§1. Opening: what the class wants to talk about [00:03]
Today is a recitation, and from my point of view you can ask me anything you want. I remember when I used to teach the Navy students, each morning they'd come in and I'd ask them if they had any questions. I kind of thought they might ask about my lecture. They were asking me very specific problems, and on the second day I realized — I said, are you asking me your homework problems through your mechanical engineering course? And they were. They had me work out their homework problems, which, fair, okay. I don't care. I don't know how well I did, I didn't get a grade, but I don't care about that either.
I was asked, what is this academic promotion and tenure? This person thinks they might want to be a faculty member someday, and I've been advising students about this for years. I can recommend a particular book called The University: An Owner's Manual by Henry Rosovsky. Rosovsky was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard for eleven years. Anybody know what the Dean of Arts and Sciences does at Harvard? There's Harvard University and Harvard College. He's Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He basically runs Harvard College, which is what most people think of as Harvard. Does anyone know what Harvard actually is? It's a conglomerate. It's got Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, Radcliffe, Harvard College, the Law School. Harvard is a conglomerate of a bunch of other colleges and universities, which we all know as Harvard and lump together, but it's not. There is a president of Harvard, the whole conglomerate, but the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences basically runs Harvard College, which is where all the undergraduates go.
He wrote this book around 1990, and it's actually interesting. It justifies why we have the whole tenure process at a university. If you ask the faculty — and I have asked the faculty in this department — how many of the students will go on to academic positions, what would they estimate? Pick a number.
Student: Ten percent.
You're very close to the real number, but they estimate eighty-five percent. The actual number is fifteen percent. The faculty think they're trying to clone themselves, and there could be no greater purpose in the world than to clone yourself. When they go out to hire new faculty, they think the best person in the world would be their best former student or someone who thinks just like they do. So it doesn't exactly foster creativity to clone yourselves. It also doesn't foster creativity in new fields to keep cloning what you've been doing well in for the past thirty or forty years. I had that tension all the time when I was department head. The faculty think there is no greater purpose in life than to be like them.
§2. The four ranks and the tenure clock [04:07]
There are four ranks on the faculty. AP for an assistant professor — that's a new hire. There's an AWOT — we call it AWOT, we don't usually say associate professor, we describe someone as AWOT, which is associate without tenure. This is at MIT; other universities might have other ranks. The criteria to be promoted to AWOT is that you have to have demonstrated promise. You've done something that looks like it might be good, and if you continue doing that for a few more years, you might get the next promotion, which is associate with tenure. That's the big promotion. It must come after eight years from your hire date.
But the hire date gets to be just like anything that's legal — it gets a little dicey when you get into the details. The hire date for everybody officially is July 1st. So if you're hired on July 31st, the next day you have used up one of your tenure years. If you're hired on June 30th, the next day you will have used up your whole first year. Most people come in on July 1st. If you wanted to come in on June 1st, you should actually come in as a research scientist or something else. You should not take on the title of professor, because there's a dean over there in the dean's office who's going to be counting and looking at what day you officially started. Some people start halfway through the year on January 1st or January 15th — they only have a half year for that first year.
The department heads and the associate dean probably spend at least a person-month of time each year calculating the dates and recalculating the dates to make sure that everyone's on track, and no one's going to get to the eighth year without getting a letter saying you do have tenure or you don't have tenure. Because under policies and procedures, if MIT doesn't make a decision on your tenure by your eighth year, you automatically receive tenure. How about that? I don't know that it's ever happened in the history of MIT, because they've paid people hundreds of thousands of dollars to calculate the dates, and department heads waste hours and hours of time justifying the dates they have on their records versus the dean's office records. It's a wonderful bureaucracy, isn't it?
For tenure, you have to have demonstrated not just promise but accomplishment. You've got to have done something that people can point to. And how do we do it? We go out and we get letters. When we hire someone originally, we go out and we get three or four or five letters typically — I think the number has been growing each year. For the AWOT promotion, typically you might get about ten letters, about half a dozen inside and four on the outside, and you don't have to have an international letter. When you get to the tenure process, it's typically in your sixth year, because it takes a whole year to do this. The process takes a whole year of going through all the committees and faculty votes and everything else. So they start in your sixth year, so that sometime before the end of your seventh year, they'll know and they're going to make a decision. And sometimes they can't quite make a decision, so they still have one more year and you could come up a second time.
To get full professor, you really have to be world-renowned. Over in the School of Science they go by the Science Citation Index, and they can calculate to six significant figures on your publication record whether you're first, second, or third in the world. If you're not in the top three in the School of Science, the faculty, the deans, and the department heads don't have to think — they just look at the number. You have a computer do this. In the School of Engineering it gets a lot more complex. The School of Science may have changed since — remember I'm talking about twenty to twenty-five years ago when I was department head.
Then you have to go to Academic Council, which is all the deans. First you have to pass your department on a vote, then you have to pass the School of Engineering on a vote. Both of those votes are on a one, two, three, or four: four being definitely promote, three being yeah, it's a good case, two being not so great a case but I probably wouldn't resign if you did promote them, and number one being I'm ready to resign if this person is going to be one of my colleagues. That's the level of one, two, three, four.
Student: [How heavily is the Science Citation Index weighted?]
Yes, they put a big weight on it. I haven't been part of it, but I can tell you that several deans I served under in engineering council would explain this. They would go to Academic Council and list the number for the one, two, and three rankings and where this person was. This was a very big thing to them. I'm sure it wasn't the only thing, but to me it's a crutch to keep from thinking. We can talk about other crutches that other people use. If you want to know a good book — I got about ten copies over there, one year I gave it out because it's only about a ten or twelve dollar book — it's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Anybody ever heard of it? What's Thinking, Fast and Slow about?
Student: [Summarizes — two ways of thinking, two brains.]
Right. Thinking, Fast and Slow is a whole series of research studies done by Daniel Kahneman — he won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this. The whole thesis is, as she said, you have two different ways of thinking about things, or two brains. One is thinking fast: you develop heuristics. You don't have to think about how to brush your teeth anymore. When I shave I have a pattern — I don't have to worry about, do I start on this side or that side, do I start on my beard? I developed a pattern. He gets a little more complex than shaving — I don't think he used that example. Thinking slow is when you have to do some analysis. The answer is not quite obvious based on your prior experience. Heuristics is, you have prior experience and you developed a way of doing things. Analytical thinking is actually probably better, but most of our decisions are based on heuristics. It's based on prior experience, and we just have knee-jerk reactions. Daniel Kahneman, this is the author, and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. It's probably one of the only new Nobel Prizes, and I only sort of understood it when I read it, but it's a worthwhile book.
AWOT used to come normally before the end of your fourth year. They'd put you up after three years for promotion. I understand they're now doing it at the end of your fifth year, which only gives you about a year and a half to make the difference between promise and accomplishment, which I think is a big mistake. But hey, who cares, I'm not on engineering council anymore. Full professor can come never, if you had demonstrated accomplishment and then sort of died or something happens. There are people who retire as an associate professor with tenure because they never got to be full professor. That's quite embarrassing. It's a way for the university to try to say we made a mistake on the tenure process, we don't really want you, you're not going to get good raises. So they do have some ways to pressure you after the tenure process.
§3. The faculty personnel record and career development [13:18]
Which actually brings up some interesting questions of how they pressure. There's something called a faculty personnel record, which over the years has gotten more and more lengthy and complex. It has rules like the income tax rules — very detailed rules. It's just a resume, but typically by the time you're in the tenure process it's a forty- to fifty-page resume. I've known people, the only thing they would do at MIT was if it would add a line to their faculty personnel record. That stifles a lot of creativity or cooperation or other things. Basically when I found that's the approach certain people are taking, I didn't deal with them much anymore. I wasn't interested in dealing with people like that.
One thing we do well — one time Dave Hardt and I were in mechanical engineering, we were hired within about two years of one another, and we were both in manufacturing, and we marched up through the ranks together. We were sitting in engineering council together, talking about some problem engineering council had making decisions. One thing Dave said is, one thing we do well is promotions in the School of Engineering. The department will probably spend about an hour discussing the promotion of an individual. They will spend about a half an hour a year even in the years you're not being promoted. The years you're being promoted they will go over that faculty personnel record. One thing Professor Flemings instituted in 1983 when he became department head was Career Development Committees. It's a committee of three more senior faculty who are your mentors, assigned to be your mentors. Before that, I've seen the letters back in the mid-sixties — I remember a letter coming from a senior faculty member to the department head saying, I think we should give this person tenure. That was the decision process: a note from one powerful faculty member.
This department in the '60s was run by a bunch of fiefdoms. You had senior faculty who ran those little groups: physical metallurgy, chemical metallurgy, ceramics; later we introduced electronic materials, then polymers. We had a general exam in each area, and it was a fiefdom. The only way you could get research funding or laboratory space was to tie yourself into one of these senior people and essentially become their serf for the next six years. They would make the decision after six years and they would tell the department head whether you should be promoted. Obviously a tremendous system for abuse. We can talk about how that was broken, but it was broken in the '70s.
In general, all this time spent as faculty today talking about and giving constructive criticism, talking to the faculty member — they should be meeting with their Career Development Committee a few hours a year, and they should be telling them, well, you need to go out and give more talks at other places so people out there can get to know you so they can write letters about you. The letters have to come from prominent people, not someone who knows you — someone who's prominent. For example, my first research contract was from the Office of Naval Research, which is the basic research funding agency of the U.S. Navy. The guy who really knew me was a guy named Bruce MacDonald. Bruce was a graduate of this department, he had worked for Morris Cohen, and he was now handing out tens of millions of dollars a year of US Navy money to universities to do research on topics of interest to the Navy. You get to nominate to your department head, these people would be good people to write letters for me. The department head gets to pick some of his people that aren't on your list, and nowadays the Career Development Committee also gets to put together a list, and the department head gets to choose who he's going to send the letters to and ask for an evaluation.
Everyone agreed that Bruce MacDonald had been funding my research for three or four years and had actually given me a big contract in 1980 of about $400,000 a year, which was huge — it'd be like a million-and-a-half to two million dollars today. That's another story about how that happened. But all of a sudden I went from someone who was not very promising — and I can show you the proof of that, at least in engineering council's eyes — to someone who had great promise. Why did I have great promise? I had more money than any untenured professor in the department. That's the answer to Epstein, by the way. Money talks. I've said that for years before Epstein. When I read about Epstein — you can read whatever you want, but one thing you should know is at a university money talks. My secretary Jerry, her last person she worked for, she worked in the Provost office at Stanford, and her boss was Condoleezza Rice. I mentioned this to Jerry a couple days ago — I don't remember if it was Epstein or something else — I said, well, money talks. And she says, you know that's true at Stanford too. It's true at any university. It's also true at a lot of companies — most companies, not all companies, but many.
In general we do very well, and I agreed with Dave Hardt, we really today spend a tremendous amount of time and effort. After you pass engineering council you have to go to Academic Council, which is the deans and a few vice presidents and the provost and the president, and they have to compare notes. MIT is one of the few universities that does this across the whole university. That's one way MIT maintains quality control across the whole university. You get a weak dean who wants to let anybody through who can spell and add, and you will have weakened that school for thirty years, because when you tenure someone it's a thirty-year decision. You have a strong dean or someone who's really tight about something, and we can talk about some of those people, good ideas and bad ideas.
§4. Administrative staff and the loss of institutional heart [22:06]
Student: [Does MIT do anything to support administrative or non-faculty staff in difficult situations?]
What, are you kidding me? MIT does nothing. I've been complaining about this for thirty years. People become department head who have no clue what decisions they're making, what they're saying, and what the legal ramifications are. I'll give you an example. There was one secretary or administrative assistant — whatever we wish to call them — who wasn't particularly performing well. There was a faculty member who was her supervisor, and he's a very nice person. She was in an automobile accident or something, and she was going to be out for three months, and he says, it's okay, you can come back whenever you want. Well, he just made a legal commitment. He was her supervisor, and she could sue MIT if they didn't hire her back. She actually was someone we would have loved to have gotten. If you talked to the Human Resources people — if they couldn't come back for three months, MIT does have rules about how long you've worked for them. If she had only worked for MIT for a year and a half and she had to leave for three months, she wouldn't have any rights. If someone had worked here for forty years and they had to be out for three months — well, in fact a lot of these things are done well, until we got more bureaucrats.
For example, there was a woman who came here from Oklahoma in the 1940s, and she became Morris Cohen's assistant. Morris Cohen was a very powerful professor running the physical metallurgy group in the '40s and '50s. He worked on the Manhattan Project, and virtually everybody who worked on the Manhattan Project for the next twenty to thirty years had automatic research from the Atomic Energy Commission and then the Department of Energy. You would just get renewed every two or three years, big grant, until you screwed it up. Most of them got screwed up. The last one was in the '70s. Dave Kingery and Bob Coble still got a big grant from the Department of Energy to do ceramics, but Cohen had lost his physical metallurgy one, John Chipman had lost his chemical metallurgy one. These were the gravy trains that helped keep the funding going and helped keep that powerful professor in power, as they controlled the money.
Marg worked for Morris Cohen. She typed — to earn a little extra money she typed most of the doctoral theses for students, because it had to be typed perfectly on carbon paper. We didn't have Xerox machines back in those days. She would type three or four carbons, and you couldn't erase on carbons very easily — anyway, it was sort of a mess. Marg was an excellent fast typist, she made a little extra money on the side. Marg was a wonderful person; she would win awards around here for how helpful she was to the students. You'd go out there and talk to people when I was department head in the '90s, and people would say, how's Marg? Because she was one of the people who really made this place a little more livable for the graduate students.
Marg's mother got sick when she was about 98, and Marg decided she had to go back to Oklahoma. There was no one else to take care of her mother. The administrative officer of the department decided to keep paying Marg a salary for a year, full salary. No one else at MIT knew that Marg was in Oklahoma. This was before I was department head, but I knew this was going on, because at one time I wrote Marg — she couldn't ever even go out, and they didn't have home delivery services like we do today, because she had to be with her mother constantly. There was no one else she could ask to come and watch her mother, so it was very difficult. I actually sent her a couple thousand dollars of my personal money, saying, Marg, here, you can hire somebody to come and be with your mother so you can go to the store. Which she really appreciated — she had no one else to turn to. The department took care of Marg. Gave her a full salary for about three years until her mother died. She came back. The department back then actually had some people who had a heart. Marg finally retired after fifty-five years of service to MIT. In fact she was sort of forced out by the person who became department head after me, because he didn't care about anybody. But anyway, that's another story. You'll find in any organization there are people who have hearts and there are people who don't.
§5. Tom's own hiring and the Mehrabian story [27:43]
I got two pieces of advice when I was being hired as a faculty member. First, Professor Flemings, who was the powerful guy who was in charge of hiring me — don't worry about tenure, you will further your career faster at MIT than at any other place. I was asking him this because there was a guy named Bob Mehrabian. He's from Iran, he was an All-American soccer player as an undergraduate at MIT, he did his graduate thesis in Professor Flemings' lab, and he became a postdoc running Professor Flemings' lab — because if you're big and powerful and have a lot of money you could hire people to run your lab, and you could go do whatever you do if you have a lot of money, and go raise more money. I knew Bob. I'd been working in Flemings' lab as an undergraduate starting my sophomore year, and Mehrabian was the guy who ran the lab. I got a good reputation because I could clean the pens in the chart recorders. The graduate students couldn't figure out how to do this — it's really complex, you put a wire to get the dried ink out, ooh. But I knew how to do it, and so I got a reputation as the guy who could do anything in the lab.
So Mehrabian liked me, but I didn't like being part of that kind of culture, so I switched to another guy. I actually needed to borrow one of these strip chart recorders, and I saw Bob Mehrabian coming up — his office was right across from our lab on the fourth floor of Building 8 — coming up from the third floor, which is where department headquarters used to be. I wanted to ask him if I could borrow a strip chart recorder from Flemings' group. Bob was now an associate professor without tenure. He had progressed up, and Flemings had gotten him a professorship and he had been promoted. He was really upset. How could I tell he's upset? He ran in the door, I walked in behind him, and he was picking up books and throwing them against the wall. I said, what's the matter Bob, you look upset. He says, you're damn right I'm upset. I said, what about? He says, do you know what Walter Owen just told me? Walter Owen was the department head — this would have been '72 or '74, probably '74, the year I would have graduated. I said, what did Walter Owen just tell you? He says, he told us if I stay in solidification I won't get tenure, but if I switch to something like welding I will get tenure.
Bob was a bright guy, he had done good work, but Flemings was only about forty-five or fifty and he was in solidification, and we didn't need two people in solidification. The department head had pulled him aside, never pulled him into his office, just pulled him aside, called him down and said, look Bob, if you stay in solidification you're not going to get tenure. If you go into some field like welding you'll get tenure. Bob's telling me this, and I said, so Bob, what are you going to do, you going to stay in solidification? Goddamn right I'm going to stay in solidification, I'm not going into welding. I said, then when you don't get tenure can I borrow your strip chart recorder? And that's exactly how the conversation went. Two years later I'd gone off to Bethlehem Steel, Bob Mehrabian didn't get tenure, and I was hired into the position that he relinquished.
Some of you might know I went into welding. Why was it rocket science for me to figure out the department wanted somebody in welding? That's why I became a welder. Plus at Bethlehem Steel I'd been a welding engineer. Everybody thought I was going to be the gofer for Merc Flemings. Unfortunately if you haven't learned already, I'm nobody's gofer. I looked at what Flemings told me when I was being hired — he told me, don't worry about tenure. I was asking him about Bob Mehrabian, who just didn't get tenure and had just been screwed. And he says, don't worry about tenure, you can further your career faster at MIT than at any other place. That's an absolutely true statement. Then the first meeting — one of only two meetings I ever had with Walter Owen as my department head for the first six years I was on the faculty, I met with the department head twice — the first one was when I first showed up, and he said, whatever anyone tells you, it is publish or perish. And that's true in most cases.
§6. Time-to-PhD and grading a nine-year student [33:03]
Student: [Question about what makes a strong faculty record / advice for prospective faculty.]
As department head I would look at about 400 resumes a year coming into the department, and I would have to make the first cut decision. Then it would go to a committee, and there was a subcommittee of the committee that looked at affirmative action and other things. The first thing I looked at on the resume — because these resumes were five or six pages long, I don't want to read all that stuff — the first thing I looked at was, how many years did it take them to get their PhD? If it was five or more, probably didn't want them. You should be able to do your PhD — once you pass all your general exams and everything, you should be able to do it in a year, in my opinion, certainly two years at the outset. Last Friday I was on a TQE exam, and this student will pass — maybe I shouldn't say this, it might have to be embargoed with us until next Friday. This student should pass the exams; they had a three-year program to do research. I said, this is too much. And the faculty says, oh no, it's five years on average in the department.
Of thirty doctoral students I never had anyone take more than four years. I remember John Elmer's got the thickest thesis of any student I've ever had. John was being paid by Lawrence Livermore, and I said, John, it's time to write up your thesis. He says, no, there's several other things I want to do. I said, fine, John, write up your thesis, graduate, and you can tell Lawrence Livermore you'll stay as a postdoc. Well, Tom, I promised him I'd do — I don't care, John, you should get out of here in four years, you can stay for another year as a postdoc, but I don't want you hanging around doing a thicker thesis. He already had the thickest thesis. So I was pretty firm about that.
In 1989 I was acting department head when Flemings went on sabbatical. There was a student, and the Graduate Committee came to me as acting department head and said, this guy's been around for nine years, what are we going to do, do we give him a satisfactory grade or not? I said, of course you don't give him a satisfactory grade. Since he's been working on it for nine years, he's making a record he could never erase. So I actually changed their grade to an unsatisfactory grade, and when Flemings came back a couple months later, the graduate students had a big meeting where they claimed I should be censured for changing the advisor's grade on the thesis. I think he wasn't making satisfactory progress. I was sort of Flemings' protege, and a mentor — he was my mentor — and I didn't get censured, but boy, some graduate students were really upset with me. I was trying to tell them, you can't just sit around and play tennis for nine years. You're supposed to be a professional. If you can't finish your thesis in a couple of years, you really probably shouldn't be getting a thesis. I never said that to any of them, but that's the way I felt. You're a professional, you should be able to manage yourself.
§7. Department heads: Chipman, King, Owen, Flemings [36:32]
So it is publish or perish. If we're going to get to Epstein I've got to get to Epstein. I wrote down a history of the department this morning — I could probably have gone back earlier if I went to some of the books, but this is what I could do from memory.
John Chipman, who was head of chemical metallurgy and world-renowned — John Chipman is revered. He taught people how to make steel. They were producing steel and throwing half of it away because it didn't have the right chemistry. He was a physical chemist from Georgia Tech, and he applied the principles of physical chemistry to high-temperature reactions of steelmaking, and essentially made it efficient to melt steel in the world. He was known all around the world. He was department head for fourteen years. He was a wonderful Southern gentleman; he could be hard-nosed when he wanted to. Tom King was one of his former students. He was a Scotsman with a great brogue.
Tom King became department head in part because Chipman was the kingmaker, but also because Morris Cohen, who was the physical metallurgy head, was Jewish. Back then MIT had an unsaid thinking — they didn't like Jewish people being in the administration. It's true, folks. I'm just telling you the truth. Morris Cohen was given a consolation prize: he's the only faculty member ever to be an Institute Professor from this department. He was made Institute Professor. He was a very accomplished scientist — at least his graduate students did great work. There's stories. I had the same office he had, 8-413, which was right next to the men's room. I actually had 8-411, but I used to hear stories from the graduate students. He had like twenty graduate students and postdocs, and you could never get to see him, he was always busy, and the graduate students would wait in the men's room until he came into the men's room, to get to see him. In '84, when I got an NSF fellowship, Cohen offered to let me — he said, oh, you'd like, come work for me. I said, well, I'd be happy to TA for you. So I TA'd for him.
Tom King was brought in also to sort of clean house, because the department had this fiefdom and there's all kinds of abuses of power. Tom King, who was a very gentle but firm Scotsman who didn't take a lot of grief from anybody, became department head. He finally had a couple of heart attacks and decided it was time to retire. Walter Owen was brought in. He had been one of Morris Cohen's postdocs, and he had gone to Northwestern, where he had become vice president for research. He was brought in by the upper administration to again clean house around here. He was department head for eleven years. None of these people had an associate head until me.
Merton Flemings became department head — Walter Owen didn't want Merc Flemings to become department head, because Merc Flemings was one of the most misogynist, somewhat abusive people. He also — I used to say, if Mert saw you in a hard spot, he always added a heel, something to help you. If he didn't see you, he wouldn't do anything though. He did a lot of things to help me. I wouldn't have been hired if he hadn't pushed for it.
I became Flemings' sort of protege. We could talk some time about how that happened, because he had a reputation for throwing people out of his office, just yelling and screaming at them. He did that to me when I came back from sabbatical in '85. I was chairing the admissions committee. I didn't want to fight with this man, so I decided I would just avoid him. I would not say a thing to him unless spoken to, and I would try to avoid him so we didn't even see each other. After about six weeks I decided, well, I need to tell him about what's going on in the admissions committee. So I wrote him a two-page memo. He thought it was wonderful. About a month later I wrote a one-page memo giving him an update, and he calls me up to his office. I'd sworn I was not going to talk to him for a year. He calls me up to his office, he says, well, Tom, what's going on in the department? One of the things you learn as department head is no one will tell you the truth. Everyone's afraid you're going to dock their salary or something. And I would tell them the truth — hard to believe, right, that I would just tell them the truth. So I told him the truth, and at that point he actually came to trust me. He didn't trust anybody else in the department, but he trusted me.
When I was 39 in 1989, he was going on sabbatical, he took me to lunch over at the Faculty Club we used to have. He said, Tom, have you ever thought about becoming department head? He had been in for like seven years and he really wanted to pass the reins on to someone else, he was tired of it. I said, well, Mert, if I took the job of department head at 40, what would I do when I'm 50? So I sort of turned him down. He went off on sabbatical, and when he came back, he basically pulled his Machiavelli, got rid of another guy as head of the Materials Processing Center, put me in. Then in '95 — he screwed up a number of things. The department paid an $850,000 settlement to a woman who didn't get tenure, and he just screwed it up royally. That's why we had to pay the money. It wasn't that she was eligible for tenure, but he messed it up. He actually stepped down about six months earlier than I thought he was going to. He just said, I quit. The reason was because he was going to have to take Peggy Cebe up for tenure — we had no tenured women in the department at the time. She was not going to get it, everybody knew that. Now she's gone off to Tufts University and she's won teaching awards up there, but she wasn't going to get tenure. So he stepped down on January 15th, and a week later I had to present her case at engineering council. So I got to take the heat, and he got retired.
§8. Department head succession and the modern process [43:26]
When I was put in as department head, the Dean said — because I was sort of known as someone who would speak his mind — well, I'm going to give you an associate head. We never had associate heads before. He gave me Ned Thomas, who was the number two person on the committee. Everybody hated him, but nonetheless he gave me Ned Thomas. I said, fine, I can work with Ned. I could, except Ned would do nothing. The only thing Ned would do is if he could go to a meeting and announce that he was the associate head. So I learned to deal with that. There was one chance to go to Malaysia for a week, and they were going to pay us $20,000, which in the '90s was a fair amount of money. I said, hey Ned, want to go to Malaysia for a week? He said, oh wow, yeah. So he went to Malaysia, I stayed here and slept in my own bed.
After a year and a half I got rid of Thomas, put in Dave Roylance. Subra Suresh replaced me first, and I went with Sam Allen — Subra made him the associate head, and Sam ran the department while Subra was going around politicking to become King Subra of the world, which was his main goal. Subra did go on — he became Dean of Engineering here, he became director of the National Science Foundation, he became president of Carnegie Mellon University, he's now president of some university in Singapore, that's the last I've heard of him. Both Subra and Ned wanted to be department head when I was selected. Then Chris Schuh, who was a very good department head, had Caroline Ross to help him, and now we've got Jeff Grossman. The whole thing has changed from the days of 1965, when one professor wrote a letter to the department head saying we think you should tenure so-and-so, to now we go through hours and committees and committees reviewing someone's qualifications. It's actually pretty fair.
§9. The 1977 letter: "will probably not make our tenure threshold" [45:35]
I don't know if I should show you this — well, sure. I found out a year ago when Bill Wood at the Oregon Graduate Center retired, he had saved this letter from 1977 that he had gotten — actually the president of Oregon Graduate Center had gotten it from the associate dean of engineering. You have to understand, I was hired in July of 1976. This is May of '77, ten months later. [Tom reads from the letter:] "On a different matter, I promised for some time I'd provide some help to you in the welding area. I'm enclosing the resume of Tom Eager" — misspelled — "Tom got his doctorate here, '75, and went to work at Homer Research Lab, Bethlehem Steel. His work there was on welding joining. He returned to the Institute last fall, and although very good, will probably not make our tenure threshold." I had six months to prove myself before they threw me out. Why did they throw me out? Because I didn't agree to be the grunt or the serf for any of these powerful professors. I basically said I was going to do it on my own, and so they decided I wasn't smart enough to work within the system.
Three years later I had more research money than any other faculty member in the department. Which could be a good place to get to Epstein. The story is here: money talks. There are two ways to control people, and this applies anywhere you go. At any company, any university, money talks. The two ways you can control people at almost any place is money or power. Why does a federal judge want to be a federal judge, or a member of the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court job is the best job in the world. I always said they die there. You can't get rid of them unless you impeach them, and we now know how easy that is, right? They pretty much can decide what they do, and they can have clerks doing all the real work and stuff. They're in there for power; they're not in there for the money. Most of them could make plenty of money, a lot more money on the outside. They're there because in a federal judge's courtroom they are king or queen. What they say goes. That's true at a lot of companies — it's money or power.
§10. Epstein, culture, and a polluted tenure case [48:21]
I don't necessarily believe that Rafael Reif, who I served on engineering council with and is a fairly reputable person from everything I ever saw — I don't think Rafael Reif necessarily was involved in the Epstein stuff frankly. You can't get involved in all that stuff, you have lots of other people working for you. But the stories you hear about other people making deals about, oh, this is going to be anonymous and stuff — well, that's the way they do things around here all the time.
Student: [Question about how one controls the culture of a large institution / military-style accountability.]
How are you going to control the culture of 40,000 people? The way they do it is, if anything happens, whether you're guilty or not — like, a submarine ran into an uncharted seamount, that captain was gone from the Navy. How is he supposed to know where an uncharted seamount is? But yes, you're right, one way to do it is exactly how the military does it. Anything goes wrong on your watch, you're responsible. Corporations do it some of the time. I think the military is pretty good about following the rules, because it has to do with discipline. But you can't, when you get to be the leader of thousands of people, be looking over the shoulder. You can set a tone for the culture. Everybody thinks Chuck Vest was one of the best presidents we ever had at MIT, and he was pretty good. But so far as the culture, Chuck Vest was interested in one thing: being a figurehead down in Washington DC. He left the day-to-day management of MIT to other people here. Those people ran all over with that.
I can tell you one of the reasons I committed political suicide when I was department head: because Flemings had polluted a promotion case. These promotions, they're very strict rules. Once a department head sends out the letter, you can have no other contact with anyone involved in that process. If you do, it's called polluting the case. You don't want to influence what anyone else on the outside writes in the promotion letter. Flemings wanted me to hire one of his former students, and we had someone in the exact same field who was coming up for tenure. I got the letter back from this case — it was from Japan, and I read it, and I walked over immediately to my administrative officer, and I said, Joe, Professor So-and-So didn't write this, this was written by the man upstairs — meaning Flemings on the fourth floor. He read it and he sort of agreed with me, because everything we'd been getting back from the Japanese was they were very impressed with the work and the demonstrated accomplishments of Dave Paul, who was the professor we already had.
It turns out we got a couple of other letters from Japan, because he worked in steelmaking, and that was the world's top thing, and they weren't so good. I went to the Dean of Engineering, who was Bob Brown at the time, and I said, I've got a problem, this case has been polluted, we need to do something. He says, well, why don't you wait and tell Professor Fuwa, who was the grand old man of Japanese steelmaking at Tohoku University, when he's coming for a visit in May. Well, how did Brown know that? Bob Brown considered Merc Flemings his mentor. Flemings knew when Fuwa was coming. Bob Brown refused to do anything during the tenure process. Dave Paul didn't get tenure. He's now a professor at Boston University. When Fuwa came to see me in May, he says, well, Professor Flemings told us you didn't want Professor Paul to get tenure. I said, no, that's not right.
Professor Flemings stuck the knife in Dave Paul's back, but that wasn't the first time he'd stuck the knife in people's backs. At that point I tried to get other people at MIT to pay attention. In the department visiting committee a year later I actually brought this up. Bob Brown was the provost now, Chuck Vest was right there, we had the MIT Corporation members in this private meeting with the department head. I said, well, we've got a problem, one of the faculty members polluted one of the tenure cases. Chuck Vest says, Tom, that's a very serious charge. I turned to Bob Brown and said, yes, Chuck, that's true, and I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. And I just stared at Bob Brown. What was done? Nothing. So people scratch each other's back. But I didn't care, I don't want to be part of that power struggle.
So I stepped back. I went back to being a regular old professor. I don't need their money, I don't need their power. That irritates them no end. They've been trying to get rid of me for — well, actually Chris Schuh wasn't trying to get rid of me, but certainly Ned Thomas and Subra Suresh considered me a threat. I had become department head when they wanted the job, and so for thirteen years the department did everything it could to screw me. But if I don't need your money, I don't need your power, and I do my teaching and I advise students — what can they do to me, right? That's one of the reasons, as Rosovsky will tell you, we have tenure: to protect people when they get in situations like that. You don't get that protection in industry — you're right, you're out.
It's not because things are fair. One of my sayings is, no one ever said the world is fair. When people heard what happened to me, they said, Tom, that's not fair. I said, well, no one ever said the world's fair. What do I have to complain about? I knew what I was doing when I committed political suicide. And I don't mind putting it on YouTube. By the way, it's not slander if you can prove it. You can say, well, you shouldn't say whatever you want about anybody, but if you can prove it, it's not slander. Thanks.