Editor’s Note: The Daily Princetonian is introducing a new weekly series: the spotlight from the Features section. Each week, the section will highlight an interesting, amusing, or significant part of Princeton in the form of a Q&A. We kick off the series this week with a Valentine’s-inspired interview with two professors who are life partners in teaching and in marriage.
Deborah and Frank Popper have been married for 58 years and both hold visiting faculty positions in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. As academic and life partners, they have co-authored papers and co-taught classes, including ENV305: Topics in Environmental Studies: Building American Style: Land-Use Policies and Rules. For the week of Valentine’s Day, the ‘Prince’ sat down with the Poppers to discuss their love story and how they navigate academia as a married couple.
The Daily Princetonian (Prince): How did you two meet?
Frank Popper (FP): We got married in August 1968 in what was my parents’ apartment, and we are sitting here right now — or looking at the computer — in pretty much the exact place we got married all those years ago.
Deborah Popper (DP): Oh, wow! That’s right. We live in Manhattan now and his parents moved into this particular apartment in 1967 which is the year we actually met. And although he was a graduate student at Harvard, I was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr and spending the summer working at Boston Public Library at the time. We got married in 1968 in the living room in front of the window that we're sitting in now.
FP: Deborah went to Bryn Mawr as an undergraduate and I went to Harvard, pretty much paired schools. They’re a mile from each other. Students take courses back and forth. There were mutual friends between us, and that’s how we met in Cambridge in 1967.
DP: We met in an ice cream shop in Harvard.
FP: I always get the name of it wrong.
DP: It’s Bailey’s and Brigham’s.
FP: I guess it’s still there, although I haven’t checked or been there in a while.
DP: I think it hasn’t been there in a while … This is to say, this [has been] a long relationship.
Prince: What did your life look like after you got married?
DP: When we were married, I was going into my senior year in college, so I was like all the students we teach, maybe younger than them. At that point, Frank was a graduate student — the first year he worked in New York — and I, instead of spending my last year at Bryn Mawr, spent it at Columbia and Barnard, because at the time, they had this program if you got married, you could go elsewhere and still graduate within the Seven Sisters [a consortium of higher education institutions in the Northeast which began as all-women schools]. I certainly could not have applied to Princeton at the time. But then we moved back to Cambridge, where he finished a Ph.D., and then we moved to Chicago for many years. And I think I did a little of this, and a little of that. So we took turns — who was working and who wasn’t working.
FP: That’s a nice way to put it — I kept getting fired. But that was a long time ago.
DP: At any rate, we had our kids in the 70s, and I went to get a library degree at one point. Well, I guess while I was having my kids…
FP: Our kids.
DP: Right. But I guess I had always, you know, from the start, read what Frank was writing. I actually did type his dissertation, I just want you to know. On a typewriter with all the paper... yeah, I did it.
Prince: How did you start working together?
DP: Frank’s colleagues were geographers, and so I discovered this great field of geography, and went ahead and got a Ph.D. at that point, and while I was doing that, we began to actually work together. I’ll put it this way: I always read Frank’s stuff and commented and edited, but it was always “accept” or “reject” anything I suggested. And then once we started working together, that meant we had to agree. That means we go into a classroom, we don’t always agree, but we actually have to agree to disagree in public, and that’s actually an important part of our teaching.
FP: In the summer of 1985 we took our kids to the Great Plains region of the United States, which I’ve always been fascinated by. We spent the summer car camping through the northern Great Plains, Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, and so forth. It was really fascinating and a lot of fun for all of us. And we came back to New Brunswick and sort of pondered around for a while. And in late ’87 we published an article. We expected nothing really to come of this article, but it turned out to be enormously influential.
DP: It looked at the boom and bust history of this region, and saw ongoing economic, environmental, and demographic pressures. I think of it as more [of] a metaphor, but it was an ecological restoration future for the rural Great Plains. This article was very controversial. It was taken as “Why are you saying nasty things about our region?” It was a slight misunderstanding of us; we didn’t mean to be nasty.
DP: We got a lot of invitations to come and talk. The one thing everybody could agree on is that they didn’t like us. But it was really terrific to be invited to very tense kinds of public meetings with another person. You know? I don't think I could have done it by myself.
FP: Tactically it was a real help. If it was a hostile question that I didn’t have a good answer for, Deborah would answer it and as she was talking, something helpful occurred to me.
FP: We started teaching at Princeton in 2001, and since then, we have taught a course on an introduction to city planning and environmental planning every year. We teach together and we often disagree in public and, I want to put this not pretentiously, but we try to offer a model... about how adults can work together and disagree civilly and keep going.
DP: And just to show you how this works, I would alter what he just said. We don’t try to do it. We can’t stop ourselves from doing it. That’s just how we interact.
FP: Given the divorce statistics in the U.S., I think there are a lot of students who benefit from seeing adult authority figures who can disagree civilly and remain productive.
Prince: What other aspects about teaching together do you both enjoy?
DP: It’s interesting to teach together, the ways in which we change the dynamic of a class. It changes the ways in which you actually have to negotiate responsibility. Everybody I know who’s a professor does this: you walk into a class, and it’s your room. You’ve got the agenda set. When you’re doing this with other people, you actually have to negotiate how that works. And in our case, because we actually have done this for so long and know each other so well, we probably don’t do it as formally as we would if [we were] co-teaching with a colleague. We know each other so well that we can say, “This, why don't you talk about it?” Or I can say, “Stop talking. I want to talk.”
FP: At Rutgers, where I taught for many years, I got bored teaching by myself. I also taught several times with other colleagues, and Deborah’s right, it felt more formal. It felt more restrained and my slight boredom at teaching by myself was not relieved by teaching with my colleagues. But teaching with Deborah, because we can do so much more stuff without offending each other, is more exciting.
DP: We often think about the same kinds of things, but we don’t approach them in the same way. Because we think so differently, sometimes what comes out of the other person's mouth is: wait a second, I didn’t think about it that way. We make a point early in every semester with a new class, to tell students about this, to not misinterpret our disagreement as anything more than an intellectual disagreement that's actually intended to help them understand the different angles on the subject.
Prince: How do you handle the divide — or lack of a divide — between home life and work life in your relationship, since the two of you have been so connected?
DP: There’s no question in my mind that the relationship is bound by a lot of the intellectuality that we actually share in that fashion. That’s such an integral part of our relationship. Our dynamic got worked on over time. Our very first public appearance, he talked and I held the maps that I had made so that people could see the maps on these overhead projectors. Over the years Frank has had to adjust to that shift, too: “Wait a second, you can’t talk too much.” We’ve had to be a little bit more careful of each other. Some people would not want to set foot near that kind of challenge, it would destroy the relationship.
FP: We were both young to be married. All kinds of things I had to learn, some of which came out of both of us being so young. But we’ve done a good job. Our classes are fun, quite apart from the entertainment that we provide in our marriage comedy act.
Valentina Moreno is an associate Features editor for the ‘Prince.’
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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