Archives & Special Collections Allen Kropf

Transcript of Alfred Kropf Interview

[0:00] Richard Fink: How did you happen to come to Amherst in the first instance? It's not the everyday place one might choose to come.

[0:08] Allen Kropf: I, I guess I really had always wanted to teach and to teach at a small college. Uh, I went to a small college as an undergraduate, Queens College in New York City. Uh, and, um, the idea of being at a liberal arts institution where I might be able to not only teach my subject but learn from colleagues in a wide variety of subjects, uh, which I was introduced to as an undergraduate. I came to Queens College, totally unaware of the worlds of literature and art, music and so forth, and that, that experience, you know, changed my life. And I thought that I would enjoy being at such a, such an institution, um, for my career. And so I guess in the back of my mind that it had always been there. And then after I, uh, finished graduate school, uh, I was interested in teaching, but, at that particular point, I didn't quite know how to go right into the, into a place like Amherst. So I spent a few years in, um, in a research lab and a few years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, learning about the chemistry of vision and doing research in that field.

[1:33] Fink: Where did you go from, from Queens College? You went to-- [crosstalk]

[1:36] Kropf: Queens College. I went to the University of Utah, where I got my PhD in physical chemistry. Being at that particular point, uh, there were, there were no, there were no advertisements for jobs in journals or in, or in forums like National American Chemical Society meetings and so forth, it was all done through, literally, the old boys’ network. 

[1:40] Fink: And that would have been what?

[2:03] Kropf: This is in 1958. And, uh, being as I was in the Department of Biology, the, the word of openings in the field of chemistry, well, just didn't filter through the, through the network into that area. So, uh, I was sort of, you know, casting about trying to find, you know, a college where I might teach and, um, Amherst was sort of an entity known to me, I didn't really know a great deal about it but I had an idea that it was a, that it was a very fine undergraduate institution and probably a good place to teach, but, you know, it was off the, it was totally off the radar screen at that point.

[2:44] Fink: Well, you're at a large research-oriented university, the premier research oriented University at the time. [crosstalk]

[2:50] Kropf: Right. Although, because of this network that I mentioned about, the old so-called boys’ network, uh, the, the, the senior people in the chemistry department did have close ties with, with Harvard. And they had a contact at Harvard, it was Paul Doty, and, and they, in fact had a candidate from the Department of Chemistry at Harvard who was their leading candidate for the position, as it turned out. [crosstalk]

[3:22] Fink: That you were hoping to be involved in? [crosstalk]

[3:23] Kropf: That I ultimately got.

[3:25] Fink: Yes.

[3:25] Kropf: But it was totally unknown to me. There was no way that I would have known that this position was, was open or that this other fellow had been a candidate. As it turned out, there was a fellow graduate student of mine from, from my time, a fellow graduate student who was, uh, doing research at the University of Minnesota, which was one of the other schools that Bob Whitney, who was the, the, one of the senior people in the department at the time and who sort of went out to his places to, uh, to find promising teachers--

[4:03] Fink: He was at Amherst.

[4:05] Kropf: Bob?

[4:05] Fink: Yes.

[4:05] Kropf: Yeah, Bob was at Amherst, right. And, uh, so he had, there was a candidate from the University of Minnesota. And he, for reasons of where he wanted to be and what he wanted to do, decided at the last minute, I mean, he had an interview planned here, decided at the last minute that he would, um, that he would not be a candidate for the job and wrote a letter to them, which, which he sent a copy of to me, saying that he's sorry to, uh, you know, withdraw his name from the job but that he does re--, there was a fellow graduate student of his at the University of Utah who he thought would probably make a pretty good teacher, who he thought was at Harvard, and might be interested in a job. And by some miracle, this letter actually got to me. 

[5:02] And, um, it also got to the department. And I think I called them and said, yes, I was interested in the job. And, um, sort of, you know, I don't, I don't think that they felt that there was, there was much hope for me. But nonetheless, they decided that they would invite me out. And I do remember when I actually arrived at the univ--, at the, at the College, that the department was just dispersing from a department meeting and Ralph Beebe, who was the other senior member of the department, walked out. I introduced myself. He said, “Oh, I'm not really sure there is a job here.” [both laugh]

[5:44] At which point I almost took my bag and left. But anyway, I did then give a seminar, I had an interview, and over the course of a day and a half, evidently, whatever I did, was enough to sort of make them change their mind about both me and the candidates that they had. And so by, you know, this incredible series of fortuitous circumstances, uh, I ended up being offered the job and took it and came to Amherst. And, uh, somehow or other I had a premonition that this was going to be the place for me.

[6:25] Fink: How, uh, how did you begin in your teaching? What were your early teaching assignments? And how, how did you get them? Were you low-man on the totem pole, or how did that work?

[6:37] Kropf: Yeah, well, uh, first of all, when I was hired one of the, one of the prerequisites for the position was that I would teach in Science 1-2, the famous course from the so-called “new curriculum,” which, uh, Arnold Arons had invented, developed. Uh, and--

[7:02] Fink: This is the post-Second War curriculum? [crosstalk]

[7:05] Kropf: Post-Second World War curriculum, right.

[7:06] Fink: And we're talking 1958 now, for you. [crosstalk]

[7:08] Kropf: The so-called Kennedy curriculum, right.

[7:10] Fink: Yes. 

[7:10] Kropf: Yeah. Right. And this was in 1958. 

[7:12] Fink: Right.

[7:13] Kropf: And so that was one of my assignments was teaching in Science 1-2, which was one of the formative experiences in my whole, in my whole teaching career. Uh, and then I also was asked to teach in, I think Chemistry 21 as it was then, Introductory Chemistry, but physical chemistry, the plum the, you know, the course that a new faculty member like myself, a physical chemist by profession by, by inclination, by enthusiastic interest was the course that I really wanted to teach and I wasn't able to do, well I was able to do that the following year, but that was largely because of this unfortunate circumstance of David Grahame’s death, since he was the person who taught the course.

[8:05] Uh, I, I know that one thing that I was told by, by, uh, Ralph Beebe was that David Grahame, uh, said to them that I could, that he, it would be all right with him if I would teach the laboratory and physical chemistry. They thought that this was some sort of, you know, miracle that happened, because David Grahame was extraordinarily, not only jealous of the course, but also very, very meticulous in how he kept his equipment, and who he let use the equipment. He had his, all the equipment for the course-- [crosstalk]

[8:50] Fink: Sounds a lot like someone I know. [crosstalk]

[8:53] Kropf: [laughs] --in a locked cabinet and the key was kept in some vault or another. And, uh, he said that I could teach the laboratory and this was, was this was seen as some enormous boost to my candidacy because David Grahame had evidently been, felt that I could be trusted in this venture. [laughs]

[9:16] Fink: Teaching with Arnold Arons in Science 1-2 was a formative part of your, uh, academic life at Amherst College. Could you expand on that just a little bit? 

[9:28] Kropf: Yeah. Um, first of all, it was, it was a course which largely focused on physics. And I had had a bit of physics in my background as an undergraduate at Queens College, and also I took some physics courses as a graduate student. So I felt that physics was something I could teach, but I had no idea as to how to teach it to beginning undergraduates.

[9:59] Fink: And these--

[10:00] Kropf: And--

[10:00] Fink: All undergraduates had to take this course? [crosstalk]

[10:02] Kropf: Right. And that's the, the next point I wanted to make. 

[10:04] Fink: Sorry.

[10:04] Kropf: Was that, that’s alright, is that it was not just science undergraduates, but all undergraduates of the College had to take this course, it was a requirement as you, as you know, but I'm not sure that present-day, uh, present-day people, colleagues would know this, uh, that it was, um. So how do you teach physics and physical science, including mathematics, as part of that course?

[10:32] Fink: Calculus?

[10:32] Kropf: Calculus. To the whole College.

[10:36] Fink: Yeah.

[10:37] Kropf: And, um, this was, then, an eye opener for me, that it could be done and it could be done not just simply by the standard method of learning formulas, learning how to plug numbers into formulas and getting answers, which is what the sort of standard view of, and probably the reality of, high school physics was and probably much of college physics around the country. But rather, it was a course in which ideas and the logic of how one understands an idea was built up. And also where they were readings, um, from, in our case, from Galileo, from Newton, and from, from other sources where you read about the history and logic of the development of an idea.

[11:27] Fink: These were not, this was not anything like a science course for poets. This was a fundamental course in concepts and theories of physical science.

[11:39] Kropf: This was a perfectly valid, from a physicist’s point of view, introduction to physics, except it was done very carefully in terms of building up the ideas and asking the students to articulate the ideas. When a problem was presented on an exam, for example, it wasn't just a matter of, you know, “the ball is thrown up with initial velocity of such and such. How high will it go? How long will it take to get, to return to the same starting point?” That was not the, that may have been the way the problem ended, but the beginning was, “what assumptions go into solving the problem? What is the logic of, of using a particular Newtonian approach and so forth.” So that, um, one had a, one had a, uh, to think through the, through your own ideas as to how to go about solving the problem. And the interesting thing and the part that, you know, I just loved and which I think, fulfilled my dreams about being at a college like this is that, at the same time, there was a course called English 1-2, which asked students to write about their experiences and again, asked them to think through the logic of what one does when you go to the library to look up a book, when you serve a tennis ball or a number of simple assignments, where you were asked to write about a simple task in, explaining it as if you were explaining it to somebody but with the logic of, of what you're doing, of the logic of the task, of the logic of what you do in, in carry out the task was, was really what it was all about. 

[13:29] In other words, if you thought that through, clearly, the writing became clearer. Well, here again, one had in the science course a problem where if presumably, you thought it through clearly first, then you could easily solve it and explain it in somewhat different language to be sure, but there was a parallel, and the students, many of them saw that parallel and were totally taken by it. I think it changed the lives of more students, those two courses, than anything that I've ever seen before.

[14:04] Fink: What was it like getting a research program started? Because you came here with four years’ post-doctoral work, and you were at the Applied Physics Lab, if I understood you correctly, for two years. [crosstalk]

[14:16] Kropf: Right.

[14:16] Fink: And then you changed your field more or less completely, to do the chemistry of vision--

[14:20] Kropf: Right.

[14:21] Fink: --uh, in the biology department with George Wald at Harvard. then you came here, small college, having come from major research, research laboratories and academic institutions. Uh, how was it? What was it like?

[14:35] Kropf: Well, uh, one, one was expected, let's put it this way, one was expected to, to develop a research program, but it was, but the realities were that it had to be extraordinarily modest. And it was, to a large extent, meant to help the honors program which was present and that is bringing students particularly in their senior year into a research project for them to do so that when they went on to medical school or graduate school, they would have some experience with research. And, uh, but it, but it couldn't have been anything like what one expected people at universities to do. The idea of publishing and so forth was, was, there was much less severe pressure on one here.

[15:29] Fink: In the College as a whole or in the chemistry department particularly?

[15:32] Kropf: Well, I think in the College, certainly in the College as a whole, in the chemistry department, um, maybe a little bit more than in the College as a whole. That is, there was a little bit more expectation that there would be some productivity. I know that the biology department had even higher expectations of, of publication and productivity. But in any case, the chemistry department expected that you would do some sort of research but it was to be, at that time, so the small college research was in a totally differently league than university research not only in the sense of having a huge laboratory with lots of equipment, but also in the types of problems that you dealt with. They were kind of, you know, backwater problems, nothing that was anywhere near the cutting edge of, uh, research.

[16:19] Fink: But surely the chemistry of vision had not been adumbrated at that time, and here you are.

[16:25] Kropf: Yeah, right. It was a field that actually, you know, had a lot of potential and, and was, you know, quotes “a hot topic” at that time. Uh, so, you know, when I came, the only sources of funding available were really small, small grants from the Research Corporation, and just the beginnings of being able to get money from the National Institutes of Health, which began to have enough money so that small college research, or research at small colleges I should say, would maybe be supported if it happened to be in a field that, you know, they were interested in.

[17:06] Fink: But they were, but you were, you would have been competing for dollars with large university faculty members. [crosstalk]

[17:13] Kropf: Oh, absolutely.

[17:13] Fink: So the quality of your research proposal is what counted, there wasn't anything as a set aside, “here's small college dollars at NIH.”

[17:22] Kropf: No, that's, that's exactly right. Uh, I first applied to the Research Corporation and received a few thousand dollars for a simple spectrophotometer and a few other pieces of apparatus which is basically what I started with. And then I, um, I applied to the National Institutes of Health. And fortunately, the National Eye Institute had been set up not too long before that, and they were interested in the chemistry of vision, having worked at Harvard with George Wald, who later received a Nobel Prize in that field, um, was a big help. And so I received grants from the, a grant from the National Eye Institute, which really got me started on a somewhat larger scale in the sense of being able to buy more sophisticated instrumentation, which was necessary for my research, and to my great good fortune that, those grants continued for another 20 years or so, 25 years. And--

[18:27] Fink: I think if I can just say for a minute--

[18:28] Kropf: [laughs]

[18:29] Fink: Allen is really being very modest because one of the fundamental questions that was unanswered at the time that he began his research here was what happens when light hits the back of your eye and initiates the process of seeing, the process of vision. And his work was amongst the earliest work to demonstrate that at the back of your eye, there is a molecular change in structure, the cause of the absorption of a bit of light that initiates the whole photochemical visual process. So when he says “a bit of this” and “a bit of that,” it was, it was a considerable contribution to the chemistry of the understanding of the visual process.

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[19:09] Kropf: The biophysics program which was, uh, which, uh, was developed during the ‘60s. And that came out of the fact that my research was not your standard research in chemistry. At that particular time--it's hard to, it's hard to imagine it or understand it even today, where so much of chemical research has a biochemical flavor and so much of chemical research is directed towards questions which have biological import--at that particular time, that was relatively new. There were relatively, relatively few people in chemical research who were doing problems which were really directed at biological problems, where the problems themselves grew out of biology but the approach was a chemical one. And, uh, so that, that was exhilarating in the sense of being at that boundary. Uh, but it was, it didn't quite fit in with, with the standard departmental boundaries. That is--

[20:23] Fink: This is an interdepartmental program?

[20:26] Kropf: Yeah, this was interdisciplinary in the, in the real sense of the term, of being, straddling chemistry, biology, physics and psychology, as it turned out. And, uh, in order to, um, sort of foster this idea and make it a, an educational objective, both Tom Yost, who was in the biology department, who was interested in these ideas, and myself along with Bruce Benson from physics instituted, well, brought to the faculty the proposal for a biophysics program, which really meant simply setting out a group of courses that would be required for somebody to major and get it, and get a, get their bachelor's degree with a major in biophysics. It didn't involve any new courses. It just involved taking courses from both, from chemistry, from physics, from biology, and then having a seminar in their senior year where students could come together and talk about questions and problems that had this interdisciplinary nature to it. And then be able to do an honest project in, um, with somebody in chemistry or somebody in physics or somebody in biology without necessarily having to major in that particular department, but which had been the case up till then. Uh, so that was kind of an interesting development that grew out of that, particularly out of my field of research and some of the ideas that were already present at Amherst. As a matter of fact, Tom and Bruce had already had some earlier students who were doing interdisciplinary, uh, work. But this was a, now a, uh, officially sanctioned major in the College, it was not a department it was just--

[22:32] Fink: But it's the first interdisciplinary major involving the sciences--

[22:36] Kropf: Yes.

[22:36] Fink: --or involving all, involving any, uh, departments at Amherst College. [crosstalk]

[22:40] Kropf: That’s true, that’s true.

[22:40] Fink: And this would have been 1960-something?

[22:42] Kropf: This was in the ‘60s, in the early ‘60s. And, uh, the reason that it came in, in answer to your question, was that a number of the students who graduated from this program went on to one of the few departments of biophysics in the country, which, particularly one at Johns Hopkins University, which was an outstanding one. And, uh, many of them are still very active in this field. And this was, we were one of the primary undergraduate, that is, pure undergraduate institutions which sent students to this program and they loved them. They loved our students because they had this interdisciplinary background. And, um--

[23:26] Fink: But were fundamentally grounded in chemistry, physics and biology.

[23:30] Kropf: Right, right. And, uh, so that was, that was one of the, that was one of the, as I say, things that, that grew out of the, of these research interests. But, and interestingly enough, as this program developed, one of the subjects that I had become interested in through my own research and through professional meetings, was the chemistry of the nervous impulse, or, I should say, the biophysics of the nerve impulse, because-- [crosstalk]

[24:01] Fink: Which would be naturally following your own line of research with the initiation of the visual--

[24:06] Kropf: Exactly.

[24:07] Fink: --process, which ultimately becomes an electrical process in your brain. 

[24:10] Kropf: Exactly right.

[24:11] Uh, and, um, so we would alternate seminar topics and almost every other year or every third year we would have the senior seminar, which, by the way, was purely voluntary and without credit but enthusiastically attended and I think it has a real impact on the students in the biophysics program. Uh, we would have it on the nervous, on the nervous system and on nerve transmission. And we would bring outside experts at the end of the year and we had some very, very interesting and distinguished people, Stephen Kuffler from the Harvard Medical School being an outstanding one. And, uh, a number of the students then went on to graduate work in this field and it became clear that this was a whole new area that was growing very, very rapidly and had huge potential. 

[25:10] And to make a long story short, eventually that developed into the proposal for a neuroscience, um, program at Amherst, which must have been developed in the mid ‘70s I think, and which brought together, Rose Olver from psychology was, was, participated in writing that proposal, Tom Yost from biology, myself from chemistry. Um, and Prosser Gifford, the dean at the time, and we sent a proposal to the Sloan Foundation, which funded this program. The, I think it was about 450,000 dollars, which was, which was thought to be a huge fortune at that time and which was the first undergraduate neuroscience program in the country. 

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[26:02] Fink: [laughs] 

[26:03] Kropf: The, the first time I was on the Committee of Six, which must have been in the, you know, in the ‘60s, in the maybe late ‘60s or so, and tenure cases came before us, I mean, they were done incredibly casually. They, the, there were a few outside letters. The president would pick up the phone and call a few people that he knew in their field sometimes, to my utter amazement, in the middle of a Committee of Six meeting. We would be discussing somebody's tenure case and, you know, going back and forth and the president picked up the phone, called an institution where somebody who was up for tenure was supposed, was, not supposedly, was spending his sabbatical and asked to talk to the person he was working with, and right in front of everybody, just asked, “well, what do you think of so and so?” And, you know, however it came back, well, that was maybe the decisive factor in the person's, uh, tenure. Um, no inclination that-- [crosstalk]

[27:16] Fink: Do you that, do you think that, uh, faculty now are under a greater amount of stress and strain? Is tenure a fixation relative to when, when you were standing, not standing particularly, when you were being observed? [crosstalk]

[27:31] Kropf: Oh, yes, I'm quite sure it is. I mean, just from what I know, from what people are saying to each other, and what they're saying to me. Um, and I contrast it with, with my tenure decision, which I guess was made, which was, I had no idea that first of all, I was even being considered for tenure at that particular moment. And--

[27:56] Fink: They didn't ask you for any input? 

[27:58] Kropf: They didn’t ask me for any input, there was no getting together of a dossier, of suggesting people to write to or anything of that sort. And, you know, I knew it was about time, one of these years I would be, I would somehow or other find out about tenure. And the way I found out about it was one summer, I had been here, what, four years or something like that, four or five years, I remember I was having a particularly intense summer working in my laboratory. And, uh--

[28:31] Fink: This is the little lab behind the elevator?

[28:33] Kropf: [laughs] This is in the Moore, the old Moore chemistry building. 

[28:35] Fink: [laughs]

[28:36] Kropf: Uh, and I took a moment out from my, uh, from my darkened room. And Ralph Beebe came by and, came by and sort of dropped into the office, asked me what I was doing, and I produced the graph that I just made of the data that I'd collected and was enthusiastically showing him what I had done and explaining it to him and he sort of listened somewhat patiently, and then said to me, he says, “You know, I, uh, it's very interesting what you're doing.” Says, “I think we'd like you to stay around here. I think we'd like, we'd like you to stay here.” I said, “Oh, thank you very much for saying that.” And I just sort of passed it up. Uh, that was nice, you know, that he said that.

[29:24] Fink: Complimentary.

[29:25] Kropf: Complimentary.

[29:26] Fink: Supportive.

[29:26] Kropf: Right. And, uh, later I found out that was Ralph telling me “you have tenure.” [both laugh] And that's the way it happened. And, uh--

[29:37] Fink: That’s a bit different.

[29:37] Kropf: At the end of the year, I, I got a letter saying that the terms of the letter were slightly different than the previous year in the sense that it said your salary for so and so for the next year will be so and so much money and you've been appointed now, your appointment is now without a term or something to that effect. 

[29:58] Fink: That’s what the word was--

[29:59] Kropf: And I looked at it and I said, “Gee, when did, uh, that's a little different.” And I asked around, they said, “Yeah, you have tenure.” I said, “Oh!” [both laugh]

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[30:09] Fink: There, there are other components of the tenure decision and one of your earliest major contributions to, uh, curricular life at the College was your experience in revising the entire college curriculum from the old curriculum of Science 1-2, English 1-2 in the special Select Committee on Curriculum of 1963-64, the Epstein committee to use his name again. [crosstalk]

[30:40] Kropf: Right.

[30:40] Fink: Uh, what was the driving force behind that and how, how did you feel in being steeped in the old curriculum, formative in your own pedagogic life here, and yet, putting it aside and saying we need to go to something?

[30:58] Kropf: I think in the chemistry and the biology and maybe in some of the social sciences, there were feelings that, or that students were being required to take courses when they should really, when they really wanted to get on with their major, maybe they wanted to branch out into other fields as well, it was a language requirement and so forth. So that there was a certain amount of ferment about the curriculum, feeling that it maybe had outlived its usefulness, and it was time for modification. And so this committee was given a charge of seeing what they could do and it was, uh, was painful to first--particularly for me who, who grew up, as you say, or at least many of my ideas about teaching science were formed by Science 1-2--to now, to now, um, in a sense, ditch it or just try and more, maybe more accurately, to try to find something that was as good or better than Science 1-2. 

[32:03] And so this, this group of us tried to sort of develop a curriculum in which we, we tried to find, to keep up the tradition of introducing all of the students at the College to subject matter in the three, you know, great divisions, that is the humanities, the social sciences, and the physical science, or the sciences, the natural sciences, I should say. Uh, and so that all students would be required to take courses in those or at least introductions to those courses, and then have other requirements like a major, uh, distribution requirements and the like. And so we struggled with this and finally hit upon the idea of the Problems of Inquiry series of courses, which I think, largely, were an inspiration of Joe Epstein, who was the one who convinced us all that it was important that students learn the methodology in these three areas. That is, how does one formulate questions, what are the criteria for knowledge in these three areas? 

[33:18] Fink: Sounds a bit like Science 1-2.

[33:19] Kropf: It's, yeah, certainly that's where that, certainly it was the same basic idea that was in Science 1-2 and presumably in these other areas. Uh, and, and so we, you know, came up with the idea of the, of these broad courses which would be developed by faculty which would change every few years, in which one would pick a few subjects which illustrated the way one acquired knowledge, one assessed knowledge in the three large areas, the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. And, in addition, we asked each department to tell us how knowledge in their field developed from, you know, the beginning course up to the end. How, what is the structure of knowledge in their department and how is it reflected in their curriculum?

[34:10] Fink: An incendiary question.

[34:12] Kropf: Well, in some cases, uh, people came in and said, “Oh, of course, that's exactly what we're doing now and we don't have to change anything.” [both laugh] Uh, we anticipated a bit of that, and Joe was a wonderful mimic. And when we were writing our proposals, he, we would have these mock interviews with the people and Joe would be the representative of the department telling us these answers, which had us all in stitches. I don't know what they thought of us at the Princeton Inn as we were rolling on the floor during our meals. 

[34:46] But, um, there were other departments, I remember Earl Latham in Political Science coming in and said, “Oh, we don't have any structure in Political Science. A student can come in and take any course in any sequence they want.” And, I mean, we were dumbfounded. I mean, partly because, being naive in the physical sciences, I thought, well, it has to be somewhat similar in these other subjects as well, here’s a political science, presumably it has some kind of a structure to it, but Earl disabused us of that idea. Anyway, that was an extreme and Earl was being a bit facetious. But anyway, we had, we had a whole range of, um, responses, but nonetheless, we, we tried to see if we could get people to think through their subject, that, their departmental courses and how they might be structured and then having, having students be required to take, you know, maybe one or two, whatever it may be, courses in their department, in that department if they want to fulfill a distribution requirement. 

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[35:54] In, um, in developing or, or revising the introductory chemistry course, was that we, we thought what we would do would be to try to, um, make the introductory chemistry into a continuous story, if you like, or at least having a logic as to how it developed and the sort of the guiding ideas, at least I recall it, you may recall it differently, uh, the guiding idea was that we would start off with atoms and talk about how we understand, how we know that there are atoms, where did atoms come from, and how matter then developed. That is, what is the potential that matter has to be able to go from atoms and their structure to molecules as complicated as DNA and their potential for, for functioning in, as they do. 

[36:58] And so that the chemistry was not just going to be a matter of learning chemical reactions and learning chemical structures, but that there was going to be a story, an evolutionary story to chemistry. And, uh, we would not only illustrate it in how we structured the lecture part of the course, but also in the laboratory. That we would, the idea was that we would begin by presenting a student with a substance or a chemical substance and say, “Okay, how do we know what it is? What is it? What is it made out of? And how do we know that and how, and then how do we, how do we understand it in terms of first of all, its chemical makeup, and then how the atoms are put together? And what is the structure and how do we find this all out? What is, how does one go into a laboratory and ask a question of a, of a substance, what are you and how you are put together?” And that was our sort of, you know, conception as to how this course should be structured. 

[37:57] And as you know, uh, from, even from our chemistry, beginning chemistry course today, there are a few remnants of that like, uh, the bit of radiation that one sees out in the, out in the universe, of that conception, although it's changed considerably over the years. But nonetheless, uh, we, again, were trying to, I think, introduce into the chemistry course something similar to what, maybe, one had in the Science 1-2, we both were influenced by that, I know, we both taught in it, I think we both sort of had, had our eye-teeth cut, cut on that. And, um, so that was the idea in the, in the beginning chemistry course. And then, um, uh, the--

[38:42] Fink: Then we come to the real structure.

[38:44] Kropf: [laughs] And then we had this diversion in the second course, which is one of the, you know, one of my contributions, one which I'm most proud of, and that is the the Chemistry 12 course, the course in chemical thermodynamics and then, added on to it, chemical kinetics. And that was a different, a different, uh, direction in a sense, although it was, it still had some of the same qualities of trying to integrate, trying to integrate ideas, trying to integrate knowledge. And there one was trying to sort of see what kind of a structure one could, one could understand in, one could place on understanding chemical matter and chemical reactions. 

[39:34] What is the overall theoretical structure that one needs to understand, you know, why chemical reactions occur? And to what extent they occur? What is the position of chemical equilibrium? Which is a key question. I know it's a technical set of terms, but nonetheless, it's a key question in understanding how chemical reactions occur. What chemical reaction can occur if you mix together any two substances? Will they react? To what extent they, will they react? In a certain sense, it's a very, very fundamental question in chemistry, as you know, what is chemistry about? It's, as Calvin Plimpton once said, it's a complicated way of pouring things down the drain--

[40:14] Fink: [laughs]

[40:15] Kropf: --or, or to be more intellectual about it and say it's a way of understanding, you know, how, why chemical reactions occur. And--

[40:25] Fink: But using two of the, if there are irreducible elements in physical science, using two of the most irreducible, to be oxymoronical, elements of theory and, in all of physical science.

[40:43] Kropf: Yeah. Yeah, I think thermodynamics, certainly, you know, the being the second one here, the atomic structure, being perhaps the first, but being not only as, well, you know, from the technical side away of understanding the whole science of chemistry in the sense of theoretical structure, but it also had a wonderful, has the wonderful quality of, um, of being a, almost a pure intellectual discipline in the sense of bringing forth those, those elements of reason that I tend to think are inherent in, in human makeup. And, and, you know, it's, it's one of the most beautiful structured aspects of science in the sense that thermodynamics is applied, as you know, to all of the sciences. In geology and physics and almost any subject, the biological, uh, thermodynamics. It's a, it's a broadly based set of ideas. 

[41:53] And, um, it, it has the wonderful quality of, as I found over the years in teaching it, of being able to allow students to, as I tend to think of it, find their minds, find that they do, in fact, have the ability to think through very difficult questions. Uh, and not having known that before, to discover something about the quality of their own minds that they never knew because it's such a tough subject. And to, to put in all of that work and finally master it, you realize that you've come to a new level of ability to understand that you never knew you possessed. 

[42:41] Fink: One of the things that you did that really was, was impressive was to take this difficult subject matter, uh, thermodynamics, which deals in its essence with energy and entropy two extremely, um, esoteric concepts. Even though we think we know what energy might be, it is a very, very abstract idea and entropy certainly is one, but you took these two ideas and you made, together with perhaps others, an extraordinary course for non-science majors dealing with energy and entropy.

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[43:22] Kropf: These, uh, ideas from thermodynamics and presenting them first of all to a, you know, non-science major audience just to give them a flavor of one of the, you know, one of the magnificent structures and developments in the physical sciences and also to expose them, and to us, the, the flowering of these ideas in areas of the social sciences and even the humanities where, you know, authors like Thomas Pynchon became fascinated with the notion of entropy and wrote about it in essays and in some of his books.

[44:02] Fink: Crying of Lot 79.

[44:03] Kropf: Crying of Lot 49, yeah. And, and then also in the social sciences where you know it, the idea of, of entropy and the increase in disorder and, and energy and energy conservation, uh, showed up in various areas, anthropology, history and so forth. I remember a conversation with a student that, uh, was very funny. And that was a student I had in Chemistry 12,  I guess a student who thought he would be a pre-medical student, took Chemistry 12 and just found that it would, overwhelmed him and decided he would become an anthropology major, sort of a move in a totally different direction. And I ran into him a couple of years later, and I said, “Oh, my, how things going?” And, uh, I said, “I remember your experience in Chemistry 12,” I said, “it was a rather difficult one, wasn't it? And I said, you know, “How have things been going in anthropology?” And he said, he made a wry face and he says, “Well,” he said, “I'm taking a course now where it's based upon the ideas energy and entropy, the same sort of structure that, uh, one that you tried to teach us,” and which he evidently retained a bit of, was now being used as a model for some anthropological studies that he was going on into. So anyway, I just mentioned this to illustrate that these ideas are so general and can be used in so many different, uh, fields, that there's writing that we could draw upon from the social sciences and humanities-- [crosstalk]

[45:47] Fink: Oh, Henry Adams.

[45:48] Kropf: --for the students to, to read--

[45:50] Fink: Sure.

[45:50] Kropf: --and, in fact, they did and I think, well, you know, maybe even better than I do, the reactions of many of these students who, who, who would say, “Well, I was sort of, uh, you know, after high school, I vowed I would never take another science course.” And they, you know, went through Amherst almost doing that and then decided, well, maybe in their senior year that they would try something different, uh, and they felt maybe a little guilty graduating without some science. And they took this course, they said, “I never realized that science could be, could have this quality of engaging me, first of all, intellectually, and having these, these, uh, you know, broad ideas which I found fascinating.” And the mathematics, which we thought maybe we were being overprotective--“Well, we better not do too much mathematics, they’ll get nervous.” I mean, these students were able to do more mathematics than we gave them credit for and were stimulated by some simple calculations we asked them to do and said, you know, “If I had known science was like this, I would have [[audio cuts out]]”

[46:58] Fink: You said to me recently, uh, that you were lucky in many ways. And that has been working around in [[?]] gray matter, what, what did you mean?

[47:11] Kropf: Well, I think, you know, some of it has come up in conversation here. That is, lucky to have, have been able to be at an institution where first of all, I had, you know, the freedom and the support, to be able to branch out and to teach the kinds of courses that we've talked about. That is where I had taught courses jointly with colleagues and found those enormously stimulating--that is, a stimulus of, of, particularly of meeting both before and after classes with colleagues teaching material and talking to them and getting their reactions to teaching the same subject matter to different students and student reactions and exchanging ideas about what they wrote in papers and so forth. So being able to interact with colleagues from across the, across the spectrum at the College, in terms of, uh, you remember the light course that we taught where we taught colleagues, with colleagues and in, largely in the English department, but in other departments as well. And being able to be in a classroom with a teacher from a discipline as far away as English, and teaching a subject, the same subject, as they were teaching, that is, the two of us teaching a subject together, uh, you know, was an experience that I don't think I would have had, certainly not at a university, I don't think, and not likely in many other institutions. So this and to me, this was something that somehow or other I dreamt of when I was a, um, an undergraduate or as I was thinking about a teaching career. So I was lucky to have been at Amherst to experience that. 

[49:06] Secondly, in terms of my own ability to carry out research at the pace that I, that I felt I wanted to carry it out instead of the frenzied pace with all the pressures that one had, would have had at a university, I believe, and to have had the students that I had, who were extraordinarily responsive to my teaching and, um, you know, who I’ve, who have remained loyal, and, um, and collegial and friendly over all of the years, and this came about because of the close contact one had with students, undergraduate students at a formative time in their careers. Uh, again, I think having done a little bit of teaching at universities where the emphasis is on your interaction with graduate students and undergraduates kind of are, you know, around but one doesn't form those close, those close ties with them.

[50:13] I think that being able to have that whole large number of friends over the years and people I still keep in contact with, you know, has been a, uh, enormously rewarding and, uh, part of my life. And, um, you know, lucky to have been at a place where whatever creative abilities I had, both, as I've talked about in research and in teaching, that is ideas that I had in terms of being, devising courses or developing ways of teaching a subject, I could actually do, I could actually carry out. Where again, at many institutions you, you know, have to teach within a fairly rigid framework, uh, you know, you're processing through large numbers of students, you're almost like a robot up at the front of the room there having to spew out the material that's in the textbook or the students feel that somehow rather you're deviating from what they're supposed to get in that particular course. It's just the, the freedom to be able to innovate here, in terms of whatever creativity you have as a teacher was, was a very fortunate experience for me. I think I was here also, I mean, we all probably feel this, anybody maybe feels this for any given era, but I do think perhaps I was really here in the golden years of teaching at Amherst, as far as, at least I felt, as far as our curricular structure and as our teaching as a community.