Arts & Culture
Why math and musical prodigy Tom Lehrer was so well-suited for young UC Santa Cruz
The uncomfortably famous satirical songwriter taught as a Cowell College fellow from 1972 to 2001
Tom Lehrer performing in Copenhagen in 1967. (Source: Getty Images via Wikimedia Commons)
The life of longtime instructor Tom Lehrer was marked by the conventions and constructs he defied: from the grand political and social trends of his day that he bucked with sardonic lyrics and playful melodies, to his own role at the upstart campus he adored and taught at for nearly 30 years—the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Since Lehrer’s death on July 26 at age 97 in Cambridge, Mass., his indelible life as one of the greatest American musical satirists and lyricists, one who eschewed fame for a humbler career in higher education, has been recounted by the world’s leading news organizations—The New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Guardian, and BBC, to name just a few.
To try and top their retellings of Lehrer’s legacy would be folly. Instead, the story to be told here is one that clarifies his time at UC Santa Cruz. So we turned to distinguished math professor Tony Tromba, who played a major role in bringing the Harvard-trained mathematician and musical genius to the campus in 1972.
How did he get here?
Lehrer had grown weary of teaching math at MIT, where he was at the time, and was fond of the Bay Area, especially Santa Cruz. So he reached out to Crown College’s founding provost, the highly regarded plant biologist Kenneth Thimann. Lehrer proposed teaching a course to the college’s students on the American musical, which would’ve been off topic for science-centric Crown.
So Thimann asked Cowell College to consider creating a fellow position for Lehrer, who Thimann knew of from his time at Harvard. The Cowell Fellowship Committee met to consider Lehrer’s appointment, but the only member who knew anything about him was Tromba, who learned about Lehrer from time spent at Harvard as a visiting graduate student.
“No one on the committee had heard of Tom,” Tromba said. “So I had to convince them that it was a great idea, and the rest is history.”
What did he do at UC Santa Cruz?
Tromba said that Lehrer was officially a “Lecturer in American Studies,” not mathematics. In his primary course, The American Musical, Lehrer explored classics like My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, Camelot, and The King and I. Admission to the class was highly selective: Students had to audition, and only 15 were accepted each year.
“Taking his musical theatre workshop … was not only a highlight of my college career, it informed the trajectory of my life.”
Alumna Courtney potter
Lehrer’s arrival coincided with UC Santa Cruz’s emergence as a bold alternative to the rise of large, sprawling, and impersonal research campuses. According to Tromba, Lehrer’s reputation matched UC Santa Cruz’s creative and irreverent spirit; and his talents played perfectly into the campus’s original intent to elevate the humanities and foster deeper connections between scholarship and society.
“We had Ph.D.s in music and art history who did scholarly work. But Cowell also wanted to have practicing artists to give students actual meaningful contact with them,” Tromba said. “Rather than just writing papers about Michelangelo, let’s have Michelangelo here—and why not?”
Lehrer entered Harvard at age 14 in the 1940s, majored in math, and graduated by 18. He earned a master’s from Harvard the following year, and then began to pursue a Ph.D. but never completed his thesis. The two math courses he taught at UC Santa Cruz were The Nature of Mathematics and Mathematics in the Social Sciences, typifying what Tromba described as Lehrer’s commitment to make others see the universal applicability and profound depth of the subject he was trained in.
He even wrote songs about math for the public at large:
When you choose --- how much postage to use,
When you know --- what's the chance it will snow,
When you bet --- and you end up in debt,
Oh, try as you may,
You just can't get away
From mathematics!
~ “That’s Mathematics” (1960)
What was he like?
According to the New York Times, Lehrer’s last burst of songwriting came in 1971, the year before he joined UC Santa Cruz—where he enjoyed a serene retreat from the public stage, along with the reprieve from East Coast winters. “I don’t want to shovel snow anymore. In fact, I don’t even want to ever see snow again,” Tromba recalled Lehrer once saying.
On Facebook, former students and peers posted about their fondest memories with Lehrer as their instructor. Alumna Courtney Potter, a writer and editor for Disney, said just one quarter learning from him has impacted her entire career thus far. “Taking his musical theatre workshop (I believe it was one of the last quarters it was even offered) was not only a highlight of my college career, it informed the trajectory of my life,” Potter posted. “I continue performing, and I stand on so much I learned during that brief but incredible time in his orbit.”
Lehrer taught at UC Santa Cruz until 2001 and last came here about five years ago. His cultural contributions are so woven into the American fabric that they ensure his place as one of the most beloved educators ever to teach at our campus.
“A very famous, extraordinarily talented, and enormously clever man who touched the lives of many students and faculty, a person who impacted the entire world, has died—and he called Santa Cruz home for 29 years,” Tromba said. “Ultimately, his goal was not to entertain. His goal was to educate, enlighten, and to make people happy. He wanted people to get a deeper meaning of life and times through laughter.”
