Creating a University Environment for Cognitive Science and A.I.
UPON my return to the Graduate School of Industrial Administration after my 1960–61 leave of absence at the RAND Corporation, Lee Bach informed me that, for reasons of health, he was going to resign the deanship. That was very unpleasant news; it was hard to think of GSIA operating under another dean. The national and international success of the school had been so spectacular that Lee’s successor would be fortunate to hold the ground gained. It would be like becoming the heir of a Roman emperor who had just made a large addition to the empire.
I was the obvious heir, but the excitement of my cognitive science research combined with my previous administrative experience, including the year as acting dean, had convinced me that I did not want to spend my days in deanly duties. Meanwhile, Dick Cyert, now about forty-one, had been exerting a good deal of leadership within the school. For several years he had been head of the undergraduate Industrial Management Department—the job I held when I came to Carnegie Tech—and he had formed a group of the younger faculty to build an innovative management game for use in the Master of Science curriculum. He and Jim March were finishing their book, The Behavioral Theory of the Firm (1963), and he had other good research to his credit.
Bill Cooper soon started a faculty drive in support of Dick’s candidacy. Lee Bach was somewhat negative, believing that we should look for an outside candidate; Dick just didn’t seem distinguished enough for the deanship of a school of GSIA’s prominence. But faculty support for Dick built up rapidly.
I had generally positive views toward Dick, and had been the principal mover in appointing him as department head. I had only one reservation: He seemed to enjoy power too much, a worrisome trait in a leader. (Leaders should exercise power, but enjoying it is another, and more dangerous, matter.) After a long and frank conversation with Dick, I retained my concern about his attitude toward power, but was persuaded that he also had a strong attachment to the goals of GSIA—the power would be used responsibly, not just to advance his career. I also concluded that since he now understood my concerns, we could get along well—and we did.
MIGRATION FROM GSIA
Dick was appointed dean in 1962, serving in that position until he became president of the university in 1972. I had (and have) serious reservations about the direction in which GSIA moved during this decade, but many factors were involved besides the actions of the dean. His most serious shortcoming was that he was bedazzled with mathematics and formal methods. As a result, senior faculty tolerance for nonquantitative research decreased, as well as for empirical work not based on formal theory. Notwithstanding Dick’s previous involvement with the behavioral theory of the firm, this research was one of the first victims of the new bias. The mathematically inclined faculty we were recruiting had little taste or talent for empirical research that did not start (and sometimes end) with formal model building.
Over time, a coalition of neoclassical economists and operations research specialists came to dominate the GSIA senior policy committee, making decisions that produced a growing imbalance in the composition of the faculty. Although I had never thought I lacked sympathy with mathematical approaches to the social sciences, I soon found myself frequently in a minority position when I took stands against what I regarded as excessive formalism and shallow mathematical pyrotechnics. The situation became worse as a strict neoclassical orthodoxy began to gain ascendancy among the economists. It began, oddly enough, with Jack Muth.
Jack, as a graduate student, had been a valuable member of the Holt-Modigliani-Muth-Simon (HMMS) team in the dynamic programming research. He was (and is) very bright, and an excellent applied mathematician. In our project, he investigated techniques for predicting future sales and, generally, for dealing with uncertainty. Shortly after completing his dissertation, which was related to the project, Jack published in Econometrica in 1961 a novel suggestion for handling uncertainty in economics. He clearly deserves a Nobel for it, even though I do not think it describes the real world correctly. Sometimes an idea that is not literally correct can have great scientific importance. To economists his idea is known today as “rational expectations.” I will explain it here only roughly; a detailed account would take us deep into technical matters that are irrelevant to the story.
The theory of rational expectations offered a direct challenge to theories of bounded rationality, for it assumed a rationality in economic actors beyond any limits that had previously been considered even in neoclassical theory. The name of the theory reveals its general idea: It claims that people’s rationality extends even to their expectations about an uncertain future, such expectations being derived, in fact, from a valid model of the economy, shared by all decision makers.
Jack’s proposal was at first not much noticed by the economics profession, but a decade later it caught the attention of a new young assistant professor at GSIA, Robert Lucas, who had just completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago.*1 Beginning in 1971, Lucas and Tom Sargent, who was also with us for a short time, brought the theory of rational expectations into national and international prominence. It is not without irony that bounded rationality and rational expectations, two of the major proposals after Keynes for the revision of economic theory (game theory is a third), though entirely antithetical to each other, were engendered in and flourished in the same small business school at almost the same time.
Not only did they flourish, but they were represented, along with Keynesian theory, in a four-man team that worked closely and amicably together for several years on a joint research project. The HMMS research team harbored simultaneously two Keynesians (Modigliani and Holt), the prophet of bounded rationality (Simon), and the inventor of rational expectations (Muth)—the previous orthodoxy, a heresy, and a new orthodoxy.
The rational expectationists, and the neoclassical mathematical economists generally, gradually made GSIA less and less congenial to me. To oppose the trend and secure more tolerance for other points of view, I would have had to devote most of my time to the politics of GSIA, which was not where my interests then lay. It is not clear whether I would have won the struggle had I undertaken it.
Amid these controversies, I slowly retreated from GSIA, beginning shortly after Dick Cyert became dean, although I have worked hard (and relatively successfully) to make sure that there is room elsewhere on the campus for economists of other persuasions—in the School of Urban and Public Affairs and, subsequently, in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences within the College of Humanities and Social Science. Eventually, around 1970, I moved my office to the Psychology Department, but continued to participate in GSIA policy meetings and retained the position of associate dean—“without portfolio,” I was fond of saying. Actually, to say that I retreated from GSIA is only partly correct; I was also drawn to the Psychology Department and the burgeoning new activity around the computer by the shift in my own research interests.*2
POLITICS ON THE CAMPUS
Throughout my career, I have devoted much time to the politics of science, both inside Illinois Tech and Carnegie Mellon and at the national level. Perhaps this is a good place to explain how Carnegie Institute of Technology became Carnegie Mellon University, because this happened in 1967, between the time when Dick Cyert became dean of GSIA and when he assumed the presidency of the university. In 1967, during the presidency of Guyford Stever, a merger was arranged between CIT and the Mellon Institute, a nonprofit industrial research organization in Pittsburgh that had been endowed by Andrew Mellon. The two institutions, and the names of their major benefactors, were merged.
I do not know whose decision it was for us to become a university. The professionals at the Mellon Institute were scientists, principally chemists, who would have been quite at home in an Institute of Technology. Somehow the merger was seized on as an opportunity to proclaim a broader mission for Carnegie Mellon by dubbing it a university.
Organization theorists will be interested to know that the change in name has not been without consequence. It has supported arguments such as, “We are now a university; universities have Philosophy Departments, therefore CMU ought to have a Philosophy Department.” What’s in a name? A great deal, it would appear.
Campus politics and administration need to be guided by two goals: excellence and innovation. Money does not guarantee excellence. Although university salaries and faculty quality are correlated, the correlation is far from perfect. Insisting on excellence—on the university’s getting what it pays for, and more if possible—at the time of critical personnel decisions (hiring, reappointment, promotion, tenure) can turn a mediocre faculty into a first-rate one.
When making tenure decisions, members of a faculty are inclined to sacrifice quality to humaneness, particularly when close associates and friends are being judged. Acting humanely is an admirable human trait, but it is easy to misconstrue what is at issue. A faculty tenure committee is not determining how many people will be employed in the society, but which people will be employed in a particular university. Retaining a faculty member who is less able than others who could be recruited is as inhumane to the (possibly unknown) replacement as it may be humane to the incumbent. Faculty members who are denied tenure don’t go on the breadline. They move to other universities or other occupations. Universities achieve high quality when they keep these facts in view.
Innovating means not simply generating ideas but disseminating them. Ideas can be disseminated by talking and writing, and the dissemination can be greatly facilitated by building institutional homes for them. At Carnegie, we have had considerable success in generating new ideas, in creating organizations to nurture them, and in propagating them through the wider educational and scientific communities. The first innovative activity I was involved in at Carnegie was founding GSIA; that organization and its worldwide influence on business education has already been described. The second was building a psychology department that has been an international leader in developing and diffusing computer simulation and information-processing psychology. The third one was introducing computers at Carnegie Tech and building there one of the world’s earliest and leading computer science departments.
A fourth effort at innovation, still developing, is reconstructing design as a scientific activity and reintroducing design into the engineering curriculum. A fifth is strengthening effective education at Carnegie, by emphasizing problem solving and the blending of liberal with professional values and approaches. The institution building associated with these innovations has largely occupied the part of my life that has been devoted to university policies and politics.
This activity is not at all separate from the main stream of my research, for the Carnegie campus provided the intellectual environment where innovative ideas could be developed and then communicated to the rest of the world. Behavioral theories of economics, bounded rationality among them, gained their visibility through the joint activities of our research group in GSIA during the 1950s. The Psychology Department provided the platform for launching the cognitive revolution in psychology. A sequence of organizations, culminating in the Computer Science Department, provided the corresponding platform for artificial intelligence.
The new research on cognitive psychology that was described in chapters 13 and 14 was launched from GSIA in 1956. Within a year, Lee Gregg in the Psychology Department began to take part, but no other interest was shown by that department. Lee, seeing the promise of the new approach, moved rapidly to it from the behaviorist empiricism of traditional experimental psychology in which he had been trained at the University of Wisconsin.
GSIA had had connections with psychology, in social and organizational psychology, and Harold Guetzkow had a joint appointment in GSIA and the Psychology Department. Because I was a Fellow of the Division of Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association (on the strength of my research on organizations), I also had at least minimal legitimacy in psychology. I began to propagandize for more participation of the Psychology Department in the cognitive revolution we had started.
Some GSIA funds were used to hire young experimental psychologists whom we thought might be seduced in the new directions, but that plan was not very successful. The traditions of the discipline and concerns about a successful career in psychology were too strong to allow untenured psychology faculty to join the revolt. By the time I went to RAND on my sabbatical, in 1960, I was beginning to doubt that we could accomplish the revolution from the foreign territory of GSIA, without a firm base also in the Psychology Department. I resolved to do something about it when I returned to Pittsburgh.
As I assessed the situation in the autumn of 1961, there had been little progress, and Haller Gilmer, chairman of the Psychology Department, unpersuaded by my particular vision of the future, was unwilling to promise there would be more. I decided to use some of my brownie points with the administration to bring about a rapid change. My method was abrupt, justified in my mind by the importance I attached to the goal. The depths of my convictions on matters important to me had not gone unnoticed by my colleagues. In his autobiography, Leland Hazard, the retired general counsel of Pittsburgh Plate Glass who taught very effectively in GSIA for many years, mentions an incident that occurred in 1960:
At the time of the School’s [GSIA’s] tenth anniversary we held a symposium called, “Management and the Corporation, 1980.” There were a dozen participants of national and international prominence. Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson) was seated next to me and Herb Simon was across the semicircle. “He has the face of a fanatic,” Barbara Ward said to me. Before I could reply the television lights came on. [Hazard 1982, p. 29.]
Whatever my face may reveal (it isn’t a poker face), I do act with coldness and calculation when important goals are at stake, even with a certain disrespect for the norms of politeness. I suppose that is as good a definition of fanaticism as any. I do not enjoy hurting people, but I do not always act to optimize human relations. When it looks like the effective thing to do, I can lose my temper, or appear to.*3
In the case of psychology, I thought a great deal was at stake, and after a tense luncheon session with Haller (I did the shouting; he was calm), I wrote him the following memorandum summarizing our conversation:
November 2, 1961
Dear Haller:
I have given further thought to my course of action on the matters we discussed yesterday. I shall presently talk to President Warner, preferably after a new Dean has been found for GSIA, as follows:
1. I can fruitfully carry on my work at Carnegie only if there is on campus a strong graduate psychology program with emphasis on the area of cognition and simulation of cognitive processes. Since the local resources—financial and environmental—cannot be expected to support a very general graduate psychology program of the first quality, this implies more specialization and focus in the department than now prevails. Apart from my own personal requirements, a specialized program of this sort is the only kind that makes sense on this campus in relation to the activities of GSIA and the new program on systems and communications sciences [computer science].
2. While we have made some progress in this direction in the past five years, we have made it only because GSIA was willing to supply the financial resources, and there is little evidence that the other resources of the Psychology Department have been oriented toward this goal. I have had the feeling that nothing happened except when I pushed, a feeling further confirmed by lack of movement during the year I was away from the campus.
3. To reach the goal will require vigorous leadership in the Psychology Department from a chairman who is thoroughly sold on the objective. Because of what I perceive as a drift in the department over the past two or three years, and because of your own statements of the limits of what you can do, I no longer have confidence that you will provide that leadership. I do not wish to continue exerting the pressure I have had to exert in the past to keep the department turned in what seems to me the only promising direction for development of its graduate work.
4. The integral relation of the behavioral science programs in Psychology and GSIA needs to be further emphasized by placing formal responsibility for the administration of the graduate programs in GSIA. The psychology graduate program cannot be satisfactorily supervised by the Dean of Graduate Studies in Engineering and Science, and the present semi-formal arrangement is too ambiguous to members of the Psychology Department.
These are not conclusions I have reached hastily, for I have examined these questions many times in the past year. I would have raised them with you earlier this fall had Lee not decided to retire from the Deanship.
Herb
The deanship of Humanities and Social Science, the division in which the Department of Psychology resided, was also vacant, but was filled at just this moment by the appointment of Jack Coleman, an economist from GSIA. Two days after I sent this memo, I also wrote to Jack, indicating my intention to appeal to Carnegie’s president if needed, to bring about the changes in the Psychology Department that I thought were necessary. It closed with “very best wishes for success in your new assignment, and apologies for precipitating your first administrative crisis within the first ten minutes of your welcoming ceremony.”
After I had sent these memoranda, I met with Keck Moyer and Lee Gregg, who were exercising active leadership in the Psychology Department, and reassured them that there would be ample room in the department for firstrate faculty in areas other than my brand of cognitive psychology. Believing that our goals were not in conflict, they agreed to major changes in the department.
Haller had already decided to resign,*4 and we persuaded Bert Green of M.I.T., who was already involved with artificial intelligence, to head the department. During Bert’s five years at Carnegie, he and Al Newell secured a research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health which provided the major support for our cognitive science research during the twenty years during which it was renewed. It was a broad grant that enabled us gradually to build a cohesive group of information-processing psychologists in the department. But even with generous funding the path was not smooth, because it was not at first easy to recruit young psychologists willing and technically competent to take this new route.
In 1965, the department initiated an annual spring symposium in cognition, which continues to the present day. The symposium brought many distinguished visitors to the department, where they could see what was going on and interact with our local talent. The published proceedings also gave growing visibility to our research program, about half the papers being authored by our faculty.
Nevertheless, progress was agonizingly slow as long as our little island was still surrounded by a great national sea of almost pure behaviorism—nearly the same problem that orthodox economics had posed for the behavioral theory of the firm in GSIA. But in this case, the historical trend was on our side and we gradually won out.
Progress was also slowed somewhat by the student Troubles, which I will give an account of in chapter 18. For several years they required much faculty attention, and gave aid and comfort to competing views about the proper role of psychology in the university. The situation was only fully stabilized about 1973, when Lee Gregg took over the chairmanship of the Psychology Department, which he held until his premature death in 1980.
COMPUTER SCIENCE
Establishing a computer science program at Carnegie was much easier than introducing cognitive psychology, because we were simply filling a vacuum rather than pushing against entrenched ideas. Soon after 1956, when the IBM 650 and Alan Perlis arrived on campus, faculty and students in four departments—GSIA, electrical engineering, mathematics, and psychology—began to take a strong interest in computing. About 1961, a steering committee was set up with representatives of these departments, under the rubric of Systems and Communications Sciences (S&CS).
Various members of the S&CS committee were offering, in their respective departments, courses that we would now regard as computer science courses, and because we had worked hard to maintain the permeability of departmental and college boundaries at Carnegie, students from many departments took these courses. The S&CS committee next decided to construct and administer a comprehensive exam at the doctoral level in computer sciences (in S&CS). Any department that wished could incorporate this exam as part of their examinations for the doctorate, and all four departments represented in the committee did so.
Soon, we were awarding degrees that were essentially computer science doctorates in the four departments. The university’s Committee on Graduate Studies learned of this several years after the fact, but by then it was too late to do anything but give it a blessing. In that way, we became one of the first universities in the country—in the world—to train students in computer science at the doctoral level.
By 1965, the desire was widespread to take the next step—to establish a separate Computer Science Department. It was created that year, with Alan Perlis as its first, and extremely effective, chairman. From the beginning, Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T., and Stanford were regarded as having the three leading computer science programs in the nation, a rank we continue to hold.
The Computer Science Department kept close ties with the departments that had formed the S&CS committee, and there have always been joint appointments of faculty among them. At present, four faculty members hold joint appointments in psychology and computer science. Computer science remained in the College of Science until 1987, when it became a separate college.
ENGINEERING DESIGN
One cannot inhabit engineering schools for several decades without acquiring views about engineering education. I formed such views very early during my tenure at Illinois Tech—but probably mainly inherited them from my father. I was even moderately active in the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education (now the American Society for Engineering Education). My initial views were that engineering education needed less vocationalism and more science.
With my experience in GSIA and a wider view of the world, I began to see things a little differently, and began to see, too, the similarities in education for various professions, especially engineering, business, and medicine. Our goal in GSIA was to balance a professional with a scientific orientation.
As I began to understand the trends in the stronger engineering schools, I saw that the same things that were happening to them were happening to the New Model business education: science was replacing professional skills in the curriculum. I looked a little further, and saw the same thing going on in medicine. More and more, business schools were becoming schools of operations research, engineering schools were becoming schools of applied physics and math, and medical schools were becoming schools of biochemistry and molecular biology. Professional skills were disappearing from the curricula, and professionals possessing those skills were disappearing from the faculties.
The distinction between the scientific and the professional is largely a distinction between analysis and synthesis. Professionals not only analyze (understand) situations, they act on them after finding appropriate strategies (synthesis). In business, they design products and marketing channels, organize manufacturing processes, and find new financial instruments; in engineering, they design structures and devices and processes; in medicine, they design and prescribe treatments and perform operations. But analysis had driven synthesis from all these curricula.
This had happened for a good reason. Analysis is at the heart of science; it is rigorous; it can be taught. Synthesis processes are much less systematic; they are generally thought to be judgmental and intuitive, taught as “studio” subjects, at the drawing board or in clinical rounds or through unstructured business cases. They did not fit the general norms of what is properly considered academic. As a result, they were gradually squeezed out of professional schools to enhance respectability in the eyes of academic colleagues.
The discovery of artificial intelligence changed this situation radically. Artificial intelligence programs generally carry out design, or synthesis. Programs were designing electrical motors, generators, and transformers as early as 1956 and, by 1961, selecting investment portfolios. Such computer programs destroyed the mystery of intuition and synthesis, for their processes were completely open to examination. We could now understand, in whatever rigorous detail pleased us, just what a design process was. Understanding it, we could teach it, at the same level of rigor that we taught analysis.
As I gradually came to understand both the dilemma of the professional schools and the solution being offered by A.I., I began to urge that Carnegie Tech restore design and designers (or theorists of design) to its Engineering College. In the early 1960s the message fell on deaf ears. The scientists then in the Engineering College neither understood engineering nor believed it could be taught. They educated engineers by giving them a lot of physics and math, hoping that their students would later be able to design safe bridges or airplanes.
In 1968, I was invited to give the prestigious Karl Taylor Compton Lectures at M.I.T. I titled my lectures “The Sciences of the Artificial,” and devoted one of them to the science of design, setting forth the view I have just sketched and filling it out with a prescription (a design!) for a curriculum in design. The curriculum was motivated by my description, in the preceding lecture, of what our research had taught us about human thought processes, including design processes. There was no immediate seismic response to the lectures, but, in their published form, they began to attract more and more notice, in this country and abroad.
Gradually, Carnegie was able to recruit to the engineering departments a few faculty members who shared this view of design. Gary Powers and Steve Director were among the first. They came together in a Design Research Center, whose activities have burgeoned into a large network of research studies on synthesis processes of many kinds.
The research, in turn, is beginning to reflect back on curriculum, so that Carnegie Mellon is today a recognized leader in restoring professional skills—design skills—to engineering education. Of course, we are not bringing back the drawing board. We are teaching not just an art of design but a science of design. The main vehicle is the study of expert systems and other artificial intelligence systems that do design, thereby revealing its anatomy and physiology.
These developments have afforded me great satisfaction, particularly because, aside from providing the initial propaganda for them, I have not had to be very actively involved in bringing them about. They are now firmly rooted in the soil of the Engineering College and are proceeding under their own momentum. If one must be a reformer, that’s the best kind of reform.
NEW PRESIDENTS FOR OLD
John Christian (Jake) Warner, who had assumed the presidency of Carnegie Tech just after my arrival there, retired from office in 1965. There was little faculty participation in the choice of his successor, and I recall only one meeting on the subject at which I was present. The new president was Guyford Stever, who left in 1972 to become director of the National Science Foundation.
In the 1972 presidential search, coming just a few years after the Student Troubles and the concessions to faculty and student democracy that they had brought about, there was much more active faculty participation, and even the students were brought into the process to a limited extent.
A few months before the 1972 search began, I had been invited by Stanford University to join its Board of Trustees. At that time many boards were co-opting an academic member or two from other campuses. I was both flattered and tempted by the invitation, but finally decided that if I was going to spend substantial time thinking about issues of educational policy in universities, I would prefer doing it for Carnegie, where I might have some influence, rather than for one of our leading competitors.
I was an obvious possibility for the Carnegie presidency. When I told the chairman of the trustee search committee, after a week or so of deliberation, that I would not be a candidate, he invited me to join his committee, which I did. I also told him I had declined a board membership at another university, but that I would not reject an invitation to join the Carnegie Board. After he had consulted his board colleagues, his response was positive, but it was agreed that nothing would be done until a new president had been selected. The announcement of my appointment to the search committee specified that I was serving as an individual, not as a faculty representative.
Dick Cyert was the other obvious inside candidate for the presidency, and by his skillful and assiduous campaigning, he soon gained rather solid faculty support. Although some of the science faculty thought that the president should be a natural scientist, Dick was able to allay their worries. The trustees’ committee was also inclined to look for a scientist or an engineer from outside, but in the end, the faculty committee won over the trustees to their preference for Dick.
I was not soon persuaded to support Dick, because, as I have already said, I was unhappy with the way GSIA was going, and blamed at least part of the problem on Dick’s policies. Finally, I concurred with the others; there were no spectacularly good alternatives. It was no secret to Dick that I had been almost the last to climb on his bandwagon, but he harbored no visible resentment. But I thought it would be unfair for me to accept the board membership that had been promised if he were opposed to, or even mildly uncomfortable with, the idea. On the contrary, he responded positively. The invitation was extended, and I accepted.
It was of course anomalous for me to be simultaneously a tenured faculty member of the university and a member of its Board of Trustees—and not as a representative of the faculty. If it made anyone uncomfortable, I never knew about it. I have always tried to remember, at any given moment, which hat I was wearing, and not to wear them both at once. For a number of years I avoided committees of the board that dealt with internal academic affairs, devoting most of my effort to the Finance Committee and its subcommittee on investments. During these years, the university changed completely its way of handling its endowment, gradually entrusting it to a small set of money managers. An enormous amount of time went into fashioning the new arrangements and selecting the managers. Later, I served also on the Audit Committee.
My membership on the board was useful in two other ways. First, it enabled me, from time to time, to interpret the university to fellow trustees. Few members of the Carnegie Board were very close to the university, and the knowledge that many of them had of it was based largely on memories of undergraduate student days (at Carnegie or elsewhere). On appropriate occasions, I could remind them of other important aspects of the university’s operations. I could even remind them that one-third to one-half of the university’s revenues were raised by the entrepreneurial activities of the faculty—far more than was coming in from gifts and endowment income. They needed to have a realistic understanding of what a research university is like, for that was more and more what Carnegie was becoming.
Second, my board membership enabled me to maintain an open relation with Dick Cyert. We fell into the custom of meeting periodically at breakfast, our conversations roaming over the whole range of university affairs. This relation was tenable only if I could avoid strong advocacy of my own hobbies and the university activities with which I was most closely associated. I did not want to become an influence broker. As long as I looked at the whole of Carnegie first, and its parts second, I could be useful. I think I have usually been able to do this, but I would be surprised if there have not been some lapses.
All of this was possible because Dick Cyert was a strong president. No one could imagine that he was an easy target of persuasion, nor did he and I always agree on policies. So we remained close friends over the eighteen years of his presidency. And there have been no doubts on campus about who was in charge.
Since a major reason I did not seek the presidency myself was to reserve time for my research, I involved myself only selectively in university administrative affairs, which have accounted for only a small part of my work week. The university went along very well under Dick’s direction without my intervention. Dick did not feel obliged to keep me especially informed—any more than any other trustee—about what was going on, except on matters he wanted to discuss with me.
On the other hand, I am not so naïve as to suggest that my faculty colleagues, much less the deans, were unaware of my dual role. I am sure that I was often treated more tenderly than I otherwise would have been, that I was kept better informed, that my views and agreement on proposed policies were sought. Sometimes I was used as a channel to bring problems to Dick’s attention. I recognized that I had more clout than I would have had without board membership, but I tried to use it responsibly and without adding more confusion to the organization structure than was already there. (Carnegie has never had a neat organization chart, and Dick has never restricted his contacts to “channels.”)
Finally, it is impossible to unconfound the influence I enjoyed by virtue of being a trustee from the growing influence I derived from my national and international scientific reputation. There are many ways in which sacred cows become sacred.
WHY I AM NOT A COLLEGE PRESIDENT
In 1961 I was the obvious successor to Lee Bach in the deanship of GSIA, and from there the presidency would not have been a very long step. I made two specific career choices in favor of research over administration. These were among the half dozen most important occasions in my life when I had to opt for the left or the right path of the branching maze. I declined to be considered for the deanship of GSIA when Lee resigned (I would nearly certainly have been appointed); and I declined to be considered for the university presidency when Guy Stever resigned eleven years later.
Although I now imagine that I always wanted a research career, the documentary evidence does not bear this memory out. While I was a high school student, I thought I had a serious interest in the law (fed by Uncle Harold and my debating experience?). I took a vocational interest test, and when I scored nearly off the scale on introversion, the counselor allowed as how law might not be my vocation. Whether the test judged me correctly is an interesting question. I do find it difficult to take the initiative in cultivating other people.
The vocational interest test by no means decided matters. As late as 1942, I weighed the prospects of a career in the civil service, and even had thoughts of a political career. The latter I ruled out because (1) I was not a veteran, and (2) I was Jewish. Even though, as I explained earlier, I sometimes enjoy an underdog role, those two strikes against me in politics were too much. No attractive civil service opportunity presented itself before I was caught up in my academic career.
Why did I, after many years of administrative responsibility (directing the measurement research project at Berkeley, chairing departments at Illinois Tech and Carnegie Tech, and serving as associate dean of GSIA) decide not to stand for the deanship? A year as acting dean, while not quite the same thing, convinced me that it was not what I wanted. It was too disciplined a life; there would be no opportunity to pursue intriguing ideas that presented themselves; I felt a distaste for getting my satisfactions mainly from stimulating the contributions of others and needing to cultivate people to get their cooperation or their money, and especially to initiate such contacts. Perhaps the vocational interest test had been right. After weighing the possibility seriously, I decided I did not want to be a candidate.
The decision on the presidency was easier, both because success was less certain and because I could simply re-evoke the feelings of the previous decision. Success was less certain because Dick Cyert then had ten years of deanly experience that I had rejected, and because my sharp tongue and fierce infighting in behalf of cognitive psychology and A.I. had made me less than beloved by parts of the faculty.
However that may be, I did not seriously consider taking on the contest. I equivocated only long enough to assure myself a strong position in the university’s decision processes. I have never regretted the decision, especially in view of Dick’s stellar performance on the job, a performance made possible by a “deviousness” that our colleague Leland Hazard admiringly attributed to him, and that I surely did not possess.
Perhaps I had cast the die even earlier. When I was first listed in Who’s Who, at about the time I came to Pittsburgh, I made sure that my political affiliation (Democratic) and my religion (Unitarian) were placed in the public record. In moving from public administration to business administration, I did not want to be tempted to compromise my liberalism. That overt inflexibility is perhaps not wholly conducive to success in an administrative position that must mediate among half a dozen constituencies, including conservative business ones.
In fact, the close association with the business community that is essential for effective performance as president of a university such as Carnegie Mellon would have been uncomfortable for me. I find it nearly as easy to associate with businesspeople as with academicians, although, since I am not good at small talk and lack an interest in golf or sports, conversation sometimes languishes. But when the talk turns to current affairs and politics, I cannot conceal my liberal views, different from the views held by most businesspeople.
Perhaps the most serious problem I have in hobnobbing with the rich, is that, however attractive their other qualities, intellectual and personal, they are (in my experience) nearly uniformly humorless about money. They believe that it is very important, and they usually behave (I don’t know what goes on inside) as if they possessed it by right and not by the grace of God or fortune. Somehow, Dorothea and I lack a proper respect for wealth, even our own. We both think the income tax is too low.
I once phoned a very wealthy man, with whom I was on warm first-name terms, to ask him to donate a company product worth $400 to scientists in a Third World country. Without a moment’s hesitation he replied, “I’ll split it with you.” I regard this man, whom I like very much, as intelligent, interesting, and possessed of enlightened social views—not as liberal as mine, but far from reactionary. What struck me about his response was its automaticity—a knee-jerk reaction. Even trifling amounts of money were not to be disbursed casually.
In view of my attitudes, should I be embarrassed that GSIA, the school that housed my most important research and educational contributions, was founded by William Larimer Mellon, who built the Gulf Oil Company; that it resides in a university created by the multimillionaire Andrew Carnegie; and that the chair I have held for a quarter of a century was endowed by the very wealthy banker Richard King Mellon? Not at all. Giving money away is often the best thing you can do with it, and I do not object to being its beneficiary for good causes.
LIBERAL-PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION
My adventures in teaching at Illinois Tech illustrate my experimental attitude toward instruction (see chapter 7). I have never confused teaching with delivering orderly lectures (to be assembled into a textbook) “covering” the subject matter. Nor did that confusion exist in the minds of the teachers that President Robert Doherty, Jake Warner’s predecessor, had assembled at Carnegie Tech beginning in 1936. Carnegie had pioneered in two important movements in engineering education: providing a substantial liberal arts component within the engineering curriculum, and shifting emphasis from teaching subject matter to teaching problem-solving skills.
Carnegie Tech was one of the engineering schools that led the way toward allocating about one-quarter of the undergraduate curriculum to nonengineering, nonscience subjects. It also undertook some pioneering steps to make that quarter of the curriculum something more than a hodgepodge of electives.
Carnegie Tech, under President Doherty, also introduced the Carnegie Plan, a statement of its fundamental educational objectives, implemented by courses specifically designed with those objectives in view. A succinct statement of the goals of the Carnegie Plan can be found in Doherty’s paper “Education for Professional Responsibility,” from which I quote:
Three changes in professional education are needed. First, a new philosophy and new outlook which will comprehend the human and social as well as the technical. Second, the development in all professional men of genuine competence in the professional way of thought—a way of thought which embodies an analytical and creative power that is as effective in the human and social realm as that developed in engineering. . . .
Third, the development of the ability to learn from experience so that in the unfolding future they can continue to expand their fundamental knowledge, deepen their understanding, and improve their power as professional men and women and as leading citizens. [Doherty 1948, pp. 76–77]
This can be read as pious sentiment. What made it more was Doherty’s rethinking of the curriculum and teaching methods to subordinate subject matter coverage to instruction in problem-solving skills. In these efforts, he was aided by his provost, Elliott Dunlap Smith, by Dick Teare, who became engineering dean, and by many others.
Doherty retired in 1950, Smith in 1958, and their influence on the university has gradually been diluted—but not wholly forgotten by those of us who were young faculty members during those years: Erwin Steinberg in English, Ted Fenton in History, and Dick Cyert among them. For that reason, faculty sophistication about educational philosophy and practice remains higher at Carnegie Mellon than at most other universities with which I am acquainted.
When I came to Carnegie, the school did not offer degrees in the social sciences and humanities (with the partial exception of Margaret Morrison Carnegie College for Women). History, English, languages, and psychology were “service” departments, and their faculty members, somewhat secondclass citizens. During the Stever administration (1965–72), Margaret Morrison College was combined with the College of Humanities and Social Science, we renamed ourselves a university (upon merging with the Mellon Institute of Research), and we began offering undergraduate degrees in several liberal arts subjects.
I had mixed feelings about these changes, because I had mixed (read negative) feelings about the viability of contemporary liberal arts education, especially in the humanities. Particularly, I was not impressed by the demeaning attitude of these fields toward “vocationalism.” They sometimes seemed to propose uselessness as an essential criterion for proper liberal studies, all the explicit emphasis being on knowledge, not skill.
Of course, practice is another matter. If there is any place in a university where skill is the name of the game, the language departments could perhaps claim it. But language teachers prefer to imagine that learning to read, write, understand, and speak is just an unfortunately necessary preliminary to immersion in literature, history, and culture. In actual fact they spend almost all their time teaching these preliminaries, but that is just one of life’s misfortunes. (English teachers have generally the same problems rationalizing their preoccupation with grammar and spelling.)
As far as Carnegie Mellon was concerned, I thought that the basic philosophy of the Carnegie Plan might be transported into the new social science and humanities curricula under the banner “liberal-professional education,” buttressed by some thoughts about what that phrase might mean in practice. We could have no comparative advantage in the liberal subjects in competition with the Ivy League schools unless we offered something different and arguably better than they did. If we had no comparative advantage, we would not achieve quality; and if we did not achieve quality, we should not be in the business.
But to extend the application of the Carnegie Plan to the liberal arts, people had to be convinced that there was no conflict between “liberal,” properly interpreted, and “professional” properly interpreted. Liberally educated people are skilled people; and the skills of well-educated professional people are infused with liberal values and knowledge. Those of us who were infected with the Carnegie Plan have had considerable, if far from complete, success in promoting the idea of liberal-professional education on our campus, especially in the College of Humanities and Social Science.
The whole story is complex and has not yet reached its denouement. Its essence can be conveyed in the following passages from a talk I gave to the faculty in 1977, which created quite a stir. At that time, Dean Pat Crecine, of the College of Humanities and Social Science, and his Associate Dean, Lee Gregg, were just instituting a core curriculum in the College, with less than 100 percent support of the faculty—although many had been won over. On April 5, I gave a well-attended lecture on the subject of liberal education, aimed at provoking serious discussion of important educational issues on the campus. I think I succeeded. I began with a definition of liberal education that challenged its frequent disparagement of skill and the tension between “liberal” and “professional”:
There is remarkable agreement that liberal education, both etymologically and in every other way, means education for a free man, a free person. Disagreement only begins when you ask what kind of education a person needs in order to become and remain free.
. . . Its charter describes Yale, for example, as a school “wherein youth may be instructed in the arts and sciences who through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for public employment both in Church and civil state.” . . . [From] classical times, to prepare someone to be a free person was to prepare him or her to take a station in society. If that station involved performing as a citizen then it was preparation for citizenship. If that station involved productive work then the free person’s education included training for appropriate employment. [Simon 1977a, pg. 1]
Next I presented an illustrative examination (ten questions) as an operational definition of liberal education, and provided alternative answers to one of the questions. “Notice,” I said, that we’re not simply examining knowledge—whether you have read your Homer and your Virgil. We’re examining skills. To answer the question you have to apply the skills of poetry writing, or the skills of computer programming, or some other skills.”
I suggested that we must draw on the social sciences to design a proper education: first, to understand the motivations of our students; second, to “capture a large part of the out-of-class time for the educational process—perhaps even insinuate in the dinner conversation ne things that are relevant to becoming an educated person.” To do this, the school must appeal differently to students whose motivations are intellectual, to those whose motives are professional, to those whose motives are social, to those who are conventional, and to those “not elsewhere classified.” “The third thing we need from the social sciences . . . is an empirically based theory of knowledge and skills and their mutual relation.”
How can we motivate our students to acquire a liberal education? I argued for a core curriculum, to provide common topics of conversation outside the classroom. Coverage was not important—was, in fact, impossible. The core must be constructed by sampling. It must aim at developing skills as well as knowledge: problem-solving skills, skills of cross-examining experts, and skills of perceiving and appreciating.
Then came the punch line: “A faculty that is not liberally educated can’t provide liberal education. American college faculties, including our own, aren’t liberally educated. . . . How many of the licensees in your own field, if you walk up to them with a question, will say, ‘Oh, I can’t answer that; that isn’t my period’?” I concluded by proposing that the university establish a program of liberal education for the faculty, requiring every CMU faculty member to pass the comprehensive examinations on the common core of that program within the next four years. This, I said, was the way to prepare ourselves to provide liberal-professional education to our students.
As a consequence of my talk, my history colleagues invited me to join a team that was teaching the freshman core course in their subject. Of course I had to accept the invitation (and was quite delighted to do so). The course focused on the French Revolution (examples, not coverage, was the watchword), and included an exercise requiring students to test hypotheses they found in standard works on the Revolution against computerized files (in English) of the Cahiers de Doléances submitted to Versailles by the French provincial assemblies in 1787. Did the Cahiers support the claims of the books or didn’t they? I thus spent an instructive semester teaching and learning history—more learning than teaching. I have not repeated the experience, but mainly from laziness and not because it would not be fun to do it—or something similar in English literature or the French novel—again.
My proposed school for teachers has not yet been established at Carnegie Mellon. But I am patient, and realize that social reform cannot be accomplished in an instant.
In looking back on my talk, I find myself speculating on the origins of my educational views. The strong belief in liberal-professional education undoubtedly derives from my experiences in engineering schools, both Illinois Tech and Carnegie Tech, combined with a view that the humanities, in their traditional forms, have had an exaggerated role in liberal education. I have never reconciled myself with the view that professional education need be narrowly vocational, or that skill is a dirty word. Nor do I believe that the contemporary humanities have demonstrated a special competence to interpret the human condition.
The importance I attach to the university as a social system and to a core curriculum for enriching the educational experience undoubtedly stems from my experiences in the College at the University of Chicago, with its enlightening survey courses addressing every domain of knowledge. Since this was not yet the Chicago of Hutchins’s and Adler’s Great Books, I did not become committed to a specific canon. Such a commitment would make the idea of sampling unacceptable, hence would make a core unworkable.
And although it peeks through only a little into this talk, my view that the social sciences (and especially cognitive science) have an essential contribution to make to university education stems directly from my research in recent years on learning and problem-solving processes. Contemporary cognitive science provides knowledge that is vital for the improvement of educational processes. It also reveals the commonality of human thought processes across the most diverse fields, giving us reason to believe that effective communication can be established and maintained among the many specialized cultures that make up professional, intellectual, and artistic society today.
Notes
*1. The Cowles Commission had migrated from Chicago to Yale, and the Economics Department at Chicago, under the influence of Milton Friedman, had become ultra-orthodox in its adherence to the neoclassical faith, and completely intolerant of alternative religions. Bob Lucas was a product of the new Chicago School.
*2. The defeat of bounded rationality and organization theory in GSIA was still a real blow to me. I have always liked the quote from General Stilwell, who, when driven with his troops from Burma, pushed aside excuses with, “I say we took a hell of a beating.”
*3. Very likely, the kind of calculated anger I sometimes exhibit is less forgivable than the spontaneous, uncontrolled kind. Many years ago, a friend said to me, “The great thing about my mother is that she never struck us except in anger.” I suspect that this is the normal reaction, that loss of temper is a better excuse for aggressive behavior than is calculated severity.
*4. Haller stayed on as a member of the department, and I was very pleased that we could become friends again not too long after these events. Perhaps his recognition that I was riding the zeitgeist took the personal edge off our encounter. After he retired from Carnegie Mellon, at around age seventy, he went on to have a very productive career for a decade at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, helping to develop their programs in industrial psychology and working with other institutions in Virginia as well.