REC_S2020_03

Hey, recitation. What are your questions on a recitation? Anybody having a question? If not, I have some things prepared, obviously, okay. And I actually have some handouts prepared. But we were talking last time, I'd gotten a question about tenure, and I told some stories about MIT and tenure, and we talked a little bit about Epstein. And I don't know anything directly about Epstein, but I do know a lot about MIT and the ethics of people who do things around here, okay. So I decided I would tell a story about Molten Metal Technologies, okay.

And so I caught, money talks at MIT, and I said that before, okay, that money talks. But it's always good to start out, like lightening up the audience with a little humor. So, news item: Harvard Medical School announces it will use attorneys instead of rats in laboratory tests. Justifications: attorneys are more plentiful than rats, the lab attendants do not grow attached to the attorneys, and the last one is there's some things a rat won't do, okay. So it's always good in a talk to lighten up the audience a little bit.

But I say there's a similarity between attorneys and university administrators. Not that they're as plentiful as attorneys necessarily, but in terms of their ethics they're about the same. And there's some very ad— I work with attorneys all the time. Eighty percent of the attorneys are really good people, okay, with high ethical values, and twenty percent are just pure slime, okay. And the reason for attorney jokes is because of those slimy ones out there, so far as that goes, and they are pretty slimy. But the problem with the whole profession in my opinion is to them advocacy is the number one thing. If you look at a hierarchy of important things, being an advocate, okay.

You go take an OJ Simpson, you could— you defend OJ Simpson on his murder charge. They turned it into something had nothing to do with OJ Simpson whether they committed murder or not. It had to do with were the Los Angeles Police racist. Yes, of course they were, okay. They had all kinds of evidence that the police department in LA was racist, okay. And the jury acquitted OJ Simpson because the police department was racist, if you really get down to it. And that's a success for those attorneys, to get a murderer out of jail, keep them out of jail, because they're advocates and they won. Well, is it really a win for society to keep murderers out of jail from being convicted? In an attorney's mind it is, because advocacy is more important than justice. I guarantee you that they think that advocacy is more important than justice, okay.

In fact, one of my favorite quotes comes from a movie called A Civil Action, where John Travolta— Robert Duvall, who is the attorney, the defense attorney, this is about a chemical spill up in Woburn, Massachusetts, it's a true story. And so Robert Duvall is representing the defense attorney, and he's just offered John Travolta twenty million dollars to settle the case, and Travolta's turned him down. And Duvall says, "What are you looking for?" And Travolta says, "I'm looking for the truth." And Duvall's comment was a wonderful comment, absolutely true: "You quit looking for the truth the day you filed suit," okay. The courtroom is not about truth. It's whose attorneys can put together the best story and pull the wool over jury's eyes, okay. Anyway, and I think we could talk about the whole impeachment proceedings that we've been watching, okay.

So that's the news item. Let's talk about Molten Metals Technologies. In 1989, this is a true story, and I was actually involved in it. Nonetheless, it took me about five hours to collect all this stuff with the references and this, and this will be on the website, so far as that goes. 1989, Chris Nagel, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at MIT and a former employee of US Steel, founded a company to use molten steel as a method of converting toxic waste into useful products, okay. Reportedly Nagel conceived the idea while employed at US Steel. He notified US Steel of his IP, and US Steel looked at it and said we're not interested, and they let him have it, okay.

And I happened to tie this into Steve Eilens' [Lipson's?] lectures. Those types of things happen from time to time. Does anybody know the Doc Edgerton story? Who's Doc Edgerton, first of all? You know who Doc Edgerton is, okay. You go on the fourth floor of building eight here, of building four here, and there's the Edgerton Center. When I was a student, Doc Edgerton was this semi-billionaire electrical engineering professor that all the students loved. Doc had come to MIT in like 1928 or so from Nebraska, and he was on the faculty in electrical engineering, and he had a contract from General Electric to study motors. And he wanted to understand the dynamics of motors while they were actually operating and spinning. So he conceived of the stroboscope, he invented the stroboscope, okay.

So he would flash the light at a known frequency, and if he could tie that to just off the frequency of the motor, you could see— you could just watch it, and you just have a slow-motion movie of a motor running, and with your own eyes, not a movie, but you could see it. So he told General Electric about his idea because they were funding the research and had the little intellectual property, and they said, "What would we use that for?" So they let him keep the intellectual property. He patented it and became a half a billionaire, okay.

One of the ways he made— he formed a company called EG&G, Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier, which is still a multi-billion dollar company here in Boston. He became a great friend of the Science Museum. Most of the Science Museum in Boston, a lot of it was funded by Doc Edgerton. He was just a wonderful Midwestern guy. He hated MIT meetings, he hated serving on committees, and he was really— I've heard that in the electrical engineering department, whenever he was asked to serve on a committee, he did a terrible job so they wouldn't ask him the next time, right. That's one way to do it. But Doc was a wonderful person. I did my doctoral thesis and my bachelor's thesis fifty yards down the hall from Doc's office, and he was just a wonderful person.

He worked on the Manhattan Project. That's where he made some of the— the company made some of the money taking pictures. You see pictures of the first nuclear explosions, those were probably Doc's pictures. He was a famous photographer. After World War Two, he was at the second station closest to the first nuclear blast at Alamogordo in New Mexico, okay. I mean, he told me that, okay. And after the war, he got interested in undersea technology and stuff, and he used to go on cruises with Jacques Cousteau, okay. And he was all over National Geographic, he was in all kinds of public broadcasting movies and stuff. He invented side-scan sonar, and he looked for the Monitor— the Monitor-Merrimac, you know, the Civil War ironclads and stuff, and he found that. He went off looking for the Loch Ness monster. I can remember walking down the infinite corridor on what are they called, Stonehenge Day or whatever, when the sun rises and the sun shines right down, and Doc were there with students measuring exactly with the sun in an intersect of the wall, and checking their watches and stuff, so they could know the exact orientation of the infinite corridor with regard to the universe, okay. Doc just— he was doing— I could tell you Doc stories for a long time. He was a wonderful guy.

And he became wealthy because General Electric didn't see much use to the technology. Well, US Steel didn't see much use to this guy's technology and turned it down. So Nagel comes back to go to graduate school in chemical engineering at MIT, and he had patented the technology, and he tells John Preston, who was head of MIT's technology licensing office, that hey, I've got this patent. Preston thought this was fantastic, and you'll see some of the quotes later. And the two of them formed a company, and supposedly in the early nineties, after they formed the company and handed out stock, both of them were worth thirty million dollars overnight, okay. And we're going to see if that created any conflicts of interest for them.

Now, this next bullet: Haney gave preference to Molten Metal Technology over other MIT-patented inventions in marketing the venture capitalists. I got that from Professor Sadoway, who had some MIT-patented technology that he had developed, and Preston was marketing Nagel's technology rather than the MIT-invented technology. A little conflict there, maybe, okay. Preston introduced Nagel to William Haney, who was a 27-year-old graduate of Harvard who had already made millions of dollars. He started a company— to me, he got fifteen million dollars when he was twenty-seven. This is in the early nineties or late eighties or whatever. And so between Haney at Harvard and Preston and Nagel at MIT, formed a very strong alliance, and they went around marketing what they had. We'll talk about how good the technology was in a little bit.

Al Gore, who was vice president of the United States and the technology guru: "a shining example of American engineering know-how and business know-how." Does anyone know about when Al Gore was the commencement speaker at MIT? So the Sloan students got together, and every student— and I was on the stand, you know, at graduation, where the faculty sit. And we didn't know what was going on. But every student, as they marched in, Sloan students were handing them buzzword bingo, okay. And everyone had a buzzword bingo sheet that had a bunch of buzzwords like internet, technology-driven, or something like that. And what you were supposed to do— had the rules— whenever Al Gore in his commencement address used the word "internet," you could cross off that buzzword bingo square. And if you actually got bingo, you know, everything in a row or whatever, you were just supposed to raise your sheet in the air, okay.

Well, none of the parents or families or the faculty knew about this, because it was just the graduates who, as they were walking in, got these buzzword bingo sheets. And every one was different. I mean, the students had put them together. It wasn't as if everybody had the same sheet— a different sheet. It really was a competition. But the Secret Service knew about it, okay. And they told Al Gore. And so Al's giving his talk and he'd use some word and there'd be a cheer from all the people who had that on their sheet, right. And he'd say, "Oh, I must have used a good word." And none of us knew what he was talking about except the students, okay. It's a great prank, okay. One of the best pranks at MIT. But you know, most people don't tell you about that hack. See, you learn something worthwhile here, right.

And then they had this guy Maurice Strong, who was secretary-general of the United Nations Earth Summit, and he said this technology can literally revolutionize our ability to deal with toxic waste, okay. This was on a thing I sent around last week on a case study at Boston University, is the school. And so they had this technology, they called Catalytic Extraction Processing. Sounds pretty sexy, huh. In any case, this is it. They were going to take solid, liquids, and sludges and stick them in the bottom of a molten steel bath, because that's actually how US Steel would process steel, okay. It's called the Q-BOP process. You actually have a gas jet blowing gases into the molten steel bath, and that's what Chris Nagel knew. And that was their recycling system: molten metal bath. Turns out iron is a universal solvent at high temperatures for almost anything on the periodic table, okay, just like water is a universal solvent at room temperature for most things, okay.

And out would come gases, which would be a product, especially in organics, which would be things that could be turned into plastics or something, and metals. And they didn't— when they sold this it was like all these things came out pure. Of course, they didn't come out pure. There's a little extra processing that had to go in there to purify, make them useful, and then people would use them. And this was going to kind of revolutionize the world. Well, would someone with a degree in chemical engineering call this a catalytic process? What does catalyst mean? A catalyst is something that speeds up a chemical reaction and is not consumed by the reaction, and therefore can be recovered and reused over and over. This is not a catalytic process, folks. But it's a nice-sounding name, and it— mmm, that's marketing, okay. Tell the lie, okay, in terms that other people can't understand.

What a metallurgist consider— the output products are pure, okay. Well, why do we talk about metallurgists here? Well, let's talk about the hype. I'll talk about the metallurgist later. On a scale of ten, this is a thirteen, according to Preston, talking to the Boston Globe, right. Molten Metal went public in February '93, ultimately raising more than 350 million dollars, employing 500 people. They built a plant down in Fall River, Massachusetts, because the state has things for new companies that are going to guarantee new jobs, and Fall River was a depressed area. So they put it in Fall River. They were in commercial production by 1996. Remember, 1996. And they were cleaning up the country's nuclear waste.

I remember I heard about this when I was teaching over at Sloan, and they said— what do you— some article in the Wall Street Journal about Molten Metal was going to start processing nuclear waste. So the students asked me about it in class. I said, "Excuse me, they think they're gonna get rid of radioactivity in a molten steel bath? All you're gonna do is dilute it, right. That makes things worse in my opinion, okay." That's why I told the students. I didn't know that they were actually going to take low-level radioactive waste, like old towels that had radioactive contaminants on the paper towels, and they were going to put those into the molten steel and burn them up, and somehow someone was going to use that molten steel that was radioactive now. Well, I don't know that many people who are looking for radioactive steel as a marketable product, but nonetheless, okay, that's what they told people they were going to do.

And it turns out, you'll see here, what helped Molten Metal get started was a cozy relationship with Vice President Gore. Executives gave tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Gore, and their big play was Harvard football legend Vic Gatto. He was a Molten Metal executive. He didn't know anything about metal, but he was a famous Harvard football player, and so obviously he was qualified, right. And he had tied the Yale-Harvard football game in 1968, and it was a classic game, of course. And somehow they were able to secure 33 million dollars from the Department of Energy to clean up nuclear waste by this technology. I still can't believe it today. They actually have scientists down there at the Department of Energy, and I can't believe that there weren't fifty people saying, "Hey, wait a second, this is crap." But you know, nobody did.

They got 33 million dollars, became the focus of the Senate Finance Committee investigation of whether this was playing loose and goosy, just like we deal with Congress today, in the democratic process, of the Democrats and the Republicans going after each other, right. So there's nothing new here, folks. Molten Metal filed for chapter 11 at the end of '97. They had just started commercial production a year and a half earlier, right. I mean, they didn't last too long before they went through their 350 million dollars, right.

But in the meantime, what was MIT's involvement? Preston, who was head of the technology licensing office and a substantial shareholder in Molten Metal, was supposed to organize a town meeting to be held in Kresge Auditorium, that Vice President Gore, who was a candidate running, you know, for the presidency, was going to come to MIT to talk about technology and how it was going to save the world, right, just like buzzword bingo, right. Molten Metal was one of four companies invited to present. And here's a Tech article that I dug out: "Gore will speak here tomorrow," on October 27th, '95, okay.

Now, about this time, it turns out that Professor Sadoway and I thought there might be some problems here. It turns out many MIT faculty and administrators, the president of MIT, owned stock in Molten Metal, okay. No conflicts here, folks. No conflicts, okay. Professor Sadoway and Eagar complained— I complained, Sadoway complained— to the technology licensing office, and the number two person, I won't tell you her name, she became— she replaced Preston when he got so rich he had to go off and count his money. And I was told that Preston is a good guy, nothing wrong with what they were doing, okay. I told the vice president of MIT that I thought there was a conflict, for the person organizing it, who owned ten percent of the company, to be putting them in front of the world at MIT, Kresge Auditorium, with Vice President Gore. I was ignored, okay. I was a whistleblower. I'm the whistleblower— with President Trump, I'm the whistleblower, okay. No one cared, because half the people we were talking to owned stock in Molten Metal. No conflicts, okay.

I asked the question about what metallurgists would think this was a good process. Well, it turns out the former head of the materials department was on the Molten Metal Technology board of directors, or scientific advisory board, or whatever, okay. In 1995, I was department head, and Chris Nagel, the inventor of this wonderful technology, had given some of his thirty or fifteen million dollars to a junior faculty member at MIT to do some research in slag behavior of these steel baths, and what would be the best slag to use in the Molten Metal Technology system. And Chris came to me and sat in my office and said, "This professor should not publish this work, because he— we funded it and we think it's proprietary, and he should not be allowed to publish it." And I said, "What am I supposed to say?" I didn't know he owned stock now, folks. So I said, "I'll look into it."

So I called the assistant professor— actually it was probably the associate professor at that time, he was coming up for tenure in a year— and I said, "What's going on here?" He says, "Oh, we're working in this part of the phase diagram, this paper is in this part of the phase diagram. They funded the work way over here, this other end of the phase diagram. So this work that he's claiming is theirs isn't theirs, it's all intellectual property regimes," right. And I said okay. So Chris Nagel came back to my office, I said I checked with the professor and he says, "You funded the work over here." I showed him the phase diagram, he's a chemical engineer, he should have understood it. I said, "I'm not gonna tell him not to publish it. He has to publish, he's got to get tenure, right." And Chris Nagel stomps out of my office.

And I believe he went upstairs to the old department head, who was a member of his scientific advisory board, okay. Later, a year later, less than a year later, I sent out for the letters to promote this junior faculty member, and— we thought it was a very good case. And all of a sudden the letters— I got a letter from Japan in September of 1996, and it was a terrible letter. And I read it, I thought, this didn't make any sense for all I knew about the people in Japan and what they thought. This— Japan was probably the world's technologically most advanced steelmaking country in the world, and they wrote this so-so letter for his promotion. I immediately walked over to our administrative officer, I said, "Joe, this professor didn't write this letter. The guy upstairs did." I pointed upstairs, to the former department head.

Well, so time goes on, months go on, and he was denied tenure. I was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer at the time. I was not at full capacity. But I remember February school vacation week, which would be this time of 1997, and I decided I had to go to the Dean and complain about this, because, in my opinion, the senior faculty member— and I had other data I'd gathered over the previous four months— that this senior faculty member at MIT had polluted the case for several reasons. He had his own former student who he wanted to hire in that same technical area, and he had brought that to me, and I looked at it, said, "No, we're not looking for somebody, we got this other professor who's coming up for tenure, and we think he's done pretty well." Not after we got a couple of bad letters from Japan.

So I went to the Dean of Engineering, said, "Look, we got a problem. I got a senior faculty member who's polluted the case." And he says, "Well, we got to find out when Professor Fuwa comes here." Professor Fuwa was Mr. Steelmaking in Japan. He was a professor at Tohoku University. He'd come here after World War Two on some sort of Fulbright or something, and he had worked and learned steelmaking under John Chipman— if you know the Chipman Room in our— in room 4 yeah, all right, okay. John Chipman was the world's greatest steelmaking chemist, okay. And Fuwa was coming to MIT in May. Well, the tenure decision was going to be made in April. A little late for this young professor. I tried to present his case, but with these letters in there it was death, okay. He didn't get tenure. He's tenured full professor over at BU now, okay. His case was polluted.

Fuwa came, sat in my office, and I was pleasant to him, and he says, "Professor so-and-so, my predecessor, who was on the board of Molten Metal, he told us you didn't want Professor so-and-so to get tenure." I said, "No, that's not true." And that was sort of the end of it. It's— at my visiting committee— you know what visiting committees are? So every department about every two years has a visiting committee. It has people from the MIT Corporation, and it has people from other universities, it has captains of industry who come, and they evaluate the department over a day and a half, and they report back to the MIT Corporation how is this department doing. It's really when the department head gets his grade, okay.

So at this point the professor at BU has gone to BU. He's doing fine over there. He's still doing fine over there. But he should have gotten tenure at MIT, if this other— my predecessor department head— inscrutable, okay. That's why I was hoping Jonathan, who asked about, you know, what's it like to be at the University— well, he can watch the video if he wants, okay. This is the type of backstabbing that occurs. It's not unique to MIT, okay.

So what happens is— oh, I guess we had other big names like Michael Porter, who was one of the great gurus of Harvard Business School, okay. He started his own consulting firm, and like, it's kind of like a McKinsey or a Bain or Boston Consulting Group. He had one, and he was on the MMT board. And there was also a Harvard Nobel laureate— can't remember his name, but if you watch one of the YouTube things on Molten Metal, he's on there, okay. They had gotten some very big-name people: vice president of the United States, the Secretary of the United Nations Environmental Summit, the Secretary-General— and these big people, you know, they had some big-name people to say how wonderful this company was, okay. But in fact, MIT continues to this day to have inappropriate relationships of all kinds. There probably are more than two dozen going on right now, okay. But they haven't risen to the level of Epstein— of the notoriety of Epstein. They're going on all the time, and I could tell other stories, but I chose Molten Metal because I was somewhat involved in some of it personally.

So why did US Steel give up the patent rights? I mean, they could have had this technology. Well, it's true molten iron is a universal solvent, somewhat like water at room temperature, and if you have a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, whatever Chris Nagel had before he came to MIT, you'd think, oh, you can dissolve anything in molten iron. But it turns out molten iron, because it is a universal solvent and at high temperatures, it has to be contained within a refractory. If you want to reline a steel melting furnace in industry, it probably is a twenty million dollar job and takes about three months. So you're going to take a half-billion-dollar production facility, you're going to shut it down for two months, do thirty million dollars worth of relining to put the refractory in, and hopefully the refractory will last for a year and a half, two years before you have to do that again. So ten percent of your time is in relining. You've got a half-billion-dollar facility— you can start running the numbers if you like, but it costs a lot of money to replace the refractory. And there are ceramists all over the world trying to improve the refractory so they could last three years rather than a year and a half, okay. It's worth a lot of money. It's worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the steel company to get the longer life out of those refractories.

Unfortunately, two elements that destroy the refractory are sodium and chlorine. So all this toxic waste would be fine to put it into the furnace, as long as it didn't have any sodium and chlorine. Now how many garbage dumps do you know that don't have any sodium and chlorine? Zero. But every metallurgist in the world, including Sadoway and Eagar, knew that you can't be dumping sulfur, sodium and chlorine into this furnace, because it will just cause the refractory to melt away. Sodium and chlorine lower the melting point of the refractory, and it actually melts, and it will last for months rather than years, okay. Minor problem— they didn't never buy the Tony buddy [?]— that's why Sadoway and Eagar thought this was a lousy thing to invest in, but no one wanted to listen.

US Steel also contains carbon— duh, it's an iron-carbon alloy— and in the presence of chlorine you form this compound COCl2. That's known as phosgene. What was phosgene used for? It was one of the toxic chemical warfare gases of World War One. So that's one of these things that's coming out the top of this stack, is phosgene. Sadoway tells me that he was actually involved in some litigation that occurred afterwards. He was a consultant in some of the litigation processes where some of these people at Molten Metal were indicted and stuff. And you also had dioxins and furans, which are fairly toxic themselves, that were produced in the bath from putting plastics in there. So you had to separate out all— you'd have to separate all of those types of plastics, I don't even know which plastics they were, because I'm not a plastics person, but most people could probably figure out what those are.

And to me— one of the things I used to say— small amounts of bismuth and antimony, and I mean like a hundred parts per million, will make the steel so brittle it can never be used for any structural application. You can't— once you get bismuth and antimony into the steel, there is no known way to get it out. So you've got to make sure that— if people use bismuth solders and stuff, you got to make sure that doesn't get into your waste stream, okay. And this is just a few things. I mean, we didn't spend a lot of time. This is just stuff we knew off the top of our head, that if you actually knew a little bit about the chemistry of what's going on here— and did anyone— I mean, you're a nuclear engineer, right? Did you think this is a solution to radioactive waste? You're just mixing it into a larger volume, okay. Maybe it's denser, but, you know, okay.

So the selling of the MIT name, where I'm done with Molten Metal for a while till the next slide. I used to say when I came here as an assistant professor that MIT gave me three things: a desk, a local telephone— before the internet I had to pay for my long-distance calls, now I don't, okay, because of the internet they use voice-over IP protocol— but I had to pay for my long-distance phone calls. I got a local telephone, they would pay for that, except I would see them trying to slip it onto my research accounts from time to time. That's a no-no, you're supposed to be paying that, not me. And they would give me the MIT name. I had the MIT imprimatur, I was a part of MIT. The only one of these things that had any real value was the MIT name. And I used to say our job is to leave MIT with a better name than we found it, okay. That's still our job, all of you, because you have— you will have the MIT name, if you know, with a brass rat to go with it, right, and people will see that.

And so the venture capitalists— this is a point I made last semester— the venture capitalists are hanging around MIT to exploit the MIT name, and have been doing so for years. I should have put decades. Is that different than what Epstein and the MIT faculty and administration did more recently? You can think about it, okay.

The rest of the story about Molten Metal— oops, did I not— okay, there we go. The rest of the story: when MIT— when Molten Metal went bankrupt in '97, I breathed a sigh of relief as I read the Boston Globe article. MIT was not named in the article about the bankruptcy on the business— full truck part, you know. Most of the big headline on the business section of the Globe was "Molten Metal Goes Bankrupt." Nagel and Haney were sued by a reinsurance company that invested twenty million dollars. Reinsurance company is just a big insurance company that invested some of their money into Molten Metal, and they ended up saying, "Look, you guys were frauds," okay. And they were, okay. I don't know what happened to that.

Preston, in the meantime, went on after Molten Metal went defunct. He took the same Fall River plant and he got control of that, and he went off to some widow in Switzerland or whatever, who he convinced to invest seventy-seven million dollars in this new company, which was Molten Metal all over again. And eventually he was convicted of fraud and embezzlement of her money. Hey, this is the legacy you're gonna be part of. How about that? I don't think you're gonna get these stories for most of the other people at MIT, okay. But it's true. I gave the references, you can go read the articles, okay. It happens all the time, and we should be ashamed of it, but we're not. Many people around here are trying to figure out how can they get part of the next one.

And why are the venture capitalists doing this? Maybe I know why. They don't care if the technology is any good or not. They want to tell the world, "We found this technology at MIT, and if you invest in it, or when we have an IPO and you buy stock in this, you're gonna be in on the next Google or the next Facebook or whatever, and you're going to be worth billions of dollars just like these people." Except who's gonna be the first to cash out on the IPO? The venture capitalists. And what are they going to do? They're gonna tell you this is the greatest technology in the world. It's all marketing ploy. Unfortunately, the people who have good ideas at MIT are in that same soup when they're trying to get money for their startups, and they have to pay for the sins of all these people who are stealing from your grandmother's pension, okay, because that's what they're doing. As you can tell, I have some strong opinions about this, but I'm not telling you all of them, okay.

There's some handouts here. One is the— which has been on the website since the first day, it's an MIT Faculty Newsletter called "Leadership, Management, Education at MIT." This is an article that I wrote back in 2003, because I didn't want the guy who was Dean of Engineering, that wouldn't listen to the part of the story about the young professor who was screwed— he became Provost, okay, and he wanted to be president of MIT. I wrote this article and his name is in here, Bob Brown, okay. And there's a quote from him, okay. And I wrote this article in part so it would help expose who Bob Brown was and what his attitudes were. But I really wrote it on what it's like to be an MIT student. I was an MIT student for six years, I've been teaching MIT students for years, and I wrote this article. And some of my classmates thought this was the best article they had ever read.

In fact, one faculty member from humanities said he'd quit reading the Faculty Newsletter, but after he saw this article, he decided he was going to start reading it again. So people liked the article. I thought— I spent a lot of time with that article. Now, another article which I wrote for the Faculty Newsletter was— MIT has a little pamphlet they hand out in the lobby of building five to people who come to visit MIT, and I looked at that, I used to hand out some of these things, and I was reading— how long ago, this is 2015. So I wrote this article, because in there it said "Research is the soul of MIT." How many of you people think that research is the soul of MIT? I think it's education is the soul of MIT. But when MIT's passing this out to all the visitors who come to the lobby of building five to take a tour, they're told that research is the soul of MIT. So I, being the naysayer that I am, I wrote this article saying I don't think so, okay.

And then another time— and this was in— one was this— doesn't have the year on it. I wrote several articles for— ah, now it doesn't look like my secretary copied both of the frog-in-water articles. I wrote an article called "A Frog in Water, the Forces That Move Us," and I'll have to make sure she posts the other version of this. They published it in two parts. But you know the story of a frog in water? You take a frog and you put him in hot water and he'll jump out. You put him in cold water and bring the water up in temperature, he never notices the change and he dies, okay. So that's sort of a metaphor for being a faculty member.

One of the students asked me to talk about being a faculty member, so this is— the "Management Leadership Education at MIT" is an article I kind of wrote based on the experience of being a student at MIT. This is sort of my idea of what the experience is of being a faculty member at MIT. I hadn't read it for a while. Chris, you came to visit me a few weeks ago to thank me for helping— you know, being not being a thorn inside, I guess, when he was department head— and he mentioned something about it. So when I was going through some of these things— [Tom locates the second article in his handouts.] here's part two right here— she didn't come, she didn't make a bunch of copies, it doesn't look like— oh yes, she did.

He mentioned the frog-in-water article, and I went back and read it last week as I was preparing these handouts. I thought, I like that better than the other one about what it's really like to be a faculty member and how the world just sort of— the water gets hotter and hotter and you just don't notice the change. In fact, I think one— the first one is called "The Forces That Move Us," and this part two is "The Long-Term Consequences of the Imperceptible Change," okay. So we have problems with that.

And then I have my last one to hand out, that some students asked me some questions back in— what's— this is in 2014, and I was at the time writing a book about my experiences at MIT, and I've written about seventy or eighty pages, but I've only gotten up through junior year, okay. And who knows if I'll ever finish it. But I wrote this— I wrote the prologue before I finished writing the whole book— and I call it "Surviving at MIT, Lessons Learned." Now this was ten things, I'm up to about twenty or twenty-four now. But there's some lessons I learned at MIT. You've got to learn to be humble but don't be humiliated, and I tell you the difference. About working hard, don't procrastinate, have self-confidence. Anyway, there are several things, you can read them. Some students liked it enough that one of them told me they had it mounted next to their desk so they could look at it all the time. Now, I don't look at it all the time, but— because I went through it, okay.

Anybody have any questions? If not, I'll give you— this didn't raise any questions in your mind? Hopefully it did, whether you want to expose— but so I actually had to give a talk yesterday at church, and so I talked about this, which is the most appropriate award I've ever received, okay. [Tom produces a piece of Steuben glass.] This is a piece of Steuben glass. Steuben was started in 1903. It was sold in World War Two or World War One to Corning Glass Works. It's in Steuben County, New York— that's why it's called Steuben Glass. And this is leaded glass, it's very heavy, and these are expensive pieces of art, okay. And I turned it this way so you won't see exactly what it is, and I'll talk— I said I'm going to do show-and-tell, and so this is why— I showed and then I told them the story.

That in 1993 I was asked to serve on the board of directors of a company called Nashua Corporation up in Nashua, New Hampshire. It'd been there since 1845, started out making coated playing cards, okay, that all the people in the Western movies would be playing poker with— Nashua playing cards, okay. And Nashua was now sort of a struggling half-billion-dollar-a-year sales company. And I was put on the board by the outgoing CEO, who had saved the company from bankruptcy in like 1983. He is now retirement age, he needed to put someone on the board, and he put me on the board. We won't talk about why later— because I was a little surprised. And I knew Mitt Romney, I had his kids in Cub Scouts and stuff, and I said, "Mitt, I've never been on a board. What do you do?" He says, "It's easy, just go to the meetings, cash the checks." Well, not exactly. Not this board.

Turns out we got a new CEO— the first meeting I went to, we also got a new CEO. We had the old CEO, but the new CEO was a guy from California, never worked for the company, he was taking over as the head of this company. And I kind of watched on the board. I went to the meetings, cashed the checks. The first year, he took a half-billion-dollar company and in one year he was able to turn it into a quarter-billion-dollar company. He lost half of the sales in one year, and half the employees got laid off, okay. I didn't think this was very good. It wasn't good for the stockholders, and that's who I was supposed to be reporting to. That's what the board members are supposed to be doing. And we had guys who were the CEO of EG&G, we had a guy who was a CEO of Mutual Insurance— I mean, he'd come in with his limo and his driver, so he could work, you know, he got ferried around New England and stuff. We had all kinds of people, but we only had two academics.

And so the new CEO, after about a year, he wanted to buy another company in Europe for twenty-five million dollars. And we went around, and everyone had— all thirteen board members, or all twelve other board members of the CEO— had a reason why he shouldn't do this. And he said, "Well, I'd still like to take a vote." So we went around, and every person voted. You know how they voted? I was the last one. Everyone voted yes to buy this company, even though all of them had stated different reasons— twelve different reasons— why this was a bad idea. When the CEO ordered to do it, they all decided to say yes, except me. Got to me, I said, "I don't understand. I'm gonna abstain." I was shunned. We then went to lunch, I was shunned, no one would talk to me. Two days later, one of the other academics, who was a Business School professor from Dartmouth, he wrote to me, said, "I wish I had the courage to do what you did." I thought, what? All I did was abstain on a vote that I didn't think was right.

Well, it turns out, over the rest of the year, I basically— I went after this CEO, and I started challenging him on all kinds of things, and he left, and we got a new CEO. And he hired Korn Ferry International, which is a big consulting firm, to come in and reconstitute the board. We were all asked to resign, all thirteen of us, and they were going to redo the board. And so at a final dinner, the new CEO gave out some awards to the people who left. I wasn't asked to rejoin the board, surprise, and this was my award. This is a Steuben glass. If I turn it around, even, look at it— if you need to come up closer— it's a mountain lion ready to pounce. [Tom shows the Steuben glass mountain lion to the class.] That was the message: I was the mountain lion on the board, ready to pounce. And these other guys— I could tell you of other votes where they all said this is the wrong thing to do, and then when the votes came in they all voted yes. It's a wonderful system, and I was pleased to be off that board, okay.

And you know what the new CEO did for me? He gave me a consulting contract, a retainer that was exactly the same as if I had been attending the board meetings. I got paid the same, and I didn't have to go to the board meetings. He had his little tongue-in-cheek award, which I think is funny, and he also compensated me for saving the company from bankruptcy.

I'm telling you the story because you are going to rise to certain levels in whatever firms you're in, and you're going to see people posturing in committee meetings, and you have to decide whether you're going to be the lightning rod that says, "Hey, there's something wrong here." And I'll tell you that seventy-five percent of the time no one's going to listen to you. Just like when I said, "There's something wrong, there's a conflict here, Preston shouldn't be putting Molten Metal on the stand in Kresge," I was ignored, okay. Just like when I went to the Dean and said this young faculty member's been screwed, I was ignored, and I had the facts. Professor Fuwa— I said, "Professor so-and-so said you didn't want him to get tenure." That was a lie. But he didn't get tenure. So I lost that battle.

You have to decide, are you going to go along with the crowd, are you gonna fight and lose your job? I didn't lose my job, I have tenure. So anyway, okay. I know this doesn't have a whole lot do with structural materials, but I've actually been told by some students in prior years, when I told some of these stories, that they actually got some important things out of them. And hopefully you will as well. It's not a pretty world a lot of times out there, particularly when money gets involved.