While working as a schoolteacher, Jeff Braden gets a phone call out of the blue from a renowned chimpanzee expert.

Jeff Braden is dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and professor of Psychology at NC State University. Prior to becoming dean, he was a professor and director of school psychology programs at NC State, University of Wisconsin—Madison, San Jose State University and the University of Florida. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, a member of the National Association of School Psychologists, and an elected member of the Society for the Study of School Psychology. He has presented more than 300 papers at state, national, and international meetings and published more than 175 articles, books, book chapters, and other products on assessment, school psychology, intelligence, and deafness. He recently completed a grant to evaluate adaptive courseware from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This story originally aired on Aug. 25, 2017, in the episode “Exploration.”

Story Transcript

So in spring of 1977, I was a student teacher, and I had just sent my first- and second-graders out of the classroom to go get on those yellow buses when, over the intercom at Mabel C. O’Donnell Elementary School, I hear, “Mr. Braden, Mr. Braden.  You have a long-distance phone call.”

Now, for those of you who have always dialed ten digits, you have no idea how big this was.  Back in 1977, it was a big deal to call a number outside of your area code, much less across state lines. 

So here I am, this little student teacher, and I’m like walking down the hallway and everybody is going, “Ooh, long distance phone call.  All right.” 

As the secretary hands me the phone, she says, “It’s long distance.” 

I said, “Hi, this is Jeff Braden.”  And I heard on the other end of the line, “Hello.  This is Allen Gardner from the Psychobiology of Language Project at the University of Nevada, Reno, and I wanna offer you a full scholarship and admission into our PhD program in experimental psych.” 

That struck me as odd for, really, three reasons.  First, in 1977, Allen Gardner was one of the most well-known scientists on the planet.  Allen and his wife, Trixie, had raised a chimpanzee named Washoe, and she was the first non-human primate to acquire a human language naturally.  In fact, Allen and Trixie were in the middle of a struggle with a linguist named Noam Chomsky. 

Professor Chomsky said chimpanzees use language the same way a chicken can fly.  In other words, he was disparaging.  Noam Chomsky’s position was only humans could acquire language, and the Gardners said, “Well, we have this research to show otherwise.”  The media was full of these images of chimpanzees walking with Allen and Trixie across this grass and announcers gushing, “Now, we can talk to the animals.”  All this kind of stuff.  So I thought it was pretty unlikely that one of the most famous scientists on the planet would be calling me.

There was a second reason where I thought it was unlikely.  I had never applied to the University of Nevada, Reno.  I had never contacted them.  I hadn’t even looked at graduate school.  My game plan was to get married that summer and start my career as an elementary school teacher in rural Wisconsin.  So I thought it’s pretty unusual to have a world-famous scientist call me out of the blue -- I've never talked to him, never contacted him -- and offer me a full ride to get my PhD. 

But the third reason that really convinced me it wasn’t Allen Gardner was that voice.  I mean, really?  We didn’t have a word for it back then, but I was convinced that one of my friends was punking me, because that’s the kind of friends I have. 

So I said what I think any logical person would say and I said, “Yeah, who the fuck is this really?” 

There was a pause, and then I heard, “This is Allen Gardner from the Psychobiology of Language Project at the University of Nevada…” and I’m like, No. 

Well, you probably can guess I wouldn’t be standing here today if it wasn’t Allen Gardner from the University of Nevada, Reno, offering me a full ride to get my PhD in experimental psych.  How he got to me is kind of an interesting question, which I will say I will get to directly, which in the South means I'll get there eventually.  But within two months my wife, Jill, and I had filled up every possession we had, stuffed it into a two-door Dodge Colt and we were driving across country to Reno, Nevada. 

Now, I don't know how many of you have actually met a chimpanzee face-to-face.  I have.  I've also met a lowland gorilla, but it’s pretty interesting.  It’s kind of freaky, actually.  I started at the Psychobiology Language Project with a chimpanzee named Moja.  She was a four-year-old female.  She's about ninety-five pounds, had arms about as long as my legs, and I can show you the exact size of her mouth.  It’s this moon-shaped scar that I carry right here. 

And the whole point of Allen and Trixie’s research was to raise Moja and two other chimps, Dar and Tattoo, in a language-rich environment, which pretty much was middle-class children’s existence.  So they had their own jackets, they had bathrobes and all this other stuff.  The idea was you tried to make every possible event a language-mediated event.  And sure enough, they signed. 

They said things like “play chase,” they said things like “want,” “eat,” “run,” “bird,” all kinds of things.  We worked with them, but, as Noam Chomsky frequently pointed out, their signing tended to be pretty concrete.  Naming things.  Action, eating, going to the bathroom, whatever it might be. 

So a couple of us decided, you know, we really need to expand this.  We really need to try and help Moja develop more abstract language.  And we thought it would be useful to teach her how to express annoyance at someone else’s actions.  So every time she did something that annoyed us, like she ripped the toilet off its moorings and water spraying over everywhere. She’d do things like bite me, other kinds of things, we’d go like this, which is to express annoyance at another person’s actions.  And for the people who might be listening to this, I just extended my middle finger.  So we worked a lot with her and we did this. 

Well, a couple of weeks after we started this, Allen had Dar and one of my other colleagues had Tattoo and I had Moja, and we took them outside.  They were playing and running around.  The downside of raising chimpanzees like children is if they want to run away, you can’t catch them.  They'll go right up on a roof, and forget about it.  So Moja decided she was going to take off and she went off on the big roof of the big house. 

There's something really paradoxical about chimpanzees.  To get them to come back to you, you scare them.  When they are frightened, they seek physical contact with the dominant person in the group. 

And so Moja took off. Allen looked up and he goes, “Okay,” and he picks up this rock and he goes [makes monkey noises] and he throws the rock, not at Moja but near Moja so that the sound would scare her and she would come running back. 

And Moja went like this. [Raises middle finger.]

Now, the other guy and I are falling on the ground laughing and Allen goes, “What did she sign?  What did she sign?”  Because a chimpanzee actually doesn’t do this.  They don’t have opposable thumbs.  It’s more like this.  And so we were just dying with laughter. 

Now, this is science.  We couldn’t count that as the usable word until it happened the second time in an appropriate context independent of the first observation.  We never saw it again.  So that event never made it into the annals of science. 

Well, I will tell you I didn’t stay with the project very long.  I left after about a year.  But that project, in many ways, changed my outlook and changed my life.  I learned a couple of things, really, about not just chimpanzees but about myself.  I learned that I could pick up things about as quick, maybe even quicker than some of the other grad students.  I learned that learning about behavior was fascinating.  I learned that I had the disposition to observe dispassionately and try and link the behavior I saw to a series of behavior and motivation. 

So about eight years later, I got my PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, one of those blue and gold schools, and I went onto a career where I either held tenure or tenure line position at four different universities, worked with probably over a hundred grad students along the way as a social scientist. 

So I did tell you that I would get to the point about how Allen found me, and this is how it happened.  I was teaching American Sign Language at my first alma matter, Beloit College, a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin, and one of the fellow students in my class had applied to work on the project and listed a professor of psychology as his reference.  Now, that professor of psychology and I knew each other because Beloit is a small community in a very small town, but I never had him for class.  I never did any work with him. 

But when Allen contacted him, he said, “Well, the guy you're talking about is really good, but the guy you really ought to be talking to is Jeff Braden.”  Allen tracked me down at this elementary school in Illinois and made that call. 

That act of unrequested, unbidden kindness and advocacy on my behalf changed my life.  So when people ask me, “Did working with chimpanzees prepare you for a career teaching undergraduate students?” I say, “Eh. Not really. But it was invaluable preparation for my two terms on faculty senate.”

What I don’t often say is it also taught me that, very often, the greatest influence that professors have on future scientists is outside the lab and outside the classroom.  I've tried to remember that throughout my career. 

Thank you.