A Broadening Experience
By Linda Carpenter
September 2007
In the mid 1970s, my undergraduate advisor strongly suggested that I participate in a study abroad program in Costa Rica. I knew that it was a great opportunity for me, since I was majoring in sociology and Spanish, but I couldn’t see how I could possibly afford it. I would lose the part of my scholarship that went toward room and board, as well as the income from my campus job. I eventually became convinced that I could just barely swing it if I took out a huge student loan and didn’t eat much.
Even as a naïve twenty-year-old, I knew there had to be more here than met the eye. Who was out to get the professor and why?
Aside from helping me to refine my career choice and providing an opportunity to improve my Spanish, study abroad was highly recommended as a valuable life experience. In my case, it was more broadening than I anticipated.
The first month or so was devoted to intensive language classes, some lectures introducing the fifteen or so program participants to the culture, and several field trips. During the remaining three months we were each required to do a research project and write a paper (in English). I really hadn’t given my project a lot of thought, as I was there primarily to be immersed in the language and culture. It turned out that I didn’t need to worry about it because I had just the qualities that one of the professors was looking for. I was indecisive and fairly fluent in Spanish. Soon I found myself not too gently steered into a project in which I had very little interest and even less preparation. The professor, whose field was one of the social sciences, had somehow hooked up with a local medical doctor who thought he was on the trail of a previously unreported genetic disease. The doctor needed someone to trace the family tree and interview the family members.
I’m not sure how my partner got reeled in. He was planning to go into an unrelated medical field, but his Spanish was not quite up to doing interviews. He was one of only two men in the program that semester and maybe was supposed to be my bodyguard during a lot of time spent in the middle of nowhere. Because of where most of the subject family lived, we ended up getting rooms in a pensión in a little town out in the country. Six days a week for three months we took day trips to even more remote villages to do our interviews. Except for some misadventures that could be the foundation for separate stories, things went along pretty smoothly.
Close to the end of the time that we had to devote to the interviews, we were spending a couple of days in the capital of San José. I came back from a shopping trip to find the doctor talking with my partner in the apartment that we shared with some other students and the professor. The doctor had been “investigating” our program and the professor. He was not pleased with either. Further, our draft papers included too much information on the subject family and the doctor’s research. I had been wondering how we were going to satisfy the research paper requirement without stepping on the doctor’s toes, but was hoping that the professor would give us some guidance for the final version. Just before he left, the doctor commented that he might have us all deported. He was from a wealthy and powerful family and we had no doubt that he could do that.
More details of the doctor’s suspicions came out in the next day or two. He thought that the professor was stealing his work. A couple who were in the same social science field as the professor were completely on his side and did not hesitate to let my partner and me know it. They told us that they would be sending a letter to the ethics committee to which our professor had just been nominated.
Even as a naïve twenty-year-old, I knew there had to be more here than met the eye. Who was out to get the professor and why? Why did the doctor have our draft papers before we had even received any feedback from the professor? I wasn’t qualified to render an opinion on her ethics or competency, but I was pretty sure that she was not stealing the doctor’s research. And the doctor, up until then, had seemed to be a wonderful person, now acting totally out of character.
After a couple of days of moral dilemma, I decided to tell the professor about the visit from the doctor. She did not react well to the possibility that her career was about to disintegrate. Then she pulled herself together and went on a horseback trip while my partner and I were left to somehow pull our papers out of the fire on our own, get credit, and not have to repeat a semester of college.
A few days later, I found myself in an inquiry with my partner, the professor, the doctor, the social scientist couple, and a few other professionals. I was slow to figure out that the female half of the couple had applied for the job that our professor was doing and was probably behind the whole witch hunt.
I managed to completely rewrite my paper and called it something like “Health Problems in a Rural Community.” There was absolutely nothing in it about the genetic disease that the doctor thought he had discovered. Somehow, before the professor went back to her home college in the States, the doctor absolved her. I could not absolve either of them, the social scientist couple, or behavioral scientists in general. Sociology and I were not on good terms.
While I was recently reviewing the journal that I kept during those four months, I Googled the professor’s name. She went on to publish several books and was very successful in academia and politics. She is now retired and so am I.