Glenn P. Strehle '58, SM '60

INTERVIEWER: Today is August 25, 2011, and I have the good fortune to be interviewing Glenn Strehle as part of MIT's Infinite History project. Glenn Strehle grew up in Scotia, New York and attended MIT as an undergraduate, receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in management in 1958. He returned to MIT for graduate school and received his Master of Science in management in 1960.

Mr. Strehle joined the Boston investment firm of Colonial Management in 1962, but stayed active at MIT as president of the MIT Club of Boston and vice president of the Alumni Association. In 1975, Strehle returned to MIT as treasurer, a position he held until his retirement in 1999. During his 24 years as treasurer, he led several initiatives that completely changed the management of MIT's endowment funds, life income funds, and retirement plans. He was the architect and motivator of MIT's five-year Campaign for the Future, which concluded in 1992, having surpassed its $550 million fundraising goal by more than $150 million.

In addition to these accomplishments, Strehle is also an internationally recognized expert on educational technology and in 2001 co-founded MIT World, an online video archive of symposia and lectures at MIT. He was also actively involved in the development of University Park in Cambridge. Strehle is now the treasurer emeritus of MIT. Welcome, Glenn, and thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.

STREHLE: Thank you for the introduction, Larry.

INTERVIEWER: Great. Great. Let's start by talking about your early years. Please tell me a bit about your family and growing up in Scotia, New York.

STREHLE: Scotia is a suburb of Schenectady. My father was a middle manager at General Electric, initially in the financial side and then in marketing in his later years. My mother was a registered nurse and she worked part time throughout my years in school. In high school, I didn't go to Scotia schools but went to a local technical education program at the Mt. Pleasant High School, which was a college prep course, and really prepared me well for MIT.

INTERVIEWER: When did you first develop an interest in things technical?

STREHLE: Probably when I was in junior high. And although I wasn't what you'd call a techie, active in the radio club and other things, I did get an amateur radio license and so forth. But it was really in junior high when I started to become more interested in technical things.

INTERVIEWER: Did you pursue a technical education specifically to prepare for MIT?

STREHLE: Well, no. It was really taking advantage of the best education around in the public system. And clearly, Mt. Pleasant had this wonderful program where some of the courses were the same as the engineers at General Electric were taking who were hired to go into the electric turbine business. So the level of coursework was well above what most people get in high school. And as a result, when I came to MIT, I had had some of the material, not only in my early courses but also in the later courses, particularly in physics and in core engineering courses.

INTERVIEWER: When did the idea of coming to MIT first appear on your radar screen?

STREHLE: Probably about a year before I graduated from high school. I was looking at other schools where I could take a course in-- initially, I was interested in being a naval architect, but there aren't many jobs in naval architecture. And I became interested in production management because that's what I saw at GE, these big manufacturing operations, the complexity of them, and the challenges that are associated with that. And MIT had a program which they defined as Industrial Management which, at least on the surface, appeared to be oriented to production engineering.

INTERVIEWER: And you knew that you wanted to go into management even back then?

STREHLE: Well, I'd say going to management, my father told me, because he was, I say, a middle manager. So he had many engineers working for him although he wasn't an engineer. And engineers tended to get slotted into positions and missed many opportunities for upward mobility in the organization unless they showed particular initiative. I think to some extent, that's even true today in many large companies. Certainly he thought it was true of GE then. So he said to me, I got 60 engineers working for me. You don't want to be an engineer. But take engineering, but make sure you get some management courses.

I also note that when I came to MIT, it was 1954. The Korean War had just ended. It wasn't that many years before we were in World War II and before that it was World War I and then the Depression. My mother, who could be a bit of a pessimist, said, well, after you graduate, you're going to go off to war. And maybe you'll come back. And my father said, you better make sure that you've got the education at the undergraduate level that's going to prepare you, because we're not sure that it's going to work out to have any MBA or advanced degrees.

So really, I looked upon the MIT degree, like many of my classmates did, as kind of the terminal degree. For many people, including me, it didn't quite turn out that way, but that, at least, was--

INTERVIEWER: Now, you took courses is mechanical engineering. And when you were an undergrad--

STREHLE: Yeah, and there was a higher emphasis on engineering courses in what we call Course 15 or Sloan School then than there is now. In the '60s, they decided to reduce the core engineering and science requirements in Course 15 and increase the quantitative approaches in the Sloan School program. So that was a difference. Because when I graduated, even though it was a tough year for getting hired, I got offered jobs that were going to be the same as if I was an engineer. I got offered a job in engineering at General Electric, for example. I didn't take it. I went with Procter & Gamble in their marketing side instead.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Was there a particular teacher or mentor that encouraged you or inspired you to pursue a technical education when you were a youngster?

STREHLE: There were a couple of teachers I had in high school who actually had worked at GE. And then during the Depression, so many people lost their jobs. They went into teaching because there weren't any jobs in engineering. And they stayed in teaching. I remember a fellow named Ralph Young was probably instrumental, somebody my father and my parents knew. And he was an outstanding teacher, teaching electrical engineering to high school students during the day, and then night teaching technicians and entry-level people at General Electric in the electrical turbine business. And so the quality of person he was certainly had an influence on me.

INTERVIEWER: So you arrived at MIT in the fall of 1954. What were your first impressions of the place?

STREHLE: Well, it was a big place, you know. And the impressions were there are a lot of people like me here, which isn't so true when you're growing up, even in high school. We're all very scared of the academics. But I found after the first exams, I could go back and look at those exams. I did pretty well. I should have. A lot of material, I'd already had. And so I decided to get involved with extracurricular activities.

I found in my freshman year the same thing that I observed throughout my years at MIT. There is a commitment to undergraduate education on the part of the faculty here that when you're a student you kind of take for granted. But then when you go out and look at what's going on at other research universities, you realize that MIT is maybe a bit unique. There's a greater commitment here. I've discussed that with successive MIT presidents about why this big commitment to undergraduate education. And they agree with it.

And of course it's a great strength of the Institute's. And I noticed that during my 15 years of being a freshman adviser, that students didn't complain because they were being taught by graduate students. That happens once in a while. But they were being taught by really outstanding people, including Nobel Prize winners in introductory courses.

INTERVIEWER: So interesting-- Paul Gray had a similar undergraduate experience as you because actually he graduated in '54 as you were coming as a freshman.

STREHLE: Yeah. That's right. That's right. And he and I have talked about some of the similarities and differences of the place. And I think that as a generalization, I think students enjoy MIT more now, and have in the recent decades, as compared to that earlier period. Student life is much richer on campus, the facilities, the counseling, and so forth, helping students. Maybe the preparation of the students on average is better than it was. Because there were certainly students back when I was here who really weren't-- they got into MIT because they were smart. But they weren't very well prepared and had to work very hard just to stay up.

INTERVIEWER: So then as an undergrad, though, you were actively involved in athletics. Can you please tell us about that experience?

STREHLE: Yeah. I remember going over and seeing the then equipment manager John Murphy and the lacrosse coach, Ben Martin, whom I had gotten to know through physical ed. And this is my first term. And I said, you know, I want to get involved with intercollegiate athletics. But I know enough to know that I'm probably not going to make the team. Well, Ben immediately recruited me to be the assistant manager on the soccer team. And so I went to soccer games of both the freshman team and the varsity team, developed a lifelong friendship with Ben and his wife Helen, but in addition, got to see the other parts of MIT and got to know people in the administration and saw what a humane place it was, and of course learn from those relationships.

INTERVIEWER: And tell us just a little bit more about the other roles that you played in supporting athletics at MIT during--

STREHLE: Well, one of the things that I remember most specifically that came up is at that time, there was something called Freshman-Sophomore Competition in the Glove Fight. Glove Fight had been around for a long time. Before that, there was something called the Cane Rush, in which a student had died early in the 20th century. And it was kind of a controlled wrestling match. And only young males need apply. I'm not sure, but there may have been some of the coeds participated. I only went one of the two years because I was out with the soccer team the other year.

And by this time, I was a senior. A couple of us-- Dan Holland and I and some others-- realized Glove Fight made no sense. People didn't even really enjoy it that much. And somebody was going to get hurt. And why didn't we put greater emphasis on intramural and intercollegiate athletics?

So we did. And actually, since it was run by the Athletic Association, we eliminated Glove Flight in my senior year. And I remember Jim Killian coming to the event that we put in place of it. And Jim was working in Washington as Eisenhower's science adviser. He came home on a Friday night, Saturday morning gets up, came to our luncheon. And I thought to myself, is this what it takes to be an MIT president, on top of being everything else? Just this wonderful energy he had. Of course, I got to know him as a friend later on.

And so the Glove Fight disappeared. And when I was in the awards convocation in June, both Dan Holland and I received the Karl Compton Prize, each received the Karl Compton Prize. So I think that was the administration's way of saying, we didn't know how to get rid of the Glove Fight, but you did. And can you imagine the Glove Fight later on as we increased the number of women students? It would have been an embarrassment until somebody finally got rid of it.

INTERVIEWER: And you and Allan Bufferd have had this 50 year back and forth--

STREHLE: That's right. I knew Allan, he and I were active in the senior honorary society, Osiris, which was kind of a secret society that actually existed for more than 50 years, and got to know him then and saw him from time to time after graduation. He was a class behind me. And so when I came back to MIT as treasurer, Allan was finishing up working in the alumni association. And he was working at MIT but getting his law degree, because he was planning to leave metallurgy and go into law.

And I encouraged him to come work in the treasurer's office. I mean, MIT was always tight on money, but I did get one opening, and Allan filled it. He showed a lot of enthusiasm, initiative, and of course he was very bright. And in 1977 when we made the decision to use outside investment managers, then Allan and I went around to visit all the managers and really oversaw that. And so Allan became really an integral part of the investment management program. And that continued on until actually his retirement in 2006, eight years after I retired.

INTERVIEWER: And we're going to get back to that. We're going to get back to that. So the Karl Taylor Compton Prize is awarded for outstanding service to the MIT community, and that's why you and your classmate were recognized.

STREHLE: I guess so.

INTERVIEWER: That's great. So now let's talk about what you did after graduating from MIT. What was next?

STREHLE: I got the job I mentioned. I got an offer from Procter & Gamble. And my father, who had worked in both accounting and marketing, said, "Take the job at Procter & Gamble. It's an absolutely first-rate company. But in addition, you're going to spend all your life listening to people in sales and marketing tell you what things are like in the field. Get a little marketing experience. You're going to be getting other experiences, but do that."

And so that was very good advice. You learn how really great companies do things. After eight months, I had to go into service. And they knew that. And so I went in the service for six months, which was as a second lieutenant. And then when I came out, I had applied to the Sloan School to get a Master's degree. And so when I left the army, I came to the Sloan School.

I got a job through Fred Fassett who was dean of residents, as the tutor in the nonresident house. The student association house was what used to be the 5:15 Club in Walker Memorial. So MIT still had a lot of commuting students then. And so I was their supposed tutor. And so I did that for a year. And then later that year, as MIT was moving some administrators into their fund drive at that time, the Second Century Campaign, Mal Kipert, who was vice chancellor at that time, whom I knew, asked me if I wanted to come and work for MIT part time with the understanding that they'd pay my tuition in the second-- I mean, I'd get a scholarship in the second term of the School of Management.

And then, would I plan to stay on for a while, full-time? And I agreed to do that. And so I started initially in the student financial aid Office working with Tom Petrie and the great Sam Jones, who was a dedicated student financial aid officer and did so much for MIT in that role.

INTERVIEWER: And that was good training for things to come, wasn't it?

STREHLE: It was a wonderful experience. And then Scotty Whitelaw who was assistant athletic director, went somewhere else for another job. And the athletics director said, well, why don't come here part-time? So actually, my full-time job was actually two places, part in student financial aid and part in athletics.

INTERVIEWER: And while you were also pursuing your Master's?

STREHLE: No. When I was finishing the Master's, I was only in student financial aid. But then I had agreed to stay on for a couple of years, so I did both places. It was a wonderful experience because you got a lot of responsibility, particularly in Athletics, where I made the athletics schedules with, actually, some of the great names, Benny Friedman, the great Michigan football player, Otto Graham needs no introduction, and others, making the athletic schedules for MIT's intercollegiate activity. And other things, working on budgets and so forth, sports publicity.

After a couple years, I realized that was not going to be my career. And fortunately, when I talked to people in the MIT administration about it, I learned that Joe Snyder, who was then treasurer, was looking for somebody to help with the MIT investments. And there was an opening at Colonial Management, which is actually where the work was done. And so I went to work for Colonial. Initially, it was to work primarily on the MIT account, but it quickly changed. And I was spending only a modest amount of time on MIT, other people did that, and actually was a security analyst and portfolio manager on mutual funds and other endowment accounts.

INTERVIEWER: And I understand you were a pretty effective fund manager. You managed one fund, the Colonial Venture Fund, a fund that in 1968 increased in value 81 percent--

STREHLE: How did you-- yeah, that's right.

INTERVIEWER: --and became Colonial Management's second best performing mutual fund. Those must've been exciting times.

STREHLE: Those were. And of course, the problem with going up 81 percent in a year-- two problems. One is people would say, just think how much you learned this year. You'll do even better next year. And the second, the realization that I'll probably never have another year like this. But it made the mutual fund shareholders happy. And I was also doing work on endowment funds. Dartmouth College is an example. And really my mentor in higher education management was John Meck, who was the treasurer of Dartmouth, where he and I had worked on a few projects together that ended up having very favorable results.

INTERVIEWER: And all, again, good training for what was to come. You continued to stay active at MIT and became vice president of the MIT Alumni Association, receiving its Bronze Beaver Award in 1974. During that time, those 12 years, had you been looking for opportunities to return to MIT in a professional capacity? And how did your appointment as MIT treasurer come about?

STREHLE: I can't say I was exactly looking at MIT. There were some pressures. People look at the problems of the investment industry today in terms of, well, what are the ethics and so forth and think those are recent problems. They're not recent problems. Although the firm I was fortunate to work with had a very clean record. And the people I worked with were of highest integrity.

But that was not true everywhere. And in addition, my wife Kathie, who got very involved in things I did at MIT, was particularly involved in the educational business. Her mother was a college dean and professor, her father was a doctor, and other people and her family were professionals in medicine. And so being in the investment business wasn't quite her image, or their image of what people did.

So when an opportunity came to be at MIT, why, they thought that was a pretty good idea. And I'd been very fortunate in making quite a bit of money in the investment business. So I was able to make the change and take a salary cut to come to MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Great. Good for MIT.

STREHLE: I guess so. Good for me.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe how MIT's investments were managed at that time and how that changed shortly after you became treasurer? Could you also talk about your longstanding collaboration with Carl Mueller, who at the time was chairman of the Investment Committee?

STREHLE: That's right. Prior to my selection as treasurer, which coincided with Carl Mueller's selection as chairman of the Investment Committee, Joe Snyder, my predecessor and his, held both positions, I guess, from the mid-'50s up to that time, which meant that he not only was the portfolio manager, but in addition was the chairman of the Investment Committee, which oversaw the investment operations.

People didn't think that was a great way to go forward. Other institutions did it differently. And so we agreed from the beginning that we were going to separate the two jobs. Carl came to me early on and demonstrated the first of a great many times of his skill in dealing with people and dealing with organizational systems. He said, I'd like to work as partners together. Let's be partners. None of this-- we're not going to compete, mine or yours. And I thought that was a great idea. I mean, here was a man who had a real commitment.

And I don't think people, maybe even today, realize how important it is for a volunteer to be successful, to have to work very hard at it. Carl worked very hard at it. He also had some great ideas in how things should be organized and then had the wisdom, if he had things well organized, to stay out of it and to oversee it in a way.

So I still keep in touch with him. We had dinner with Carl and his wife Sue a few months ago.

INTERVIEWER: So can you talk about the process that led MIT to hire a professional investment management firm?

STREHLE: Yes. It was obvious with all the issues in the treasurer's office that I wasn't going to have time to really be the portfolio manager. I mean, I can remember the first--

INTERVIEWER: But your predecessor had been.

STREHLE: He had been, but it was not a very-- he wasn't making a lot of transactions. And nor was he necessarily relying heavily on people's advice. It was a low turnover portfolio. Not fully diversified, but it had a number of holdings of very large companies. But the stock ratio was not as high as some other institutions. And he was a pretty conservative person. I think he had good judgment, but he had been affected, like people of his era were, by experiencing the Depression and so forth.

So when we got involved, fortunately with Carl willing to spend time on it, it became pretty obvious I couldn't be the full-time portfolio manager. I mean, at that first year, I can remember going home working nights, trying to keep up to date on investment research and new ideas because during the day, I was involved with all of the things that were going on. We also needed a lot of work spent on real estate around the campus, which we owned the Simplex but it was then undeveloped, as an example.

So we began the search for an outside investment manager, a process that Dartmouth and a lot of other institutions, in fact, had. In fact, the vast majority of institutions were using partially or fully outside money managers. And so we had a search. And my concern was that if we followed the typical pattern of hiring multiple managers, not only was I going to have to spend full time following all these people, but in addition, the record was that doesn't work too well. You're always enthusiastic about the one that's doing well and want to fire the one that's doing poorly. And there's stock cycles and when you've got all done.

So it was my desire, and I think other people shared the view, let's see if we can find one manager who's capable of providing us with a diversified portfolio. And instead of having what turns out in many cases to be kind of an adversarial relationship with your investment manager, why didn't you do well and so forth, become a team. For better or worse, work with them.

And you know, you look back at the results that was achieved during that period, we had a fellow whom I still see, David Scudder, who really, it was obvious to me in 1977 that David had remarkably good judgement. And he oversaw the stock portfolio for 20 years. And so when people look back at his 20-year record and they say, well, we know managers can't beat the market. So he must've been lucky. For 20 years? Not too likely, right? He and his colleagues were really very good at it.

INTERVIEWER: So that strategy served you very, very well.

STREHLE: It did. At the same time, I didn't have to spend a lot of time at it, as you know.

INTERVIEWER: And then you were able to do other things which we're going to talk about. Can you please talk about the influence you had on how MIT invested its funds, and in particular, the strategy behind the creation of the Pool C special account?

STREHLE: OK. The Pool C. The Pool C account was current invested funds. And there was Pool A special, which was stocks that MIT held as gifts and so forth. So we had a lot of different kinds of pools. Pool C was our current invested funds which was basically where tuition came and where funds were held when you wanted to assure principal.

It became obvious as we moved into the 1980s that the pool kept getting bigger and bigger. It was a pretty good time for MIT and its financial operation. And so we decided early on, early '80s, that we should be investing some of it in in common stocks, even though we wanted to. And so we developed some strategies. And Allan Bufferd was a major player in that, to invest a portion of it in common stocks, an increasing portion.

INTERVIEWER: Which wasn't being done before that.

STREHLE: Before, at MIT and other institutions, those kind of monies were kept in short-term securities, getting those returns. And Carl Mueller, as part of visiting with him recently, he asked me to figure out how much we had gained. Well, I stopped counting at $100 million, because it's much more than $100 million, was the favorable investment returns from one over the other. But what difference? And so that continued.

Although interestingly in the early part of the most recent decade when stocks didn't do so well, I understand-- this is well after I retired-- they reversed some of that, probably a good idea, and had less of the current funds. Institutions that chose to be even more aggressive with their current funds or cash funds, some of them really regret it.

INTERVIEWER: Let's talk about the contributions you've made to MIT's Real Estate Program. I'd like to start with how MIT acquired the Nabisco building in support of the expansion of the Plasma Fusion Center. Carl Mueller tells a story whereby MIT was initially considering purchasing that building, but president emeritus Jim Killian suggested another strategy. And I quote Jim Killian, "Companies like Nabisco ought to be given the great opportunity to make a gift like that to MIT." Can you finish that story?

STREHLE: Well, Carl has this level of optimism that if properly channeled can be incredibly creative, and it certainly was then, and I say that is true of Jim Killian as well, and others. So we visited with Nabisco, who-- as you can understand, this company that was making Fig Newtons and Oreo cookies all over the world-- didn't spend a lot of time thinking about their biscuit distribution plant. But it was very important to MIT because it was located right next to a facility that MIT had. Shortly after I became treasurer, MIT received as a gift a very large generator from Consolidated Edison in New York which was adjacent to the biscuit factory.

And the way in which you created a fusion reaction, or tried to create one, was to get the generator going at a very high speed in a near vacuum, which it operated on-- and then short circuiting it. At this point, the electrical engineers who might be watching this will-- but at any rate, so you couldn't transmit the power great distances. It had to be next to it. And basically, we convinced the management of Nabisco that they could choose another facility and we would buy, or make some arrangement with them, some complex real estate transaction, which actually we had done in several cases when we moved companies out of the Simplex area so that we could develop that.

But it turned out, Nabisco finally said, oh, all this is too complicated. We'll just give you the building. We found a nice place for a warehouse that's in a more rural location. It's going to work well for us. And so to recognize the value of that gift, we created a program called the Nabisco scholars. And we mocked up a plaque of what the Nabisco laboratory would say on it for the people. And so for several years, MIT, after the gift, chose students to be Nabisco scholars. The first year's group actually got flown down in the corporate jet to visit Nabisco and see how they made Oreo cookies and Fig Newtons and other-- anyway I give Carl, wonderful to work with on that, particularly.

And we did have the management of Nabisco up for an event here on the campus. And I remember the events people getting a lot of plants and so forth around-- you know that group, Larry. And so you know what an incredible job they can do in making a festive environment, particularly for a company that gave us something of great value to MIT.

INTERVIEWER: So I understand that when you went down to New Jersey to meet with them, you were kind of instrumental in setting the CEO straight about this location of this building with some interesting photos.

STREHLE: Well, that's right. It turned out that when we went out to take pictures of the Nabisco building to show it, it had recently snowed. And of course, those are pretty narrow streets, Albany Street. So it didn't take a lot of imagination to see when we took his picture the days it snowed. There weren't many biscuit trucks that were going to move until the city of Cambridge got around to plowing that street. And even then, you had to deal with the city. And I happen to know where they relocated was a rural location where their trucks could move a lot more easily.

And I think the Nabisco management saw it the same way. Now, Carl Mueller got a lot of enjoyment out of the photos we chose to show the management. And Howard Johnson, who was also helpful in that process, felt the same way. But whatever. It happened.

INTERVIEWER: And MIT got a building out of it.

STREHLE: You know what we also got out of it? And I think that Bob Schaeberle who was the then CEO-- just an absolutely first-rate guy at Nabisco. By agreeing to the Nabisco Scholars and getting the publicity for Nabisco, we realized that MIT students really enjoyed having named scholarships. You know, at that time, we had succeeded in having for more than a decade, a decade and a half, need-blind admissions, meaning full-need. So the general assumption was, well, students might not care that much where their money for their scholarships came from.

And that turned out not to be true at all. Students were really honored to realize that in some way, a company's name was associated with their scholarship. Leaving aside the financial machinations that resulted. And so with the help of Lucy Miller in student financial aid and others, we started putting labels on many more of the scholarships. There will always labels put on some, where the monies came, but we didn't make a big thing out of it. We started making a bigger thing out of it.

INTERVIEWER: Yes. And that also provided incentive for the corporations to give scholarships.

STREHLE: And the donors. And the donors. I can remember a wonderful alumnus, Bill Weiss, the head of Motorola, died at an early age. Bill had not been well for some time. And his family discovered in his files all the letters he had between the students who had the Weiss scholarships and wrote to him to thank him and his wife Barbara, and so forth. And they realized there was a whole part of their father that they'd never had a chance to understand. It was wonderful.

INTERVIEWER: So getting back to real estate, certainly the development of University Park is a great success story. How did University Park come about, and what group of individuals provided the vision, and what were some of the challenges involved in realizing that vision?

STREHLE: Well, when I became treasurer, MIT had bought around 1969 the Simplex parcel, but when you looked at it on a map by 1975, because there were only a few other acquisitions after that time, it looked like you owned the black checks on a checkerboard. But you couldn't develop it unless you owned the red ones. So it was obvious that we had to buy the red ones. And of course, well, people will say, sure, it's like buying common stocks. You just say so much and the owner sells. It doesn't work that way. Actually, it works that way on some properties, but not all.

So we had to acquire those properties. Now, we had some changes in the real estate office shortly after I came. And we were able to hire Phil Trussell who had been at Cabot, Cabot & Forbes and actually had been involved in the development of Technology Square. And so Phil came. And we had on our staff Bob Simha, the planning officer, and Walter Milne, who ran the government relations part of MIT and was so effective in a very positive way in dealing with the city of--

INTERVIEWER: Relationships with Cambridge.

STREHLE: --Cambridge. Yeah. A man of infinite patience and--

INTERVIEWER: Which was required.

STREHLE: --skill. Infinite patience and skill and so forth. And so we all kind of worked as one team. There were some false starts. We had hoped, actually, that Polaroid was going to occupy what was the Simplex site. And they had big plans. But it was obvious as their business plans didn't work out so well that they, at some point, decided that they weren't going to be the occupant.

And as a matter of fact, we eventually, as you know, as Polaroid eventually-- finally, actually-- went bankrupt a decade ago, MIT ended up buying most of their properties rather than the other way. So we had this site and then we decided we'll be better-- we went around and bought all the properties that we didn't own, or at least tried to buy them. And we got most of them. Phil Trussell was remarkably creative. An owner had a very low cost on a property, had a thriving business adjacent near the Simplex property, and we needed their property, we got them to agree to move to a location that we found. And they would move to the North Shore or somewhere else. And we would buy that property, do a tax swap.

And we did a quite a few fairly complex transactions. I can't understate the role of Norman Leventhal, who was a Boston real estate developer, member of the corporation. Tireless in his willingness to be available to us to go over real estate transactions that we were about to do and to help us think them through. Carl Mueller brought on a consultant from New York early in his chairmanship of the Investment Committee, Sam Walker. And it was really Sam's vision. Sam had been involved in the area in Pittsburgh down by the river which had been a wasteland.

And I can remember Sam saying to us after first coming here, he said, oh, that Simplex site, that's a gem. Oh, you can develop that. It's going to be wonderful. You can look at the pictures, Larry, and wonder where he was at. And Sam lived long enough to see that University Park was going to happen, because we bought the properties, we started the development, but he was a much older man. And we actually visited him in the Boston hospitals when he was sick. But he didn't actually see the vision created. But he got to see his vision of what was going to happen.

And in addition, Carl developed a real estate subcommittee very early on, the first few months of his chairmanship of the Investment Committee, that included the chairman, the president, the provost, and the chancellor, and other academics, give them a chance to find out what we were doing and so forth. And that was Carl Mueller's idea. And that just worked. Wonderful. And it was a wonderful way to interact and so forth.

INTERVIEWER: And there were still challenges, though, down the road with the--

STREHLE: The city of Cambridge, downzoning, lots of issues. You need a lot of patience. Sometimes owners didn't want to sell, or they wanted so much money that-- since you have to disclose what you pay for things, if you paid way out of line for something, well, the next property you went to buy, the owner would say, well, I know you paid this for that. I mean, that would be-- and therefore, that precise. So we had to play that off.

There were people who said, oh, why couldn't you buy everything? We obviously didn't do it. And I learned just in the past year that properties that we were not able to buy in the '70s and early '80s only in the last year, two properties, got bought by MIT. Well, sometimes our critics are right. But I would say maybe those who said I should have bought them in the '80s maybe didn't have quite the right vision. Because I was gone a long time before they finally got bought.

The University Park has, I think, turned out to be a pretty good development. Certainly, when I learned what the return is to MIT, the taxes to the city and so forth, it kind of justifies everything that we did.

INTERVIEWER: Right. I think initially there was concerned that those properties actually, because they were being acquired by MIT, were being taken off the tax rolls. But in fact, when you consider the occupants that now occupy those spaces, the tax revenues have increased significantly.

STREHLE: Right. Well, now to be specific, the only ones that could actually go off the tax rolls were the ones that were being used for academic expansion. But there were a number of those where we had buildings, Mass. Avenue and elsewhere, where actually MIT used them for academic purposes. So they went off the tax rolls. And you really have to look at the total. And you look at it and you realize that because of what MIT was doing in University Park, there were things happening in Kendall Square, this became a center globally for biotech, which probably wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been doing some of the things we were doing. And of course, the tax revenues to the city.

INTERVIEWER: Right. But the success of University Park, as you just noted, encouraged other developments. And one of the long-term effects is that Cambridge has become a magnet for the location of these kinds of facilities.

STREHLE: That's right. And well, when you look back at it and you go there and walk those streets and you realize it happened within my professional life, I mean, I'm not sure I would have realized when we started that I was going to live that long. But obviously it did.

INTERVIEWER: Great success. Let's shift gears again and talk about your role in MIT's fundraising campaign. Launched in 1984 and named the campaign for the future, that campaign ended up being very successful but got off to a bit of a shaky start. Can you talk about some of the challenges and successes associated with that campaign?

STREHLE: Well, some of the challenges were early on. And when it started in 1984, I was treasurer. I was doing the investments. Allan Bufferd had come along very well. We had built, for example, a pretty successful venture capital portfolio and private equity portfolio which was going to be a lot bigger as he became a leader among institutions in that kind of activity.

But I was spending an increasing amount of time on fundraising. The focus of fundraising was very heavily international. Japan, the vice president for resource development spent a lot of time in Japan and Europe successfully. But major gifts in the United States was probably behind where many institutions were. The Alumni Fund was doing a good job but was only then beginning to move to having reunion giving every five years rather than just at the 25th, 40th, and 50th. They don't usually get credit for managing that process which they did. And I give them full credit. But that was getting started.

The result was that as I was spending more time on fundraising, people said, we've got to figure out how we can get enough core gifts into the campaign so that we can announce it. Because they had started it in 1984, but they hadn't really announced it.

INTERVIEWER: That's the silent part of the--

STREHLE: The silent part of the campaign, right. Well, this one was going to be silent for a long time if if we didn't figure out how to do it. So anyway, I agreed. Things by then were in pretty-- you know, the real estate. We had already picked Forest City to develop University Park. People like Allan Bufferd and Phil Trussell had been in place almost a decade. Bob Simha, Walter Milne, and others were overseeing parts of MIT's planning effort. The investment thing was by then at Wellington Management Company. Things seemed to be going well.

I had gotten a lot of help on investments from the faculty of MIT's Economics and Sloan School. In fact, over the years, I had some 50 lunches with those people. And they became much more knowledgeable about the portfolio and encouraged us to diversify and do other things.

INTERVIEWER: These are people like Samuelson, Modigliani, Merton.

STREHLE: Merton. And while he was at MIT, Fischer Black. And later, Stew Myers became very-- Jim Poterba. I mean, these are giants in their respective fields. And they devoted meaningful time to MIT and its investments, and particularly related to the real estate portfolio.

INTERVIEWER: Great resource to call upon.

STREHLE: They're wonderful people and very caring. Another person who was helpful to us in lots of ways was professor Bob Solow, which I will say early in the campaign, we worked hard in 1986 and early 1987. And we got enough money for the announcement to be made. It happen on the day of the great crash of 1987. Here, Bob Solow, who agreed to give a talk in New York to alumni because people were really scared. And Bob assured them that the economy, at least at that time, was in pretty good shape. And he'd end up being right. And Bob later gave talks for MIT at several places in the country, really spent a lot of time helping us, and in many other ways was a wonderful MIT citizen.

INTERVIEWER: But what I recall is that the Black Monday was actually the day that there was going to be a kickoff event at the president's house.

STREHLE: The kickoff, that was on Thursday.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, that was on Thursday?

STREHLE: The Black Monday was on Monday, and the kickoff was, as I remember, Thursday. And I mean, people were saying, you're announcing a campaign? I mean, this is pretty funny. And so actually, by late 1989, it was just two years later, we were doing so well, we decided to raise the goal from $550 to $700 million. And it looked at that time like this was going to be easy, whereupon the economy started to weaken, Iraq attacked Kuwait, and the real estate market in this country got so weak that you really had to cancel your plans to ask people in the real estate business for either new or additional gifts.

We did get across the campaign total of $700 million, but not by a lot. And although some of the donors who had made moderate gifts to the campaign, in the next several years, in fact, gave a lot more than your common campaign. But we had moved things to a whole new level. From running around $50 million a year, maybe a little more, prior to the campaign, we were then $100 million or more most of the time. And then, of course, it moved on up to $200 million, $300 million in good years.

INTERVIEWER: You also secured more longer-term commitments as part of that, right?

STREHLE: One of the measures of where we were when I took it over was that we had a total of $15 million of pledges on the books. These were good pledges to be paid in the future, but it was only $15 million. So a campaign is supposed to build that up. By the end of the campaign, that got up over $120 million.

I was looking at the treasurer's report getting ready for this visit. And for several years, it's run well over $400 million, which meant that those are commitments people have made. They're going to be paid in the future. And of course, you can picture the amount of activity, then, involved in keeping it at $400 million because people are making large pay downs every year, so you've got to-- and so the whole level of giving to endowment went up, well, I'm sure, from when we started the campaign to where it has been in recent years, you're talking about a 10 or 20 times increase in the annual giving to endowment.

INTERVIEWER: And it was during that time during the campaign that you were also called upon to become vice president for resource development.

STREHLE: That's right. And that was in the fall of 1985. The campaign had been going for a little over a year. It was obvious they weren't going to make their core silent period giving. And so I took it over in January of '86. And we were fortunate, MIT gave us enough budget money to hire a number of new people. We hired people from both within MIT and also brought in some people from outside. George Ramonat came to us from Princeton to be our director of major gifts. Lucy Miller moved from student financial aid. We hired some people from Boston University, including Shelly Brown and Diane Golden and a couple of other people. And Barbara Stowe came back from humanities and social sciences to head foundation relations. So there were a lot of changes, big and small, that helped us.

And we also changed the way we communicated with donors and to stewardship. And then, I wasn't entirely happy with the image that Technology Review was projecting to alumni and was given the opportunity to create a new magazine, Spectrum, which put an emphasis on the new MIT, much more emphasis on the role of women students and faculty, much more in fact. And much more on people at MIT and what they're doing.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, and it remains a very effective vehicle.

STREHLE: Great photographs, great pictures. I really wanted to design it as a coffee table book. Come into a home, the alumnus, usually a man, of course, particularly at that time, less so today. And his spouse would see it and say, oh, I'm going to put it on the coffee table. It looks nice there. Believe it or not, many years later, it wasn't that many years ago, we were at some event and a woman said, oh, you were at MIT. She said, I saw this magazine. It was at a friend's house. I said, was it on the coffee table? And this woman, who had no relationships with MIT, just thought how wonderful the pictures and the stories were about the people at MIT.