deal, he doesn't understand why the university won't continue employing "a very fine teacher."

One of Mr. López's mistakes, Mr. Shefftz believes, was revealing that he had tried to kill himself. "I think people are nervous about mental illness," says Mr. Shefftz. "They think: 'What if he goes off his medications? He'll come and shoot us.'"

For the past month, as the weather has grown colder, two former staff members at Binghamton who have remained friendly with Mr. López have spent their lunch hours each weekday standing in front of the Library Tower with signs that read, "Keep López Teaching." One of the protesters, Jack Sperling, who earned a bachelor's degree here in 1967 and coordinated support programs for students who lived off campus until 1981, says the university's refusal to keep Mr. López "shows that it is just playing lip service to diversity."

In his letter to the history department, Mr. López himself noted that he is "one of the most accomplished Hispanic academicians in the state and a member of a group that remains woefully underrepresented in higher education." In an interview, he adds, "I happen to be Puerto Rican, and you'd think the university would be anxious to keep someone like me around, even if it's just a show." He is the only Hispanic professor, he notes, ever to teach in Binghamton's history department.

When asked about charges that the university is discriminating against Mr. López because of his mental condition or his race, Ms. Swain, the provost, says only, "Neither of those are the case." She says the university simply wants to use the money it is spending on Mr. López's part-time contract to hire tenured and tenure-track faculty members.

Binghamton administrators have never argued that Mr. López has lost his touch as a teacher. He can still pack a classroom. During one of his last classes, in December, 28 students -- the maximum number allowed according to a sign on the wall -- sat rapt as he told stories about Mexican leaders from the early 1900s, describing their personalities as if he knew them.

Several years ago, Mr. López gave up his career to save his life. Now that he has his health back, he wants to make up for lost time. But as classes ended for the semester and he cleaned out his office, it looked as if he wouldn't get that chance. A few days after exams were over, he packed the remnants of his 30-year career into his 1989 Toyota Camry and drove away.

Robin Wilson is a senior writer for The Chronicle.

Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education