Lawrence S. Bacow ’72

INTERVIEWER: Today is October 31, 2008. I'm Karen Arenson for the MIT sesquicentennial Oral History project, talking with Lawrence Bacow, former chancellor of MIT and now president of Tufts University. Larry, thank you for talking to us.

Let's go back in time. How did you know about MIT and how did you get there?

BACOW: I grew up in Pontiac, Michigan. Probably like a lot of other MIT kids, I was a math, science kid from the time I was about this big. I was a ham radio operator at the age of eight. I used to enter science fairs. And MIT was this mythical place where the smartest people in the world went. And I used to read about it in Scientific American, Popular Science, anything I could get my hands on. And for as long as I can remember, I wanted to go to MIT. There was no other place.

INTERVIEWER: Were either of your parents in science or technology, or anyone else you knew?

BACOW: No. My dad was also a ham radio operator. The interesting thing is, I didn't want to be a scientist or an engineer. When I came to MIT, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but I wanted to go to MIT. And in fact, I had never met an MIT graduate until I went for my interview with a member of the Educational Council in Detroit. And I'd never seen the MIT campus until after I got in.

INTERVIEWER: What were your impressions of MIT when you did arrive in 1969, I think, from Michigan?

BACOW: Well, I remember driving up to the campus, and there was a big protest going on at 77 Mass Ave. It was a sign of the times. And I remember the MIT police were there, and there were a bunch of students with bullhorns, and there was a lot of chanting that was going on. And I remember my father, who was a lawyer, turning to me and saying, "If you get arrested, don't call home."

INTERVIEWER: [LAUGHTER] Did it put you off?

BACOW: No. I mean, it was 1969. And I guess it was what was going on on every college campus. But I'd led a pretty sheltered life, coming from Pontiac, Michigan. So I didn't quite know what to expect. But I think, like a lot of other kids, when I got to MIT, for the first time I felt like I was at home. It was okay to be smart. It was okay to get excited about stuff which other people thought was nerdy. It was an amazing experience for me. Amazing.

INTERVIEWER: And did you think you were going to major in science or engineering and then go into law, or did you have any clue?

BACOW: I thought I was going to major in math. I remember, it was only after I took analysis that I realized there was a difference between being good at math and being a mathematician. I was good at math. And so I was looking around, and I remember there was a guy in my fraternity named Jeff Handler. And Jeff was an economics major, and he said, "Why don't you take an economics course?" And so I did, and I loved it.

INTERVIEWER: And that was freshman year.

BACOW: That was freshman year. Although I actually took the economics course freshman year, and then I took analysis first semester sophomore year. So I was taking math and economics at the same time.

INTERVIEWER: So what was your MIT experience like as a student? How did you navigate through the place-- with help from your fraternity brothers, I think? But, did you party a lot? Did you work all the time? Did you...

BACOW: My MIT life was defined, really, by a couple of things. I was on the sailing team, and I spent more time sailing than doing practically anything else, other than studying. And I was fortunate in that my roommates from my fraternity were far more studious than I was. In fact, I was sort of the slacker in the group.

And it was a pretty remarkable group, because there were five of us who lived together on and off. And when we all graduated, it was the first year that I think MIT had a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and I think there were somewhere between 25 and 30 people who were inducted, and we were five of them. So, they all pushed me, and would come in and turn the TV off when I was watching the Bruins. I was a big hockey fan. And they'd say, "Larry, do you realize you have two problem sets and a paper due tomorrow?" So they were like mother hens.

INTERVIEWER: What made you decide to join a fraternity? You had the choice when you came in.

BACOW: It was pure serendipity. I got off the airplane at Logan, and I was trying to figure out how to get to MIT on my own. And I saw somebody with a sign that said MIT. And he was in a fraternity, and he said, "Would you like a ride?" And I said yes. And the rest is history.

INTERVIEWER: He took you to that fraternity that you ended up joining, or...

BACOW: No, he took me, as the rules dictated, to register at Stratton. And then I remember having a temporary room in Baker House. You know, we were all assigned temporary housing. And his name was Steve Sondheim-- um, Steve Sondheimer, excuse me Steve Sondheimer. He's an OB/GYN in Philadelphia. Absolutely. And it was all because of Steve that I wound up joining a fraternity. He called me back and he said, "I'm a member of a fraternity. Would you like to come see it?" And I had nothing better to do, so I said, "Sure." And I wound up joining ZBT because I happened to bump into Steve Sondheimer at Logan Airport.

INTERVIEWER: So talk more about your progression through the Institute. You kept sailing. You studied hard --

BACOW: I kept sailing. I studied hard. Like most of us, my career was a series of fortuitous accidents.

One of my roommates was also an economics major, who took the same courses. And about midway through spring of his junior year, he announced he was going to graduate a year early, to save a year's tuition. I realized, gee, I'd taken the same courses as Alan. If he can do it, so can I. And so I did. And at that point, it was too late to apply to graduate school, to law school. I hadn't taken the LSAT. And I was trying to figure out what to do, so I went to my undergraduate mentor, who was Bob Solow. I'd taken a course with Bob my sophomore year, asked him a question at the end of class. He invited me back to his office, and I wound up doing a reading course with him second semester my sophomore year, which was just an amazing experience.

Bob tried to persuade me to stick around and get a PhD in economics. The reason I didn't was because, if I'd done that, I wanted to be Bob Solow, and I didn't think I was smart enough to do that. And I really wanted to go to law school; he tried to persuade me not to do it.

But I needed something to do, so he told me about a new program that had started a couple of years earlier at the Kennedy School at Harvard. I think what happened is that Bob picked up the phone and called Tom Schelling, who became one of my graduate school mentors, and said, "Take this kid." And so that's how I wound up at the Kennedy School.

I had a magnificent experience as an undergraduate at MIT. I got a phenomenal education, I met amazing classmates, I spent a lot of time sailing, and was taken seriously by one of the great minds in economics, great scholars of all time at MIT, one of the great human beings. And that changed my life.

INTERVIEWER: You've talked about one thing that guarantees that a student will have a good experience, and look back on it as a good experience, as relating closely to some professors while they're there, to the extent that they'll stay in touch with them for the rest of their lives. And you've certainly stayed in touch with Bob Solow. Were the people you knew having experiences like that? You talked about how close you were and how similar you were to some of your fraternity brothers, for example. You probably know other economics students. Were they all having experiences like that, or was there something unusual about your's, and what would make it so it if it was?

BACOW: When I think about my roommates, each of them had a similar experience, as it turns out. I can tell you with which professor. Alan Tipermas was very close to Harvey Sapolsky. Alan Spoon was very close with Lou Menand.

INTERVIEWER: Those are both in political science, yes?

BACOW: Yeah. Alan Detsky was very close with Jerry Rothenberg, and then Bob Solow, as well, in economics. I had three roommates all named Alan. We had this wonderful experience. It took me a while when I joined the faculty to realize that not every MIT student had that experience, and it sort of became a bit of a mission on my part; I wanted to make sure that my students had that experience. And then, when I became chair of the Faculty and chancellor, I kept trying to do things to make sure that happened.

INTERVIEWER: Do professors really have time to relate to each of their students that way, or to some of their students that way, and how many of them do you think do?

BACOW: One of the reasons why MIT is the very special place that it is, is that I think MIT faculty take undergraduate education phenomenally seriously. MIT is the ultimate meritocracy. And what I found interesting about it as an undergraduate is, I took a lot of graduate courses as an undergraduate. I took the graduate theory sequence in economics. And the faculty didn't care if I was an undergraduate or a graduate student. Nobody knew. All anybody cared about was, did you have a good idea? Sort of, best idea wins. That was MIT.

And so I think, because MIT undergraduates are as talented as they are, the faculty love to teach them. And it's one of the reasons why UROP is the great success that it is. I think that's a great opportunity for students to develop those kinds of close relationships with faculty. It's one of the reasons that faculty embrace UROP as they do. It's one of the reasons why you get some of the best, most prestigious faculty members at MIT teaching some of those most basic courses. Remember, Bob taught the intermediate Macro course, that's how I met him as a first semester sophomore. Henry Kendall used to teach the sophomore physics lab, Nobel Laureate in physics. Salvador Luria used to teach 7.01. That says everything about MIT.

INTERVIEWER: From that description, it sounds like the MIT student body should be a really happy group. And yet, if you look at the alumni surveys, or surveys done shortly after students graduate, or at the end of senior year, I'm not sure, they've come through this very tough rigorous period. And they're not such a happy group. It turns out they get happier later. How do you square those two images?

BACOW: MIT is a really hard place. There's no easy or soft path through MIT. There's no place for anybody to hide. And in fact, that's one of its strengths. I think institutions are like people. For most of us, our strengths are also mirror images of our weaknesses. This person is great because they're so focused; well, their limitation is that they're so focused. One of the things that makes MIT as unique and special as it is, is its intensity.

And also, it's a relatively homogeneous experience for undergraduates. I think that's its strength. When I say that, I don't mean to say that there's a lack of diversity in the curriculum, or there's a lack of diversity in the student body. But everybody at MIT has to pass through the same needle. The core curriculum. It is a way in which, for better or for worse, everybody gets measured. And that can be a humbling experience. I've often said that you hang around MIT long enough and eventually everybody feels stupid.

But it also is an experience that forces people to grow, and to understand that they're capable of doing more than they ever thought that they were capable of doing. I think the most valuable thing I got out of MIT as a student was the realization that there was no problem that was so difficult that if I didn't plug away at it long enough, eventually I'd make some progress.

I had an interesting experience as a first year graduate student at Harvard. I sat through a class, and I remember leaving the class, and my classmates were just in a tizzy. One of them said, "I didn't understand half of what was going on in there." I said, "Well, that's pretty good! You understood half." I said, "I just spent three years in college, in which my goal was to stay no more than three blackboards behind the professor." I didn't expect to understand things at the end of a class. You took your notes and you took your book and you took your problem sets, and you went back to your room and you sat there with your classmates. And that's when you really learned the course. So, MIT is a hard place. Art Smith used to say it was a praise-free zone, and I think he was right.

But having said that, you appreciate it in interesting ways once you leave. What's the old line? It takes ten years for nausea to turn to nostalgia for MIT undergraduates. And there's some truth to that.

INTERVIEWER: This Larry Bacow the student doesn't quite sound like the Larry Bacow your father wrote to the dean about. You sometimes have talked about how MIT, the dean's Office, asked parents to send them letters, of guidance, I guess. What did he say, and then, where was he right and where wasn't he right?

BACOW: I have the letter in my drawer. Would you like me to read it?

INTERVIEWER: So that's the letter.

BACOW: So this is the letter. It was addressed to Ken Wadleigh, who was dean of students back then. They used to write parents, asking for a letter describing their son or daughter, to be read by the student's adviser. I'll only read briefly from this.

"Larry gets enthused very rapidly, but, except for certain sports and a few girls, he tends to lose interest very quickly. He also tends to wait until the last minute to get things done. He appears to work better under pressure. He is also somewhat on the lazy side. However, his greatest fault is his tendency to worry too much. This may require a bit of watching on the part of his counselor. In short, we think that Larry will prove to be a good average MIT student: not the best, not the worst, but fairly well-adjusted and adept."

INTERVIEWER: But it doesn't sound like he captured you at MIT. Something happened. What was that?

BACOW: Like a lot of other kids, I grew at MIT. MIT made me better than I thought I could be. What was immensely influential in my life at MIT, beyond the faculty, were my fellow students. They would do things, and I would say, "Gee, they can do them, maybe I can do them, too." And that made me far better than I ever thought I could be. It raised my expectations for myself. I think that's one of the things MIT does for students.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. You mentioned that when you first arrived at MIT, it was in the midst of a protest. It was a very turbulent time for the Institute and for society. Did that turbulence affect you at all, or did you somehow go through and ignore most of it?

BACOW: I think it really affected everybody. For example, I was in John Wulff's class that George Katsiaficas and Mike Alpert disrupted, for which they went to jail. I remember meeting Constantine Simonides for the first time, as we went to watch a protest at the Center for International Studies at the Hermann Building. I actually later saw a picture of that event. I can't find myself in it, but I can see Constantine and Paul Gray, and Jim Culliton, all there together, three people who would become good friends later in life for me.

And I remember being tear gassed in Harvard Square. I remember marching down Massachusetts Avenue in the great protest that started at Harvard, and then we all went to the Common, when Jerry Wiesner came out and led the MIT community. And as a university president today, I have just enormous respect for that gesture on Jerry's part, which I think said volumes about both who he was as a person, but also for an institution that would embrace that kind of openness on the part of its leader. And I went to Washington, drove all night through the night to go to the march on Washington after Kent State. My freshman year was when the student strike occurred and they suspended classes. So we were all affected.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that going through this period affected your view of protest in society, and how universities ought to handle it when it comes to campus, and your thinking about this kind of division?

BACOW: I think that experience has affected me in quite profound ways. Today, in part because of the job that I now hold, I look back on those who led institutions at that time with just incredible respect. Howard Johnson has become a good friend, and I've had an opportunity to talk to Howard, to talk to Paul, before he passed away, to talk to Jim Culliton. Unfortunately, I never really got to know Jerry Wiesner. But, to talk to them about what it was like being a university leader and administrator, trying to hold the center, as Howard so eloquently put it in his book. And I think it affects the way I do my job today, and how I see the challenges. How I try to engage various constituencies that are the university around whatever the issue du jour happens to be. And no matter how bad things get, I know that I will never face the kinds of challenges which they faced during those times. I cannot imagine what it was like to be president of the Institute in 1969.

INTERVIEWER: And Howard and Paul look back with a great deal of pain. They still talk about how difficult a period it was. You've had some difficult periods yourself. Jumping ahead, you became president of Tufts in September, 2001, less than two weeks before the bombing of the Trade Center.

BACOW: Ten days.

INTERVIEWER: That must have been a difficult time. It wasn't an attack on you or the campus, but how did you think about handling that? How did you handle that?

BACOW: I remember distinctly, I was in my office. I was in a meeting, the meeting ended. I opened the door, I saw my assistant and she was ashen-faced. I asked her, "Elise, what's wrong?" She said, "We're under attack, turn on the TV." And turned on the TV in time to see the second plane fly into the Trade Center. And very quickly people were gathered in my office, because it has one of the few TVs in the building. And we were all watching with astonishment. And then I realized that everybody was looking at me, asking, what are we going to do? And I realized that I couldn't deal with my own emotions at the time, but rather I had to step up and lead.

I feel very, very fortunate that during my time at MIT, I had the opportunity to work with some really terrific leaders, both Paul and Howard, but especially Chuck Vest. And I recall how Chuck tended to handle difficult situations, and the way in which he would pull together people, and try and frame the important questions and encourage people to give him the benefit of their best advice. And he would ask probing questions and then, having listened to everybody, he would say, "Okay, this is what we're going to do." And in a lot of ways, on September 11, I just tried to be Chuck. I'm not sure I succeeded, but at least we got through it.

And one of the things which I also learned, not just from Chuck, but from Kathryn Willmore, was the importance of clear communications during a crisis. So I worked hard with everybody else to try and get a message out to the community immediately, about what was happening, what we were going to do, what we expected of others. I think I really drew heavily on my MIT experience.

INTERVIEWER: Of course, one big change now is that we have the internet and email and you can communicate. With violence at Virginia Tech and other campuses, they've been pushed to find even faster ways of reaching students. Has the ability to communicate that way changed the way campuses are run, and the way you think about leadership and communication?

BACOW: Well, what it's done is it's made every organization more porous. And it means that you are, as a result, responsible, if you will, to many, many more constituencies. And it's reduced the cycle time for response to each of those constituencies. So when an event like that happens, not only are you dealing with the students on campus and the faculty and staff on campus-- at Tufts, that's a community of roughly 14,000 people-- but you're dealing with parents off campus, you're dealing with alumni, you're dealing with others whose lives have been influenced by it. So sure, it changes, but in the end, it's still communication. To be able to communicate clearly and concisely and effectively is, I think, a skill which I actually learned at MIT.

INTERIVEWER: Were you aware that--

BACOW: I should add that I'm proud of the fact that I'm often complimented by people about my messages to the community. I make a point of telling people that I write them myself, and people sometimes ask me, "Where did you learn how to write that way?" And I always respond, "At a small New England technical school on the Charles River."

INTERVIEWER: In a class, or... I mean, people sometimes say that there hadn't been, or hasn't been, enough teaching of writing skills at MIT, and it's something they've tweaked again in recent years. Where and how did you learn... were your economics professors saying, "Write it again," or, "Write it more concisely," or what, exactly, was the learning experience?

BACOW: I think I learned how to write from a number of people, some directly and some indirectly. Directly were the people who would critique what I was writing. I remember courses that I took from people. I took a course from Heather Lechtman. Heather was very good at giving comments on papers. Rob Engle was my undergraduate thesis adviser, who, like Bob Solow, went on to win a Nobel Prize. And Rob made me write multiple drafts. But also, one of the people who helped me with my writing indirectly was Bob Solow. Bob has always written with bell-like clarity, in a voice that was perfectly conversational and could express the most sophisticated ideas elegantly and simply. And what I've always tried to do was to emulate Bob, and to emulate my graduate school mentor, Tom Schelling who also wrote in a very similar style. So I think having had good teachers makes a difference. INTERVIEWER: Schelling being another Nobel winner. You spent a brief period away...

BACOW: You mentioned Schelling. I've sometimes joked that I am the Forrest Gump of economics, because as an undergraduate, I worked pretty closely with Rob Engle, who won a Nobel Prize, and with Bob Solow. And then I went to Harvard, and as a first year graduate student I encountered Tom Schelling, and Mike Spence, who was my teaching fellow first year as a graduate student at Harvard. And of course, Mike went on to win the Nobel Prize as well. So, I've been very blessed to have great teachers.

INTERVIEWER: You went up the river to Harvard to do the public policy degree and the law degree. You earned your PhD. And you were thinking, at that point, of going to Washington, perhaps?

BACOW: Correct.

INTERVIEWER: But you came back to MIT. What was your thought process?

BACOW: What happened is that I was graduating from Harvard. I got my law degree in '76, and then my PhD, I really did the bulk of the work for my PhD the following year for my dissertation. I was almost done with it, but not quite. And I realized I was in the right place at the right time, and I started getting teaching offers. There were other institutions that were starting public policy programs that were modeled after Harvard's at the time, and they were looking for faculty. So I started thinking about doing some teaching. I'd been a teaching fellow in graduate school. And an opportunity came along to teach at MIT. A two- year, non-tenure-track, terminal appointment. I would have been filling in for somebody for two years.

I went back to Bob and asked him for advice, Bob Solow. He said, "The government will be there when you're ready to go work for it. It will always look good if you have spent a little bit of time as an MIT Faculty member." So it was a two- year appointment, and it lasted 24 years.

INTERVIEWER: Did it feel odd to come back to MIT as a professor, as a faculty member? Did you see it differently at that point, suddenly?

BACOW: It was exhilarating to come back to MIT as a faculty member. I placed the faculty, I think like most students, on such a pedestal. I felt a bit like an imposter when I did it. And you know, I was a 25- year- old assistant professor, and I looked even younger. And I was teaching in a department in which the bulk of the students were graduate students, and most of them were much older than I was. This was the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. So it took awhile to get my bearings, and find my way.

But again, one of the great things about MIT is that, in the end, all people care about is, can you do the work? I sort of found myself as a faculty member. I liked it, and I enjoyed the teaching. My department decided to create a tenure track position, I entered the search, I was picked, and then, as I said, I stayed 24 years.

INTERVIEWER: Your department was probably one of the lesser-known ones at MIT. With the majority of the students in engineering and science, far fewer students are in departments like the one you were in. Did you ever feel marginalized?

BACOW: Well, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning is lesser-known only within MIT. Within the larger world, it is far and away the most distinguished planning department, literally, anywhere. And so it occupies a position relative to its peers in the field not unlike any of the other great departments at MIT. But at MIT, it's a bit off the beaten path.

I never felt marginalized at MIT, in part because I was a product of MIT, I was an undergraduate at MIT, and I made a point of always teaching undergraduates, which I loved doing. And I taught them not just in my department, but at various times I taught environmental economics in the Economics Department, I taught a course with Debbie Stone in the Political Science Department on regulation. So I got around. And I also, when asked to serve, I agreed to serve on things like the IAP policy committee and stuff. And I enjoyed that; it gave me a connection with others at MIT. I never felt marginalized.

INTERVIEWER: You were somewhat entrepreneurial in your period as a faculty member. You started a new center that became quite well known. What prompted you to do that?

BACOW: I was drafted by my department chair. One day my department chair, Gary Hack, who later became dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, asked me if I would work with an MIT alumnus, who also happened to be an MIT Corporation member-- that was Hank Spaulding-- to explore what MIT should be doing in the area of real estate. Hank was a graduate of Course 1. There were lots of civil engineers who would come through MIT who had gone on to do great things in the real estate business, Norman Leventhal, Ed Linde, Hank, lots of others. And Hank thought that this was a big area, a huge capital market that needed more scholarship and perhaps there was something we could do in the area of teaching.

So my dean asked me to work with him. I knew relatively little about the field, but my dean, John De Monchaux at the time, and Gary Hack, my department chair, said we'd like you to do this. I was an assistant professor, so I did it. I enjoyed it, and it led to something which I never could have anticipated.

INTERVIEWER: What did it lead to?

BACOW: It led to a proposal to create a new Master's program in real estate development. Which involved participation from faculty from the Sloan School, from the Civil Engineering Department, from the Economics Department, from the Architecture Department, from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. And then Gary Hack asked me to shepherd this through the approval process, which is how I came to encounter faculty governance at MIT. And I think in some ways that is what ultimately led me to become chairman of the Faculty. I got to know a number of people...

INTERVIEWER: So when you talk about encountering faculty governance, at first it sounded like you were saying boy, it was a set of obstacles, but maybe it meant that you became familiar with it? What did you have in mind?

BACOW: Well, it gave me a chance to understand how it was that MIT created new programs, and what was the process for creating new programs. And who really controlled the curriculum, and how are decisions made, and how are resources allocated within MIT to support new initiatives. And so, through the process of creating the degree program and the center, and then raising the resources to support it, I learned an awful lot about MIT. And it also connected me to different parts of the Institute. We had faculty in four schools teaching in this program. The only school that was not represented was the School of Science.

INTERVIEWER: You talked about how, as a student, you'd look at some of your fellow students and say, gee, if they can do that, I can too, and that it raised your aspirations. As you were a faculty member, did you have that same kind of experience? Were your aspirations beginning to rise? Were you beginning to think, hmm, he went on to do this or she went on to do that, maybe I should be thinking?

BACOW: Not really. One of the wonderful things about being a faculty member is, you can pick and choose what problems you work on. And you do so because they are of interest to you. And I loved that. And I really worked pretty hard to avoid academic administration. I started the Center for Real Estate, I tried to get rid of it, to give it to somebody else as soon as I could. In fact, the first year graduating class was in 1985. I remember, it was through the creation of the Center that I met Paul Gray for the first time one-on-one; obviously, I knew who he was.

INTERVIEWER: He was president then.

BACOW: He was president then, and I had to go talk to him about it. Which is interesting. An aside: now I have students sometimes who say, "You know, here I've been at Tufts for three years and I've yet to meet the president." My response is, "I'd been an MIT faculty member for six years before I ever met the president."

It allowed me to get this program off the ground. But, as soon as the first class graduated in 1985, I went on my first sabbatical. And turned it over to somebody else, and went back to my teaching and research when I came back.

INTERVIEWER: Because you didn't like being an administrator, or because you didn't like real estate, or what about it made you say, time to go?

BACOW: I loved my teaching and I loved my scholarship. And I think being a faculty member is a fabulous job, and that's what I wanted to do. And so that's what I did. I viewed administration, as I think so many do at MIT, as service. And so, in fact, when the Center fell on hard times I came back and did another stint, and tried to help it out. But once it got stabilized, I turned it over to somebody else and went back to my teaching and scholarship. So my administrative career at MIT was relatively brief, and I was drafted for virtually every job that I ever had.

INTERVIEWER: So how did they finally pry you out of your nice faculty life? Was it becoming chairman of the Faculty? That was another job you weren't particularly campaigning for.

BACOW: No, in fact I was on sabbatical in Amsterdam, teaching in the Economics Department at the University of Amsterdam, trying to write a book on trade policy and the environment, when I got a phone call from Claude Canizares. And Claude was chairman of the nominations committee. In fact he had called and left a message with Adele, and so I called him back. And I thought, "They're going to ask me to serve on the undergraduate committee or something like that." Maybe on the undergraduate program, CUP. And I called them back, and Claude said, "We would like you to be chairman of the Faculty." You could have knocked me over with a feather. I said, "Claude, are you sure? Me?" And he said yes.

I was dumbfounded for many reasons. One is, as we've already discussed, I came from a department which was a little bit off the beaten path. Although Bernie Frieden one of my colleagues, had been chairman of the Faculty a number of years before. I was relatively young. Most, but certainly not all, Faculty chairs had had a lot more grey hair than I did. And I remember calling Constantine and saying, "Constantine, should I do this?" And he said, "Of course you should do it."

And, candidly, I knew I was going to say yes. It's difficult to say no to your colleagues. To head the MIT Faculty is a singular honor. And it was also at a time when I thought that there were a set of issues that were before the faculty that I thought I might be able to be helpful with. So it was service. I have to say I loved being Faculty chair. I thought it was a wonderful job.

INTERVIEWER: Why? What about it?

BACOW: A number of things. One is that you have the world's biggest hunting license. You can literally stick your nose into any issue that you want, because you do represent the Faculty. And, like many others who had grown up at MIT, there were things about the Institute that, as a faculty member, I always thought, "Why do we do it that way? Life would be better if we did it slightly differently." And as chairman of the Faculty, I could actually do something about those things.

INTERVIEWER: Like what?

BACOW: Oh like all sorts of things. I remember, there were issues having to do with student life, which I cared about. There were issues that had to do with faculty life which I cared about. With the way in which we welcomed junior faculty members at MIT. A whole variety of things.

Also what I loved about being chairman of the Faculty is that I had wonderful colleagues. I loved my time on Academic Council, both times. I served on Academic Council as Faculty chair and when I became Chancellor. I don't think I've ever worked with a finer group of people than I worked with on Academic Council. I loved the collegiality about it. What I realized is that, as faculty, we tend to keep our noses down. We know the people who live in our neighborhoods. And by that I mean intellectually and geographically. So I knew the people at MIT who worked on similar problems to what I worked on, everybody who did environmental stuff. Wherever they were, I knew them. And I knew the people whose offices were in close proximity to mine. And it was an interesting group of people. For a year or two Millie Dresselhaus, Millie Dresselhaus's office was just right around the corner from mine, and Millie and I became friends because we would be there at odd hours. But as chair of the Faculty, I got to know people from throughout the Institute, in every nook and cranny of the Institute, every corner, and I love that.

INTERVIEWER: It was a two- year post?

BACOW: Yeah, it's one year as chair-elect and two years as chair. So Bob Jaffe was the chair when I became chair-elect, and Bob was a great mentor. And then I had the privilege of being mentor to my chair-elect, Lotte Bailyn. Great people. We all did the job differently, everybody brings a different skill set to the job. But I loved it. It also gave me a chance to work with Chuck and Joel Moses as well, as provost.

INTERVIEWER: And you said you came in thinking that there were at least a few issues that you had some ideas about, how change might be helpful. Student life. I mean, did you really think that as chairman of the Faculty you could affect student life, and what did you have in mind, and were you able to do anything?

BACOW: Sure. Well, Roz Williams and I teamed up and persuaded Chuck-- it didn't take much persuading-- that there should be a task force on student life and learning, for example.

INTERVIEWER: Roz was then dean of...

BACOW: Well, we called it dean of... it was odd, so, the Office of the Dean for Students and Undergraduate Education. Actually, when I became chancellor, I split the two.

INTERVIEWER: So you helped set in motion this committee.

BACOW: Roz and I were co-conspirators. And Roz really was the driving force behind the creation of that task force. But as Faculty chair, I got behind it. And Bob Jaffe raised a really good question. He said, there have been lots of faculty committees created over the years to study the undergraduate experience, the undergraduate curriculum, student life, and with a few exceptions, many of them had gone nowhere. So Bob said, "why don't we do something radical? Why don't we have a committee to take a look at why these other committees had failed?" And as Faculty chair-elect, he asked me to chair that. So we did a study, and basically recommended a different way of doing business. And that became really the modus opperandi for the Task Force on Student Life and Learning.

INTERVIEWER: And you said another thing on your mind was how faculty were welcomed to the Institute. Were you able to do something on that?

BACOW: Together with Joel Moses, who was the provost at the time, we took a fresh look at how we welcomed new faculty, the new faculty orientation. I remember when I became a faculty member, somebody said, here's your ID, here are the courses that you're going to teach, here's where you go to get an athletic card, and welcome to MIT. And it's evolved greatly since then. I think all for the better. Lots of people had a hand in it. But it was an issue which I cared about. So I made a point of greeting new faculty, bringing them together in a variety of contexts.

One of the things which I also enjoyed was, the chair of the Faculty sits in on Corporation meetings. And I thought Corporation members needed to get a better sense of what faculty do on a day-to-day basis. So as Faculty chair, I invited Corporation members to come a couple of hours early to each Corporation meeting. And I would invite a half a dozen faculty members, and just ask them to bring their calendars with them, and to talk about what they did the previous day from the time they got up in the morning to the time they went to bed at night. To give Corporation members a better sense of what faculty do on a day-to-day basis. Otherwise, there's a tendency to say, "Well, you teach one or two courses a semester, at most. Maybe five hours of teaching a week. What do you do with the rest of your time?" I enjoyed that.

INTERVIEWER: So you had access, or you became part of the, you say, Academic Council, which is a small group that the president meets with weekly.

BACOW: President chairs Academic Council meets weekly for two hours. Tuesdays, 10 to 12.

INTERVIEWER: So that's a dozen people or so?

BACOW: No, it's all the deans, the vice presidents, the provost, the associate provosts, the head of the libraries, secretary of the Corporation. I'm probably forgetting a few people, at least.

But we used to meet in the engineering conference room. It was lively conversation about virtually every issue at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Were there surprises? I mean, were there problems you hadn't been aware of, or anything else that suddenly you had this front row seat as well as being a participant? That you were seeing the Institute in a different light, even though you'd been there so many years?

BACOW: Of course one of the things that's unusual about MIT, and I didn't appreciate it until I came to Tufts, was the degree to which everything is centralized. And as a result of that, we take certain things for granted. We take for granted that there's one academic calendar. That there's one unitary faculty at MIT. That to a first approximation, at least when I left it was only with the exception of the Sloan School, there was one tuition at MIT. We took for granted that the educational opportunity was equally open to undergraduate and graduate students, and students regardless of department. If you met the prerequisites, you could take a course. You were an MIT student, as opposed to exclusively being a student in one school or one department. And as a result of that, if you sit on Academic Council, you get a window literally on every issue that comes before MIT.

The other treat was being a member of the tenure and promotion subcommittee of Academic Council. If you're an Academic Council member and with professor in your title, you read literally every tenure and promotion case that comes before the Institute. And I found that to be an intellectual feast. You get a window on the most interesting cutting-edge research in literally every discipline that's represented at MIT. I loved that.

INTERVIEWER: Did you find that there were problems you hadn't been aware of? In other words, I wonder if as faculty or students, are in a way sheltered from the complexity of the difficulties institutions face, and that maybe becoming part of Academic Council and/or the Corporation suddenly opened your eyes to anything you really hadn't been aware of so much?

BACOW: Well certainly. When you're a faculty member, your focus by definition is reasonably narrow. And when I became Faculty chair, I started thinking about all sorts of issues. Like faculty renewal. I became chair at a time in which mandatory retirement for tenured faculty was being eliminated as a result of federal policy change. And so that caused us to reflect on this issue, of retirement and the life cycle of a faculty member. And we did some extensive surveys, and one of the things which we learned was that attitudes towards retirement and work were very different, and differed by discipline. And also differed if you took a look at the experimentalists versus theorists, versus humanists, for example.

So, I learned a lot there. I learned a lot about the culture of different disciplines and departments, and how that varied. For example, tenure and promotion letters in the Math Department are exceedingly short-- one or two paragraphs, often. "This person proved the following theorem, which had been a conjecture for 300 years. It is worthy of tenure." Versus the style of letters in fields that are intellectually much messier, and as a result there's much greater nuance and far less convergence of opinion. I learned a lot about the different styles of graduate education and support across the Institute. And how students who are in the life sciences had different experiences from students who are in the social sciences versus students in the humanities, versus professional students, whether or not they were Sloan students, or architecture students, or professional engineering students.

There was lots that I learned. I learned a tremendous amount from Chuck, just about the role of federal policy, and how that influenced the operations and economics of the Institute. So my eyes were opened to lots of things in higher education. A lot of discussion about the composition of the class, and intentional policy decisions that we were making that affected who we would admit, and how that would shape the class. Financial aid policy. It was a wonderful education in higher education administration.

INTERVIEWER: So you were chairman of the Faculty in the mid-'90s. What were the big issues facing MIT, the problems that Chuck Vest and his administration had to grapple with?

BACOW: Probably the biggest issue, at the time that I was chair of the Faculty, was MIT was trying to cut a significant portion of its operating costs through re-engineering. And, candidly, re-engineering at the time alienated the faculty. It stressed the administration on a day-to-day basis, the people on whose backs the place really operated. And I think it was a difficult period for MIT. It did not go well. And one of the jobs of chairman of the Faculty is to tell the president when the president is about to step in it. And I did; I saw that as my role. And to Chuck's credit, Chuck always wanted to hear the truth, and to hear it unvarnished. And he gave me... I know as president now, it's difficult to hear news that you want to wanna hear, but the people who tell you that news are often your friends. Paul Gray used to have a great joke about that. Ask him about his Russian peasant joke.

INTERVIEWER: You're not going to tell us?

BACOW: I can't tell it as good as Paul tells it.

INTERVIEWER: Were there other serious issues or problems?

BACOW: Another major issue at that time was that the federal government was cutting back on its support for basic research. It was doing so in a variety of ways, both directly and indirectly. And at the time, the Institute was experiencing a number of financial stresses, in part because indirect cost recovery was down. There were a number of changes to A-21, the OMB circular that governs indirect cost recovery, that affected us quite dramatically. Part of the push for re-engineering was, in fact, to adjust to those changes.

INTERVIEWER: Did you feel that you wore two hats? On the one hand that you were there to say to Chuck, "The faculty believe this, they're not going to like this, this isn't the right way to go about it." But did you also feel any responsibility to go back to the faculty and say, "Hey look, we're in a tough spot," and to try to sell Chuck's program, or to explain why he was doing things? Or was that his job?

BACOW: Well, I think one of the unique aspects of MIT that separates it from much of the rest of American higher education, is that traditionally we've not drawn sharp distinctions between faculty and administration. Here I am, I've been gone for over seven years and I'm still saying "we." Old habits die hard. And so the people who've served in the position of Faculty chair have been honest brokers on behalf of the faculty. And to be a broker, you have to be willing to work in both directions. The way I use a particular metaphor which I think is good in describing it, part of one's job as Faculty chair is to ensure that there's a good impedance match between the faculty and the administration. And so, I worked hard at that; Chuck worked hard at that. It was both of our jobs. It was not in the faculty's interest, nor was it the administration's interest, to see that we were not in resonance.