Steven R. Lerman ’72, SM ’73, PhD ’75

INTERVIEWER: Today is May 13, 2010. We're talking this afternoon with Steven R. Lerman, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the vice chancellor and dean for graduate education at MIT.

He graduated from MIT in 1972 and stayed on first to earn a Master's degree and doctorate, and then to serve as a faculty member. He has worn many different hats. He was chair of the faculty not once, but twice. He was the first director of MIT's Project Athena, a student computing system created in 1983 to explore how computing technology could be used to enhance education. He has been deeply involved with MIT's OpenCourseWare and directs the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives. He recently coordinated the work of a task force for Institute-wide planning and is acting MIT co-director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance.

Nor does he stray very far from MIT after work. He and his wife Lori have been housemasters in The Warehouse, one of MIT's graduate residence halls, since it opened almost a decade ago, and they are known for their monthly pancake brunches. But that will all end soon. Although Steve has called himself a lifer at MIT, he will become provost and executive vice president at George Washington University in July.

Steve, congratulations on your new post, and thank you for talking with us. We're happy to catch you before you walk out the door. When you entered MIT as a freshman in 1969, did you have any expectations that you would stay so long?

LERMAN: No, of course not. I mean 1969, first of all placing it in context, was not a year known for people doing a long-term planning. It was the height of the Vietnam War era. It was a year of tremendous change in the United States and universities and university cultures. Planning horizons were more like in months and weeks rather than years and decades. So no, there was no long-term plan at all, frankly.

I did have some interest, although certainly not an exclusive one, in academia, but even that was a vague notion or certainly nothing resembling a plan. And when I came as a freshman, most of my goal was simply to get adapted to MIT, and figure out who I was and what I was going to be doing for the next, well turned out three years, then six years while in graduate school. And then, of course, 40 years.

INTERVIEWER: Did you fall in love with the Institute when you were an undergraduate or have any conscious sense that this was a place that you wanted to remain at?

LERMAN: I loved the place when I got here, particularly after the middle of my freshman year. I think that for me, the big turning point for being here at MIT and really what I felt most comfortable, was I started doing a UROP at MIT. Up until then, of course, I was doing a lot of course work, which I loved and enjoyed. But the special nature of the place I think only became clear to me and feeling at home within a small piece of it was when I started doing a UROP in the civil engineering program-- now we call it civil environmental engineering. And that's a UROP I did throughout my undergraduate years, and ultimately my own career interests moved over to civil engineering.

I had not come it was any attention at all of being a civil environmental engineer. I probably couldn't have told you coherently what a civil environmental engineer does. I came in physics major. It didn't last that long. but I thought I was going to be in astrophysics.

INTERVIEWER: What moved you away from physics and how did you discover the civil and environmental engineering?

LERMAN: Well, what moved me away from physics? I think many high school students have a less clear understanding of modern physics. And when they think of their interest in physics, it's part because they may have never been exposed to engineering. What they're really interested is how things work. And certainly basic mechanics begins to give you a coherent intellectual framework for understanding the fundamental things that make things work: force, mass, inertia.

But you think you're interested in physics, but in fact for many students-- not all, of course. There are people who come and want to be physicists --that's what's fascinating to them. It's just high schools provide absolutely no experience in how to translate those ideas into what we now think of as engineering. Making stuff that's practical, applied to human needs.

I think as I began to understand that my real interests were around how do you apply science, mathematics, technology to meet human needs. I became much more interested in civil engineering. And I think for me the vehicle for that was predominately my freshman advising seminar.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

INTERVIEWER: What subject?

LERMAN: It was on basically engineering systems. It was co-taught by someone who is still on our faculty, Richard de Neufville, and someone by the name of professor Joseph Stafford, who left MIT later. They co-taught it, and I was their freshman advisee. They co-advised a cohort of maybe eight or 10 freshman. And that whole six unit experience actually was what got me interested in the idea that one could think about both physical systems and social systems coherently to make good judgments and decisions about things like public infrastructure.

So one of the case studies was the New York City water system, which was a fascinating case study at the time. Incredibly interesting civil engineering project, fantastic water supply system. But at that time we did look at alternatives for how you could do maintenance on it more effectively, and whether it needed an extra tunnel so that you could shut down some of the existing ones.

Well, that simple insight that one could analyze the economics of that, and the physical infrastructure using a set of, at that point very simple mathematical tools because we were freshmen, after all. Fascinated me. And that's where I made a commitment, very early on. Probably well before the middle of my freshman year, that I was not going to be physics major, that I was going to major in, what later I ended up specializing in, which was transportation engineering.

INTERVIEWER: Did you take things apart to figure out how they worked when you were growing up? Was this part of your childhood?

LERMAN: Yeah. My father was a tool and die maker who ultimately owned a small tool and die making company. And this is a field that which making things matters. And my brothers-- I have two older brothers and I. I was the youngest. Taking stuff apart, making stuff was important. We did a lot of it. And having access to a complete metal machine shop, my father's work, was also something that we were not just taking stuff apart, but making stuff was very much part of it.

My father was an inveterate person who made stuff all the time. My brothers and I and he were all ham radio operators-- very common for MIT students, by the way, of that era --and decided we needed a radio tower in our backyard. It was a suburban--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

INTERVIEWER: Elmont, New York?

LERMAN: It was Elmont, New York. This is a dense suburban. This is you know, 40 by 100 lots. We're not talking about you know, multi-acre lots of which putting up a radio tower in your backyard barely would get noticed. And of course, this was a time when zoning was sort of a little less rigid, because I doubt if most places would approve it now. So my father you know, basically got out arc welding equipment and welded what must have been a 60 foot tower into our backyard. Mounted in concrete and near the house and we used that back to mount the antenna on.

INTERVIEWER: And then the neighbors didn't complain and take you to the zoning board?

LERMAN: No, that was a different era. This was probably you know circa 1960-ish. And you know it was painted with lead paint at the time, right? Because everyone used lead paint. It was a great substance, right? Except for the lead, which we found out later. And it was a radio tower we put up, mounted an antenna, and you know built-- actually out of kits, mostly-- ham radio equipment. So that was part of the household culture for us to do things like that.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think has kept you at MIT all these years?

LERMAN: Well, I thought about that as you mentioned earlier. And one becomes much more introspective when you're leaving. You know, it's a moment for reflection. So in leaving, you sort of ask yourself exactly that question: what kept you here?

I think for me it's two things. First of all, I love the culture here. This notion of a whole community of very smart people. Highly motivated, intense in their passion for discovery and learning. It's always been a place I felt very comfortable in, and being able to work with the people here has been exciting. And then the second thing is more career-related, which is it's given me the opportunity to do different things. I don't think-- I've been 35 years on the faculty now --I don't think if I were doing the same thing every one of those 35 years with minor variations I would've been interested in staying. I would have found that just too long. But it's given me opportunities, as you noted, to be chair of the faculty, which was fantastic experience unto itself. I've been a dean, I've been the vice chancellor, I've been a center director, I've been a major project director through Project Athena.

And that variety of experiences, I think, has kept me engaged here in ways that just doing the same thing-- as much as I love teaching, as much as I love research --doing that as a portfolio year after year after year probably would not have kept me here.

INTERVIEWER: What about MIT has changed the most since you arrived and what's still the same?

LERMAN: Well of course, the place is very different in some dimensions and actually oddly similar. The most obvious, of course, is the demographic of our students and faculty. We are far more international. We are far more gender balanced. We are form ethnically and racially diverse. And that's incredibly helpful to the Institute. I like to go, why is it that our median SAT scores have gone up over the last two to three decades? Well you know, in some ways the answer isn't that complicated; we doubled the pool we can draw from.

From a time when we were a few percent women to a time when the undergraduate body is about 45 percent, 46 percent women, if you double the pool you're going to get better people on average. When you get the best of the best of a pool that's now twice the size-- plus, of course, normal population growth --you're going to have better students. So I think it's enabled us. And that plus the greater access to under-represented minority students who for complicated reasons going into even the 1950s, 1960s were not coming to places like MIT. Now having about almost a quarter of our undergraduate students represented from under-represented and minority populations has also increased the pool. So our students are better simply because we have more to draw upon.

I think the culture of the place has not shifted nearly as much. It is still a culture of course centered in science and technology with excellence in other fields. Management, economics, political science, linguistics, couple other fields. But it's core and center still rests on it engineering and science. About 2/3 of the faculty are there. More than 2/3 of the undergraduates are majoring in those fields. And that's still the center point. There's been some minor shifts. Clearly, the growth of life sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. So the physics department is somewhat smaller, but the biology department is a lot bigger.

But all that is sort of I would argue in the noise. You know, they're all the sciences or engineering and the shifts in disciplines are just the natural evolution. Core values. Place that values excellence, values creativity, values entrepreneurship. Not a particularly hierarchical place. Good ideas seem to thrive no matter where they come from. All those I think are things that were true to a greater or lesser extent over its history and probably as compared to other universities, more true at MIT than a lot of other places.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember when you first learned about MIT and how did you decide to come here?

LERMAN: Well, that's an interesting question. So I can't remember when I first learned of it, but I certainly had it on my list of places I wanted to apply to for a very long time. And I honestly don't know where it was I became aware. You know, as all high school students sort of grow an awareness of college opportunities.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know anybody who went to school here?

LERMAN: I don't think so, no. I was part of a wave out of my high school. Certainly the year before mine some of the students I knew went here. But if you go back five years earlier, there wasn't like a high school that was sending large cohorts of students to MIT. Year or two before I did it begin to grow and I think my year and the year before mine was probably half a dozen students that went. So it sort of happened fairly quickly.

But I was always interested. I think maybe my awareness started through, if I can recall it, there was a National Science Foundation summer program that I went to as a high school student. It was in astronomy--

INTERVIEWER: Where did go?

LERMAN: It was Mount Hermon Academy-- got taken over-- which is a private school out in western Massachusetts. But they took over the whole place and kids went there on the NSF programs. They had non NSF programs are as well, went free. And so it was fantastic opportunity. It was the first college professor I ever met who ran the program in astronomy. And then many of those students also talked about where they wanted to go, and Caltech and MIT were on pretty much everyone's list, not surprisingly.

It was the first time I'd been in a group of students who all were incredibly smart and all who were fascinated by science and engineering. And in this case we were very interested in astronomy. I was an amateur astronomer. I built my own telescope. That was one of the hands on things I did as a kid. And it was also the first time I had an experience of an excitement of being within a cohort that was highly motivated, that really actually liked that stuff. It was small and the astronomy program alone must have had maybe a dozen students in it. We had a professor from Mount Holyoke College, was the professor. And it was great, most transformational experience for me in having a feeling of what it would be like to be with people who were similarly motivated.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have good math and science teaching in high school?

LERMAN: Yes. I had some great math and science teachers. I had some teachers who weren't very good, either. But there was some, both in junior high and high school, a couple of stand-outs.

INTERVIEWER: You were at [INAUDIBLE]?

LERMAN: No, I was at Elmont Memorial High School. And again, it was a mixed bag, like all high schools. But there were was a very good calculus teacher, which turned out to be very handy going to MIT. There were some very good basic science teachers. And my seventh grade math teacher for some reason was incredibly memorable. She was an incredible woman in terms of motivating those of us were really interested in mathematics. That was the year, of course, of major curriculum change. So it was the post-Sputnik era where funding and interest in sciences and math with growing. And the government was investing in it. New curricula were coming out. The mathematics, we got introduced to things like set theory and other things very early on in the curriculum, which I think was to me a very useful foundation. I think for students who were mathematically inclined it worked really well. For those I think more remedially necessary, it's probably wasn't a great service to them because they were doing with basic math skills. So I think I had a good but not certainly world class science and mathematics background.

INTERVIEWER: You entered MIT during the turmoil of Vietnam and the anti-war protests. Did those activities affect you at all, or did you focus pretty hard on the academics?

LERMAN: I focused fairly hard on the academics. I was tangentially involved. My one effort at poetry was an anti-war poem. That was published in one of the Cambridge off-off-brand newspapers. But I don't think I was deeply involved.

I was a little bit separated from the community in some ways. I was married very young. My wife, who I knew from junior high school, and I went to college together. She went to Tufts and I went to MIT. And that was a quite conscious decision, we were dating at the time. We were married our sophomore year. So then we moved off campus for a year. And then I moved back for my last year as an undergrad and my graduate years, but in Eastgate, which is married student housing, or family housing as we call it now. And the population that was overwhelmingly graduate students. We may have been one of one or two undergraduate couples in the whole place. So my community there was more graduate oriented.

INTERVIEWER: Did being married affect your decision to try to graduate in three years?

LERMAN: Absolutely. We were economically independent. I worked a couple jobs while going to school. My wife did as well. We did not have four years of tuition in us. So both of us graduated in three years.

INTERVIEWER: What kinds of jobs did you hold?

LERMAN: Well, of course UROP-ing was a great one. But for a while I drove a lawyer who was handicapped. We had a car at the time, because we were living in Malden for that sophomore year. So I would drive out to Lincoln, Massachusetts in the morning. On the way I'd usually drop my wife off at Tufts. I'd pick him up in Lincoln, drive him to Boston, go from Boston back to Cambridge, and then reverse the route when he had to go home.

He was an interesting guy. He was a lawyer. He--

INTERVIEWER: He had sheep.

LERMAN: Yes, he had sheep.

INTERVIEWER: And his wife's name was Betty.

LERMAN: I don't, you must know them. And he was a fascinating guy--

INTERVIEWER: Alvin.

LERMAN: Alvin, yes. He had gotten polio. He contracted polio as an adult just before, of course, the vaccines came in. I was born in 1952 and so I remember kids maybe three years younger than I, two or three years younger, who had polio. But you know in my cohort I don't remember ever meeting a kid, except at a camp once, who had polio and it was because the parents didn't vaccinate him early enough. And he was considerably older, but if you were any younger than I was, you could've had polio.

INTERVIEWER: Did he become a mentor or an advisor at all?

LERMAN: No. He was interesting, though. I learned a lot in the sense that he was politically, actually more liberal than I was, in some ways. He was, you know, very much an anti-war activist. And I think I learned from the experience.

Here was someone who, one might have argued life dealt not exactly a fair hand, but he made the best of it. He was a practicing lawyer. They still had sheep, you know, and they adapted the house. And this was of course, pre ADA, so I became very aware of how ill-suited some of the facilities were, and part of me is still have very much interest in things like ADA compliance. I think it's because of that experience having helped him through, dealt with the practical realities of getting a wheelchair in and out of places, that a piece of me is still very much interested in the areas of ADA compliance.

INTERVIEWER: What about transportation systems interested you? Do you recall?

LERMAN: Well, I think everyone has some interest just through personal experience, but I think part of it was I think it was a great domain to look at the intersection of economics, technology, and social policy. And the era that I was an undergraduate was a transformational era in transportation because it was a time with people questioning what had become the standard master planning approach, which was overwhelmingly highway oriented.

So the classic case study was in the Boston area where there had been a plan to build a highway to connect major existing highways and to drive a circumferential road, which was called the inner belt-- which never got built --and some spoke of out of that through some neighborhoods in Boston. And before that time the prevailing wisdom was, yes you had to take a bunch of houses, but it was net socially good. And those people whose neighborhoods where basically displaced we're almost considered collateral damage. And everyone would agree it was unfortunate, but there was just part of the master plan to achieve it.

This was the year in which people came to start questioning that, and political forces started aligning to resist that and to say, maybe having a highway through the neighborhood isn't such a good thing. And maybe the neighborhood matters more.

And that was a fascinating to me convergence around, so how do you look at alternatives? What's the appropriate role of the technical analyst?

Someone who was a very influential figure in my academic development, who really was one of the leading thinkers, a guy by the name of Marvin Manheim. And Marvin was a faculty member and one of my mentors. He ultimately, later in his career, actually moved to Northwestern to go to a faculty position at Kellogg, and then he died of cancer a while ago.

But Marvin was one of the people who articulated a very different way of thinking about engineering. Of thinking about the engineer as an information provider to decision making processes, and particularly relevant to civil engineering, where the things you build cannot be divorced from the large societal context. So you're building a new semiconductor, either works or it doesn't, and yes, in the aggregate semiconductors have enormous consequence, but every one semiconductor does not change the world. But every highway, every dam, every bridge has enormous social consequences, and you can't think of them in isolation of the economics of them, the urban development consequences.

You just can't be in isolation or just think technologically. You have to think more holistically.

INTERVIEWER: So were you taking courses in political science or city planning or economics?

LERMAN: All the above. Yeah, I could've gotten a Master's degree in economics given the number of courses I took. I took some political science on urban structure. I took a little bit of urban planning and urban economics. So the course offerings were very eclectic by engineering standards, the program I took.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned having done some years of UROP. Were you the first year they started it? Or very close to the beginning?

LERMAN: It was early in the stages, but I was not the first. I actually can't remember the exact date. I'm sure one of the people you interview will.

INTERVIEWER: I think it was the late 60s.

LERMAN: Yeah, and so we were in the early stages of UROP. And I UROP-ed predominantly for Marv Manheim and then people of similar environmental engineering.

Mostly, it's also where I built my interest in software, computers. This was a time when particularly in civil m there was a lot of innovation about developing computer aided tools to assist with the various sorts of analyses. And the project that I spent almost all my time working on as a UROP was building a software system that would support transportation analysis. And this was, at that time, extremely innovative for civil engineering.

Civil engineering owned one of the early computers that was one of the first computers around MIT where the students could actually put their hands on it. It wasn't in the back room. They'd gotten a grant from IBM and the course, one of the major entry level courses, called 100, which I took as a student.

INTERVIEWER: I did, too.

LERMAN: Yeah, and then the ultimate thing that tickled me was that I ended up teaching it. I taught it both in the late 1970s, and then I taught it in the 1990s for about eight or 10 years in a row. So the funny part is I took it from people like Joe Sussman and Dan Roos and Bob Logcher, who were faculty members--

INTERVIEWER: Does it still exist now?

LERMAN: Oh yeah. Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Even with laptops and iPhones and so forth, you still need to take 100?

LERMAN: Yeah. It's transformed, of course. We teach them different programming languages, different tools, graphics. I mean it's different content, but the core goal of it actually isn't that different, which is to teach students how to use computers as effective tools in various forms of analysis.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. How satisfied were you with your undergraduate education at the time, and what do you think of it now? If you could reach back and tweak anything, was there anything you would have done differently?

LERMAN: Well, I benefited because my own personal interest in the great flexibility that characterized that era. So my guess is I would've been less happy if I take an engineering curriculum five or 10 years earlier. But I was lucky enough to hit the era of curriculum change in which people who had interests which were not what a lot of people would have called hard core engineering, but who were interested in this nexus of technology and planning, economics, social theory, that you could do that in engineering at that time when you couldn't have possibly done it before. So the curriculum was much more flexible that it had been even five years earlier, even three years earlier. So for me that worked fantastically because it enabled me to work inside an engineering department but also have the flexibility to learn things that a lot of engineers earlier would never gotten a chance to look at.

INTERVIEWER: Is the curriculum still that flexible? Has it remained so and how well do students tend to use that flexibility?

LERMAN: I think interesting enough, I think there's been a shift back to a slightly more conservative curriculum. Conservative in the sense of not being quite as flexible and more things defined, more prescribed. But it's sort of in between where the old days and now. And students may be a little less interested in that. I mean, I think it came with the generation. Where not only were people questioning their government, but they were also questioning traditional structures for course offerings. And so it fit with the times, and I think today's times are noticeably more conservative on those sort of things.

INTERVIEWER: I guess there's a move right now in engineering to create paths that are more flexible from each of the departments, so I guess they are reinventing that wheel?

LERMAN: Absolutely. We just approved a program for mechanical engineering called-- well, that's actually been around for a while, 2A. And then aeronautics and astronomics just approved a curriculum that has a similar feel to it. And yes, I think it's exactly what you're suggesting. I think there what it's opening up is the students to actually more easily choose multiple disciplines. So I believe we'll see from that a growth of multiple majors, do a lot more dual majors because it's just easier to fill the curriculum of two different departments. So yeah, it's a bit of a shift backwards.

INTERVIEWER: When did you decide to stay on for graduate school? And did you think of going any place other than MIT?

LERMAN: I gave it a little thought. It was complicated locationally. By that time my wife had graduated-- same year I did --and she had a job in the Boston schools as a teacher. Jobs were pretty scarce then for teachers. And so she got this job and it wasn't like you could easily pick up and move. I was offered admission and a first year graduate fellowship, which actually was an NSFA trainee-ship. And so it was economically it was the first time we wouldn't have to worry about tuition. We'd have a stipend. And so I actually did not apply to other graduate schools at the time because the offer came in quite early. I was approached by faculty and I was still very much interested in the whole field.

The other thing in transportation: this was a time when there weren't that many programs out there. And I think it's fair to say MIT's keys program in the fields I was interested was so much better than everyone else's that it wouldn't have been all what useful to go elsewhere, other than for the different look at things. Now there are many more very good programs and a student and doing what I wanted to do could go any one of at least a dozen places. At least half a dozen would be world class.

But at that time MIT was really out in front in this field. And this was the Mecca for people who wanted to study these sort of things. And Manheim was here and a bunch of other people who were really lead figures.

INTERVIEWER: Besides not having to pay tuition, getting paid or funded to go through, how did being a graduate student here compare to being an undergraduate? Did much change?

LERMAN: Enormously. It's normal things. Course work was less relevant. I was working with-- very influential for me was I shared offices. I had offices in UROP and actually I still know some of those people --four graduate students in an office, all of whom shared this interest in transportation. And I really got to understand the benefits of peer learning. Because we got great advice for our advisors, but that was intermittent. But we actually saw each other 10 hours a day, and we would talk about you know, the work we were doing that had enough intersection that we really learn from each other.

INTERVIEWER: Have they all stayed in academia, too?

LERMAN: No, actually. One did. One actually, was Israeli, and he actually became a member of parliament in Israel. Actually a well-known figure in the Israeli parliament, and the other one did go into academia. So three of us were academia, and one went to academia then politics.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know as you started graduate school that was the path you would continue on or was it more open?

LERMAN: It was more open. Simultaneous with doing that a group of the faculty had started a consulting firm that they invited me, as a student, to work part time at. Because I was on a fellowship I could do that. And I began to spend I would guess about 10 hours a week at this consulting firm. And it offered also a range of opportunities as well as compensation, which was great when being a teacher didn't pay well. It was a good job because it was a job, but it didn't pay fantastically. And graduate stipends were small.

So I worked at this consulting firm and it opened up a whole range of new options. It was a consulting firm and when it started it was a group of faculty and they hired a president and it was me showing up periodically. I got a fantastic opportunity from it. They had this project in the Netherlands, and it was to use the sort of mathematical analysis tools that I was doing my research on and I had learned at MIT and to transport that to a consulting project in the Netherlands. So my wife and I got to spend an entire summer in the Netherlands.

I was working in the small Dutch town called Deventer-- barely a city, I would say-- commuting by bike, and they provided an apartment and a salary. And we had this great summer experience. I learned, you know, a lot just being there and it was just fantastic. I think it was the summer before I finished my doctorate I did that.

INTERVIEWER: And the decision to stay on and be a faculty member here, how did that happen?

LERMAN: I applied to a couple faculty positions, mostly local. Again, my wife was still a teacher at the time in the Boston schools. I applied to a position at Harvard, and I applied to a here, informally. It was much less formal then, too. And I also had, as another option, going to the consulting firm. And I was undecided at the time, but eventually MIT did make me an offer to stay on the faculty as assistant professor. And I decided some way that I could have my cake and eat it too, because I could still be affiliated with the firm on a part time basis. Day a week would be the typical guidelines for faculty member. And I was doing some really interesting work. The work they were doing, and still do, you know a lot of it was publishable. So I could do projects there that had a fairly deep research content.

INTERVIEWER: So what about the academia part made you want to keep one foot on this side?

LERMAN: Well, I love teaching. So one of the experiences I got: I was never a full time TA, but one of my colleagues-- someone who I co-taught with after that --offered me the opportunity to guest lecture his course. And so I would come in for four or five lectures. This was professor Moshe Ben-Akiva, he's still on the faculty. He was wonderful as a mentor, and he gave me the opportunity to guest lecture. And I loved guest lecturing, I love lecturing. This was a graduate course, an advanced graduate course. And I enjoyed it, the students enjoyed it, and so teaching became something which I always liked, but I realized it was something I really could do. And so the opportunity to teach I think was really important to me.

INTERVIEWER: It doesn't sound like you had much discomfort about moving from being a student to being a professor and teaching students who were probably about your age, if not older.

LERMAN: They were typically older. I was fairly young when I graduated.

INTERVIEWER: You went through in three years and then three years for your doctorate.

LERMAN: So I was 23 when I joined the faculty and most graduate students were 24 or 25. But actually it never became an issue. I think first of all, the students were great. They, I think, responded quite naturally to the fact that you know I really was in front of the classroom, not in the seats. It actually was never an issue.

I told my daughter who's an academic-- one of my daughters is an academic --I told her, part of it is just remembering that you are the professor. And students follow the lead. And of course, my style isn't dictatorial in the classroom, anyway. So if they have other thoughts, great: it makes classroom time interesting.

INTERVIEWER: So after you became a professor, you seem to have this proclivity for picking up projects and things. I guess one of the most visible was Project Athena, probably one of the largest. How did you get involved in that and what was it intended to do and how did it go?

LERMAN: I got involved. The dean of engineering had this little group that he got together every week for breakfast. I forget what day it was, and he asked each of the departments to send someone. The group was to sit around the table and talk about what could you do educationally if computing were ubiquitous and free. Now, wind the clock back. At that point, access to computing was very limited. Either you were part of a research group so you could buy computer time on the mainframe, as it was called-- which was then a big IBM product. Or you were part of a department that might own a high-end mini-computer, and they let you use it periodically. But the average student never saw a computer, never got to use one except in these very rigid ways. And then the student information processing board would give out very small amounts of computer time. They would give it out as fake money, basically, so you would get $50 worth of computer time on the mainframe.

So Jerry Wilson, who led this with Mike Dertouzos, who was then head of the laboratory for computer science, would get this group together to talk about, what would a world be like-- and they even had this crazy idea that the computers could actually talk to each other through this thing called networks --so what would a future be like in which-- in the same way, and it's extreme: everyone had you know, access to electric outlets --everyone had access to computers that could talk to each other. And we met and talked about well, what educational innovations might you leverage off of such a fictitious world?

And of course, they-- particularly Mike Dertouzos-- was very well plugged into where computer technology was headed. And what was called the ArpaNet existed in his research lab. A very small number of computers around the country were connected to it. It was only for research purposes. But he had seen the power of what having computers talk to each other could do. And had the vision-- he and Jerry Wilson had the vision to think, well what might the world be like 10, 20 years. And of course, they were incredibly spot on that these were technologies that turned out to be transformational in our lives.

So as the discussion went on, there were great opportunities, and Mike and Jerry were pretty well plugged into the two largest computer companies in the world at that time. IBM, which we still know, and Digital Equipment Corporation, which of course since has gone by the wayside. They knew that new products were about to come out that initially would be very expensive, but they would be computers that would sit under your desktop. And maybe they'd be a little noisy, and maybe they'd have big fans, but each person in your research group might have his own computer. And yeah, it might cost $10 thousand initially, but they understood that that price would change very rapidly. And that there would be a new generation of products where each user would actually have one.

A little bizarre. We now of course call it the personal computer. But they saw that coming and they managed to persuade the companies that, wouldn't it be interesting to build this version of this world of the future that they were envisioning in which computing was relatively ubiquitous and everything was networked? Suppose we built it at MIT and then used it as a test bed to figure out how it might affect education?

Well, how do you build something that no one had ever built before and which was ridiculously expensive? What you do is get the companies to give you all the hardware you need and maybe some people and support. So they negotiated this idea to create this very large project, to create, to make MIT a laboratory for a future computing world, which literally didn't exist in almost anywhere else.

INTERVIEWER: And this was what, late 70s?

LERMAN: By this time these discussions were going on around 1982. And you know we were beginning to see, you remember the Apple. Apple shifted to Macintosh in 1984, but there were some predecessors to it. IBM was either talking about or just beginning to ship products. And we had the Ataris and other sort of game oriented systems that you could buy for your home that were actually rather inexpensive, even by today's standards.

So they got this idea and it gained momentum, it snowballed. Originally Jerry had, the vision was to just do it in the School of Engineering. And as the project got bigger and bigger in their heads it became clear, mostly from the senior administration's point of view at MIT, you couldn't do it that way because it would so lopsidedly resource the School of Engineering compared to the other schools, no one would want to major in anything else. So the administration said, you've got to do it MIT-wide.

So they formulated the thing, which didn't have a name yet at the time, that would be an MIT-wide initiative, rather than a School of Engineering initiative. They dragged in IBM into this. Originally the idea was to do it with Digital only, but they needed a second vendor. And began serious discussions, which ultimately led to the announcement of Project Athena.

I was part of that team and working group. And I thought it was a fascinating idea, I spent a lot of time on that committee, I began talking up a lot at it. And they launched the project with no director. And they launched it sort of late either May, June, sort of 1983. The project was flailing, unfortunately, because of lack of a director. Hard to recruit new staff, it was just unclear. And so it was-- I remember vividly when it was --it was the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend, 1983, when I got a call from Jerry Wilson's office. Now first of all, only Jerry and I would be working that day, so the Institute was dead quiet, even though it was technically a working day.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, so you were at work.

LERMAN: I was at work, yeah. It was technically a working day, but a yeah, nowadays we take it off, of course. But even then, almost nobody. But I had stuff to do. And I went up and talked to Jerry, and Jerry offered me this position to be director of Athena. And I told him, of course, the normal thing-- I'd think about it.

INTERVIEWER: Now you had tenure by then?

LERMAN: Yes, in fact I'd just been promoted to full professor. I forget what year that was, but I was relatively recently minted full professor. The tenure clock was a little bit shorter then. It was seven years rather than eight, so you got tenure at the end of your sixth year-- you knew you had tenure. And then a couple years later I got promoted to full professor.

And Jerry wanted me to direct it. And I went home and talked to my wife. I talked to some mentors. One of my mentors at that time was the then department head, Joe Sussman, who was someone I had known since I was an undergraduate. I got great advice from him.

INTERVIEWER: And what were the pluses and minuses? The pros and cons.

LERMAN: The negative is, it was clear that this was going to be pretty much a full time job, and so I would have to curtail my existing research in transportation to a greater, much greater extent. Eventually it tapered off. I would probably not be able to do the sort of teaching I was doing, because it would just be too big of a management job. I guess the third aspect was, this required a scale of management which I was unfamiliar with.

The Athena staff ultimately grew to about 100 people, about half students, half staff. It was a project, including hardware, that ran about $20 million a year. This was in 1983. $20 million was a lot of money. Much of it was in hardware, so some of it was what we might call funny money. So the real question, was I really up to doing this? I really didn't have the background in managing large projects.

But ultimately the pluses were, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. You know, we didn't do Project Athena scale things very often at MIT, and it wasn't ever clear that another opportunity to run one would ever come around. So ultimately I decided to take it, partly because it was fascinating as an area--

INTERVIEWER: Did you think about the possibility of maybe it wasn't do-able? Or did that not seem likely?

LERMAN: Well, the good news is the thing we were to do was still a little vague, and so there was some flexibility. I certainly thought we might just fail miserably. I think failing miserably would be the failure to meet MIT's expectations, or failing to meet the sponsor's expectations and having them pull out, creating a disaster for everybody. And there were times that occurred to me as possible outcome.

INTERVIEWER: And so how long was it? What did it take for you to get it up and running and what could students do when you finally got it produced?

LERMAN: Well, we built a staff. And I got great mentoring. Jim Bruce, for example, who was then Vice President for Information Technology, was fantastic. He actually spearheaded a lot of the physical installation and design. We didn't have a network. We had to lay cable for networks. We had to find rooms. We had to install huge amounts of equipment. There was a time at which we they were shipping so much equipment we never had a place to put it. We put it in the corridors. So you'd walk around some of the corridors and there was very expensive computer hardware just stacked in boxes.

So there were enormous challenges. Jim was an incredibly good mentor to me on that dimension. Jerry Wilson was fantastic on helping me learn management. And then something that really helped me on the management side of running a large project, is each of the company sited staff, physically at MIT, to be part of the project team. So we had Digital staff, and IBM staff, and MIT staff. And some of those folks had much more management experience than I did. And they were very good at mentoring me on just the normal, what I call blocking and tackling, of running any large enterprise.