WIE_F2015_03

For the first time in 1984, so I was going to a conference in Hangzhou, China. Flew into Shanghai and took the train. Hangzhou, we got to Hangzhou, and we're riding the bus to the hotel, and they were putting drainage ditches in all the streets, the whole city, all at once, okay. It's kind of the way the Chinese do things, okay. They don't do it halfway, they kind of, we're going to do it, we're going to do the whole city, all at once, okay. You don't do it in pieces. And they were all doing it with shovels. I mean these were like five-foot deep ditches, and great big concrete bricks to put in drainage ditches for the rains and stuff.

And I thought when I got to the hotel, boy, why don't they buy these people a backhoe? And then the second day I realized, as we went through the town and I started seeing how many people they had, I realized first of all in 1984 the Chinese couldn't afford the diesel fuel to run the backhoe if you gave it to them, and second, they have all these people that have nothing else to do with it, okay. I mean the people wouldn't be employed, they'd be starving, okay. And so you dig it by hand because you've got a lot of people, okay.

So when we think about how we would do something, engineer something in the United States, you're thinking about your experience. You have to think about what it's like in the other part of the world, okay. They have different constraints. Labor is cheap in China — well, it was, okay. Labor is still cheap in places like the former Soviet Union, and India has a lot of cheap labor, but it also has a lot of very highly qualified labor, which is why they're writing software and answering telephones and things like that. So anyway, there's different constraints in different places. I don't, may not have election constraints, hadn't planned on it but maybe we will. So, anybody have a question? See, I got half the class. Digression.

So I wanted to also tell you the story about the revelation I had in my junior year here. I took a course, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. It was an elective for me. I didn't have to take this course in the physics department, but I was told that electronic materials, you needed to know quantum mechanics to understand electronic materials. I was a material scientist, so I took this Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. The lecturer was Vera Kistiakowsky. She was the first full professor of physics, woman professor of physics at MIT. Her father won the Nobel Prize at Harvard in chemistry, okay. Vera was very smart, family very accomplished. She always brought her great big dog to class. Anyway, but she was a very nice woman, and I was flunking the class. I mean I always got 15s out of a hundred when the average on the homework sets was 85. I mean I just didn't have a clue what was going on in this class.

And so the night before the final, I figured, just like my freshman year 8.01, I figured I was going to flunk. I didn't flunk, I got a pass in 8.01, probably it was a very good pass. But I took the textbook the night before the final and I decided I'm just going to go through and try to figure out the high points, okay. I walked into the three-hour final, I'm finished in an hour and twenty minutes. I looked it over, we couldn't leave before two hours, so after two hours — I actually sat there twiddling my thumbs or playing tic-tac-toe or something with myself, which you usually win, but anyway — until for two hours I walked out, and I got an A in the course. I mean I think I came close to getting a hundred if not a hundred on the final. And Professor Kinsey [Kistiakowsky] figured if you could do the final, you, which would be great, mostly. A lot of physicists think that way. It's the end point on how you get there.

And so it was a great revelation to me that, oh, it's only the high points. I started thinking about this and I realized all these other stuff we teach in class is just fluff, okay. There's only one or two themes that a professor can get across in an hour, okay. And I call it "guess my outline." And so for the rest of my career at MIT, which I actually did very, I mean, I had a hard time the first couple years, but the last part, once I figured this out, I just coasted through, because I never took another note in class. Which is why I give a lecture here that you don't have to take notes, okay. You should be paying attention to try to figure out what is it they're trying to say. They're trying to hide the information from you, okay, and you've got to figure out what the outline is. They're giving you all this extraneous information, like what did my stories in the beginning have to do with anything about what my theme is today? Well, you don't even know where the theme is today.

But what I often do in this class is, the next class, I put up the theme. So the theme from the last class is, indeed, well actually, I came up — a guy I was talking about this yesterday, a guy was visiting me and he said engineering is harnessing the forces of nature for the benefit of mankind. One of you had a definition for class that was something about benefit of mankind in there, or something, okay. Engineering involves — and I told you this is my, because remember, being an engineer: complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, and safety. And then this morning I decided to write down, well, you know, because I got some other things on what an engineer is. I don't want to beat it to death, but I will probably beat it to death. The Hippocratic oath, the physicians, is do no harm. You've probably heard that before, right? The engineering code is to try to do good. It's a little bit better than just doing no harm, okay. We want to actually improve life for people, okay. So that's one of the things that, that's sort of what I'd like you to take away from last Thursday's lecture.

The other thing is, I told you Jerry will post this book in pieces. The next chapter is on canals, okay. And this is some Roman aqueducts or canal, or — no, this is, well, it is Roman, this is in France. Well you can't see it very well, but it's a beautiful scene. Hopefully it shows up better on the web. The Grand Canal in China — had rivers going east and west, and they decided they should build a canal. It was really sort of for military purposes, just like the roads, the Roman roads and the Eisenhower interstate highway system. This is someone on a Roman canal aqueduct. No, it isn't Roman, this is, this is a British one, but they're in their boat high above the valley running down their canal.

But the Erie Canal, we talked about the Erie Canal, you can read about these things. This is the building of the Erie Canal, and it talks about Benjamin Wright [Wright] was the first civil engineer in the country, and every civil engineer of the next 50 years, he was the engineer for the Erie Canal. He knew nothing about engineering when he was given the job of building the Erie Canal, but he kind of learned very quickly. The Panama Canal, which is considered one of the greatest achievements of the last hundred, well, more than a hundred years, building the Panama Canal. This is sort of an interesting, well, if you can see this one very well — this doesn't show up — oh yeah, thank you, learned how to brighten this up. Let's see, this is a Greek canal, and the cliffs are sheer, they just cut straight through the rock, okay.

Anyway, so there's various things on canals. This is wrong, and then there's also, I'll probably throw in aqueducts here, the Roman aqueducts, okay. Between a canal and aqueducts — aqueduct is just to transport water for drinking and bathing and things like that. A canal is basically a water roadway, okay, to transport goods if you will, okay. Canal aqueducts are often smaller in scope, okay. And then it gets — we'll do bridges next time. Anyway, I'm not going to spend time on this. There was, actually, not my fault, a student complained in one of the evaluations last year that I didn't give enough reading. So here's more reading. I gave you, you know, the whole book now. Keep you so you can't complain I didn't give you reading this time. But you're not going to be quizzed on it, so it's up to you whether you're going to read it, okay.

The other thing is, I've been trying to figure out what other people say about engineering. And they say all kinds of things. This is a book called Exploring Engineering, in its third edition. I'm usually impressed when I see something in its third edition, because it sort of suggests that, see, okay, it sort of suggests that people read part of the first and second editions, okay. Why would it be in a third edition, right? So anyway, this is some definitions at the beginning of that book. This book is sort of, if you're a sophomore at Purdue or somewhere, they might teach it out of this book to tell you what all the different types of engineering are. But nonetheless, it's got some interesting quotes about engineering.

"It is engineering that changes the world." They've got to blow this up some more. "Engineering is the art of doing — " that was Isaac Asimov, by the way, you know who he is. "Engineering is the art of doing that well with one dollar that any bumbler can do with two," okay. So that's something about economics. And "engineering is not merely analysis. Engineering is not merely the possession of the capacity to get elegant solutions to non-existent engineering problems. Engineering is practicing the art of organizing forces of technological change. Engineers operate at the interface between science and society." Gordon Stanley Brown [S. Brown]. Who is Gordon Stanley Brown? He was Dean of Engineering at MIT 50 years ago. He was the one who took engineering from being just kind of traditional, teaching drafting and things, and he turned it into engineering science.

It was the same time we moved — Alfred Sloan gave money and they created the Sloan School of Management out of the Department of Business and Industrial Development in the School of Engineering. So the 1950s is when MIT took management out of engineering and put science in. And Gordon Brown was one of those people who put it in, okay. And Professor Flemings, if you ask him, he was sort of a real engineer, and all of a sudden when he was a young assistant or associate professor Gordon Brown came along and said we're going to do engineering science, and I've heard him tell me the story about he started scrambling to make sure he'd get tenure by proving that he was a scientist as opposed to an engineer.

Today, I mean, I, when I became acting department head in 1989, I think, I had replaced Flemings for six months, and I used to get in at 6 a.m. And so one time I decided to go over to the file cabinet and read my tenure letters. I've told people you're not supposed to be able to do that. Well, I don't know what else is around. I read my tenure letters, and so I know what people said about me. Obviously they said some decent things or I wouldn't have gotten tenure, but one person described me as a pure engineer. Now, he meant it as a compliment, but I'll tell you that ninety percent of the faculty around here would consider that a slur, even today. We just had a Dean of Engineering who went off to be head of the National Science Foundation, now president of the University, and he would not let any engineers through the tenure process. He was enough of a wannabe scientist, he thought anyone doing real problem solving was not pure.

In fact, I'm going to tell you the story of some of the history of engineering. You're going to find that's part of the difference between the culture of Caltech and the culture of MIT. Yes, it was part of World War Two. And we'll get some quotes later here, but the scientists came up with the creative ideas for World War Two, but who carried it out? Engineers. And you're going to see some quotes here and a little bit about people saying that, okay. Remember, a scientist discovers that which exists, an engineer creates that which never was. So the scientists, and as we'll talk about, the hierarchy of snobbery here, okay. The scientists look down on the engineers. In medicine, the engineers look down on the clinicians, the practicing doctors, because they're just empiricism. You know, if everybody has a cold, you come in with the sniffles, you've got a cold, and they diagnose you with the same as everything else, okay.

And if you read the book I gave you yesterday, you'll find he divides thinking into system one and system two, and system one is your intuitive thinking, and he will explain, hey, if everyone has a cold and you come in with the sniffles, you've got a cold too, they don't necessarily start system two, which is the analytical thinking, okay. And that's what Gordon Brown is here, engineering is not merely analysis. It's got a lot of intuitive stuff in it. In that book, one of the reasons I gave it to you, there's a chapter — when we get to the book I'll spend some time on it — but what's, how do, what is an expert, okay. And actually there's some quotes that I'll probably give you tomorrow on some of that about what constitutes an expert, because you're trying to become experts in engineering, right?

"In theory, scientists investigate that which already is, engineers create that which never has been." They attributed this to Albert Einstein, that's wrong, I just want to put it in. You've heard the quote from Theodore von Karman, it's von Karman, "scientists dream about doing great things, engineers do them," okay. James Michener. Okay, "engineers are the interface between science and society," right. I mean, I'm giving you some of these things because I want you to start thinking about what you think engineering is. I don't think most of you in your engineering classes get a real feel for what engineering is. You get a good feel for engineering science. Your problem sets are engineering science. You're given just all the right pieces of the puzzle, no more, no less, and you plug and chug, and you learn how to grind through. That's not engineering. That might be learning to be a scientist and solve differential equations, but it's not engineering, okay. Engineering is solving problems for which there is no known solution, okay, is another way of saying it.

You can say lots of things about what engineering is. This is a quote from Thomas Edison in 1911. "There is no question but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the best technical school in the country. I've found the graduates of Tech to have a better, more practical, more usable knowledge as a class" — that's, this is not talking about one of you as being good, okay — "than the graduates of any other school in the country. The salvation of America lies in them." MIT, hey. That was in my, acting, well, yeah. Well, I got some other quotes from 1911 or 1912. MIT really was a watershed school in terms of defining engineering at all. We'll get to that.

This is another Thomas Edison quote from a year later, it's a little bit redundant maybe. "The future of America demands technical education of a high system. There's no question but MIT is the best technical school. If every state had such a school, it would be great for the country. It would improve business conditions, it would teach us how to grapple with evils of the day in a confident, sane manner." Now, at this point, what company did Thomas Edison head? General Electric, exactly. And so he wanted to hire engineers, okay. And he found that the MIT engineers were among the best.

General Electric was actually the merging of Thomas Edison's company with a guy named Elihu Thomson. Anybody ever heard of Elihu Thomson? Okay, well I wouldn't expect that you had, but Elihu Thomson started an electrical engineering company up here in Lynn, Massachusetts, okay. It was called the Thomson-Houston Company. You can look in Wikipedia for all this if you like. I could just happen to have the Wikipedia article here, surprise. And there's Elihu Thomson, from Manchester, England, died in Swampscott, Massachusetts. In 1880 he left Central [High School] to pursue research in the emerging field of electrical engineering. That's the beginning of electrical engineering, was the 1880s. We'll talk about why that was. Between 1880 and '85 he averaged 21 patent applications annually, doubling that in the next five years.

At the time that he merged his company with Edison to form the General Electric we know now today, he had 380 patents. He was number two behind Edison, who had 420, okay. When they merged their companies in 1880, 1892, he served as acting president — I just learned this, I always thought he'd been a faculty member. He served as acting president of MIT from 20 to 23, overcoming his distaste — he was actually, had the Thomson lab up here in Lynn, Massachusetts, which is now a General Electric where they build jet engines — his distaste for management, accepted the role during a critical period of the university when he could not otherwise find a president. Hey, if you were looking for work in 1920, you could come to MIT and you could apply to be president. And Thomson hated management. But in fact, I'm going to argue that management is part of engineering, okay.

Anybody have any questions? Okay, yeah. I'm not — what's coming up? It's coming up, yeah, okay. What's the difference between science and engineering? Well, we've kind of talked around that. How old is engineering as a profession? It goes back thousands of years, if you're talking — and mechanical engineering. Electrical engineering didn't exist until 1880. Why did it not exist until 1880? Because we didn't have a good source of electricity. It was Edison, Westinghouse, that once they developed electrical generators and distribution and stuff, all of a sudden, all kinds of people, including Elihu Thomson, started inventing things. We talked about the internet today and all the apps and the things that developers do. Well, in 1880 it was the new thing, was not the internet, it was electricity, and people were out developing new things to solve new problems. Material — 1870s, material science.

Yes, as we'll see today, I'm going to talk about the history of MIT, and when the courses, Course 1 at MIT is civil engineering, that's because before that, at RPI there was only one course, it was civil, to distinguish it from military. But I'm getting ahead of myself in the history, okay. But having other — quite — I mean, it's okay if they get ahead of me, okay. What types of engineering, sub-disciplines, what's PE licensed — these, I'm going to keep going back to that little questionnaire I gave you. So what is engineering? If you look it up on the web, this had a couple of good quotes. "Engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems," okay. Engineering is problem solving, but in fact we use math and science to solve those problems in most cases. We're not just solving, you know, child welfare abuse or something like that, although if you've got some good math and science way to do that, it would be good, but it actually would be good to solve it anyway.

But anyway, "scientists and inventors often get the credit for innovations that advance the human condition, but it's engineers who are instrumental in making those innovations available to the world." Kind of what happened after World War Two, why did Gordon Brown go to engineering science? They wanted to get closer back to the roots of how we solved significant problems that we didn't know how to solve, whether it's radar, the fuze, the Manhattan Project, or bomb sights — I mean it's the Draper lab, okay, they made bomb sights. And physicist Freeman Dyson wrote, "a good scientist is a person with original ideas, a good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering." There are plenty of prima donnas in science, okay. And actually they are — we have our prima donnas, but in general engineers sort of take a back seat to a lot of other things.

What are the types of engineering? Well, if you go to Wikipedia, again, you know, the source of all knowledge, they list these fields of engineering. Civil engineering was the first, after military. Chemical engineering didn't come along until the 1890s. Electrical, not until the 1880s. Mechanical goes back thousands of years. Anyway, so everyone's got their list, and you can go to Wikipedia. If the materials engineers want to find out where you fit in, these are the primary areas, and chemical engineering is the first one that they list, because I think they did it alphabetically. And materials engineering is a subgroup of chemical engineering, okay. And nuclear engineering is in there somewhere, okay, so far as that goes. But there's lots of ways to divide up engineering.

It turns out the National Academy of Sciences was chartered by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. I hadn't planned on this, but here's, this is the making of the National Academy of Engineering, 25 years, well it was founded in like 1864, so this is what, this 1889? Scott, back down here is Abraham Lincoln sitting with the founders of the National Academy of Sciences, portrayed with Abraham Lincoln at the signing of the Academy charter. Benjamin Pierce, Alexander Dallas Bache, Joseph Henry, Louis Agassiz, who was a professor at Harvard. Senator Henry Wilson, Admiral Charles Davis, so the military was involved. Benjamin Apthorp Gould.

Anyway, so the National Academy of Sciences, which is, it's not a governmental agency, but it gets a lot of its funding for doing work, studies, the National Research Council is a subsidiary. They formed the National Academy of Engineering in 1964. And there's only about twenty-two hundred members of the National Academy of Engineering, and about 2.2 million engineers in the country. So only about one out of a thousand engineers gets elected to the National Academy. And you can only be elected by your peers, which means people who are already members. You can't be nominated by someone who's not a member. And it used to be really very much an old boys' club. It was ninety-eight percent male. They're trying, I think that, up to about 5% female now.

But anyway, they had aerospace engineering, bioengineering, chemical engineering — this is alphabetical — but these are the sections. And here's materials engineering, section nine. Mechanical, section ten. You're going to see a little bit later, mechanical engineering actually has the most engineers in the country, okay, as a field. And then they've added these others: earth resources, special fields, okay. So there's lots of ways to divide up engineering.

There is, and I used to give this out on the first day of class, but I would encourage you to read this article by Norm Augustine on social engineering. This was a 1993, 1994 commencement address at Colorado State. He grew up in Colorado, or at least his mother lived there, and I assume he knew his mother at some point. But anyway, Norm Augustine — you know who he is? Okay, he became, the principal claim, became a little bit famous, he worked for Martin Marietta and became a little bit famous because he wrote a book called Augustine's Laws. And there's a hardcopy version of it, which is nowhere near as good as the early versions, but it's a lot of tongue-in-cheek, but facts that, I mean, maybe I'll bring in some of that stuff. But then he went on to become CEO of Martin Marietta, Lockheed Martin, and he was asked to be the president's science advisor. He's been chair of the National Academy of Engineering. He's a spokesman for engineering, a national spokesman for engineering. He's a graduate of Princeton, but he sits on the MIT Corporation, okay. And he's a very interesting, thoughtful person, and he has interesting ways to look at things.

Well, he's talked about forms of engineering and ages of engineering. And 1957 was when he started — mechanical age of engineering from the mid-seventeen, he says from the mid-1700s, I know it's too small for you to read, you can read this later. The electrical engineering age from 1879. The information age of engineering from 1906. The socio-engineering age from 1979. What is socio-engineering? Socio-engineering is all these externalities like economics, environment, finance, you know, not-in-my-backyard. You know, you want to build, you want to build a prison, everybody wants more prisons, put those criminals in jail, but no one wants it in their backyard, okay. So what do you do, where do you put it? Where did we put the last prison? I know in Massachusetts it's down here in Dedham, and it's between, they have, one part of 128 that goes south, the other part goes north, and in between is just the wasteland. It's pretty big wasteland. So they put a prison there because the neighbors are just the cars going by, okay. That's one solution as far as that goes.

Anyway, this is something that you will get on Stellar. It's the American Society of Engineering Education, and engineering by the numbers. And here you can see mechanical engineering among all engineering. This is bachelor's degree by discipline. There's a total of eighty-three thousand engineers graduated in whatever year they're looking at. Mechanical engineers were 19,000, over twenty percent. So sometimes you'll see definitions of engineering that talks about mechanical, because over twenty percent of all engineers are mechanical. Obviously after that it's civil. That surprised me. A lot of the schools out west, Purdue and Minnesota and Illinois has huge civil engineering departments. I guess they all flunk out or something, but they have huge civil engineering departments. MIT does not — ranked number one in civil, okay.

In fact, when I was department head, I used to say, well, one of the differences between School of Science and School of Engineering at MIT is, if you ask in the School of Engineering, you should ask which departments of the eight departments are not ranked number one in the nation in their field. And civil, it's bioengineering — it's ranked four or five, and that's 'cause sort of new to MIT, and I think that's the only one. You can think of any other department, and I think there's two that are not ranked number one over in the School of En — School of Science. It's easier to ask which ones are ranked number one in their field, okay. And out of eight or nine departments, I think molecular biology is number one. I'm not sure, I think it's like brain and cognitive sciences may be number one. Anyway, but it's not physics, and it's not chemistry. Those prima donnas in physics and chemistry ruled the roost in a lot of things at MIT until recently.

Professor Reif actually used to be — going to president of MIT. If he was an engineer, he would have a scientist for a provost, to try to balance. Professor Reif doesn't care. All the leaders are electrical engineers. They all come from his department, okay. But they're actually doing a reasonably good job, better than any administration since Paul Gray in the 1980s. The other administrations were not so hot, for various reasons.

But since this is a materials and mechanical course, I highlighted these two. There are about — what is it — a thousand, eleven hundred metallurgical, materials engineers. If you look at this whole thing, you'll have it on Stellar, websites about a 40-page article of statistics, but you'll see that the number of master's degrees in mechanical engineering is very, relatively small. In materials it's like eight, almost nine hundred. Materials is really a graduate program as opposed to an undergraduate program. This is bachelors. They have the data in there for masters, okay. This is bachelors. This is, it didn't really say, but I think this is fairly recent, okay, within the last ten years, okay. I have some other data going back to '97 which I'll show you. Anyway, it hasn't changed dramatically in the last 10 years, but I don't know the exact year.

Student: [inaudible question about petroleum engineering]

Well, it is petroleum on here. Yeah, petroleum is right after materials, okay. Yeah, but okay, but Texas A&M, you probably are twenty-five percent of all the petroleum engineers. It's the number one program in petroleum in the country, probably the world, right. And one of the reasons is, you dominate, okay. And you also have a lot of very highly qualified faculty who come from Texas. A lot of people in Texas go to Texas A&M, okay.

Student: [question about computer science]

But yes, question here. Oh, CS, well, computer science I cut off. Come — they don't consider computer science engineering, okay. They say outside engineering here. I mean, 3,000, so they'd be way over here and stuff. But there's always problems with how you collect all this type of data and stuff, okay. And it doesn't count all the people who are like, oh, you're in materials engineering or chemical engineering with a petroleum focus. All right, yep. So yeah, it's statistics, right, and it depends on what your base is, right.

Actually, that book Thinking Fast and Slow, he's got a whole chapter on what he calls — they did, where they, people ignore the denominator, okay. And so they get lots of intuitive feelings about things. I did highlight some other things on here. I just took the first five pages. Among bachelor's degrees awarded, MIT with 666 is 25th. Georgia Tech gives more bachelor's degrees. I'm sure this data is fairly accurate, okay, in terms of, you can actually define a degree. There's a lot of that on minorities and women. This is bachelor's degrees awarded to women by school. MIT is 289 on the, 666 — 289 divided by 666, does it sound like forty-three percent to me? But anyway, yeah, but okay, maybe it is forty-three percent. But you want to know why? Because we admit now forty-five percent women, or whatever, okay. When I came here in '68 my class was less than ten percent women. There was McCormick Hall, that's where all the women lived, okay.

So MIT, Asian-Americans, 165 down here. African-Americans, 46. This is Hispanics, 76, okay. MIT actually has worked very hard, and because we give better scholarships to enhance them to come. But we didn't always do what was right. My second year on the faculty, I was an advisor to course 3-C, which doesn't exist anymore, it's sort of an interdisciplinary course of Course 3. And so I had this student, who was, he was a Naval ROTC, he was black, he was just an outstanding leader. I mean, if he walked in the room, you could feel his presence, right. And he was flunking out of MIT. Why? If he'd gone to any other school in the country with his full-ride four-year NROTC scholarship, he would have been top of his class. But he wasn't at MIT. Why?

Well, so I'll tell you a story about something similar that happened over at BU in the management school. So some donor to the management school decided they wanted, he wanted to have more minorities, and so he gave 10 full-ride scholarships to go to management school, okay. Ordinarily you pay your own way through management school, right. Gave 10 of these, and they gave out 10 fellowships the first year to minority students, and not half made it through. And they, rather than saying, well, you know, minorities just can't hack it, they said, wait, this is our fault. We thought we would bring them in here and just throw them in with everybody else. And so the next year they admitted 10 more, where they told them, you're getting a free ride, you're going to be here every Thursday and Tuesday afternoon, evenings, and we're going to have a tutor here for you to help you learn how to study. And eight out of ten made it that year.

What I saw in 1977 with this outstanding NROTC student who eventually flunked out of MIT, he couldn't hack it. And I was writing to the administration, said, look, you can't admit these people and just leave them to flounder. They didn't grow up in a household where their parents read stories to them. They didn't grow up in a household where their parents went to college. They didn't have the environment. It's not, they're not smart enough. It's just, they don't have the same experience space. And so now we actually — you look on the Infinite Corridor here, and we actually have a whole section of it which is dedicated to minorities, which is why we now have a reasonable fraction of Hispanics and minorities who are graduating. But hey, 40 years ago it wasn't that way. They just figured if you admit them, that you love me — that's not the way to success, okay. It's not a way to success for anybody.

I told you that a lot of the problems we face when you get out there are not technical problems, they're management problems, people problems. When I became department head in '95, this department had a terrible reputation about women, okay. My predecessor happened to be a male chauvinist par excellence, okay. In my first two months I was asked how much were we going to contribute to the eight hundred fifty thousand dollar settlement for the woman who didn't get tenure under him, okay. And I said, well, you know what my budget is. He left me with a two million dollar deficit. Where do you want to take it? That's what I told the assistant dean, and she kind of grudgingly hung up, and they didn't take anything from me then, just took it later.

But so I was faced with this problem. I was told senior women scientists at Bell Labs were telling women postdocs about Bell Labs, don't even interview the materials department at MIT, just a bunch of male chauvinists. And you know what, there's a little truth to that. He wasn't only male chauvinist, and we had other women who probably should have gotten tenure who didn't in the previous 30 years. But without going into all that, so I had to figure out how to solve the problem, right. What's engineering? It's problem solving, okay.

Well, the first thing I did is there were two women who were lecturers in the department, was the senior, one is the junior lecturer. They were archaeologists. They're still here. And they had been kept out of — they wanted a home in the department, but my predecessor had kept them out. And within the first two months I had discussions with him, I had discussions with provost, actually have letters with provost, and I agreed to take them on, in be a department head to them, not to put them on the rank list, which means they weren't ever be part of the department. Because I asked them, I said, could you teach 3.091, could you TA 3.091? And they both said no. Okay, well, it's the introductory freshman course, and I had a criteria, if you couldn't TA 3.091, you weren't really fit to be a faculty member in this department, okay. I mean, I thought that was fairly objective, and they said no.

So anyway, I basically said, okay, I'll take you on. And well, over the next five years it was major war in the department. It's not major war anymore, but there's still underlying skirmishes every now and then where people take shots, okay. But nonetheless, that was one thing I did, because I needed an existence proof that there could be women in the department. At the time there were no senior women, there was one junior woman. In fact, my predecessor had stepped down six months earlier than I thought he was going to because he didn't want to take the one woman who was coming up for tenure, take her case forward, because she was going to lose, 'cause she had not been mentored, okay. Then she wasn't — she's smart enough. She's gone off to Tufts, and she wins teaching awards for the whole university over there. She was actually a very good scientist in many ways, but she never was — having taught how to do it in the impactful way.

Anyway, but the other thing I did is I started looking at the statistics, like this, and so for hiring Martin Luther — minorities, not just women but minorities. How many PhD material scientists do you think we graduate in this country a year? One [hundred], okay. And I said, well, just hint that you're going to get your faculty from typically PhD material scientists, I said, well, that's a loser, because General Electric and Intel and AT&T, they're going to be throwing millions of dollars at these people to come work for them, because they got to meet the EEOC quotas too, okay.

And so I remembered a story I'd heard when I was over at Sloan. I took the Sloan Senior Executive Program, and they told the story of this guy who graduated from Sloan, he went off and he became the cocoa futures king, and he made a lot of money in cocoa because he could predict the price of cocoa with better accuracy than anybody else in the world. And afterwards he went off to become a university president and other things, joined the faculty. He eventually became a university president, and someone asked him, well, how, why were you so successful? And he said, it's simple. In the spring of the year, which mostly in the Ivory Coast, which is where mostly cocoa come from, but spring of the year, whether it's north of, in northern hemisphere or southern, he would send people out to count the buds on the trees.

Hey, so I decided I need to figure out how to count the buds on the trees. So the first thing I did, as I knew there was a statistic that this department produced one out of every seven PhDs in the department, and as I used to say quietly, and half good ones, okay. So if I wanted to find good women or minorities, they were probably already here in graduate school. And you can usually tell by the first or second year who the better students are. And so I started courting these people in their second year of graduate school. After five years I had hired tragically four women, four men. One of the women was Hispanic, one of the men was black, American African-American, and another woman, the women was gay. I had all the bases covered.

When I stepped down — I know I'd never even thought about it — Tom Devine, who had been one of my grad, been with me in graduate school here and had just become department head at Berkeley in materials, he calls me up about a week after I stepped down, and says, Tom, I hear you were really successful at hiring women and minorities. And I said, well, oh, I guess, you know, fifty percent women, fifty percent men, one black and one Hispanic. And I didn't even know the other woman was gay. Actually I guess I did, anyway, I didn't, I wouldn't even count it today. I count, okay, because it's in the news. And I said, well, yeah. He said, well, how did you do it? I said, I just hired the most qualified people, okay.

But I did, I always had a Martin Luther King Scholar, which is basically if you could find a minority, you could get a — and they wanted to go on sabbatical. When I'd go to conferences and I'd see a minority faculty member at some place, I'd say, hey, when you're going to take a sabbatical, would you like to come to MIT? We can provide you a full salary, and they get half salary from their own university. So what a bad deal. Now, unfortunately, I was never able to hire one of them, mostly because of the backlash from the faculty in the department, okay. One woman is now a member of the National Academy. She was — she graduated from MIT, she was ready to come back, but my, teach, you, she'd just gotten her tenure. Anyway, but there is still a lot of resistance. It's hidden resistance.

I guess I'll take a moment if any of you have to leave, go ahead and leave. One of the things I did when I sat down with the two women faculty, the archaeologists, I said, okay, tell me what the problems are, okay, from your perspective. And the senior woman said, well, if you go to a faculty meeting, you're going to find that the male faculty will, if one of the women, if a woman is talking, the males will interrupt her in mid, and they won't do that to other men. So I went to the next faculty meeting and I paid attention to this. It was absolutely true, okay. So what did I do? If a male tried to interrupt the woman when she's talking, say, excuse me, and she's still talking, let her finish. And slowly the faculty learned, not by my telling them they were being chauvinist, because they didn't even know they were being chauvinist, okay, let's face it, okay. But this is one way where a little bit of leadership can go a long way, if you understand what the problem is.

I didn't, I didn't understand the problem. I never paid — I had probably been guilty of it, I never thought about it. Actually, I interrupt everybody, okay. The other thing that I heard, I was talking to one guy who was an alumnus who actually worked for my predecessor as a graduate student, and I was talking to him about this problem. And he said, I'm the father of four daughters, and one thing I've learned is people who don't respect women don't respect men either. And I found that's absolutely true, okay. So when you look at these things and let's say you're a woman, you're being disrespected, don't take it personally. They disrespect, they disrespect other people too. They just don't have respect for people, okay. And then the people who do respect women also will respect other men. I mean, it just sort of makes sense, okay, if you think about it. But you actually have to spend the time thinking about it.

And that gets back to Kahneman's book about their system one, which is your intuitive thinking, and their system two, which is your analytical. You got to be a little analytical about some of these things and figure out what the root cause is. And someone will — I'll talk about that some more next time, okay. Thanks.