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The following Faculty Newsletter (FNL) interview with John Curry (CURRY) took place on September 23, 1999.
FNL: There's a perception at MIT that there has been a diminution in the quality of life. Years ago, the faculty had $800 towards travel to a scientific meeting once a year. That's disappeared. We once had free parking on campus. There was a slight fee and it increased at one point, but now the subsidy has essentially disappeared. It was once easy to find a parking space. Now if you go away in the middle of the day and come back, forget about it. There's some perception that building services have not been quite as good as they used to be. Some of this comes under facilities and services, all of whose people report to you. So we wonder two things. One, what's your general read on this perception? Of course, you don't have the history here, so it's hard for you to make a comparison. And two, to what extent does the quality of life of the faculty enter into your decision-making process?
CURRY: It's got to be critical to that process in many ways. I have to think broadly as well about the quality of life for our staff and students on the campus, and how what we do affects that. I have learned as much history as I could absorb in my 10 months here and can't speak very well for how the past was. I think we have some work ahead of us to improve the overall look and cleanliness of the campus. And parking is a tough issue. Our operating context is the City of Cambridge, and I am just coming to understand through permitting processes, among other activities, just how much focus there is on traffic and parking. And I must say that sometimes we were looked at by others as having low parking rates, and thereby encouraging traffic in the city, when many people in the city would like to discourage people driving their cars and instead coming to work on the T or another way. So I think we have a real balancing act in front of us in how we retain sufficient parking here for our faculty and our staff that and how we balance the pressing issues of the city. Coming from L.A. I'm accustomed to high institutional parking rates. I paid extraordinary parking rates, as did everyone. We need to thoroughly think through relationships among number of parking spaces, how we charge for parking, and how we facilitate other kinds of travel, perhaps through increased subsidies for T travel. At this point, I'm much more aware of the problems than I am of the solutions.
FNL: What precipitated a 20% increase in this year's parking fee?
CURRY: Fairly simple. When Bill Dickson [former Senior Vice President] introduced the parking fee, (this is where I do understand some history), he said that it should be held constant for a specific period, which was three or four years; after which one should expect an increase of 5% a year cumulatively. And that time came. Let me mention one other thing. We have very little capability through our charging mechanisms for parking to reinvest in and refurbish a parking garage. We have some great problems, for example, with the East garage and the Albany garage. And so one would like to see some resources available through the parking revenues themselves, not necessarily through the general fund, that would enable us to keep those facilities in better shape, and we just don't have the resources to do that. So in fact our parking infrastructure, primarily the garages, is in a pretty sad state. There has been a very thoughtful parking committee on the campus that has taken a hard look at these issues. Frankly, I anticipate a much larger agenda in the coming year to try to pull many things together.
FNL: One of the prominent issues is the failure to recognize that the salary disparity at the Institute is extraordinary. We charge heads of laboratories the same parking fee as incoming secretaries.
CURRY: This issue should be considered. One thing that I have learned is that huge numbers of people who work near the Kendall Square station use the T to get to work. And I do know, but I can't quote the amount, that we have an incentive program for people who need to use the T, and this came about some time ago. It's certainly not for everybody. It probably depends on things like the number of changes between train lines that you have to make, and other factors. But we are under considerbale pressure from the City to encourage the use of public transportation to reduce the flow of traffic into and out of Cambridge. This is also a function of the fact that development in the area is substantially greater than it used to be, especially as you look to the north of campus. That, too, brought with it traffic and parking issues that we have to deal with.
FNL: You mentioned the infrastructure of the garages, and that brings up sort of a general, physical plant question. In your time here, what has been your assessment of the infrastructure, particularly with respect to buildings and grounds, and what are your plans? How are you attacking the problem of finding out what buildings need to be repaired, replaced? Is the East garage safe? Are the buildings safe? You can walk along the Chemistry building and see exposed steel girders.
CURRY: I've seen them. Let's say this: We have a significant problem and I think we have a pretty good handle on it. We had, before my arrival, a very thorough study of all of our buildings and ratings of where they stand between optimum functionality and their present position. And it's a serious problem, there's no question about it. You can see it in the exterior of the Chemistry building, for example. You can see it in many buildings' interiors. You can see it looking at the windows of the main group. So, yes, you can see it. I will say what has been done to date. We have the study. In the initiatives that Chuck Vest has announced, which include the tuition benefit for Ph.D. students on grants in summer and the presidential fellowships, we have $20 million a year to contribute to the deferred maintenance problem, which is a serious amount of money compared to what it was, which was very, very little.
FNL: What was the previous number, do you know?
CURRY: The previous number was $4 to $5 million.
FNL: So it's going up by a factor of four or five.
CURRY: Yes. And in fact we have supplemented that in the present year with additional financing to kick start some critical projects. One of the large projects, as you know, is the Chemistry building. Also, we have ranked our deferred maintenance issues with respect to things like safety, where we know, for example, that given facilities need renovations in their fire safety programs or have other safety-related issues. We are starting there first.
FNL: What about the mechanical safety of buildings? Has that been considered?
CURRY: It has been evaluated, yes. And from what I've seen and what I've read, we are comfortable today, but we do know where we need to put our first-order efforts. So the good news is we have comprehensively reviewed all of the buildings on the campus and have good documentation of what needs to be done. We have prioritized the work and kick started the deferred maintenance program. Now there's more work that needs to be done, and sometimes it's hard to get a feeling that you're getting ahead of this, because some areas will not be treated immediately and will continue to show their signs of age. The biggest single problem we saw in this study is how many of our buildings were constructed in a relatively short period of time and turned 30 years old at roughly the same time, which is basically the life cycle time for HVAC systems and all of the infrastructure supporting the buildings. One of the examples is the Chemistry building.
FNL: Sort of changing the subject a little bit, what about vehicular traffic on campus? It has long been a problem, from the day in which Paul Gray was nearly struck by a vehicle on his way from the President's house to his office. Today, where there's a constant battle to limit and control the number of vehicles on campus. With the forthcoming renovations, it seems like that's only going to get worse. Has there been a study of that?
CURRY: Yes. And we have not solved it, but we have a very active study under way of how traffic will flow when we have the Stata site, for example, under construction, and when we have another site to the west on Vassar Street, the undergraduate residence under construction. We should also note that we are not in total control of our destiny here. The city and the state will be tearing up a major portion of Massachusetts Avenue, probably during our construction period, to replace the storm drains. It's a much-needed replacement, as you can tell by some of the flooding on this campus because the storm drains simply can't carry the water. When we include the fact that Massachusetts Avenue will be under major repair, I think we will have a serious traffic problem to try to manage and solve. Some of our issues with parking and with each new building that comes online are in the traffic studies that we have to review with the city. Those traffic studies are as much for our benefit as they are for the city's benefit in thinking through flows on the campus and in particular, in thinking through how we cope through the construction periods. I don't have an answer for you yet. I can't tell you what the traffic patterns will be, but we are painfully aware of the potential problems.
FNL: The delivery of certain supplies like compressed liquefied gases has brought onto our campus 18 wheelers, onto the plaza.
CURRY: A lot of them are right out here, too. [LAUGHTER] You can hear them daily. BOC is a set of initials I've learned to know well.
FNL: In other institutions and corporations they find ways to bring supplies in and store them in a central location - and this also includes waste, which is an increasing problem - and then pipe them in and out, which would of course require a huge infrastructure cost, but in terms of effectiveness it's really spectacular. You don't see people delivering individual tanks of gases to any individual laboratories or liquefied gases or taking wastes out of individual laboratories. It all goes through piped areas to central storehouses.
CURRY: Let me say first order, that that seems like a dream we may not realize in the foreseeable future, because it's an extraordinarily costly one. Creating a whole new infrastructure of its own, actually. But with the advent of new buildings on campus and traffic issues, we are looking at materials handling in a serious way. First of all, it would surely be desirable to get the large trucks off the malls. And we have to think about it systematically. It appears we may have thought about materials handling one location at a time. But the amount of construction that we would anticipate on the campus in the next several years and the frequency with which key areas are being developed, provide an opportunity to focus on the broad issues of materials handling, everything from gases to paper deliveries to chemical supplies.
FNL: What is the construction schedule for this? What are the definite projects, definite go and then the order in which they're going to come down? Which ones are considered on hold? Which ones are being eliminated?
CURRY: I gave a brief talk at the faculty meeting last week on that subject. The things that are "go" right now, without perfectly precise start dates, are the undergraduate residence on Vassar Street, which is about halfway between Massachusetts Avenue and where Vassar Street ends on Memorial Drive at the river; and the Stata Complex at the corner of Vassar and Main.
FNL: And the residence will be to the south of the railroad tracks?
CURRY: Yes. To the south of the tracks, but north of and facing Vassar Street. And that is a definite go.
FNL: How big is that building?
CURRY: It will house about 350 students and will have five faculty apartments in it, as well as two suites for faculty master and faculty associate master. And then it will have some rather wonderful common spaces for students and faculty to gather, and in fact for others around the campus to enjoy. And it's scheduled to start late this fall and to open in September 2001. That's a very fast track. And there's a lot of pressure around it.
FNL: We know why.
CURRY: Well, I guess we do. It's very fast track, yet we do not control all of the components. I mean, on issues of permitting and traffic and those kinds of things, we do them one at a time. Stata is the other project moving rapidly forward; it is in, as they say, design development. We've seen the schematic design, which is on the picture over at the corner of Main and Vassar.
FNL: The question is, will the picture have faded before the first hole gets dug? [LAUGHTER]
CURRY: Well, it may. We've started the hole by taking the top off the hole; we have one of the big gravel fields out there now, and you'll probably see the hole some time around the dawn of the new millennium. This is a somewhat longer construction project, looking more like 2002, 2003 as an opening date. It's a very large building, very complex.
FNL: Will there be any disruption for faculty parking in the East garage during that construction?
CURRY: No. It won't be quite as easy to get in, but the garage will live through the construction. I'm thinking that this is a personally relevant question? [LAUGHTER]
FNL: For probably 400 faculty. . .
CURRY: That's right. Now, those buildings are the two that are right up front and center on our radar screen. There are attendant projects that go with that. We do not have the capacity for steam and chilled water to serve the increased square footage that these two buildings would bring, and therefore we have some major work to do on the energy corridor on Vassar Street, where the co-gen plant is, the chilled water facility is. That's probably going to cause some construction bother along that portion of the street. And that's fairly major.
FNL: Can you take the co-gen plant off-line on December 31st this year?
CURRY: Meaning off the grid?
FNL: Right.
CURRY: We're thinking about it.
FNL: We think that would be very wise.
CURRY: We are thinking about it. I can tell you a couple things --
FNL: I don't know how many of us are going to drive in here with our families in the hope of finding heat and warmth. [LAUGHTER] We're wondering how many people might walk in.
CURRY: We do have a pretty extensive Y2K program underway. We know that our energy facilities are compliant. We've run them with forwarded clocks; we've reviewed the embedded chips; we're confident that they'll be working properly. We are told with confidence that our suppliers of energy are compliant, but it's important to know, among other things, that our co-gen plant will run on both oil and gas, and we want to be doubly secure so we will have a maximum supply of stored fuel oil for that time period.
FNL: How long will it run on the maximum supply?
CURRY: Maximum supply, seven days. You should know that we are already lining up suppliers and orders for stand-by trucks to get ourselves in the queue if there is an issue with respect to electricity delivery or gas delivery to the campus. That's one of the things. So we expect that one to run. There are always worries if you're running on a grid that you could import somebody else's Y2K problem, and that's been looked at pretty carefully. I think we're now fairly confident, though, that the local energy systems will be up; but we will be there for the whole weekend. We'll start early and we'll stay through around the 4th with all kinds of technologically talented people. I did say something the other day in a meeting, though, that is amazing to me. In the time in our lives when we will be among the few people on earth ever to witness the turn of a century and the turn of a millennium, an awful lot of us are going to be working on New Year's Eve. [LAUGHTER] Rather than drinking the champagne of a lifetime.
FNL: It appears the Institute has been very extensive in its Y2K preparation.
CURRY: We have been all over our enterprise systems. We have provided a service from an outside company to look at the embedded chips in the equipment across the campus, and where they can, to do serial number match-ups with data they have that tells them when the equipment was made, whether it's compliant, etc.
FNL: If not MIT, then who else? Because if something horrible happens here, the embarrassment factor would be enormous.
CURRY: It would be enormous, and the only thing about it is that surely others will have bigger embarrassments, except they won't have an IT at the end of their initials. We've also looked at 800 vendors who provide us with key supplies and have done our best to get positive affirmation from them that they are Y2K compliant. It's been an extensive effort.
FNL: Back to the construction: are there some old projects that you'd like to tell us about?
CURRY: We had considered starting, as early as last summer, a central athletics facility.
FNL: Wasn't there a multi-million dollar donation for the swimming pool? I don't remember the exact numbers.
CURRY: There is a key donation that seeded fundraising for that building but we put it on hold last year, although we committed to going forward with design development because we wanted to take some time to raise more money for it. Pending the fundraising success on that building, it's scheduled to start next summer. Now, what else can we talk about?
FNL: What about the concept of a teaching center?
CURRY: It would be good to talk to [Provost] Bob Brown about that. Let me tell you my understanding, but I'm less than confident in what I'm saying. As part of the Stata site, where the garage is now, there is a site for a teaching and learning center, as I've seen it named. And there's even a sketch of a design for it that's a Lego block shape that occasionally you will see when you look at a three-dimensional mockup of the Stata Center. East garage is scheduled to come down after the Stata complex is finished.
FNL: Is the garage going to be reconstructed underground?
CURRY: There are two thoughts right now about the garage. There's an Albany site that has a garage designed for it that could constitute the replacement parking. And there's active consideration of the potential of parking under the Stata complex itself. And we haven't reached a conclusion on the two. And there are important pros and cons of each. Although the proximity of the underground parking and the aesthetic character of it, which is to say it is out of sight, have some positive components to them. The flip side, of course, is that underground parking is quite expensive to design and build. [Editor's note: Underground parking has now been approved for Stata.]
FNL: Let's make a big switch to MIT Medical. What do you foresee in the future there? There are some quality of life issues, such as long delays in getting appointments. A tremendously large increase in the number of people who belong to MIT Medical has put pressure on the physicians who work there. We know that the Lexington site has recently opened. Some physicians have left and not been replaced. What's your sort of overview of the medical service here? It's been one of those wonderful things that has been available to the faculty and community. Some people are beginning to wonder, is that going to be able to continue under the current pressure on modern health plans?
CURRY: I think the question is an important one, but I'm far from an answer. Among the many things I looked into in my early days here, that is not the first. I have had more than one occasion to have direct appreciation of the benefit to people. Just in special ways, including a very minor moment for myself, which was just something very quick, a minor infection that got out of hand; but it got fixed, boom. And I just walked over there.
FNL: It's a tremendous resource. They do report to you, ultimately, is that true?
CURRY: Yes, they do. Certainly, we're coming to understand it as a service business model, which is important because we need to understand and think about the benefits versus the costs. Five years ago, I might have thought I knew more about the right health care model than I know now, because it seems like we are trying to work our way towards possibly yet another paradigm. Managed care is under serious attack. I have a very open mind about it and my first-order sense is to value enormously what the Medical Department provides locally. If there are service issues, and I've heard only a couple, then I think they should be addressed. And I think there's a reason for the fact that it's popular, meaning it's local; it has good connections with Massachusetts General and with other health care facilities in Boston, the superstar city in the health care world. And while in the past one might have said that this is a kind of local, expensive institution whose time has passed, I wouldn't be surprised if we prove that we're just on the cusp of the moment in which its time has come again. I think it's extremely high quality care.
FNL: Has the new director been appointed?
CURRY: No. Arnie [Arnold Weinberg] is retiring at the end of this fiscal year and we are just starting to get the wheels rolling for a search. I should say this, however; it will report again to the vice president for HR. The person we have recruited, Laura Avakian, was the senior vice president for HR for Care Group and for many years the VP HR at Beth Israel. She is deeply knowledgeable in the health care business; and is a world-class HR person. Beth Israel under her leadership had a national reputation as one of the top ten best places in the country to work, and that was no accident. So she knows the health care business, she's deeply connected within the medical community, and I think she will bring an added dimension of thoughtfulness about how we should think about the future of the Medical Department.
FNL: Good. Hopefully there will be faculty input on this issue.
CURRY: There absolutely will be, make no question about that. We had strong input into the search for the VP HR from faculty, and this one is a benefit to all members of the campus community, so we should have broad participation in the search and any thoughts about the individual characteristics we're seeking.
FNL: One suggestion for faculty input is that, rather than just simply appointing some faculty members to a committee, that one uses the power of modern computers and gets more invited input through e-mail. I can't remember when we were last asked by the central administration for our thoughts on this, that, or the other thing that might affect our everyday life.
CURRY: That's a wonderful idea.
FNL: Faculty do read e-mail; they're as hooked on it as the students.
CURRY: So that might be an interesting way to start the search: a few constructive questions. I might ask some of you to help me with the questions; meaning, I need to know the perspective before I know the stuff to ask.
FNL: The Medical Service is just one of a whole variety of areas where, at least you get the faculty feeling they have the opportunity to give the input. Whether or not it's listened to depends on a variety of complicated factors, but it might work. You could even connect that e-mail to a site on the Web where people could then offer their views.
CURRY: We did not necessarily use cutting-edge technology in the HR VP search. But we did wind up with broader participation than anyone could ever imagine; the search committee had 23 people. And people told me it was absolutely impossible, but it wasn't. It turned out to be a wonderful committee partly because Bob McKersie chaired it and it was a stellar group. But I think e-mail participation is a terrific idea; and given that this affects a lot of people very, very personally and directly, it would be a good way to assemble the value, importance, and characteristics of the service that would help us write the job spec, and do a better job of identifying the right individual.
FNL: Let's turn to IS [Information Systems]. You may or may not know from history, but that has been an area that has caused some friction among the different operating units on the campus and the outside world. What's the plan for improved quality of service?
CURRY: I've had three IT groups in my life reporting to me. From the standpoint of concentration of talent, it's good to be here.
FNL: Technical talent.
CURRY: Yes, technical talent. And that's a hell of a start. The second part is that I am very aware that IS is growing self-aware, through some of their own querying of people, using standard questionnaires that the Gartner Group uses to help IT organizations evaluate their customer-friendliness. But they have some customer issues to deal with. I was at a session yesterday in their strategic planning effort and the service issue was very thoroughly looked at. I was gratified because it's the kind of awareness you must before you can get at customer issues. We are also very aware that rate structures involving voice/video data, telephones, and the network haven't been looked at in years and are undergoing a fundamental rethinking. And that will become the subject of a lot of conversation around the campus in the coming months, because we need to think it through, have a rational basis for the charging that you can understand. So there's a lot of stuff going on. Bob Brown and I both talked with Jim [Bruce] about the fact that we would all find it useful to examine IT. I think an appropriately constituted visiting committee is a fine way to go; in part because we learn a lot, in part because we benchmark ourselves, and that can give us a real impetus to change where it's necessary and important to do so. So I would anticipate doing something like that in the relatively near future. There is one initiative being developed at the moment that I think is useful to get a sense of, which is Bob Brown's Educational Technology Council and academic computing in the purer of terms - around the educational side of it as opposed to just say software application development for enterprise systems. As the Council begins to shape itself and begins to redefine aspects of academic computing, then I think it begins to look at the connections inside of IT or the IS organization, and the relationships and appropriateness of them. I think that would be an ideal time to engage in a review and I know Jim Bruce is comfortable with it because I talked to him about it.
FNL: Does he report to you?
CURRY: Yes he does.
FNL: You may want at some point to do an independent evaluation of what the problems have been.
CURRY: I'd be happy to do that.
FNL: It has been difficult, financially, to support the human/computing service needs in connection to the outside world when so much was being charged for every individual drop, etc.
CURRY: Well, that's got to be part of a real pricing strategy; meaning there should be some real recognition in pricing strategies of scale. And if you're looking at the way the outside world is going in just pricing telephone these days, and the way some of the network connections are going, it's a rapidly, rapidly changing world. Increasingly, you're seeing companies with flat rates for a huge quanta of consumption, if you will, and then a stair-step kind of a system. So it's in that sense, I think, that this whole issue needs to be deeply reexamined.
FNL: Let's talk about safety and security.We talked a little bit about the Y2K situation and transportation on the campus but, other important issues include thefts, making sure buildings are locked, and so forth. Lighting, in particular, is one area that a large number of people, particularly women, workers and spouses, have been concerned about. If you walk, for example, from the T to the Infinite Corridor in the evening, you notice that it's pretty dark as you come across those plazas. And there's limited security in any of the parking garages. They've improved, and they've done the windows outside and there are cameras; but there was a problem with a rapist last year, plus some questions about the route for Safe Ride. So there's this whole issue of security.
CURRY: This has not, in fact, arisen, but I do know something about considerations of lighting. In recognition of the amount of construction that's going to be going on and in recognition of the fact that the campus is in some areas less than congenial, which is to say not a garden spot, there's work to do on some streets. Very serious work on just Vassar Street itself, for example, which is from end to end an extraordinarily unattractive street. And in recognition of making sure that as options for new buildings come along through dreams and fundraising starts to match them, then we have siting issues, traffic issues, pedestrian flow issues, and common space issues. And we need to be sure the solutions are attractive. We've engaged a great planner and landscape architect, Laurie Olin, and among his assignments is to look at lighting all over the campus with two issues in mind, issues of safety, of course, but another from the standpoint of consistency with design so that we begin to integrate the campus through some common elements. We haven't hired Laurie to be on our staff. He's a consultant with a worldwide practice, but he's brought some real thoughtfulness to pulling the campus together through preservation of sight lines, through a change in traffic patterns, through being sensitive to strategically locating quads or parks. We'll have a first pass at that work in November, meaning a kind of what I'd call a schematic design of the campus with those issues.
FNL: That's sort of the physical plant architecture. What about the human architecture, the assurance that the police department, Campus Police has sufficient numbers of people on patrol? They're very good after the horse is out of the barn. But, you know, when you walk around the campus at almost any time you rarely see a police officer.
CURRY: I'm never sure when you know you have enough. My initial impressions are that for the openness of this campus, it's a remarkably safe place. Campus crime, as I see it, is surprisingly low for being a city institution and being as open as we are without gates, fences, with many of our buildings open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I'm certainly willing to think through those issues. I haven't thought much about them because nothing much has hit the radar screen yet.
FNL: You get blips from time to time. I think that the most recent blip that I can think of was the student who was killed by Cambridge youths right in front of the library on Memorial Drive one evening. It was five years ago, I think. They had been walking from the graduate house, Ashdown House, where there's a pub, to the Muddy Charles, when they ran into a couple of kids. As luck would have it, these kids ran on over to Kenmore Square and were caught by B.U. police, of all things, arrested, arraigned, charged in Cambridge Court, and brought up on murder charges. And so, you may want to do a little review of the history with the chief at some point.
CURRY: Oh, I'm more than willing to do that.
FNL: A couple of other things because we're running close to the end of the time. Coming from Caltech, how do you see MIT versus Caltech from the viewpoint of your position at this institute?
CURRY: Wow, I've got to be careful with this one. [LAUGHTER] I still have friends there. One of them knows MIT intimately! In fact, many do. Well, the first order, is that it's remarkable how many people I knew at Caltech who had gone to school as either undergraduates or graduates at MIT. Let's say this, there's a difference here I plainly like and I knew it when I made my decision. I like some of the real-world feeling at MIT. It's part of the mission statement that says MIT deals with real-world issues. It's exciting to be around a business school again. It's terrific to have the opportunity to interact with some of the finest economics and finance people and stay a little bit sharper as a consequence. I should note that one of the people who joined me as a newcomer at MIT is Steven Ross. Steve was a member of the Caltech board and came from Yale where he was one of the great finance people in the country; he was on my investment committee at Caltech. Well, I can seek his advice now as a faculty member rather than as a trustee, and I like that. I like having an architecture and planning school on campus and I like having a strong performing arts component here.
FNL: Are you a musician yourself?
CURRY: I play piano a little and used to play trumpet a lot. The chops are in sorry shape today, but I like the mixture of discipline and professions here that are not part of Caltech. Caltech is very, very concentrated as, I'm sure you know, although the concentration is extraordinary. I generally am more at home in MIT's kind of mixture of science and technology, which I'm very familiar with, and some aspect of the professions. Many of them are quite related in important ways, so as you start to work through the humanities, you can come to linguistics and then you start to migrate toward artificial intelligence and chemistry and biology. Those are exciting links.
FNL: Is there anything they do that you'd like to see done here?
CURRY: There's something that we have just begun to do that they've done for a long time. Caltech has systematically invested in its physical facilities to maintain them at a relatively high level, and we need to get into that mode. If you walk on campus, inside or out, you can see a difference. Now, it's a somewhat younger campus than this one, there's no doubt of that, and on the other hand, it's a somewhat more congenial climate . . . .
FNL: No argument. [LAUGHTER]
CURRY: But systematically, there was investment in infrastructure and it was not just in the buildings themselves. It was in the landscape and interconnections. Caltech's kind of a garden spot that stays green year-round. I'm very pleased with our new sensitivity to those issues at MIT. And it is certainly part of Chuck 's long-term plans to invest in infrastructure, to focus on quality architecture, and to engage our campus planner to try to pull it together. And I'm just pleased to enter that mix.
FNL: Do you get involved in resource development?
CURRY: Not directly. It happens to report to me, but it's really kind of an administrative oversight where managerial issues can arise and be debated, but certainly that area receives its primary direction from the President.
FNL: There are some activities on the campus that have generated income, such as the summer program where faculty have brought people in from the outside, and I'm sure there must be a program at the Sloan School that they do with executives. Some people believe that more of that sort of thing might be done, taking advantage of MIT's resources in a way that would generate revenue and that would improve the quality of life overall. Is that something to which you've given thought?
CURRY: It is. In part, because through a significant portion of my existence I spent time developing revenue incentives through various budget structures at other institutions. I think it's important to focus on, and here's my sense of it. MIT is, in significant ways, defined by its long-term federal sponsorship relationship, all the way back to Vannevar Bush, who invented the national model, in effect through today. Now the kind of entrepreneurship of individual, principal investigators and the development of programs through partnerships with the federal government has been enormously productive. At the same time, if you look at MIT's sources of funds over the years, the percentage that's federal is declining. The percentage that's growing is private, and MIT is developing its sense of the private side through both the fundraising campaign and our increasing awareness that there is a rebalancing broadly between private and public, not just at MIT but elsewhere. And there's a significant opportunity for MIT to participate in that.
Then we begin to look at other sources of revenue. I think that if programs are carefully done and are of extraordinary quality, then there would be real revenue opportunities in this. I've seen them developed elsewhere.
FNL: Can you give us a couple of specific examples?
CURRY: Well, I don't want to predispose anything with respect to, say, the Sloan School, but I've certainly seen what high-level executive education programs do at management schools. They can be very cost-effective and help provide resources to subsidize high-cost programs like the Ph.D. program, for example.
FNL: What about other than that, because that's a fairly well-known model.
CURRY: And it's a fairly well-developed one.
FNL: What about for a physics department or for a math department, where some people can't pay themselves summer salaries?
CURRY: Let me think a little bit about that, but I'll give you an instance, and I can't define it perfectly, but it's a neat idea. A couple of professors at my former institution were applied mathematicians and they had their own consulting relationships with private enterprise that they mutually benefited from. They assembled a kind of focal point of fellow travelers, broadly across Caltech, and made it known that they were a small think-tank swat team to tackle complex industrial problems. And when I'd left, they'd had some real successes. Now, they've involved graduate students in the work, to introduce them to this sort of thing and to get them doing some applied research.
FNL: It's an interesting concept.
CURRY: And it was just beginning. I said I can go through the professional schools, what medical schools do and law schools do and business schools do and they're kind of naturals, but this one was unusual because Caltech has no professional schools at all.
FNL: There is a balance, of course, between the free spirit of inquiry and the industrial strengths of proprietary research.
CURRY: Of course. And I think that the folks involved in that were very, very sensitive to it. On the other hand, what they also recognized is that there were some really interesting problems out there that, in fact, could lead to areas of purer inquiry, so there's a kind of constant source of ideas.
FNL: One last thing. It's a fairly localized question and has to do with the Family Resource Center; the issue of daycare, the two-parent working family, etc. Working routines have changed, of course, as have the difficulties faculty face. We've tried to address it from the academic side, department heads and so forth, but the sort of general question of a family resource center and a little broader than that, the dream of affordable faculty housing. You know, there's a community at MIT that wouldn't necessarily be only a daytime community, but more full-time.
CURRY: Let me address the first one, the daycare. Phil Clay has been chairing a committee or a task force that's been looking broadly at that and as part of the capital construction coming up, there are sites for development in parts of the new structure including, as I understand it, space for daycare programs. It's certainly on the radar screen, certainly known and understood as important, but I would urge a quick question to Phil with respect to where he stands and where that committee stands.
FNL: Maybe we can get him to write an article for us.
CURRY: I don't know what's in the pipeline specifically, but it's a very active topic that he's got the lead on and knows far more about it than I do, especially from a needs assessment standpoint. The second thing I'd like to add to that is that when I mentioned our new HR VP, part of the reason her former institution was known as such a good place to work is that they developed an extraordinary sensitivity around family issues, recognizing specific needs of two-profession families, and how to work that out, and that's from one end of the spectrum to the other. She'd be worth talking to.
FNL: She may be a little gun-shy.
CURRY: Give her a couple of months. You were very generous to me giving me ten months. My honeymoon's over. [LAUGHTER] I've no allusions any more.
FNL: Well, thanks a lot for your time.
CURRY: Well, thank you. This was really fun to do.
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