Below, Paul Nachman suggests that readers cast their eyes "on the graduate-student roster for Caltech’s Department of Electrical Engineering". I did this, and I note, using the patented "what kind of name is that" stereotyping technique, that less than one fifth of the class has a name you would have found in an engineering class in America in 1960.
Diversity wasn’t totally absent from American at that point — any one of the foreign names might have been studying engineering in an American school at any time. I. M. Pei, a native of Shanghai, was studying architecture in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in 1935.
But he would have been the only one — a member of a minority group. He would have been surrounded, in fact, by Americans. At Caltech, it’s the Americans who are surrounded.
The names below are so weird that "Carlos Roberto Gonzalez" seems like a breath of air from home.
