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From The Faculty Chair
By the time you will read this, I will have started my two-year term as the Chair of the MIT Faculty. I fully expect it to be an exciting time for me personally, and I hope I can serve the entire faculty with at least some of the wisdom and ability of my predecessor, Lotte Bailyn. As I said at a dinner meeting in May for the faculty involved in the governance system, Lotte will be a very hard act to follow. She is truly an extraordinary person, and MIT owes her our collective thanks for her leadership. I am grateful for the opportunity to have learned the ropes about the role of the chair from her.
The editors of the Faculty Newsletter asked me to write this first column as a brief autobiography. The idea is to give those of you I haven't met some sense of who I am. They also asked me to write something that at least some readers would enjoy reading rather than a boring, prose version of my CV. So, here goes.
In a very real sense, I am a product of MIT. I came here from a suburb of New York City as an undergraduate in 1969, and somehow never left. I always wanted to be a teacher and researcher, so becoming a professor seemed like a natural result of at least my more realistic childhood yearnings. (Actually, until age eight I wanted to be a helicopter pilot, but that is a different story altogether.) I originally thought I would become a physicist, but I became interested in public infrastructure issues through a freshman seminar offered by two professors in the Civil Engineering Department (now the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department). I stayed on through 1975 to get my doctorate in Transportation Systems, and joined the faculty immediately thereafter. In short, if MIT were operated by the federal penal system, I'd be considered a "lifer."
My early academic career was largely uneventful, so I'll skip most of it. Actually, I didn't get much sleep during those years as an untenured professor, so I don't remember many of the details.
The more interesting part of my academic career started in 1983. By that time I was a full professor, and I was becoming increasingly interested in how computers and communications technologies might be used as part of the educational process. I had been involved in some of the informal deliberations leading to the formation of Project Athena at MIT, and (through a process I still don't understand) the then dean of engineering, Gerald Wilson, asked me to direct it. I felt ready for a change in my work, and I was excited by the prospect of running a major educational research initiative.
Athena offered me the opportunity to get outside the traditional "stovepipe" boundaries of the academic departments for the first time. It was also the most challenging program I have ever been involved in. For the next five years, virtually my entire professional life was focused on the project. The truth is that I had never run anything even remotely at that scale, so Athena was perhaps one of the better examples of learning on the job.
I directed Project Athena for five years, and then took a sabbatical at Digital Equipment Corporation working with both their external research organization and their just-opened Cambridge Research Lab. When Athena came to its end as an externally-funded research program in 1991, the then provost, Mark Wrighton, asked me to create a new interdepartmental lab devoted to research in the use of computers and communications in education. With his advice and support, we created the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, which I continue to direct. The Center became part of the newly formed Center for Advanced Educational Services about three years ago.
Two years ago, the chair of the Nominations Committee, Arnaldo Hax, called me and asked if I would be interested in becoming the associate chair of the faculty. Lotte Bailyn was about to become chair, and she was interested in an associate chair who was involved in MIT-wide activities and knew parts of MIT she was less familiar with, particularly the School of Engineering. I hadn't spent much time on faculty governance issues recently, so I viewed the offer as yet another opportunity to do something different.
A year ago Arnaldo called me again and asked me if I would serve as chair of the faculty. The offer forced me to reflect on whether I had truly enjoyed being involved in issues of governance. That reflection made me understand that, at least at this point in my academic career, I found the broad range of problems facing MIT fascinating, and the offer to become chair of the faculty was a rare and wonderful opportunity. My youngest child will be leaving for college next year, so I was about to make major life changes anyway. Accepting the offer to become chair was, at least for me, the right choice at the right time. I suspect there will be a few moments in the next two years when I ask myself, "What was I thinking?"
The next two years will be important to MIT, and there are serious issues that we as a faculty need to debate and decide upon. I'll address these in later Faculty Newsletter articles, and just give some highlights here.
Finally, we need to continue the commitment to excellence in both research and teaching that we inherit from the faculty members and students who made MIT the premiere institution it is. This is the reason we came here in the first place, and it's the reason for staying here when there are other opportunities that require less work and are more lucrative. We must never lose sight of this.
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