At that time, most women still had difficulty finding tenure-track positions and were usually recruited as research associates or teachers in non-tenure-track jobs. It would have been far easier for a Canadian institution like UBC to recruit excellent female prospects and become a world-class school. At the time, the Zoology Department had one woman with tenure out of perhaps twenty-five faculty. The response to my proposal was dead silence; then discussion abruptly shifted to other matters. Once again I felt I had marginalized myself in the department with what was thought to be another kooky Suzuki idea.
When I had been recruited by UBC, about 60 percent of the faculty in the Zoology Department were Canadians, and the rest were Britons and Americans. Canadian universities exploded in size as more and more students enrolled, so by the 1970s, Canadian institutions were graduating substantial numbers of students with PhDs. Yet we were hiring more and more Americans and Brits, and the proportion of Canadians in my department fell below 50 percent. At a departmental meeting, I suggested that when we received applications for a position, we should separate them into two piles, one for Canadians, the other for all the rest. We should then examine only the file of Canadians to see whether any applicants met our academic standards and needs. If there was someone who did, I recommended we try to recruit that person without even looking at the applicants in the other group. Only if we couldn't find someone of high enough caliber in the Canadian applications would we then look at the second group.
I couldn't believe the response. One young professor from Britain called me a “fascist” and raised the specter of jackbooted Nazi-like brownshirts if my advice were followed. It was astonishing to see the equally angry reaction from others to my attempt to make it possible for Canadians to compete in a more equitable way without compromising academic standards. After all, by grading all applications together, Canadians would immediately be at a disadvantage just in numbers of competitors for the job.
I don't want to imply that I suffered by being an outsider. In large measure, I chose to remain in that position by not playing the game. The politics of rising through the academic ranks never interested me, and so long as I had research support and great students, I was happy. I also remembered my father's admonition that if I wanted to be liked by everybody, I wouldn't stand for anything. If I was going to say what I believed, I had to be prepared for the reality that some people would always be pissed off at me. Many times in meetings, when I knew I would be a minority of one on an issue and would anger a lot of people, I would agonize over whether to let it pass and make my own life simpler. But I couldn't help responding if it was a matter of principle, even though everything in me just wanted to fit in and not make waves. My fellow faculty members would roll their eyes, suggesting they were thinking, “There goes Suzuki, grandstanding again.”
An outsider sees things from a different angle and thus, I believe, often recognizes what others may not see. A scientist working in bio-technology with the prospect of making a lot of money from a product can be resistant, if not blind, to questions of hazards or risks that someone without a vested interest might see with greater clarity. For me, status as an outsider has been a mixed blessing. When I was younger, I so wanted to fit in and not stand apart, to be accepted and liked. However, on the outside, not only do I see things from a different perspective, but also I don't have a vested interest in the status quo or in companies, groups, or organizations of which I might be critical.
THREE
A NEW CAREER
IN 1954, WHEN I graduated from high school and went away to college, my family had never owned a television set. At that time in London, Ontario, television was still a novelty, and a pioneer who purchased a TV set required a giant antenna to pick up signals from Cleveland or Detroit. I remember the thrill of sitting in my uncle's living room watching shadowy on-screen images flitting through a curtain of heavy electronic snow — it was the technology more than the programs that fascinated us. But watching television had never been part of my early family life, and when I went away to college and then graduate school, I was too busy to watch TV.
On another front that would turn out to be a thread in the fabric of my life, my father had encouraged me to take up public speaking. In Japanese culture, extreme deference is paid to authority and social position, and self-deprecation and politeness often mean people are reluctant to speak out or stand up for themselves or their ideas. In Canada, a culture in which outspokenness or aggressive self-promotion is often admired, the inability of many Japanese Canadians to stand up and speak with enthusiasm or authority is a disability.
My father was a very rare Japanese Canadian, outgoing, gregarious, and articulate, and he wanted me to be the same way. “You've got to be able to get up and speak in public,” he told me over and over when I was a teenager. He worked hard to train me to give speeches, and at his urging, I entered oratorical contests and won a number of them.
Amherst College in the 1950s aimed to graduate students who were well rounded in the humanities and the sciences. Every Amherst undergraduate of the time, regardless of area of specialty, had to take such courses as English and American Studies and a foreign language; one of the more idiosyncratic requirements was that all students had to be able to swim two lengths of the pool. Amherst men also had to take public speaking in sophomore year. The course was a joke among the students, because no one ever failed, but I took it seriously and won top marks in the six speeches we had to give over two semesters. As well, as an honors biology student, I was required to make a scientific presentation to students and professors in each semester of my senior year, and I discovered I had an ability to present complex scientific topics in a way that not only was understandable but also excited the listeners. I realized teaching was something I enjoyed and could do well, and in graduate school this awareness was reinforced in the seminars and discussions I led.
After I arrived at the University of Alberta in 1962 to take up my first academic position, I soon earned a reputation as a good lecturer and was invited to give a talk on a program called Your University Speaks, broadcast on a local television channel. It featured university professors lecturing on subjects in their areas of expertise, aided by slides. As the title of the show suggests, it was a pretty stodgy series. But I was curious and accepted the invitation (I think we were even paid twenty-five bucks), and apparently I did all right, because I was asked to go back the next week and the next and the next until I ended up doing eight programs. The series was broadcast early Sunday mornings, so I was shocked when people stopped me and told me how much they had enjoyed one of the shows I had done. Initially I couldn't understand why anyone would watch TV on a Sunday morning, but I began to realize television had become a powerful vehicle to inform people.
I moved to the University of British Columbia a year after returning to Canada, and in Vancouver I was asked to appear on television to do the occasional book review or commentary on a scientific story. I became more interested in the medium as a way to communicate and ended up proposing a television series to look at cutting-edge science. Knowlton Nash was head of programming at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and approved the series to come out of Vancouver. At one point, he called Keith Christie, who had been assigned to produce the series, and asked how “it” was going. Keith asked what he was talking about, and Knowlton replied, “You know, that Suzuki-on-science series.” Keith tells me he said, “That's it,” and the show was called Suzuki on Science. It was broadcast across the country in 1969 and was my first involvement in a television series with a national audience. It ran for two seasons and was renewed for a third, but I quit: we had a lousy time slot and low budget and I saw no future for the show, exciting though making the series had been.