Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–250
well. I don’t know whether she has had problems with the current administration or not, but I do
know that she’s had a trying time. That suicide cluster we had last year cannot have been easy—
there were something like three students, plus Andy Lange. And for a school the size of Caltech,
four people in a suicide cluster is a lot. The trouble with suicide clusters is you don’t know what
causes them, and when they go away, you don’t know if you caused them to go away or they just
have disappeared below the surface. They’re very frustrating. I’m sure Caltech was frustrated.
Cornell was having a suicide cluster at the same time. NYU went through this, too. At Cornell,
they were jumping into the gorges. At NYU, they had this new library with an atrium and people
were either jumping out of buildings or into the atrium. At Caltech, I think with one exception,
they were using the so-called getaway bags, where you modify plastic dress bags and basically
drown yourself in helium that you buy at some toy store, you know, for balloons. I think three of
the four were like that. It’s amazing how these things take on the characteristics of an infectious
epidemic. I studied that a little bit last year, because I was so concerned when Andrew Lange
died [January 2010]. Andrew, apparently, although none of us knew it, had had this tendency
toward depression most of his life. If I had known, I certainly would have tried to discourage
him from being division chair—not that I think that caused it. I think it was just one more thing
in his life. I learned enough to know that suicide is a very complex issue. These university
suicide clusters have got to be enormously frustrating to the people involved. I think Caltech
made some mistakes. In retrospect, you can always see that mistakes have been made.
ASPATURIAN: Yes, hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
TOMBRELLO: Other leaders: There’s Jonas Zmuidzinas, who runs the Microdevices Lab at JPL
and has a joint appointment on campus; we talked about that. I tried very hard to develop a next
generation of leaders at Caltech the same way I tried at Schlumberger. It’s always been fun,
watching the careers of these people at Schlumberger as they move up the food chain or move
into something different. At Caltech, there were some I put into positions where they might
develop as administrative leaders, because I thought they would succeed. Caltech’s about doing
good science and teaching, and it’s just this extra bit if one or more of them turn out to also be
able to run things. It should be no disgrace to “fail”—put that in quotation marks—at being an
administrator. But it’s very important to groom future leaders. Institutions do it well or badly.
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