Phillip L. Clay PhD '75

INTERVIEWER: This is the    150th Oral History Project, and this is Dr. Phillip Clay. And    I guess I'd like to start out --    we're interested in stories -- so can you tell me a little bit about    where you were born and what it was like growing up in Wilmington?

CLAY: I was born    in Wilmington, North Carolina,    and I was born    in the       late    mid-1940 and    grew up in the 1950's and 1960's. By growing up, I mean I sort of had some idea of what was going on in the world.    So I remember, on my eighth birthday,    the    supreme court decision,    the Brown decision on    desegregation occurred.    I won't claim at eight years old to have understood the law, but I did understand that there was a momentous change, about which the predominant    feeling    among my family and people I knew was    both hope and fear: hope that this would be a change and fear that the change might actually not be initially good and perhaps not apply to Wilmington.    The fact is that it did not apply to Wilmington;    so the entire educational experience I had in elementary and junior high and senior high school    was in a segregated school. Now the truth is that    for reasons I'm not quite clear,    there was always a very strong educational tradition; so that after Sputnik, as occurred in many places in the US, there was a re-doubled education to       accelerating educational preparation    and    tracking and the "talented 10th" and other dynamics were in place; so that    I was among the say 30 or 40 kids in my county -- black kids in my county -- who in the fifth grade were plucked out and told, you're going to skip the seventh grade;    you're going to go to an accelerated sixth grade,    because, you know, the nation, you know, we have these things that we have to do. And I remember quite explicitly    President Kennedy    challenging the nation    to the       moon adventure; and I remember explicitly    a deep sense that    at least the "talented 10th" were destined to college.

It wasn't a question about whether we would go; it wasn't a question about making the right choices in terms of the courses you would take.    There was an expectation which was communicated       to    my family,    who very supportive, and    lots of things were put in our way    to make sure that we were prepared; and this ranged from the acceleration -- we skipped things like North Carolina history, that was considered not terribly important for people who were headed to the moon --    and we went straight to    what would eventually be advanced science courses and what we would now call AP courses. I don't think they were called AP in those days.    So I had a very good high school preparation; I had a very supportive family and I recall    in the sixth grade    that       the smartest ,       the brightest    bulb    was not me. I think I actually graduated    eighth or ninth in my class, but clearly the smartest person in the class was    a young woman who was the oldest of 13 kids,    and she came to school periodically. Whenever she came she did a great job; but after a while she disappeared. Now it's possible she moved away, but my guess is that, you know, she was what we would now call a "parentified" child and essentially    had a stunted educational experience because of the demands of       taking care of her younger siblings. And I understand that, because at least in my own family my uncles were similarly pulled out in the Depression and told, you know, it is more important for you to work than go to school;    but    I never had any of that kind of pressure even though I was the oldest of five boys.    We were always    told, you know, your job is to go to school, and the only reason you can't go to school is that, you know, your body can't hold itself together.

INTERVIEWER: So what was the environment at home? What did your parents do?

CLAY: Well, I was always encouraged. My parents -- my mother and father graduated from high school but they did not have professional jobs, and most of my family    did not. Most of their siblings       did not graduate from high school, and no one in my family prior to myself graduated from college.

INTERVIEWER: How did your    parents support the family?

CLAY: My father was a barber, and my mother worked at various jobs.

INTERVIEWER: And your siblings?

CLAY: Well they were younger me...

INTERVIEWER: Well no, I mean did they -- tell me just a little about them -- how many --

CLAY: Well there were five, and they had various experiences; I think we were all very strongly encouraged to       do high school; we all graduated    from high school. I was the first to go to college, and they had various experiences and have ended up in various jobs.    My second oldest brother, you know, retired before I did but, you know, that's okay.

INTERVIEWER: How did you    wind up going --

CLAY: Did. I haven't retired.   

INTERVIEWER: How did you wind up going to UNC at Chapel Hill?

CLAY: Well part of the    push to college was,    you know, every    prior class where there were successful individuals in terms of going to college --    there was a great local profile to their success; so    if you could imagine a graduation where the emphasis was not on how well the basketball team did or the football team, but how much scholarship money the senior class won --    I don't remember any of the numbers, but I remember the number being tallied.    So there were       the older brothers of my classmates and sisters, too, of my classmates who went on to Ivy League schools and to other great institutions, and they would    come back to visit, you know, the Friday before Easter, or the last day before the    Christmas vacation or at other times and talk about their great experiences at Columbia or Penn or some other institution. And this was designed, I guess, to motivate the rest of us, you know, that there is a reward at the end of the tunnel, and you too might win, you know, $50,000 in scholarships, and that sort of thing, and that was very encouraging. So the older brother of one of my best friends    went to UNC,    and this was when going to UNC was a big deal, not because it was hard to get into, but because none of us had ever been invited to come.    So he,       some time during my    junior year,    took me back to campus,    and looked around, and    Chapel Hill is a very active place.    And    I must say that the fact that    Jessie Helms thought that, you know, the whole place should be turned into a parking lot, you know, helped get my attention to it. Anything he was against, I was probably for it.    So I went to the campus, I visited, and liked it very much. My friend, the younger brother of this guy, went to Duke.

INTERVIEWER: How was it that you first got interested in urban studies?

CLAY: Well, being a child of that particular period of history,    I picked up on sort of what the great challenges were, and my first --    and this was in high school -- my first    ambition was    to be a diplomat. I thought that the Peace Corps and world peace,    were the goals.    I managed to convince an English teacher once    that I shouldn't read -- I don't remember what novel was, but it was, in my view, a thoroughly boring novel, and I had no interest whatsoever in reading it -- so I convinced her to allow me to read the autobiography of Ralph Bunch, who was a black    undersecretary of the UN, someone who had been    passed over to be a senior State Department official, and who had a biography that wasn't terribly unlike my own life story.    And, you know, sort of wandering through the library, I found it, you know.    So that motivated me or made me become very interested in becoming a diplomat,    and that lasted until maybe first or second year in college, when I    heard a joke from Dick Gregory--Dick Gregory is sort of       the comedian of that period--    and his comment was that Americans are willing to go halfway around the world to tell somebory else how to live, but they won't go around the corner, and they own it. And that sort of got me to thinking, well maybe the great challenges are in the US, and maybe I shouldn't be so interested in, you know, going halfway around the world to bring peace.

So I think I drifted toward law school, and I remember at some point probably as a sophomore or junior going to the library to look at -- well what do you study in law school? And needless to say, I discovered things like torts, and civil procedure, and criminal process, and so forth, and that didn't look too interesting. And I then started talking to some of my professors about what are the public service professions that are new and bold and would sort of fit into the great questions that, you know, we were studying about, because I was a sociology/urban studies major, as an undergraduate? And that's when urban planning popped up.    They did not give and still don't give, at UNC, an undergraduate degree in Planning, but they gave what they call "a certificate," meaning it be the equivalent, at MIT, of a minor. So I did, and you know, I was the only undergraduate in the classes I took,    and    when it became time to go to graduate school, that's where I was headed.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you wind up -- what attracted you to MIT?

CLAY: Well, as many students do. They commit to go to graduate school, and then they want to know where they should apply. So I went to faculty and said, so where should I apply? And they gave me a list of five schools; MIT was at the top of the list, along with Berkeley and Harvard.    I didn't want to go to the west coast, so I came    to Cambridge in November, 1967, in my senior year,    and I visited    Harvard in the morning, and MIT in the afternoon, and at the end of the day, the choice for me was very clear. I was admitted to both, and the rest is history.

INTERVIEWER: What was it that made MIT your first choice?

CLAY: Well, I think it's as simple as describing the two 1/2 days.    The 1/2 day    at the other end of Massachusetts Avenue was       wandering around looking at the bulletin board;    I did not have an appointment;    I didn't see too many people;    and sitting in the classes, I didn't find it terribly interesting.    I don't think anybody was unfriendly; they just weren't available.    I came to MIT, and I approached a couple of people -- one of them would be    the professor who would become my advisor,    and he gave me about an hour.    All of the department activities were concentrated in an area and, you know, it was open. I walked in and listened and looked around. People were happy to describe what it is they were doing and ask me what I was interested in.    I didn't see any other part of MIT, unless, you know, it was just a matter of walking the hall.    And    you know, I had a sense that, you know, this is a place where I could be.

INTERVIEWER: So your graduate study    for the said Master's and the PhD, how many years were you a graduate student?

CLAY: Well I was a graduate student    for one year as a Master's student, and a good part of that year was spent in an unsuccessful effort    to avoid being drafted. So after    being away for two years, I came back in the PhD program. I'd had some thinking over the time, lots of correspondence with friends and faculty,    and I came back as a PhD student. So I was a PhD student from 1974, I mean, 1971 to 1975. I graduated February of 1975, as I recall.

INTERVIEWER: And how would you describe those years as a graduate student? What's it like being a graduate student at MIT?   

CLAY: It's probably    not appropriate to describe it this way, that is the years as a graduate student here, but I felt it was very much like going to work.    I got married    just before I came back. I married in June of 1971, and I started graduate school again in September of 1971, so I lived off campus, and I had a life and I had friends who had nothing to do with MIT.    And I came and I went to class and I did my projects and I did internships. I would later do research    as an RA and    as a Fellow at the Joint Center at Harvard Square, and so it was a very focused --    I knew what I wanted, I had good advice, very good support.    And I was in a field that was outward looking.

I mean, when we did research it meant going someplace; you didn't do it in Cambridge. In fact, I was quite explicit that I would not do it in Cambridge; there could have been opportunities, but Cambridge was a bit high maintenance.    You have to spend a lot of time on stuff that wasn't quite critical, whereas I could go to Cleveland or    you know, Prince George's County or New York and sort of focus on why I am there and what I'm doing.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that there was the professor who gave you an hour and then became your Advisor. Are there particular mentors that stand out from your graduate study years?

CLAY: Well, the person I'm referring to as the faculty member with whom I spent that first hour    was professor Bernard Frieden,    and he did become my advisor; he taught several courses -- in fact, every course he taught,    I was his RA    And at the time I was a Fellow at the Joints Center for Urban Studies between Harvard and MIT; he was the director. And when he stepped down as director,       and I finished my degree and became a faculty member -- that was 1975 -- then I think I kept an association with the Joint Center, as he did.    And then in 1982, I became assistant director of the Joint Center.    He was a wonderful man.    He retired a number of years ago; he was wonderful because    he was quiet and patient, had a great sense of humor, and was very generous with his students.    He was --       had very high standards and high expectations; but he was also the kind of advisor who would make things happen, would say that you really had to go to this meeting; and it would be a meeting about which you had no knowledge.    And    he would sometimes tell you explicitly why you ought to go, and other times I think he probably said, this is a place you ought to be.    He and his wife, Elaine,    had his    students over,    you know, for events    he would host at his home.    And    he was    generous with advice,    generous and gentle    with his advice.

INTERVIEWER: Sounds like he looked out for you.

CLAY: I think so. And he did. I think he saw it as part of his responsibility; I wasn't the only one, there probably --    several of    our colleagues,    my peers,    who had a similar experience with him at know roughly the same time. Many of us are still friends.    And    he was a very effective person in the department; he was never department head;    he was briefly associate dean;    but he was the kind of person who       actually was able to have great influence by the questions he asked.    I don't ever recall    in all of the years I attended faculty meetings with him and all of the years I was his student, his ever making, what we would call, a sermon or speech; but I do recall he would ask a question, and if people didn't get the message from the question, he'd ask it again,    and had a very quiet way of influencing processes.

INTERVIEWER: Have you adapted that yourself?

CLAY: Probably. I think there's a great power in universities in the questions you ask.    I've always told students that sometimes you make a bigger impression by the questions you ask than the answer you give, at least initially.    And    I learned, you know, similarly useful lessons, from my point of view, from other colleagues.    I was a social scientist and social science--especially applied social science--we don't really do experiments; you really can't. But I had one faculty -- member of our faculty -- from whom I took courses and with whom I was later a colleague,    who, when things became complicated or difficult or divided and he had a particular point of view that he was pushing, he would sort of truncate the discussion by saying, well, let's experiment, let's do it this way and then in a year or two, we'll come back and discuss how it went.    And that was quite disarming in many cases.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to ask a couple of questions about your scholarship.    What led you to become particularly interested in housing, housing policy?

CLAY: I don't ever remember a conversation with myself    in terms of which field I chose -- a conversation with myself that said I'm going to choose housing rather than transportation or health or some other policy issue. I think it was probably a consequence of the fact that housing is the most universal transaction in the way cities develop. Now it could have been jobs and economic development, but    the department really wasn't very strong in economic development at that time; we have since become much stronger in it. So I suspect the answer to the question of why housing is simply that it was the basic transaction in community building.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

CLAY: Everybody has to live somewhere.

INTERVIEWER: What are your thoughts about housing and housing policy in this country?

CLAY: Well I've had the    opportunity    to be engaged in the evolution of housing policy over this long period in a variety of ways:    teaching it, writing about it. Second,    I've had the opportunity for foundations and others to be an advisor on it, and I've been a member of a board    since 1980 , where we have, in Boston, and then in the last 15 years nationally, used every opportunity to explore ways of building communities    that housing policy would allow. This is not only US housing policy, but the housing initiatives that states and cities    came up with as well. So I've had the opportunity to be deeply involved    without having to leave the academy    and roll up my sleeves all day. I only roll up my sleeves once a week or once a month or two days a quarter or some other way of engaging, but still having, hopefully, made a contribution to the organizations in which I was involved, in how they would make use of resources to advance    shared views about how community should develop.

INTERVIEWER: So how has that -- how have you seen the field change over the years?

CLAY: Over the years the field has changed in a variety of ways, and    it's been my    pleasure to observe it, both as a way of helping to prepare students, practitioners who -- and scholars who would go out into that field    and how we serve the sort of social goals we have for community development.    There are several things that I would describe as having emerged during this period, because, I think, it's probably fair to say the field grew rather than there being discrete cycles. So I think we've gone from a point where building public housing would be a principal way of adding to supply to a set a policies aimed at facilitating the development.    So we provide tax credits to developers rather than actually the cash subsidy to build housing. We also evolved to a point of trying to balance    the development of housing with the provision of cash assistance,    because even though we had this evolution of support for housing development through tax credits and financing mechanisms, there was also the sense that we could possibly build housing or subsidize housing for everybody who needed it. So we developed a number of direct subsidy arrangements.

We've also    revitalized    the notion of home ownership.    Home ownership was a big deal after World War II through the 1960's; and then it sort of fell out of favor.    And I would say more recently, in the last 15 years, it has come back in favor, and we've gone through a period where we were trying to make housing    accessible to a broader range of people as housing affordability escalated as a problem. To give you an illustration,       when I bought my first house, the rule was that you could not spend more than 28 percent of your gross income for housing,    and you had to make a downpayment of a specific amount, and that depended on what kind of loan you had. And you had to have --       meet all of the underwriting criteria. So for example, if there was a 10 percent down-payment requirement, you had to prove to a green-eye- shaded banker, that you had that money for six months prior to the time you bought the home, because they didn't want to risk that this was a secret loan that you were going to have to repay and that that would undermine your ability to afford the housing. And I remember also that they checked income; they not only wanted to see your pay stubs, they wanted a letter from your employer saying that you were employed and six weeks later when you closed on the house, they wanted a letter to make sure you were still employed, or the last week's pay stub.

Well, we obviously    had a situation where not very many poor people could pass through all these filters, and so we created a variety of mechanisms that made the filters    less of a barrier,    and the home ownership rate, you know, all of a sudden tacked up    somewhere after the mid-1990's, especially after 2000.    So that was a trend, and of course, we are reaping the benefits or the bitter fruits of that effort in the current    financial crisis, and you know, I think part of it is that some people were squeezed into more housing than they could afford, but there was also the issue of fraud and poor underwriting, things that, you know, never would have passed,    even with relative high income people, a    decade before. Another trend has been focus on community:    that is, you don't just build a house, but you strengthen a housing market, or you reverse decline in an area, or you do mixed-income development, or you piggyback    economic development on housing development or vice versa. So those have been some of the major trends, and each of these trends    had a different life at different points over my career.    I remember a push for home ownership in 1968 as a big part of the Housing Act of the Great Society,    and then it sort of fell out of favor to re-emerge 25 years later, almost the same rhetoric, many of the same provisions.

INTERVIEWER: I'm not even sure if, you know, there an answer to this question, but is there a way to sort of articulate or summarize what the major obstacles are to    good housing policy?

CLAY: The obstacles to housing policy are several.    The big one is affordability. Housing prices and rents have gone up faster than incomes. In fact, if you were to isolate the middle class--however you define middle class really doesn't matter--but if you look at the incomes of the middle class, they have essentially been stagnant since the mid-1970's in real terms.    Housing prices have not been stagnant, so it's not surprising that individuals, families,    have had to devote more than that old 28 percent of their income to housing.    That wouldn't be so bad,    except other things have gone up: the cost of energy,    insurance,    our habits --    I don't think anybody had a latte or bottled water    in the 1960's -- and those things add up.    And       I think landlords on the rental side    have had a variety of motivations to raise rents or pressures to raise rents much faster than income, so affordability is the first obstacle.

Second obstacle is that we've had    a struggle for turf in ways in the last generation that we did not have in previous generations.    One of the first    studies I did       after becoming a faculty member was to look at the gentrification process, the process of middle class reclaiming of urban neighborhoods, so that       cheap housing disappeared because in some locations, that housing, irrespective of what condition it was in,    became an attractive location for a middle class that wanted to live in the city. If we look at some neighborhoods, the areas where the middle class reclaimed are the areas that had been the cheap housing    in the previous generation. Some of the explanation for homelessness can be explained by the fact that the areas that used to be the cheapest housing, rooming houses,    just the bottom of the market, was essentially pulled out in the mid-late 1970's-- and so by the early 1980's we had homelessness. And the question was where did these homeless people come from. Well, they came out of the areas that we had just reclaimed. There are other explanations, too:       the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, for example, a Recession that lasted very long, almost indefinitely in some regions and in some parts of metropolitan areas. So that change    is part of the obstacle.

Another obstacle    was that housing became much more of a commodity. Now, while there have been efforts at sort of the development of non-profit housing, and I've been associated with that in a number of different ways,    most other efforts were aimed at commodification.    We couldn't build single family houses fast enough, so we convinced Americans that, well, you can buy an apartment, and we can turn that apartment    down the street into your future home.    Many people found that strange, but housing was in short supply -- and affordable --    not affordable at some distance, and so, you know, we went from, you know, single-family houses versus the rental apartments to this category called condos.    Another obstacle were    location, environmental issues; there are places that, you know, had we been able to build housing, that might have moderated price, increases    but that affordable housing was not built--    there are transportation issues,    you know, far away, bad location, not near jobs. And then       we sort of lost our will to have national housing policy to counteract these strategies,    starting in the 1980's. I think the Reagan administration basically felt that housing was not something that the federal government ought to deal with, and so while in a different generation, we might have addressed some of these problems quite dramatically,    for the 1980's through about 1992    or 1993, we basically had no housing policy, other than    the effort on the part of cities and advocates and public policy people to preserve the    elements of housing policy that survived from the previous generation. Congress would routinely overrule    the Reagan administration's efforts at dismantling the system,    but they were always significantly short of successful.    So over time, the pieces fell away.

INTERVIEWER: Is there a particular contribution you feel you've been able to make in the field?   

CLAY: I think other people have to answer the question of what my contributions have been, but where I've tried to contribute    is in    bringing some knowledge and some    clarity    to what was happening and to how practitioners, our own students, would    be effective in that environment.    I tried to    help people understand in the early 1990's    that that system we had built had pretty much eroded, and that we were not only    seeing the evolution that led to housing but we were creating homelessness.    And I've tried to    bring a some clarity to    racial discrimination and community building.    And then in organizations in which I participated, I hope I have made some contribution.

INTERVIEWER: Is some of that contribution connected to the National Commission policy recommendations that became part of that Housing Act of 1990?

CLAY: Yeah. I think the study I did    in 1987 that sort of percolated into the Housing Act of, I believe, 1990 or something like that, where I think    Congress really did tried to reclaim some of the responsibility for what was happening with respect to housing policy. So it was a fortuitous       coming together of a piece of work and    an opportunity to have some influence in the way legislation was written.    So an organization emerged out of that --    we had non-profits before but we did not have non-profits that moved    directly into the area of preservation of affordable housing, and I think that's one of the things that I'm pleased to have been a part of. In fact, I joined    the founding board,    and I'm going to get the dates wrong, probably by 1994, and I've just gone emeritus.

INTERVIEWER: Congratulations.    For a minute I wanted to ask about the books that you've written. What is it that you needed to say about urban studies or housing policy that prompted you to write these books?   

CLAY: Well, the first book was the one that focused on neighborhood gentrification and encumbent upgrading, and I think, I tried to make two big points there. One was    that what we had as a paradigm in the field: that neighborhoods decline, and you know, proverbially just rot away or bulldoze--that that doesn't have to happen; that neighborhoods can be reborn. They can be reborn because the original architectural social class role is reclaimed, as occurred with    gentrification, or it can be reborn because resources become available to working class families to reclaim the neighborhood and rebuild it to strengthen the market and to improve physical quality. And it was my goal in that book to make both of those points-- to make it clear that you don't need,       you know, heart surgeons with extra cash to come in and fix up an old house; that you can have the sons and daughters of long-term residents of the neighborhood come in.    The latter group will need a bit more help than the surgeon with extra cash, but that can be done.    Other works    that I did    were aimed at    trying to point out that a combination of those barriers that I mentioned earlier related to affordability, changes in the financing environment and the regulatory environment, were all combining    to contribute to the homeless problem: homeless problem in the sense of the supply of affordable housing, low cost housing,    was eroding,    and that that's something that we needed to focus on rather than focus on the macro issues, because    the Republicans and the Reagan administration had abandoned housing policy in favor of macro strategies aimed at, you know,       monetary policy and fiscal policy, not housing policy or jobs policy or health policy, or any of those other issues.    And so that work was aimed at trying to    pull together the information to document that    what we had held dear--namely access, affordability--       were at risk and seriously address.

I learned one other thing, which is that it's best to write your own communications, because    in that study,    and I remember it distinctly,    it was about to    be    released,    and someone sent me a draft -- a press release -- and there was one phrase in there that I overlooked,    and    it represented a misrepresentation of what I said in the study--not a serious misrepresentation, but a nuance--    and    I don't recall exactly what it was, but they essentially pulled a number, an irrelevant number and placed it with my estimation that we were losing housing. So somehow they publicized that five million houses were being lost, and I never said that. I said we were losing the stock; but five million was never a number that was either correct or that I put in the study. So for a good 1/3 of the communications with the press, it was to straighten out that misperception. Valuable lesson.

INTERVIEWER: Yes. Yes. Let me re-focus back to MIT, because I have a lot to ask you about that.    How about if we start with the School of Architecture and Planning.    What role do you see this school having in the MIT campus at large?

CLAY: The role of the School of Architecture and Planning has evolved over the period when I was here.    When I came as a student,    my world was the Department of Urban Studies and Planning    and the Department of Political Science. The Department of Political Science, at the time, had a number of faculty members, Alan Altshuler the most prominent,    who were interested in urban politics and    international politics and collaborated with our faculty, cross-listed courses,    students moved back and forth in terms of participating in seminars and the like. So my world    was Building Seven and Building E-52, and I didn't much notice what went on in between.   

That changed a little bit as the years evolved; there are a couple of faculty members in economics, who had a similar connection to the department that would evolve shortly after.    Students who were interested in transportation would soon develop a relationship with civil and environmental -- of course, just called civil engineering at the time.    As the    environmental issues emerged    in the late 1970's,       that expanded the network a little bit more,    and it wasn't until, I would say, about 1990,    and I remember this because we had a strategic plan in the department that, I think, was dated 1992, where there was the explicit question and the challenge from the provost,    how    the department    would    join forces, collaborate more broadly,    so that we would participate in the major issues that developed    at MIT, in which the department had some interest.

Environmental would be the easiest to illustrate in that regard, because over the period    since the late 1970's probably a dozen departments had a significant role in the environmental research and education at MIT. No school was not included in that, and    our school, you know, played a significant role.    The next challenge was to go beyond    teaching and sort of minimal research engagement to a much more substantial engagement, and I think that has been --    that has occurred    to a much more substantial degree in the last six or eight years. I think students have been ahead of the faculty on this;    students would go to classes and make connections    that we did not recognize    in the curriculum or in faculty efforts. For example,    when I was a student I didn't do it, but a number of my peers took courses at the Sloan School.    They identified a number of faculty there who were interested in organizational behavior, for example,    and we had a regular group of students who would go to Sloan for that purpose.       And of course, there were those who had a more quantitative background and who would go deeply into infrastructure and transportation courses in civil engineering. I think there's much more of an institutional department-faculty leadership in making these connections now than has ever existed in the past.

INTERVIEWER: The change has been to have a much more multi-disciplinary approach to urban studies?

CLAY: Well, I think the basic shift has been to move into the way MIT operates generally, which is you define a problem, you sharpen the questions, and then you bring to bear all of the disciplines and departments and people who can make a contribution to that.    Again, environmental is the easiest to illustrate, but       if we get into areas of economic development,    then the obvious likely    people to collaborate on such projects would be urban studies, economics, and Sloan. There have always been small personal connections at that level, but to organize courses and other kinds of initiatives    is of more recent tenure.

INTERVIEWER: Do you see that as a particular role that the school has either nationally or internationally?

CLAY: I think the international -- the role the school has perceived of itself has been developed largely    independent of relation to other parts of MIT, so in the international area, for example, the school for as long as I can remember, is the leading program in international development.    So when it came to metropolitan planning, regional planning,    our close peers were, you know, UCLA, Berkeley, Cornell, at one point;    but, you know, we were the leaders. We had big projects and    several countries around the world, in South America and Africa and    the Middle East for many years. And we did that    and, you know, there are stories of urban studies faculty sort of meeting, you know, civil engineering faculty in the airport in Cairo.    They were there working on the same region, but on different projects. I think now they're more likely to be working on the same team.

INTERVIEWER: Can we talk a little about your sort of progression at MIT from, you know, professor, department head, associate provost, assistant director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies? Can you just sort of tell me the story of that evolution?   

CLAY: I'm probably not able to tell a story of the evolution, but let me just affirm that those were the steps I took.    I think the basic explanation is that I probably have a, you know, a dna element, called service, and saying yes.    I tend to like, in situations where I'm present, to try to make a contribution,    and I think I do it in a way that -- I offer myself in a way that's    appealing to some people,    and MIT has been a place, still is a place, that looks for leadership among -- tends to look around the table for it's next    academic    leaders and departments and schools and programs, and so forth. So I guess I was -- once I got around the table -- that I would sort of be in line for the things that would occur. In my department, for example,    in the 77 years of the department,    this last transition is the first time we've gone outside the department for a leader.    And that's not unlike many other departments at MIT, so it's not surprising that    I would not, sort of, be in line for something. I think if I were to try to    describe the mentoring process,    it is that    there are opportunities in the department, progressively more challenging opportunities or opportunities that had more responsibility,    in that if you got on that path and you didn't screw up, you moved up.

INTERVIEWER: But you must have asked the right questions along the way? So I have this note here, the definition of a chancellor, and it's so broad. It says the chancellor has oversight responsibility for graduate and undergraduate education at MIT, student life and student services, oversight of many of the Institute's large scale international partnerships and other initiatives. What do you really do?

CLAY: Well, the definition of the chancellor's role,    I think it's fair to say, that MIT has,    you know, two, as opposed to just one, senior academic officers, and the chancellor's role is    principally    activities that relate to education of students, and the dean's and the units related to that, report to the chancellor. That's the simplest definition of the job that I have, that the job Larry Bacow had before me, and that Paul Gray had before that.    All those other things you mentioned turn out to be    areas that    represented particular opportunities. I did have some responsibilities for international oversight when I was associate provost, so that responsibility sort of followed me around the corner. They have since been    re-assigned to    Phil Curry who's associate provost,    but I still have my fingers in a few things, and its sort of hard to disentangle,    because many of these are relationships, not just jobs, and they take more time       depending on, you know, where they are, and most of them are fairly mature, so they take a lot less time.   

But I think the origin of the current definition of the role really goes back to 1998, when Chuck Vest    received a report from the task force on student life and committed MIT to greatly changing the way the students experienced MIT, and there was a lot to be done, and he wanted to have someone    senior whose job it was to make those changes. At that time we had a dean for undergraduate education and student life,    and we decided, he decided,    that those positions ought to be split: that we should have a dean for undergraduate education and a dean for student life, and that there was a very long agenda for each of them; and it's been my responsibility and Larry Bacow's before that    to work through that long agenda.

INTERVIEWER: So let's talk about what student life was like before that report came out that prompted the commitment to make a change. What was identified as needing to be improved?   

CLAY: The changes that    the task force proposed, that the faculty adopted and that Chuck wanted to implement    was a very long list, and let me just illustrate it, I don't want to suggest that I'm giving you the whole list. They range from a residence system in which the focus    was on minimal, to put it simply, adult supervision.    We'd had a system where    the dormitories were buildings that students lived; there were housemasters that gave a variety of oversight, based on their disposition and the physical characteristics of the building, and the historic culture of the building. But you couldn't say that there was an approach to student life. We had fraternities that were    very strong in the sense that    the best of them provided an invaluable environment to their students, in fact, I think it would be fair to say, that the best description of the experience of being a student at MIT often was associated with being in    some of the fraternities, rather than living in the dorm, though there were exceptions there.    We had    a judgment, a conclusion about the pace and pressure that MIT was a hard, rough, unfriendly place;    that students were on their own; that faculty didn't wander across Mass. Avenue; that the western part of the campus was a refuge that students would go to at night    to get away from the "Instititute," which was on the other side of Massachusetts Avenue.    We didn't have a lot of programs, but there were a lot of activities. So it was very easy to set up a, you know,    juggling club, but there wasn't a notion about where would they practice and how would they be a part of the National Juggling Association. We had athletics in which lots of students participated, much higher than most institutions,    but we had very, very       marginal facilities.    We had some great coaches, but we had other    sports that were    under-invested in,    and we had the perception that this was a rough place to survive, and while the statistics did not support it, there was a sense that students were over-stressed and, you know, suicide rates were high and nobody cared. So that was the scenario, that was the image that people had. Some of those things were very true, and embarrassingly true; some of them were just perceptions. Faculty really did care about student life, and some dormitories had wonderful cultures the alumni now    reflect on,    but we weren't getting the message across. In some cases we were under-performing, and in some places       there was a gem that wasn't polished or held up for it's true value, and that's been the challenge: to change all of those things in the last decade. And 1998 was 10 years ago.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about the changes that have taken place.

CLAY: Well, I think some fraternities have not made it through this period.    I think the system is stronger now than it has been. I think we have invested a great deal in supporting this system,    and supporting it through a transition that involved having freshman live on campus, as opposed to    the first week of a student's experience be carrying a suitcase around campus, looking for a place to live. I think we've created,    with the strong support of alumni, a set of facilities that much more honor the interests that students have and the passion they bring to this campus about activities,    whether it's athletics or music. I think we have programs now that       put resources    to support what we think students ought to have as an experience, whether it's theatre or    affinity groups.    I think we have    a great deal more invested in community health,    mental health, and I believe the    housing experience is more uniformly positive    than it was believed then. We have a housemaster system and GRT and residence life program staff who support student initiatives as well as provide a framework, an infrastructure, for student activities. I believe we have more support for student leadership development, because the underlying point about all of these is that there is a great expectation that students would take responsibility for major elements of this community.    There are no faculty    supervisors in fraternity houses, for example, they are enterprises run by students. And so we've given a lot more attention to student leadership development, and this has been joined with a greater attention to more active learning on the academic side, and I believe lots more students    develop a voice and a sense about       their own responsibility for taking action. That is    also a    definition for entrepreneurship, which, I think, has also emerged powerfully in the same period.