Phil Gussin, plumber turned professor

Phil Gussin’s hands used to be grubby, his skin a topography of calluses. Tough, like the surface people strike matches against, he said.

But when he first started working as a plumber’s assistant, he’d never wrapped his fingers around a wrench or worked with pipes.

“In my family, we knew we were all going to college. That was the way the world was,” Gussin said.

By the time he was 25, though, Gussin had two daughters and an ex-wife. The world had set a different path at his feet: He had kids to raise on his own, and he needed a job, any job.

During his marriage, he had attended graduate school while his wife worked. After they separated, Gussin dropped out and spent more than a decade working as a plumber on various construction sites. That was when the skin of his hands began to toughen.

By the time he returned to graduate school to become a teacher, Gussin was nearly 40 years old.

Now a lecturer in political science at UCLA, he uses his hands for what he’s always wanted to use them for ““ grading tests, calling on students.

“My hands are like a baby’s bottom now,” Gussin said. “But if you looked at my hands back in the day, I looked like a guy who worked outside.”

Valley roots

Gussin grew up in a fairly wealthy family in the San Fernando Valley. His father, who had lived during the Great Depression, was always at work and seemed to make money top priority. All he wanted was to give his kids the comfortable life he didn’t have, but that was a concept Gussin could not understand at the time.

He had stopped listening to his parents by the time he was 20 years old and married his high school girlfriend on a hot day in her family’s backyard.

“Whatever my parents said I should do, I did the opposite,” Gussin said. “Everybody said we’d be a disaster, so of course we got married.”

Their relationship was crumbling, but they thought the birth of their first daughter, Jessie, would make everything stick together.

“It didn’t, so we had another kid,” Gussin said. “And that didn’t work either.”

Meanwhile, they moved around California, transferring schools twice after leaving their original college, California State University, Northridge. They ended up at Humboldt State University, where Gussin immersed himself in his political science studies.

At the end of each day, Gussin and his wife would leave campus, driving the family’s Ford Econoline van to a place where they could park for the night.

Their bare-bones lifestyle was a way to distance themselves from their upper-middle-class parents. The family slept in the back of the vehicle, on a wood platform topped with a mattress, and cooked meals on a camping stove.

For Gussin and his wife, marriage never came easy, and it remained difficult even after they moved back to the San Fernando Valley. They were in their mid-20s when they divorced.

Gussin, then working toward his master’s degree in history, received custody of his two daughters.

“I couldn’t work and go to school and take care of them. So school had to give. It wasn’t something I was angry about. I didn’t contemplate for a second not doing it,” said Gussin, adding that he had always planned to return to school.
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A physical and mental challenge*

Gussin saw an ad for a plumber’s helper in the newspaper and took the job out of desperation. He had no previous experience in the field but ended up working as a plumber for about 12 years.

The hard labor of lifting pipes and digging ditches gave his body a workout, while deciphering the blueprints exercised his mind.

“Standing on a job site that was nothing but dirt and being able to envision the whole building and where the pipes were going to go, that was an intellectual challenge,” he said.

There were other grittier challenges. One day, he was hit on the bridge of his nose with plywood a worker had tossed out of the building. Blood streaming down his face, he yelled at the man responsible.

Other times, Gussin was the one being yelled at.

Eventually, he started his own business. By then he was married again, to Nancy Gussin, who has a master’s degree in social welfare from UCLA. The couple met when they were children ““ their families went to the same temple and took vacations together.

After they married, home life was good, but the business’s financial instability burdened the family. At the same time, Gussin was stuck in an empty routine, and he wanted out.

“Waking up and going to a job you don’t like every day is really taxing on the soul. It felt like I was waiting to die,” Gussin said.

Professor at last

When a friend bought his business, Gussin was able to pay for school and work toward his dream of being a teacher. He applied to UCLA.

“It never even occurred to me … that they would turn me down,” he said. “They wrote a very nice letter, said, “˜It’s been a long time since you’ve been in school, go back … and show us what you’ve got.’ I think it was a nice way to say, “˜We don’t take plumbers.'”

He took the advice to heart and enrolled in a master’s program at Cal State Northridge. After graduating with a 4.0 GPA, he reapplied to UCLA and was accepted.

“I felt like they were taking pity on me,” Gussin said. “I don’t know that I ever got over that feeling, quite frankly.”

He remembers the orientation for the political science doctoral program.

Sitting among students and professors, Gussin saw one man as old as he was. He instantly pegged him for a fellow student who could be a friend, and then the man stood up, introducing himself as a professor.

Gussin eventually became friends with Wesley Hussey, who now teaches at California State University, Sacramento. Both were in graduate school with a zeal to finish their degrees and start teaching.

“Phil likes to be interrupted, he likes students asking him questions,” said Hussey, who co-taught a class with Gussin when they were at UCLA.

After finishing his dissertation on mass media and political preferences, Gussin taught as a faculty fellow at UCLA for two years before taking a job at Pepperdine University. Throughout this time, he also lectured at various community colleges.

Gussin’s two-year stint at Pepperdine University ended in spring.

He was worried about his job lineup when he got an e-mail from UCLA, offering him a lecturer position for the upcoming school year.

He was already set to teach at UCLA over the summer, a reprise of last summer, when he held the same position.

“When he’s teaching, he starts with the basics. Like if you were going to build a PB and J sandwich, you’d start with the bread. … It’s a really easy way to learn,” said Jenna Chilingerian, a second-year political science student who took Gussin’s “Introduction to American Politics” class this summer.

A lot has changed since he switched professions. Most importantly, Gussin says his daily routine no longer feels meaningless. It’s filled with awe that his dream came true, and humbleness that he works alongside prestigious scholars.

For Gussin, his classes come first. He’s never had trouble balancing teaching with research because he no longer does research.

In some ways, his blue-collar job has helped him with his current one. On construction sites, he’d converse with Spanish-speaking workers, trying to learn the language.

“That sensitized me to students who are non-English speakers,” Gussin said.

Though his jump from plumber to professor may be startling at first, Gussin actually hasn’t ended up too far from where he started.

He still lives in the Valley, about 8 miles from where he grew up. He still goes to work in tennis shoes and jeans and occasionally falls back into his old style of speaking.

“I think like a political scientist, but sometimes I speak like a plumber,” Gussin said.