Building a Business School:The Graduate School of Industrial Administration
BILL Cooper joined the Economics Department at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1947. At his invitation, I visited Carnegie a year later to give a seminar for the economists. Pittsburgh had been for me, as for everyone, the Smoky City, the city where the streetlights had to burn at noon to pierce the sulfurous smog. I had seen Pittsburgh only from an overnight Pullman, which stopped there around midnight on my trips between Chicago and Washington.
Wakened by the shunting and switching of the cars, I would peer out the window of my berth as the train slowly maneuvered through the steepwalled valley of the Monongahela, the hillsides reflecting the lurid red glare of the open hearths, the coke ovens, and the blast furnaces of the great steel mills that lined the valley. Intermittently, a Bessemer converter would send up a great flaming flare, turning the scene almost daylight-bright. With the smoke and flame, the blackness lit by the red fires, it was a preview of hell.
I had a curious first impression of the Carnegie campus, too. I arrived there by cab through a snow-covered Schenley Park on a bright winter morning, catching a glimpse of Henry Hornbostel’s stately Palladian buildings, then sitting almost outdoors, it seemed, in Bill’s many-windowed office, surrounded by snow-carpeted lawns. I lectured to the economists on disguised unemployment in agriculture in “backward” economies, a topic I had explored in the course of my studies of the economic effects of atomic energy. The economists detected a bit of a foreign accent, but were polite.
Pittsburgh was a far more pleasant city than my midnight experiences had led me to expect. I learned of the Pittsburgh Renaissance which was just then ridding the city of most of its major sources of smog and pollution: houses heated by coal (replaced by natural gas), steam locomotives (replaced by diesels), and Bessemer converters (replaced by open hearths). Technological changes had conspired at this time to make all of these polluters uneconomical, and civic action had introduced strong and successful regulations to clean the air. (Was invention—the new technology—the mother of necessity here?)
Sometime in 1948, soon after my first visit to Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Institute of Technology received a gift of $5 million in endowment and $1 million for a building for a new Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) that would provide business education for students with undergraduate degrees in science and engineering. The donor was William Larimer Mellon, who had founded the Gulf Oil Company.* From his industrial experience, he had concluded that modern high-tech firms needed top executives who both were skilled in management and understood science and technology. The provost of Carnegie Tech, Elliott Dunlap Smith, had described to Mellon the newly revised undergraduate industrial management curriculum as a rough prototype for a program that would attain these goals. Mr. Mellon was impressed, and the gift followed.
At Bill’s suggestion, I was asked to come to Carnegie again to discuss the plans for the new school with Provost Smith and Lee Bach, chairman of the Economics Department. An invitation to join the faculty as professor of administration and chairman of the Department of Industrial Management soon followed.
I was not eager to leave Illinois Tech, for I had confidence that with Don Smithburg and Victor Thompson we could build a strong public administration program there. We were also writing our textbook in public administration (published in 1950). I had sunk deep roots into IIT. I was finally convinced, however, that the financial resources of GSIA could launch, much sooner than at IIT, the program of empirical research in organization that seemed the logical sequel to Administrative Behavior. My visits to Pittsburgh showed me that it was a livable city, no dirtier than Chicago, perhaps cleaner.
Having made the decision, on a trip to Pittsburgh in April 1949, I took a long walk early one morning through much of the north part of Squirrel Hill. Just before this visit, I had drawn on a map of Pittsburgh a circle of one mile radius around the Carnegie Tech campus, for I was resolved to walk to work instead of commuting, and had checked the census tract data to discover which portions of this area were inhabited by college-educated, middle-class families. I looked in these portions for a house we could afford.
In the last lap of my walk, I climbed the steep slope behind the campus to the Schenley Park Golf Course, and walked east a half-mile on a street called Northumberland. The houses were noticeably nicer than the house we had just bought in Chicago. From the corner of Northumberland and Inverness, I looked at the lawns and flowers a bit enviously, glad that I would soon be able to bring the children to a brighter and greener neighborhood.
That was more than forty years ago. We still live in the house on Northumberland Street that we bought in the summer of 1949, just a mile from the Carnegie campus, from which I have walked back and forth each day, gradually erasing the memories of commuting on Chicago streetcars. I estimate that I have walked nearly 20,000 miles on that one mile of Northumberland Street, enough to carry me around the world if I don’t stick too close to the equator (but only, as a friend has pointed out, if I can walk on water).
After 10,000 trips along the same path, one’s surroundings should become invisible. They don’t. On the first half of the morning walk straight west from home, I proceed down the tree-lined street of affluent homes, noting new construction, for-sale signs, and other marks of change. From April to early autumn, a succession of flowers, shrubs, and trees display their colors. I hear a song sparrow or a mourning dove; occasionally in autumn I catch a glimpse of a flicker’s white rump and red-gold wings. I’d like to say that I spend the time of those morning walks thinking deep thoughts. I rarely do. Thoughts are easily interrupted by any new sight or sound, the chain broken and unpatchable.
At the halfway mark, after crossing Forbes Street, there is a short climb to gain the ridge at the golf course, where, looking southwest far across the valley, I see clusters of houses marching up the hills that form the steep south bank of the Monongahela River, nearly three miles away. The masses of white and pastel-colored houses reflecting the morning light are sharply outlined against the dark green hills, giving them a three-dimensional solidity.
In foreground and middle distance below me lie the meadows and woods of Schenley Park, the contours of the last line of treetops in the park composing a complex counterpoint with the gently undulating ridge on the horizon. As I proceed along my path, the contour continually shifts against the ridge, forming at each glance a new composition. Sometimes I am reminded of the Rhine below Weisbaden, of Gardanne on its hill hear Aix-en-Provence, of Siena, viewed from a distant ridge—all different, but each with this sense of human settlement crowding up onto the protective hills, crowned each by its church or fortress. Mumford’s medieval city, repeated even in New World Pittsburgh.
On some mornings, of course, the far bank of the river is hidden in mists or smog (much less of the latter since the steel mills disappeared). In winter, the buildings on the slope are dark against the snow, a negative of the summer scene. But ten thousand different views present me with new pleasures for every walk. Then the rapid descent down to the campus.
Going home in the evening is another matter. The walk starts with the steep hundred-foot climb to the golf course. These days, even walking slowly, I reach the top winded. (Why wasn’t it possible to arrange the uphill walk for morning and the downhill for evening? Alas, the East End of Pittsburgh isn’t laid out that way.)
Sometimes, looking back, I am rewarded by a spectacular sunset, but, with the light behind them, the houses on the distant hills do not announce themselves with the same sharp contrast as in the morning. The south bank loses its solidity, its third dimension, and becomes a flat backdrop to the park landscape. At the end of the golf course, I turn my back to the view and trudge home.
GETTING STARTED
Life during the early years of GSIA was a three-ring circus. Lee Bach, who was appointed dean of the new school, Bill Cooper, and I played leading roles in developing its faculty and curriculum. Provost Smith, who had an industrial and academic background in personnel administration, was also very active. We had almost a clean slate, but what had previously been written on it is worth mentioning.
First, we inherited the undergraduate industrial management (read “industrial engineering”) curriculum, which Bach, Cooper, and Smith had revamped, and which in fact provided an excellent template for our new graduate program. Second, Lee Bach had come to Carnegie in 1947, at age thirty, with the promise that he could start a small doctoral program in economics, and had hired several economists on the strength of that promise. The first of these two inheritances gave us a good start, the second, as I shall recount, caused complications.
Almost none of the founding fathers of GSIA (except Provost Smith) had extensive backgrounds in management or business education. We were social scientists who had discovered in one way or another that organizational and business environments provide a fertile source of basic research ideas, and who therefore did not regard basic and applied as antithetical terms. Accurately or not, we perceived American business education at that time as a wasteland of vocationalism that needed to be transformed into sciencebased professionalism, as medicine and engineering had been transformed a generation or two earlier.
We were most fortunate in that we took on this task at that particular moment in history. World War II had spawned something called “operational analysis” or “operations research,” the use of quantitative tools for managerial problem solving and decision making. Just after the war, a number of people were seeking to transfer these tools to peacetime industrial applications, and new tools (such as linear programming) were being discovered.
At about the same time, the behavioral sciences were flourishing and were being brought to bear on issues in organization and management. (The activities of the Political Science Department at Chicago, Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive, and my Administrative Behavior were examples of these trends.) Publication of the extensive field studies carried out in the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company by F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson (1939) had begun before the war, and our field experiment in the California State Relief Administration was completed in 1941.
The postwar flowering of management science and of the behavioral approach to organization theory provided the substance of applied science we needed. The quantitative undergraduate training of our students made it possible to put that science into the curriculum. Having worked out a Master’s curriculum appropriate to these goals, we developed two major research areas: organizational behavior and quantitative management science. I assumed leadership in the former, in collaboration with Harold Guetzkow, who joined a year later. Bill Cooper took the principal initiative in the quantitative area, but I also participated heavily in that, heading one of his research teams. So during this period I was at once organization theorist, management scientist, and business school administrator—the three rings of my circus.
We got off to a good start, keeping very busy for several years recruiting faculty, launching classes of about fifteen students each, and getting the research programs under way. My unaided memory insists that everything went fantastically well, but my files remind me that our ultimate success was not achieved without pain. The crisis arrived in the spring and summer of 1951. It had two interrelated foci, Bill Cooper and the economics faculty.
Although he was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, I cannot think of Bill as a Southerner. He grew up on the west side of Chicago, full of plans and projects. From previous chapters, it is already evident that some of his projects have had major impacts on my own life. You will recall that in 1937 he had persuaded a girl named Dorothea Pye to accept me as a partner on a double date. Not long after that, he and I formed the Progressive Club at the University of Chicago as the instrument for our political activities. I have mentioned that a B in boxing was the only grade on my graduate transcript at Chicago, but I did not disclose that Bill Cooper had been my instructor in that class.
Nearly ten years later, Bill had suggested to me that I might like to attend with him the seminars of the Cowles Commission, almost converting me into a full-time economist. Some four years after that, he had persuaded me to leave my position at IIT and join the new venture in business education just starting at Carnegie Tech. Bill Cooper can be very persuasive, with the persuasiveness of the true entrepreneur. Without his persuasion, my life would have been very different from the one I am recounting here—whether better or worse I cannot say, but different. It would not have traversed the same branches of the maze.
It was the economist Joseph Schumpeter, I believe, who defined an entrepreneur as someone who risks someone else’s money. Put less pejoratively, an entrepreneur is a broker who brings about marriages between ideas and resources. He dreams imaginative dreams and convinces others that those dreams are attainable, persuades them to place their bets on him.
Classically, entrepreneurs were supposed to belong to the world of business. But brokerage of ideas and resources is not confined to business; it is at least as much at home in academe. In a typical major American research university, one-third to one-half of the annual expenditures are funded by the entrepreneurial efforts of faculty members who write their dreams of undiscovered truths in research proposals addressed persuasively to foundations and government agencies.
For the academic entrepreneur, the stakes are even higher than dollars because the resources at risk are human careers. An academic entrepreneur publishes a paper arguing that a particular domain of knowledge is a gold vein of secrets, thereby attracting a swarm of prospectors. He urges some colleagues into a joint venture of exploration. He persuades a graduate student to direct his life into a particularly alluring line of inquiry. Entrepreneurship in science is a Roman gamble: the winnings are more often glory than riches, and the losses, lifelong futility. Bill Cooper has been a highly successful academic entrepreneur, whose successes have paid off not only for himself but for those who have invested in him.
Bill was a Depression child, who, to make his way in the world, started up the ladder of Golden Gloves boxing. His mental abilities were recognized by the accountant Eric Kohler, who found him caddying on a golf course and put him back on the track of education. Admitted to the University of Chicago without completing high school, Bill arrived on the campus in 1934. I have no recollection of how we met there, but we became friends soon after he came, and a couple of years later were engaged in the joint political venture that has already been described.
Bill came to Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1947, recommended to Lee Bach by someone at Chicago. He had meanwhile spent some years after graduation from college as assistant to the controller of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as a graduate student at Columbia University, as an economist in the Bureau of the Budget, and, just after World War II, as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He arrived in Pittsburgh in time to become one of the entrepreneurs who attracted the six million GSIA dollars to Carnegie.
Bill Cooper was not only an entrepreneur but a revolutionary. His imagination and his indifference to convention were critical ingredients in the successful GSIA effort. That indifference also caused a temporary personal problem for Bill. At Columbia University, where he was writing a doctoral dissertation, his offbeat approach to accounting and economics greatly perplexed some members of his thesis committee. For several years his colleagues at Carnegie urged him to make such compromises and clarifications in the thesis document as would satisfy the committee, for we did not want the lack of a union card to endanger his academic progress.
But Bill’s entrepreneurial luck (or talent) held out here too. After a short time, his contributions to economics and management science became so well recognized that the question of a degree never came up at promotion time. Most people, by then, just supposed he had one; and in any event, it did not matter a whit whether or not he had. When in 1970 Ohio State University awarded Bill an honorary doctorate, I am sure he felt pleased, as all people do in such circumstances; but I am sure also that in the intervening years he did not feel that he lacked credentials for the job he was doing.
Bill’s example probably accounted for the flexibility that the GSIA faculty later sometimes exhibited in deciding what constituted a thesis in industrial administration, awarding the degree, for example, to Allen Newell and to others for research in artificial intelligence. Bill Cooper was never one to think slots should not be as flexible as people.
As soon as the new management science techniques appeared on the horizon, and especially linear programming, Bill understood their potential and undertook to master them, to push them forward and apply them to important practical problems. He also saw their key significance for the curriculum. Our first class of Master’s students in 1950 was exposed to linear programming in a seminar that Bill and I taught jointly. He soon found in the Mathematics Department exactly the right partner, Abe Charnes, for pushing research that used this tool. After forty years of partnership, the team of Charnes and Cooper continues today to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the linear programming (LP) formalism, and the range of its real-world applications.
The contributions of Charnes and Cooper being matters of public record, they do not have to be recounted here. I will just mention how their entrepreneurial skills were tested by their first great success—the introduction of linear programming into the oil industry for blending gasoline in refineries. Prudent businessmen, like prudent educators, always follow Alexander Pope’s precept: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried; nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” The problem of the entrepreneur is to persuade someone to go first; the others will follow readily enough.
In the case of the refinery problem, Gulf Oil’s Philadelphia refinery agreed to provide Bill and Abe with access and data; models were tested; and results were obtained (on paper) showing the superiority of the new model over traditional rule-of-thumb decision methods. But no amount of persuasion convinced the company that they should be “the first by whom the new are tried.” So Bill and Abe could publish only their on-paper results in a scholarly article.
But that did the trick. The article came to the attention of ESSO, who assumed that surely Gulf was already using LP and that ESSO was lagging behind its competitors. Work was soon under way at the ESSO Research Laboratories, and a genuine application became a reality, with everyone congratulating himself on not taking the first, big risk.
Bill Cooper also played a central role in creating the Institute of Management Sciences. When Carnegie Tech received an endowment for a School of Urban and Public Affairs, Bill became its first dean. More surprisingly, he later held, for several years, an appointment at the Harvard Business School, which we had always regarded as The Competition. He evidently thought (and no doubt correctly) that Harvard had not yet wholly digested the message of management science and needed reform in that direction.
Still later, Bill rejoined his former colleagues Abe Charnes and George Kozmetsky at the University of Texas Business School. I will leave Bill’s story at that point, and return to my account of events in 1951, having noted that Bill’s entrepreneurial activity continues as vigorously as ever today.
Of the three members of the triumvirate—Lee, Bill, and I—that assumed the leadership of GSIA, Bill was the radical, the least constrained by the established conventions of business education or by the realities of organizations. (At the same time, of the three, he had had the most extensive organizational experience.) His influence prevented Lee and me from conceding too much to the pressures of the outside business and academic worlds. His many innovative ideas also included some that seemed pretty wild to us. When there was disagreement among us, it often ended with a 2-to-1 vote, with Bill in the minority. (Lee did not take his deanship lightly, and did not settle things by formal majorities. He discussed and listened and was most unarbitrary, but in the end, he made the decision.)
Bill also brought into his research team several researchers who seemed to Lee and me to live in a very abstract world having little contact with real management problems. Space constraints displaced this little group to another building, 500 feet from the rest of us—an enormous social distance, as anyone who is familiar with organizations and the importance of proximity for social communication will recognize.
Relations between Bill and me were soon badly strained, as he and his companions became more and more frustrated by the 2-to-1 votes. The situation worsened when one of Bill’s close associates decided to leave because we would not meet all the terms he had set for remaining. Since, wearing one of my three hats, I was part of Bill’s project, he had also injected himself into my continuing consulting relation with the Cowles Commission, which he viewed as a conflict of interest or of loyalty. Finally, he dragged his feet on providing support for the empirical work I wanted to begin in my scheduling project. We had all the ingredients for a good feud.
Meanwhile, the economists were becoming unhappy, believing they were being pressured (and perhaps they were) to move their research in directions relevant to a school of business. We didn’t think of it as “pressure” but as opportunity to participate in research for which we had found funding: a study of the use of accounting data by factory managers in their decision making; a study of the roles of forecasting and feedback in scheduling factories with uncertain demands for their products.
Here were settings in which we could compare the ways in which decisions were actually made in business firms with the ways that economic theory and textbooks said they were made. These were not settings, however, to which economists were accustomed or in which they felt comfortable. There were few precedents in the profession for studying the decisions of individual firms at first-hand. Nevertheless, an economist, Gordon Tyndal, participated in the accounting study, and three economists, Charlie Holt, Franco Modigliani, and Jack Muth, in the study of production planning; and both studies produced results of considerable value.
But there was another difficulty with the economists—perhaps the real reason they felt coerced and threatened. I had not for some years (certainly not since my association with the Cowles Commission) kept secret my skepticism about mainstream neoclassical economics. I was prepared to preach the heresies of bounded rationality to economists, from the gospel of Administrative Behavior, chapter 5, in season and out.
At first I did not recognize that when you are in a position of authority you cannot debate freely with people in your organization without some of them believing that they may endanger their careers if they disagree with you too vigorously. Perhaps they are right—I like to think not in my case, but self-deception is easy. People who agree with you are apt to seem a little more intelligent than those who don’t. Power does corrupt.
But behaving differently as administrator than as colleague by pulling my intellectual punches did not (and does not) appeal to me as a way of life. In my previous administrative posts, in Berkeley and at IIT, my colleagues had not taken any guff from me. Perhaps I had been too young and inexperienced to be intimidating to them. And in my previous associations, we were almost all political scientists; I didn’t come from an alien discipline.
GSIA, with its plurality of economists, was different. I began to acquire a distaste for the intermingling of academic with management roles that undoubtedly contributed to my later decisions gradually to retreat from administration. I would rather see my ideas gain acceptance by their merit than by administrative fiat; but at the same time I cannot be neutral about the directions taken by the organizations to which I belong. The conflict is eased when I do not have line authority. Then I have to persuade.
At any rate, I heckled the GSIA economists about their ridiculous assumptions of human omniscience, and they increasingly viewed me as the main obstacle to building “real” economics in the school. That was the other half of the crisis, which became acute when the two dissident factions, Bill Cooper’s research group and the economists, sought to unite.
Early in July 1951, I had a long evening’s conversation with Bill at a bar in Shadyside called The Fox Cafe, in which tempers were kept but all of the dirty linen was hung out for inspection. Bill described me as intimidating the faculty who disagreed with me, and proposed that I give up my formal authority as chairman of the I.M. Department. He even proposed an “autonomous” research project in administration, with its own $100,000 budget as compensation!
I listened for a long time to Bill’s description of my shortcomings, then allowed as how I didn’t think I would resign my chairmanship and counterattacked by discussing my problems working within Bill’s research group and what was needed to solve them. The conversation ended inconclusively but in what I would describe as a tentatively friendly mood. The next morning I recorded the conversation in a four-page, single-spaced aide-mémoire, which I carefully filed in case there were later disagreements about what had transpired.
After I had confirmed with a few other faculty that morale was truly low, I directed a memorandum to Lee. As I reread it now, I find the tone of the document in some ways curious. I nearly always refer to our colleagues as “staff” instead of “faculty.” Some of the references to the culling of the faculty that Lee and I had inherited have a rather cold-blooded sound. There is a straining for objectivity, and perhaps no more defensiveness than one would expect under the circumstances. The document seeks to conceal rather than convey the anger and anxiety I was feeling. The mood is one of diagnosis and treatment rather than blame.
In my memorandum, I told Lee that I had verified the generally low level of morale. The economists were ambivalent “about the special character of the school as a school of industrial administration,” and were “desperately intent on retaining their professional roles as economists.” They felt that they had no representation in administrative councils and that he, Lee, had ceased to look at things as an economist. There was much misinformation about the plans and intentions of the leadership, and in the griping, the faculty sometimes referred to themselves as “vassals.”
The faculty in industrial administration had been urged to associate themselves with the economists in their opposition to current policies. While feeling themselves excluded from policy making, the faculty also complained about the long, inconclusive staff meetings, where they did not think they had a real influence on the decisions that were reached.
Having detailed the problems, I went on to list some possible actions: A committee composed solely of economists could be created to guide the graduate program in economics. A chairman could be appointed to take charge of this program, although there was a danger that he would either be “captured” by the economists or rejected as not loyally representing them. The troika of Bach, Cooper, and myself should be expanded to bring in other economists (balanced by faculty from industrial management). Lee should avoid transacting business conspicuously with me at lunch. I should probably participate more actively in Bill’s research group, avoiding “methodological discussions about the need for economists becoming psychologists.”More concern should be shown for the morale of faculty who would probably not be retained indefinitely. Additional administrative assistance should be provided for Lee.
I concluded the memorandum with the ringing declaration that “as I look over the situation . . . I see nothing that calls in question the basic directions the School’s development has been following. . . . I see no real proposal for an alternative direction, but a rather high concentration of the stresses that commonly go with rapid organizational change.” I then expressed optimism that we could rebuild morale and “agreement as to the School’s function and focus” and “allay the fear of the economists that they are being made the victims of an empire-building attempt by the I.M. group.”
The memorandum is a good example of my approach to an administrative crisis. Reading it after passions have had nearly forty years to cool, I am struck by how much it draws on theory from Administrative Behavior, and particularly the theory of organizational identification and loyalty, as the basis for its diagnosis and recommendations. Evidently I believed what I had written about organizations well enough to apply it to my own administrative problems.
Much of my later article on the organization of a business school (1967a) is already present in my analysis of this crisis. The crisis was ended, as most crises are, by gradual exhaustion, by applying a few Band-aids (some of them suggested in my memorandum), by the departure of some of our more alienated colleagues, and by the completion of the new GSIA building, which allowed us to reunite our faculty in one compact group.
The building, which was supposed to cost $1 million, was designed by an architect, with the usual recklessness of that profession, to cost $1.6 million. Since we were not about to dip into endowment, we reduced cost nearly to budget by postponing the installation of air-conditioning and eliminating the elevator (the building is only three stories in height). A few years later, needing more space, we installed an office for an associate dean in the elevator shaft.
To puncture as much as possible the disciplinary boundaries, we distributed the faculty more or less randomly throughout the building, so that there would not be compact pockets of organization theorists, economists, or finance specialists. Of course they gradually found ways of reuniting themselves, but we were able at least to delay their segregation into disciplines.
The problems that created the crisis did not wholly go away; they were built into the fabric of the GSIA mission. One problem was the fascination of abstract mathematical techniques, which sometimes emphasized the mathematics more than the management applications. A second problem was the partial mismatch between the “pure science” values economists acquire from their discipline and the interest in real-world applications that characterizes a business school. A third, related problem was the near incompatibility of the behavioral theories of economic decision making that some of us were developing with the neoclassical theories espoused by most of the economists.
Keeping the balance of the scientific and the professional, of the economic and the behavioral, was an arduous job. Only the complete dedication and strong leadership of Lee Bach held the venture on course. In my paper on business schools, I wrote that “organizing a professional school . . . is very much like mixing oil with water: . . . And the task is not finished when the goal has been achieved. Left to themselves, the oil and water will separate again. So also will the disciplines and the professions” (Simon 1967a, p. 16). By hard work, we managed to keep GSIA pretty well emulsified, at least until the 1960s.
In my essay from which the preceding quotation comes, I explain why these problems are endemic to professional education—in medicine, engineering, and business. This law of nature, learned during my first two years at GSIA, continued to influence the development of the school.
The great thing about such controversy as we had in GSIA was that it was more about principles, issues, and policies than about personal or organizational advantage. I see Mr. Freud smiling, but he is wrong, as he should have known from his own controversies. Only people who believe deeply and almost fanatically in a dream—as many of us in GSIA did—can struggle so hard without inner doubt and conflict, and without losing, in the presence of frequent disagreement on particulars, a deep sense of common purpose and mutual respect.
Nor do I want to make conflict seem to play a greater role in GSIA than it did; but the story of a marriage that pretends there were no spats is always a little dull. More important than internal agreement and disagreement was the position of GSIA vis-à-vis the world. Evolutionists have discussed the advantages and disadvantages, for progress, of an isolated island community. GSIA was such a community, open and hospitable to alien ideas blown in from the sea, but protected from the need to defend the tender mutants it had bred against constant confrontation with all the established mainland species. Its success speaks for the island as a locus for innovation.
The island metaphor was only one part of GSIA’s external posture. We also had David and Goliath much in mind. For several of us—certainly for Bill Cooper and me—there was no greater pleasure than being the underdog, unless it was the pleasure of being the winning underdog. And we often portrayed in such terms our struggles against the Goliaths of traditional education, conventional business practice, and classical economics.
MORE COLLEAGUES
I have observed that the spectacular growth of GSIA owed much to the leadership style of Lee Bach, who served as dean from 1949 until 1961, and whose strength of conviction and character kept the enterprise on course. It owed a great deal, also, to Provost Elliott Dunlap Smith, who played a very active role in the early development of the school, and an educational role throughout Carnegie Tech that was exceptionally important for my own development.
Business schools (GSIA included) are sometimes accused of not teaching management and leadership. I expect that generally they do not, mainly because they don’t know what to teach under those headings or how to teach it. Possibly, just possibly, we could start with biography, with the styles and behaviors of outstanding managers. It isn’t very analytic, but maybe it could do some good.
Lee Bach serves as an example. His talents are very different from the entrepreneurial talents of Bill Cooper, yet he managed with immense success the venture capital that W. L. Mellon had entrusted to him. When I try to describe his style, it always seems too simple, too obvious. It’s like saying of a tennis ace, “He always hit the ball squarely and with force, placing it precisely where he aimed.” If you can do that, you can be a great tennis player. But is the advice worth teaching? What do you do with that information? I will try to describe Lee Bach’s methods, but with no conviction that what I say will make great managers or entrepreneurs.
Lee Bach persuaded us, by example, to set the goals of GSIA sky-high, stretching the limits of the possible. And as aspirations were attained, goals moved higher. Second, Lee always found a way to reconcile technique (we were loaded with that) with common sense (sometimes in short supply). Third, Lee was always more interested in getting the job done, and done well, than in placing blame when something went awry along the way. High aspirations, common sense, and responsibility for getting results. It seems simple enough.
I have traveled a good deal in Japan, mostly for enjoyment but also from curiosity about Japanese methods of management. I have learned the Japanese language (badly); I have read widely. Over even a longer period, I have had at least four close Japanese friends. I have learned about the ringi system of decentralized and consultative decision making. But I have also met some of the founders, like Matsushita, of the Japanese electronics industry. With all the talk of “decentralization” and “participation,” these executives are tough cookies, men of decision and action. Perhaps—probably—they listen, but I doubt that they lead from behind.
The moral I have drawn from these journeys abroad and my studies is that a strong rudder and motivation on top are not antithetical to openness to ideas from below, from above—from everywhere. Management does not have to be weak to be “participative.” All it requires is a manager who is strong enough in his inner convictions not to feel obliged to defend himself from ideas that come from without.
Lee Bach was also (and is) a tough cookie. He led from strength, but he was never afraid of ideas, even the ideas of others. He was not afraid because he had confidence in his ability to separate sense from malarky; he was never bowled over (to use his favorite phrase) by technological virtuosity and fireworks.
Lee spent a year in law school before he opted for graduate study in economics. Possibly as a result of this experience, he is a formidable crossexaminer, as anyone who has been questioned by him at lunch or in the classroom will testify. When the cross-examination ends, the proposal under consideration has been dissected thoroughly, and its muscles, blood vessels, and bones are all clearly visible on the dissecting table. And the scalpel was ordinary English, no mathematical equations or technical jargon.
Lee has a sense of legitimacy and hierarchy that today may seem a little old-fashioned (undemocratic?), especially in a typical academic environment. But Carnegie Tech was not a typical academic environment. It had come out of the tradition of technical universities, very different from the tradition of liberal arts colleges, much closer to the organizational tradition of business and industry. In that tradition, Lee never let you forget that the dean was responsible for the final decisions in his school, or that he was dean.
On the other hand, I rarely felt that Lee pulled rank on me or others, because decisions were made after full discussion, and consensus was reached more often than not. Lee was enormously patient in conducting lengthy Quaker meetings of the faculty, which usually reached agreement and rarely took a formal vote. Sometimes he did arrive at a meeting with a knowledge of what the outcome must be, but generally he was open to advice and persuasion, and invested little of his self-esteem in trademarking ideas with his own name. If decisions had to be made within specified ground rules, because of Carnegie Tech policies or for other reasons, he was open and explicit in stating the constraints.
Lee was sometimes regarded as cold by those who did not know him well, a reputation that stemmed from his concern for formal organization. His greatest weakness was his inability to delegate detail to others, which left him with an immense workload. In a year when he was on leave of absence and I was acting dean, I had great difficulty convincing him that nothing terrible would happen if he simply forgot about GSIA for a while, and by budget time in the spring, although his leave had not ended, he was back nearly full-time. If I had really wanted to manage rather than spend my time on research, I might have been quite unhappy that year.
I did accomplish one thing as acting dean. It always seemed to me important that Lee, with his reputation for aloofness, should have a secretary who would present a gracious and smiling face to those who came to see him. That did not describe his secretary at the time I took over. I quickly made her sufficiently unhappy with my managerial style that she quit. Lee never said much about the departure of his secretary, but I think he forgave me when he found his public relations significantly improved with the new one I had hired.
When I returned from my own leave at RAND in 1961, Lee informed me that he was going to resign as dean. He had learned that he was suffering from an illness that would be aggravated by heavy administrative responsibilities, and he was unwilling to proceed at half steam. A few years later he moved to Stanford, where he did not have an official administrative position, but where his advice and counsel played an important role in the rapid progress of the Stanford Business School and in top policy making in the university as a whole.
I warned you that I would say little about Lee that would tell you how to be a good manager, and I have made good my warning. The principles of good management are simple, even trivial. They are not widely practiced for the same reason that Christianity is not widely practiced. It is not enough to know what the principles are; you must acquire deeply ingrained habits of carrying them out, in the face of all sorts of strong urges to stray onto more comfortable and pleasant paths, to respond without inhibition to provocations, and just to goof off. Lee had the self-discipline actually to apply the principles, to behave like a good manager and leader. Not many of us do.
Another person of great importance to GSIA, to Carnegie Tech, and to me was Elliott Dunlap Smith, the provost. Smith was always careful to point out that his name was spelled with two l’s and two t’s, thus distinguishing his line from the more prestigious New England Eliots. Still, and in spite of the additional fact that he was raised in Chicago, he never forgot, or allowed you to forget, his New England roots or his ties with Yale.
As an unchallengeable patrician, he permitted himself a full quota of those idiosyncrasies and crotchets that mark the gentry of England, both Old and New. Occasionally there wafted from him a hint of condescending anti-Semitism, but had I been Irish, I am sure I would have detected corresponding condescension. In my experience, it never translated into acts of partiality; he was simply aware that he was a Brahmin, and did not reject the sense of superior birth that came with that endowment. His wife, Marie, was as New England as he.
Graduated as a lawyer, Elliott Smith had spent much of his professional career as personnel manager for the Dennison Manufacturing Company, a leading manufacturer of office supplies. There he educated himself to be rather a good amateur psychologist (I am not sure that the word amateur is even fair here), concerned with applying psychology to industrial management. His 1928 book, titled Psychology for Executives, has an appendix listing “good books on psychology” that references the core psychological works of that time—James, Woodworth, Watson, Koffka, Dewey, F. A. Allport, and many others—but not Freud. The book is full of sound functionalist psychology and common sense.
Elliott Smith was to distinguish himself mainly not as a writer or a scholar but as a passionate teacher and trainer of teachers. His own teaching was largely in the domain of human relations, first in Yale’s industrial administration course in its Engineering College, then in Carnegie Tech’s undergraduate industrial management program, and finally in GSIA.
Perhaps his interest in human relations had its origins in his early exposure to John Dewey’s experimental school in Chicago, which he attended as a boy. Perhaps this interest was encouraged further by the fact that his own human relations often left something to be desired, as I shall explain. Certainly the interest matured as a central professional concern in his work at Dennison.
His course, “Human Relations in Industry,” was built around a combination of lectures, role-playing sessions, and pure Elliott Smith. He was one of the pioneers in the use of role playing as an educational device, and probably unique in hiring and coaching students of the Drama Department to play roles opposite the management students. The management students interviewed secretaries, applied for jobs (with Smith as prospective employer), presented consulting reports, and disciplined erring employees on the GSIA stage, in front of their fellow students and critiqued by Smith.
One of Smith’s favorite performances, early in the semester, was to read aloud on the stage and comment upon the genuine application letters he had received from his students, who were required to apply in this way for the position of teaching assistant. No student whose letter was thus read (anonymously, of course) and dissected ever forgot the vivid thumbnail sketch of his character that Smith provided. The whole procedure would never have passed a university review committee on human subjects, an institution that did not then exist.
The character analyses were all hunch and no science (but of course that is the way the real world works too). I think Smith believed his diagnoses, but that is not the point. What he demonstrated to the students, unforgettably, is how we reveal ourselves to others, intentionally or not, accurately or not, by our written and oral words.
As befitted one who followed James and Dewey and ignored Freud, Smith’s course provided a highly rationalistic view of human relations based primarily on learning theory. His central aim was to show students how to manage their own learning, of human relations skills or any others, and to set their own goals for learning. Fundamentally, he was a teacher of skills, not of knowledge—believing in the latter only as it contributed to the former. It was more important that the students understand a few basic psychological principles and apply them than that they be sophisticated in academic psychology.
Hence the course was built around a simple, but sound, catechism of learning theory combined with exercises for applying the catechism. Learning requires knowledge of results (reinforcement). The student learns from doing, and only from doing. (The teacher is relevant only in influencing the behavior of the student.) There were other principles relating to problem-solving skills and human relations skills, but these will give the flavor. The entire catechism was handed out to the students at the beginning of the semester on a couple of mimeographed sheets, expressed in a highly esoteric ideographic code that Smith had developed—I guess as a mnemonic device. Woe to the student who did not learn to use this encrypted language accurately.
At Yale, Smith had met Robert Doherty, electrical engineer and dean of engineering, who, upon becoming president of Carnegie Tech, brought Smith there as provost. Hence, Elliott’s full stage, ranging over all of Carnegie Tech, was much larger than the one on which he acted with his management students.
A tall, lean man of enormous energy and speed of stride and speech, Smith was always full of ideas, some new, some old, which he supported passionately as long as he held them. He was not a stubborn man, but, as with most of us, his changes in mind usually took place between conversations rather than during them. Placed in authority, his vigor and activism were often a source of terror to his subordinates. (Some referred to him privately as “El Toro.”) When one had been overwhelmed by his stream of arguments (it wasn’t enough for him to order, he felt impelled to convince) and had agreed to do something that was wholly unreasonable, one would hope that Smith would forget what had been promised. And the hope was often (not always) realized.
Once when I was auditing his class (for a time he hoped I would understudy him, but ultimately let me go my own way), he made a particularly sweeping statement, then turned to me and asked, “Isn’t that so, Professor Simon?” My father had carefully taught me, “Never sign in the presence of the salesman,” and I had learned that valuable lesson well, to the point of reflexive response. Recovering from my momentary shock, I quickly replied, “On the whole, it seems reasonable.” Smith turned to the class and, his voice dripping with sarcasm, said, “Professor Simon says on the whole it seems reasonable. I tell you it’s so.”
As head of the Industrial Management Department, I had occasion to confer with Provost Smith frequently. Finding myself often unable to meet his arguments in “real time,” I soon devised a defensive stratagem: I always brought along another colleague when I was summoned to the provost’s office. It was the task of the colleague to wave a distracting conversational red flag at Smith when he saw that I was at the point of agreeing to something I ought not accept. That made life simpler for all of us.
I have painted Elliott Smith as a character, one who was rather difficult to live with. But he was difficult mainly because he expected you to think deeply and well about education, to justify your views on first principles, and to carry them into well-designed practice. Moreover, the first principles on which he himself operated, however idiosyncratically expressed, were almost all quite sound. Hence he had an enormous and lasting positive impact on education at Carnegie Tech and ultimately, by imitation and borrowing, at many other institutions. Those of us who had any considerable contact with him regard him as a major influence on our own educational thoughts and ways, and find ourselves frequently quoting and plagiarizing him, nearly forty years later.
From observing Elliott Smith I learned that being a decent person is terribly important, but being a “nice guy” is not important at all. Elliott Smith never attained high office. He was passed over for the presidency of Carnegie Tech when Bob Doherty retired, and he never achieved the influence with Doherty’s successor, Jake Warner (who placed more emphasis on research than teaching), that he had with Doherty. He retired with some feelings of bitterness and failure—the latter, I think, quite unjustified. He would probably have made a terrible chief executive for any organization, but he was much more influential, by virtue of ideas, not position, than are most chief executives. I suppose my own reluctance to go the managerial route was partly influenced by my observation of Elliott Smith’s career, and by comparison of my human relations skills with his.
THE NEW MODEL BUSINESS SCHOOL
Having weathered its first crisis, and holding to its social science emphasis, GSIA quickly gained national visibility as the new model for a business school. European universities, moving cautiously into business education for the first time, generally found the scientism of GSIA a more comfortable model than the unfamiliar case method of the Harvard Business School. Two national studies of business education (whose directors came from liberal arts backgrounds and were extremely skeptical of business education in general) picked GSIA as the example for other business schools to imitate (R. A. Gordon and J. E. Howell 1959; F. C. Pierson et al. 1959).
Within about five years, GSIA came to be regarded as one of the two or three best business schools in the nation. To avoid constraining our ability to innovate, we did not seek national accreditation until our reputation was so well established that the accrediting body could not put pressure on us to conform to conventional ideas.
The status of the school at the end of 1957 can be illustrated by the supremely arrogant letter I wrote to Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton of the University of Chicago on December 26, 1957, and his remarkably gracious reply of January 6:
Dear Chancellor Kimpton:
Certain passages in your recent message to alumni were reminiscent of the contempt for extra-Chicago academia that was so often exhibited in Bob Hutchins’ utterances. The particular barb that stung most sharply, of course, was the reference to business schools. That the business schools need reform is no secret. But your comment about “even the best” suggests that Allen Wallis hasn’t informed you very fully about what has been done over the past decade in the Graduate School here at Carnegie, more recently at MIT, UCLA, and to varying degrees at other institutions. In fact, even the Harvard Business School, whose conception of reform would differ considerably from ours, has been moving at least as rapidly as Chicago toward bringing itself into closer relation with fundamental work in the behavioral sciences and economics.
When you announce that the Business School at Chicago is henceforth going to stress quality, fundamental social science research, and a quantitative approach to business problems I guess I do not really expect you to append a footnote acknowledgment to Carnegie as the origin of this conception. However, if you or Allen would like a concrete picture of what your school will look like when such goals are realized, we will be most pleased to welcome you to our campus. Sometimes, in our immodesty, we think that we have done for business education here what MIT did for engineering—if it was MIT that did it.
But if there is disappointment in the fact that a fine new invention has been anticipated, perhaps there is consolation in the fact that most of those responsible for the anticipation were products of the Chicago of Bob Hutchins—including Lee Bach, Bill Cooper, Jack Coleman, Harold Guetzkow, and me. Perhaps it was because we acquired at Chicago some of the same brashness that I complain of in Hutchins that we felt as free as we did to flout tradition.
With best wishes to you and Allen in bringing the Business School at Chicago into partnership with the effort to make this stem of university education as fundamental and vital as the best of the other professional schools, I am
Sincerely yours,
Herbert A. Simon
Professor of Administration
Dear Professor Simon:
I appreciate your letter of December 26, 1957. Occasionally I let my prose run away with me, and I certainly did on my statement on business schools. I have an enormous admiration for what you and your colleagues have done at Carnegie Institute of Technology. Since we have spent a lot of time in the last few years trying to hire you and Lee Bach, and a number of other people from your Business School, I think our actions prove how false my flippant words are.
I appreciate your good wishes on the development of our Business School. Allen is doing a superb job, and I should confess to you that I told Jake Warner [President of CIT] the other day if only our Business School could begin to rival yours in quality, I would feel that we had made a great success. Please forgive me.
Very sincerely yours,
Lawrence A. Kimpton
The Ford Foundation, seeking to improve business education, used its golden carrots to push and pull other business schools toward the road GSIA had pioneered. GSIA faculty staffed a number of summer schools that the Foundation financed for business school faculty who wanted to learn about the new methods. GSIA students regularly won the Foundation’s annual awards for the best business school dissertations and its graduate fellowships. The Foundation also funded some of our research (though never on the scale we thought we deserved for our services to it). Many of our doctoral alumni soon became deans of other business schools.
THE SETTING AND THE CULTURE
Since I never met Henry Hornbostel, the architect of the Carnegie Institute of Technology campus and first head of the Architecture Department, this tale is not about the man but about his buildings. But, having lived in and around his buildings for forty years, perhaps I also know the man. I do not know whether, in building the campus, beginning in 1904, he stayed within budget—fortunately the bills were paid generations before my time. What I do know is that he was a man of great imagination and that my gradual awareness of the beauty of the campus buildings has been a source of substantial pleasure to me during my sojourn here.
When I first saw the CIT buildings, they seemed quaint, with their Beaux Arts symmetry and decorative detail. In spite of my experiences with Mies von der Rohe’s department at Illinois Tech, I was rather addicted to the Bauhaus and the International styles. Hornbostel was a disciple of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, or more accurately, of the fifteenth-century Leon Battista Alberti. The campus was laid out in a large open quadrangle, its long axis running east to west along the boundary with Schenley Park and having a distinct downward slope of about four degrees.
The east (upper) end was bounded by the Fine Arts Building, an Italian palazzo, Hornbostel’s jewel, the floors inlaid with mosaics showing the floor plans of celebrated buildings, and the facade that faces the quad decorated with a series of empty niches intended—until the budget ran out—to be filled with sculpture. The west (lower) end was bounded by Hammerschlag Hall, an engineering building that was also the power plant. The tall chimney was encased in a splendid cylindrical Italianate campanile, so that I always thought of the building, especially in winter when smoke and steam billowed from the campanile, as the Samovar. It is exquisitely proportioned, the facade, facing the quad, showing a strong resemblance to the facade of San’Andrea di Mantova, one of Alberti’s masterpieces.
On the south, or Schenley Park, side of the quad are Baker and Porter Halls, the one joined to the other by a 500-foot central corridor. Since the axis of these buildings slopes, the buildings have to slope, so that the corridor has a grade of several degrees, making roller skating from east to west a great sport. You can get a good idea of the first-floor corridor, viewed from the east portal, from Vincent van Gogh’s well-known painting of the interior of his insane asylum, Saint-Paul Hospital at Saint-Rémy. Near the east entrance of Baker Hall is a beautiful, tiled circular staircase.
Of course the floors in Baker Hall don’t slope (although you have to remember to step down when you enter my office from the adjoining secretary’s office). Planarity is achieved by locating most of the space in wings that lie at right angles to the main corridor. The arched openings to these wings, as indeed all the doorways, are banded with thick strips of black iron, a constant reminder of the economic base for Pittsburgh and Andrew Carnegie. The exteriors of all the buildings and the interior corridors are lined with yellow brick. Originally, the roofs were of red tile, but we had to install a less costly material when they were replaced a few years ago.
There is much more I could say about these original campus buildings, but perhaps I have conveyed a sufficient idea of them. If my description sounds quirky, even irreverent, it conveys correctly the first impression the campus has on most people. Seeing the buildings constantly, living in them, one slowly learns that they are masterpieces. Perhaps the recent architectural fad that erected Palladian structures with their round-arched windows in every city in the land helps in the instruction. But I had discovered that they were masterpieces before then.
One of the University of Chicago Aristotelians, whose name, I think, was Nils Fuqua, had a habit, whenever some aesthetic heresy was uttered in his presence, of saying, “Hear more Mozart!” So I say, “See more Hornbostel!” You don’t even need to come to Pittsburgh. He designed the Oakland, California, City Hall (which unfortunately is to be demolished after being damaged by the 1989 earthquake), and the architectural treatment for the Hell’s Gate Bridge, the large arched railway bridge that is visible on your right as you cross the Triborough on your way to Manhattan from La Guardia Airport. Come to think of it, it was a picture of that bridge in an atlas I owned as a child that first entranced me with the beauty of Hornbostel’s style.
My description of GSIA and its programs, and particularly my account of its early administrative crisis, may well astonish—even shock—readers whose experience of academe began during or after the troubles of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War period, or whose academic lives have not brought them in contact with institutes of technology. In the United States, institutes of technology, including the engineering and agricultural schools of the land grant colleges, have had rather different traditions from the liberal arts colleges, and even from the nonprofessional divisions of research universities.
The liberal arts tradition (if not always the practice) is one of extreme decentralization. In its limiting form, a faculty is a collection of individuals, each expert in his or her own field and each possessing an autonomy called academic freedom. To be sure, collective decisions have to be made—new faculty selected, students evaluated for admission, curricula formulated, and so on—and most of them are made with broad faculty participation.
For administrative convenience, the faculty is organized in departments along disciplinary lines (that is, members of a department generally hold their degrees in the same discipline, have had very similar training), and the chairman of the department is primus inter pares, most often elected by the members of the department. While curricula are determined by group processes, as they must be, individual faculty members organize and conduct their classes as they see fit, with a minimum of coordination with other classes.
In universities and colleges where research is part of the role of faculty, the researcher chooses his or her own topics. Senior researchers in major research universities are often, and quite correctly, described as feudal barons, whose academic freedom consists in the right to run their baronies without much interference from higher authority. Usually they acquire that independence by their entrepreneurial activities in raising most of their own research funds, and they are delegated broad authority to manage their research teams.
Of course, what I have described are ideal types. Few colleges operate precisely in this fashion. Presidents in small colleges, and deans and department heads in larger ones, have more than one vote—sometimes the only vote—in personnel and salary decisions. In universities, large introductory courses are sometimes taught by teams, who have to coordinate their plans and efforts. My earlier description of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science under Charles Merriam makes clear that it was less than a pure democracy.
At the time I came to Carnegie, institutes of technology lived much closer to traditions that came out of industrial practice. The administrative hierarchy was clearly defined, and deans and department heads, usually appointed from above after a modicum of consultation with their subordinates, had real authority. It was not unthinkable for research areas to be defined by a department for its members, or for faculty members to be urged or persuaded to aim their efforts in particular directions.
Carnegie Tech, and GSIA within it, clearly belonged to the tradition of institutes of technology, not the liberal arts tradition. Those of us who had responsibility for leadership in GSIA had no doubts or qualms about our duty (right?) to define research and teaching goals for the school. The research memoranda of 1950 and 1952, to which I have referred, are examples of the way we went about discharging that duty. The research directions we outlined were also much in our minds when we recruited faculty. We were looking for able teachers and researchers who would find these kinds of missions challenging; we were not expecting them to define their missions wholly independently.
This perception of the world was congenial enough to most of the faculty members recruited on the industrial management side of our roster. Our environment and assumptions were not noticeably different from those of other business and engineering schools. It was far less congenial to faculty members recruited from psychology and economics, disciplines that usually reside in the liberal arts colleges of their universities and that do not often gain access to the large-scale research funding that produces baronies. So part of what we were seeing, in the tension within GSIA, was a conflict between two academic cultures that had different definitions of the academic role and of academic freedom.
That Lee Bach, Bill Cooper, and I came out of the liberal arts culture (the same University of Chicago in all three cases, in fact) but accepted the premises of the other culture requires explanation I do not feel fully able to provide. The fact that we were the leaders no doubt made us more willing to define the leadership role broadly. The fact that we had substantial funds for research from both internal and external sources required us to manage the activities that used those funds.
As a consequence, neither teaching nor research were areas of full faculty autonomy. The organization had more than a little concern and involvement with the content of both. We frequently drew conclusions about the particular talents of young faculty members, and advised them to move in one direction rather than another. Merton Miller, for example, who has had a very distinguished career in the economics of finance, had no initial intention of going into that field. When we convinced him that the area was underpopulated and that his abilities might shine there even more brightly than elsewhere, he prepared himself with great effectiveness to move in that direction. Such advice is not unknown in the world of liberal arts colleges or research universities; it simply was more common in our environment.
I hope that a note of apology has not crept into my voice as I describe these administrative arrangements. They have always seemed to me good for a university, enabling it to pursue goals vigorously, to innovate, even to change the world in modest ways. In such a university, I find the roles of both follower and leader generally comfortable, although I must confess that I have had more experience with leading than with following.
Academe had changed in some fundamental ways since World War II. One change has been toward gradual grass-roots democratization even of those schools that descended from the tradition of institutes of technology and professional schools. The democratization was greatly accelerated by the student Troubles of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Today, in most universities of even modest distinction, a dean cannot be appointed without strong support from the faculty of the college, nor a department head without departmental consensus. Even in the case of the university president, the views of the faculty—especially if it unites behind a candidate—are likely to be as important as the views of the Board of Trustees, at least important enough to impose a veto on an undesired candidate. The last time a president of Carnegie was appointed from above with minimal faculty participation was in 1965.
It is harder today to bring about real innovations in a university than it was before the democratization took place. I regret that, and think the price of organizational democracy has been high. Moreover, I do not believe that this kind of democracy within organizations has any connection with, or relevance for, democracy in the society at large. But that topic is beyond my purposes here.
Note
*William Larimer Mellon was a grandson of the banker Thomas Mellon, who had established the Mellon fortune at the time of the Civil War. He was a nephew of Andrew Mellon and a cousin of Richard King Mellon, who in turn was the central figure in the Mellon barony when I reached Pittsburgh and the partner, with Mayor Dave Lawrence, in bringing about the Pittsburgh Renaissance.