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Off to Harvard at 16, Kaczynski managed to share a suite in preppy Eliot House with five fellow students without making much of an impression on any of them. "We had no interaction," says Michael Rohr, a philosophy professor at Rutgers. "I can't remember having a conversation with him." But N-43 was a strange suite, cobbled together out of converted servants' quarters in "the low-rent wing of Eliot House," as one roommate called it. The long corridor, with bedrooms branching off it, was where the college consigned its lone wolves. "We didn't choose to room together," Rohr says. "I was assigned to a suite of people without roommates. They were mostly loners. One of my suite mates, as I recall, seemed more interested in insects than people."
"Ted had a special talent for avoiding relationships by moving quickly past groups of people and slamming the door behind him," says Patrick McIntosh, another of the suite mates. Kaczynski's room was a swamp; the others finally called in the housemaster, the legendary Master of Eliot House John Finley, who was aghast. "I swear it was one or two feet deep in trash," McIntosh says. "It had an odor to it. Underneath it all were what smelled like unused cartons of milk."
Kaczynski had finished with Harvard by the time he was 20 and headed off into the cauldron of '60s campus radicalism, first at the University of Michigan, where he got his master's and Ph.D., then to the University of California, Berkeley, to teach. At Michigan he could be considered a rebel only because he wore a jacket and tie at just the moment when that was no longer done.
Like just about everything else during the antiwar years, mathematics had become politicized at Michigan, and Kaczynski's thesis adviser was among those who signed a manifesto urging peers to shun military contractors. Yet no one, either at Michigan or Berkeley, remembers Ted's having any contact with the leftists he would later excoriate in his manifesto. "He did not go out of his way to make social contact," recalls his professor Peter Duren. "But he didn't strike me as being pathological. People in math are sometimes a bit strange. It goes with creativity." Despite almost five years' residency at the University of Michigan, he left no pictures, no yearbook entries--not even in 1964, when he got his master's degree, nor in 1967, when he received his Ph.D.
AT BERKELEY, AS AN ASSISTANT professor on a tenure track at the world's premier math department, Kaczynski seems to have lost his way. Again the radical politics of the antiwar movement were "in your face," recalls Robert Wold, 45, a Berkeley graduate from those years. "You had to choose. You were either part of it or you were against it." Again Ted hid in plain sight--no friends, no allies, no networking. When he suddenly resigned after teaching for two years, the department chair, John W. Addison Jr., tried and failed to talk him into staying. Not that dropping out was such a surprising move in that era. "It was not uncommon," recalls Addison, now professor emeritus of mathematics. "One of my advisees went and lived on a farm and did carpentry."