Nils Hasselmo had to rely on his parents in Sweden for part of his education. They used correspondence courses to teach him at home for a time in junior high because there was no school in the village. This month he finishes his job as president of the University of Minnesota to return to his work as professor. Today on our Voices of Minnesota interview Hasselmo talks about his Swedish roots and his University experiences. In the first part of his conversation with Minnesota Public Radio's Kate Smith Hasselmo talks about growing up in Sweden.
Transcripts
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SPEAKER 1: That I was going to be in academic life, was quite clear to me. I can't remember a time when I did not realize that I was going to pursue some academic career. My parents were both teachers, and the whole culture in my home was geared towards using every opportunity to learn, and to teach, and to explore, and do research and scholarship.
And so I think I never gave any serious thought to doing anything else than what I ended up doing. That I was going into administration, I had never anticipated. Maybe I should have anticipated that too, because both my father and my mother were involved in a certain amount of organizational activities.
And my mother was actually the headmaster of a school for a while, so she was in administration and seemed to have liked that. So I should have suspected that maybe I had that strain in me too. Although it was not part of my aspirations when I was in my 20s or even in my early 30s.
SPEAKER 2: So maybe it's not part of the genetic makeup, but maybe is there something about your early education that really focused you in this arena? It sounds like it might have been more family and upbringing than your early schooling.
SPEAKER 1: Well, my family and my schooling, in the early years, were totally intertwined. Because I had my father and my mother as teachers before I graduated from high school, both of them. And our family life was very much geared towards the school environment. So I have a difficult time really separating family from school. And maybe that's why I've always felt so much at home in educational settings.
SPEAKER 2: Sounds like you were taking on the lifelong learning mission that a lot of people talk about now in education from the very beginning.
SPEAKER 1: Well, I've read a lot, and one reason I ended up going to America was that I started quite early reading Mark Twain and maybe somewhat more amazingly, Fenimore Cooper, and others. Then I, of course, graduated to Steinbeck, and, the American realists. I have often claimed that I learned English when I started reading Hemingway, and I learned all 800 words that Hemingway uses. That was my first assignment.
SPEAKER 2: [LAUGHS] You weren't a totally bookish young person, were you? There was swimming, and there were athletics, and there were sports, right?
SPEAKER 1: I grew up in a most, a wonderful part of Western Sweden with deep forests, and mountains, and lakes, and rivers. And, of course, bands of boys roamed those woods at all times, and we built huts in the woods, and even, spent the night in some of those huts. We lived a very free and somewhat, primitive life in those woods.
I did sports, too, but we had very few sports facilities. We played soccer, of course, like every Swedish boy. And we made our own goalposts and played in some meadow. And I remember we would have learned to hurdle, and we built our own hurdles. So we were really, there was a lot of self-help.
SPEAKER 2: Now, this gives me an entry into asking a question that I've actually been prompted to ask you. And you say you were outside. You need to then explain to me how the swimming pig factored into your childhood. [LAUGHS]
SPEAKER 1: I don't know how this swimming pig story came to light. I grew up in a very rural setting, although my parents were both teachers. But this was during the Second World War when I was a little boy at that time. And everybody grew their own things, and we had chickens, and we had geese, and we had sheep, and we had a pig, and we fished.
So we had almost subsistence farming in addition to the teaching that my parents did. So that's the setting where I grew up. With a swimming pig it was, one year we had a pig that we lived right by the river, and this pig loved to break out of the pig pen and head for the river, and loved to swim. And it used to swim up and down the river, and we had to get into our boat and chase the pig. And I still remember my dad grabbing this pig by its tail and hauling it, squealing back into the boat.
SPEAKER 2: And the neighbors would say, get that Hasselmo boy over here and get that.
SPEAKER 1: At one time, they called from about a mile and a half down the river and say, we have a swimming pig in the river, and we understand your pig loves to swim. So it was well known in the community.
SPEAKER 2: [LAUGHS] You didn't have to go in the water with it, though, I assume.
SPEAKER 1: Well, that was the river where I swam too.
SPEAKER 2: All right. All right. Talk a little bit about how you came to be in the United States. Came as an exchange student, I think, at first. And what was that transition like?
SPEAKER 1: Well, first of all, I think that my interest in the United States and in American culture in certain respects, goes way back into my childhood, the reading that I did. And of course, the United States was a very big presence in Europe during the Second World War and right after the war. I got interested in jazz music, so that was another aspect of American life that I was very interested in.
And then when I went to Uppsala University, I became very interested in what was happening in linguistics in the United States. And I fairly quickly decided that linguistics was going to be my field. And I wanted to go to the United States both out of a curiosity that went back to my early childhood, and because of my academic interest in what was happening in linguistics. Because at that time, so-called descriptive linguistics in the United States really was the new and exciting development in linguistics.
SPEAKER 2: And just tell us what that is.
SPEAKER 1: Well, it was an application of what is called structuralism to the study of language. And it was really a linguistic tradition that grew out of anthropological work, especially among Native Americans in this country, with people like Bloomfield and Sapir or some of the great names in American linguistics.
And I came here and studied it and was fascinated by it. Then, of course, with the arrival of Noam Chomsky in the late 50s at MIT, things dramatically changed. But the United States retained its leadership role in linguistic theory. And it's been very exciting over the years to be able to follow, to some extent, those developments in linguistics that have been spearheaded by American linguists.
SPEAKER 2: So it was an area of expertise, it sounds like, that brought you here initially, but is that what kept you here?
SPEAKER 1: No. Well, there were two reasons I stayed. The official reason was that I wanted to go to graduate school and study linguistics, and I got a scholarship from Harvard, so I went and did that. But the real reason and of course, the emotional reason was that I met a young lady by the name of Patricia the first year I was in America, and I wanted to, by whatever means, marry her, so I came back and did that.
SPEAKER 2: I should imagine that coming to the United States in the, what, late 50s it would have been 57?
SPEAKER 1: I came the first time in 56, and then came back in 58.
SPEAKER 2: It would have been probably very different setting for a student than what you experienced in Sweden, just from a cultural standpoint, from the habits of student life standpoint. Was there a big transition to be made coming across the ocean?
SPEAKER 1: I discovered the wonders of American College education, that four-year undergraduate college experience, which is unmatched, I think, in any educational system anywhere in the world. And maybe one reason in my presidency I've been such a bear about quality undergraduate education, is that I think it is such a wonderful opportunity for learning to make a transition from high school into professional life, where you continue a fairly broad-based study of a liberal education curriculum while you are beginning to explore your professional field.
I think that is just an absolutely wonderful opportunity. And that's the opportunity that I discovered somewhat belatedly when I came to the United States. And I thoroughly enjoyed my year at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and then, of course, had the opportunity to go on and study at an outstanding research University and do my graduate work at Harvard in a very stimulating and intellectual environment.
So I'm very happy with my American educational experience. That I then ended up spending my professional life in public land grant universities is also very fortunate, because that's another marvel of American higher education. What this commitment to broad-based access to quality education and to research, world class research, that also has application for the betterment of society.