CARNEGIE CORPORATION OF NEW YORK ORAL HISTORY PROJECT. The Reminiscences of. Susan Hockfield

Transcription

1 CARNEGIE CORPORATION OF NEW YORK ORAL HISTORY PROJECT The Reminiscences of Susan Hockfield Columbia Center for Oral History Columbia University 2013

2 PREFACE The following oral history is the result of a recorded interview with Susan Hockfield conducted by Sarah E. Dziedzic on June 20, This interview is part of the Carnegie Corporation of New York Oral History Project. The reader is asked to bear in mind that s/he is reading a verbatim transcript of the spoken word, rather than written prose.

3 3PM Interviewee: Susan Hockfield Session #1 (video) Location: Cambridge, MA Interviewer: Sarah E. Dziedzic Date: June 20, 2013 Q: Today is June 20, This is Sarah Dziedzic interviewing President Emerita Susan Hockfield for the Carnegie Corporation of New York Oral History Project. Thanks for joining me this morning on MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] s campus. I d like to start by getting a sense of the place where you grew up, a little bit about your family, the people that you knew and the kind of ideas and activities that were part of your life. Hockfield: Interesting question. I went to junior high school and high school in Chappaqua, New York. I went to the public schools. My parents moved to Chappaqua so that I and my three sisters could go to public schools. Chappaqua had one of the top-ranked public school systems in the nation at the time. It may still. I am second among the four, and I would say that probably the most important feature of my upbringing is that my parents believed that each of us could do whatever we wanted. With that said, my older sister is very accomplished in literature, language arts, history, and she was supposed to go to law school. And I was somewhat more accomplished in science and mathematics, and more interested in science and mathematics, and I was to go to medical school. My older sister did not go to law school and I did not go to medical school. But we both earned PhD s, she in Indian art history and I in anatomy and neuroscience. Q: And what did your parents do?

4 Hockfield 1 2 Hockfield: Three of my grandparents were immigrants and so my parents were first-generation Americans. My mother went to college but didn t complete her degree. My father was the first in his family to go to college and graduated, as many first-generation Americans do, in electrical engineering. He then went to World War II. He was in the Navy during the war, in the submarine service. He was, I think, a sixty-day wonder one of the young men who was made very rapidly an officer and I think he may have done his officer training here in Boston, possibly at MIT, but I m not sure. In any case, when he came back from the war, he returned to school to study law and started out his career as a patent attorney and eventually became a corporate lawyer. Q: So did that bring a sense of oration to your household? [Laughter] Hockfield: He wasn t that kind of a lawyer. He was one of these magnificent behind-the-scenes problem solvers he was general counsel of his company and his background, of course, was patent law. He was most interested in communications law, which was a new field, but he didn t work in that field. He worked for an American subsidiary of a French company, basically a metal alloys company. He was very interested in technology. One of the important lessons I learned from him was that anyone can fix anything, because he fixed everything around the house. He was an engineer, kind of constitutively, and also a lawyer, and he made it clear that you can get to the bottom of just about any problem by analysis, and that understanding how things in the world work was part of the great joy of human existence.

5 Hockfield 1 3 Q: So you were saying that you were supposed to go to med school and become a doctor. When did it become clear to you that that was the trajectory that you were supposed to follow? And what was that like in high school for you? Were there other people who had the same kind of vision for themselves? Hockfield: It was interesting. I remember when I was three or four years old, and it seems like every occasion, Christmas or birthdays, was an occasion to receive another doctor kit. So it was pretty clear where [laughs] I was supposed to be headed, but it never felt exactly right to me, except that people who are interested in science and math would go to medical school that was kind of an assumption. But for me, I was really very interested in how living things worked and much less comfortable with the sociology, the psychology of medicine. So while I was, in a sense, programmed for medical school, I wasn t entirely comfortable with it. And it was probably my junior year in college when I had a conversation with a faculty member in my somewhat less-than rabidly-enthusiastic [laughs] progress towards medical school, and I revealed to him where my interests were in the context of the class he was teaching. And I just will never forget him looking me straight in the eye and saying, You should get a job in a laboratory. That had never occurred to me. And I said, How would I do that? (That was at the University of Rochester.) He said, Well, there s a medical school over there and you should just go walk around and ask someone if they ll hire you. In retrospect, it was an insane thing to suggest that I do. But I was naive enough to do exactly what he said and succeeded in finding someone who would give me a job. I was graduating a

6 Hockfield 1 4 semester early and spent, oh, I think the first year post-graduation at the University of Rochester Medical [Center] school in a research lab and just fell in love. I found the thing that I d been looking for my whole life. I was a technician for two years, loved every minute of it, and from there, went to graduate school in Washington, D.C. Q: How did you get that job? Hockfield: I walked around the medical school and asked people if they would hire me, unbelievable as it seems. And it s totally unbelievable to me right now. If someone just kind of wandered into my laboratory and asked if I would hire them, I would never hire that person [Laughter] Hockfield: even knowing what I know about my own history. But someone, one of the faculty members of the medical school, saw some kind of a spark and gave me a part-time job, which was an intelligent way for that employment to begin, which then grew into a full-time job. Q: When you started working in a laboratory, what were the first things that you learned how to do? Hockfield: Well, lucky for me, because it became very much part of my career, that first lab experience was in a neuroanatomy lab. And I wasn t necessarily looking for a neuroscience lab. I was looking for any lab, any lab that would hire me. I wasn t looking for an anatomy lab. And I

7 Hockfield 1 5 wasn t looking for a neuroscience lab. And now in retrospect, I understand that anatomy, in which I got my PhD, is a field for which my brain is tuned. I see things visually, I have an intuitive understanding of how function follows form and so, for me, anatomy is where everything begins. Structure is where things begin, if you really want to understand things. If you want to understand, oh, for example, how the vacuum cleaner works, what you want to do is take the vacuum cleaner apart. You want to dissect it so you understand how it works. And so for me, understanding things through form works quite profoundly, and so it was a great good fortune for me to stumble into my first job in a neuroanatomy lab. It was in a lab that did not do just light microscopy, but also electron microscopy, which I just absolutely fell in love with. And electron microscopy figured significantly in all of my research from then on. Q: It s fascinating to hear you talk about form in the field of neuroanatomy, where things are not visible to the naked eye. So what was that process like, of being able to see things that were not visible? Hockfield: One of the exciting things about neuroanatomy is that there is not much structure in brain tissue that you can discern with the naked eye. But through a kind of chemical magic, that is differential staining techniques, a universe of structure can be revealed. So if you make slices of the nervous system of any animal it could be a leech, it could be a human and attach or subject it to particular chemicals or particular molecules, you can light up subcomponents of the brain so you can see cells. You can see pathways. You can discriminate nerve cells from supporting cells. And it is just magnificently beautiful. Camillo Golgi, a scientist in the nineteenth century, developed a silver stain called the Golgi stain that he and then others applied

8 Hockfield 1 6 to the study of the brain, and the Golgi stain has the uncanny ability, for reasons I think we still don t understand, to light up a single nerve cell with all of its processes. And all of its processes is really quite phenomenal when you consider that nerve cells in the motor cortex of your brain [gestures to an area over her ear] that have axons, output processes, that travel all the way down into your spinal cord [points to the middle of her back] so you can move your toes. A single nerve cell can covers a lot of territory. The cell has very little mass because it s very small, but it can extend over many feet in length. The Golgi stain will light up every part of a nerve cell s receptive arbor, its dendrite, and also its output arbor, its axon. I ended up working on a very new technology at the time, that permitted the identification of subsystems, sets of cells, parts of cells in the brain, using a technique out of immunology called monoclonal antibodies. And it was very exciting but also very beautiful. My graduate adviser was a bit unusual. I did my dissertation work at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] and my graduate adviser had never had a graduate student before me I don t think he ever had a graduate student again because the NIH doesn t have students and again, another fortuitous accident. He had secured some funding for a summer student and contacted the chairman of my department, asking if there might be a student who would like working in his lab at NIH for the summer, and the department chair let me know, and I don t know how many other students he let know, about the possibility. I started graduate school in January so it was only a few months after I had started graduate school that I started in a lab at NIH and continued there with my dissertation project. At one point, I asked my adviser why he studied neuroanatomy. He was a Golgi neuroanatomist and also an electron microscopist, and I asked him why he did what he did.

9 Hockfield 1 7 And he said the most extraordinary thing. He said, Because it s beautiful. And indeed, it is magnificently beautiful. And the beauty only increases with an increase in understanding. Q: Just imagining those images I don t know if I m accurate or not in what I m thinking but that s a great image. Thanks. When did you kind of hit your stride and become able to start researching the things that you were interested in and designing your own projects? Hockfield: Yes. So again, I was very fortunate because I had spent two years as a lab technician and had I learned a tremendous number of laboratory techniques. I had a set of skills that were ready to be put to use in a laboratory environment. Also, because I was at the NIH for my research and graduate students weren t really part of the intellectual ecosystem, I was treated as a post-doc. So I essentially had an independent project just from the start in my graduate work because I had already put in the time to learn the skills, and I had already learned how to use the literature to develop experiments. Of course, I didn t do it on my own. Science is never well, very rarely done on one s own. I was working in an incredibly wonderful and generous intellectual community, where I could test my ideas and I could get advice about experimental protocols and what literature I should be reading. I was in a marvelous mix of great scientists who helped guide my experiments. And certainly my adviser and I talked. He had a small group, just me, as his only graduate student, and one post-doc and two technicians. To say that I talked to him every day doesn t begin to represent how much conversation we had. We had lunch almost every day together with other people in our larger lab group.

10 Hockfield 1 8 Q: Now I know that you spent some time at Cold Spring Harbor [Laboratory] also, but I m curious about how you put these skills that you learned in the laboratory which sound like a lot of interpersonal skills as well as skills concerning identifying problems, solving problems, sticking with problems, and designing projects how did you put that to use in the next phase of your career when you went to Yale [University] as an administrator and also a professor? Hockfield: Yes. I wasn t intending to be an academic leader. Back to my post-doc at UC [University of California] San Francisco, I was just in seventh heaven. I felt, Wow, this is so great. All of the joy of research and none of responsibilities of faculty maybe I ll just stay a post-doc. Of course, simply saying that meant I would be a post-doc for only a year, or maybe a year and a month, [laughs] before I moved into a faculty-like position at Cold Spring Harbor. But I wasn t particularly interested in academic leadership. I didn t understand it. I did understand that I would have a lab of some reasonable size not a gigantic lab. And I didn t really think about what it would mean in terms of managing people. It s not something you learn in graduate school. You learn it by doing it and by watching other people do it. But what happened at Cold Spring Harbor was very interesting. Shortly after I arrived, I think within a year of my arrival, [James] Jim [D.] Watson, who was the director of the lab and who had hired me, asked that I take on the running of a summer course program. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is famous, and I think justifiably famous, for its summer courses, which are not for undergraduates. They re for people who are well on in their careers who want to learn new approaches, want to understand the cutting-edge ideas, want to learn new technologies. And the lab offers a set of courses in molecular genetics that is world-renowned and also a set of courses

11 Hockfield 1 9 in neuroscience. I don t remember when they started, perhaps in the 60s, maybe even before that. So he asked me to become the director of the summer course program in neurobiology, and of course you say yes when someone asks you to do something like that, even though I didn t have a clue how to do it. And it was marvelous. It was very exciting in ways that I had never imagined. And now when I think back, that was my very first experience in academic leadership. But I didn t think of it that way at the time. It was exciting because the courses were taught by scientists from all over the world. They were sometimes taught by the Cold Spring Harbor scientists, but most of the faculty of the courses were brought in from all over the world. I taught a course while I was there and continued for a couple of years after I left for Yale University. To establish a course, first we d identify a topic of pressing interest because it was new, it was coming, and we saw great potential for it. And it wasn t me alone identifying the topic, it wasn t simply what I thought. The course ideas came from talking to all kinds of fascinating people who really had the ability to see around corners asking them where they thought the next directions were and bringing all that information together and then understanding, Okay, these are the courses we need to offer next year, or This is the direction that a particular course we have offered needs to go, and then finding the faculty, who are the leaders in those particular technologies or interest areas, persuading them that they wanted to come to Cold Spring Harbor for a ridiculously small amount of money and lead a course, and then recruit students from all over the world. I wrote the grants to support the courses. It was so exciting to have those conversations about the future.

12 Hockfield 1 10 And then I have to tell you, it was enormously exciting to work with Jim Watson, a brilliant man and a very unusual thinker and just a great person to work with. Q: How was his thinking unusual? Hockfield: I ll give you an example that the late [Charles] Charlie [A.] Janeway [Jr.], a great immunologist, told me. He was giving a seminar at Cold Spring Harbor and there was some man who he hadn t recognized it ended up to be Jim Watson striding back and forth across the room and making hissing sounds and seeming very agitated as Charlie gave his talk. This was in the very early days of immunology, before molecular biology molecular biology was just beginning. Molecular biology, when it began, required a vat full of a single kind of cell in order to do any analysis. The resolution was lousy. And Charlie Janeway studied the immune system, which is composed of many different kinds of cells that interact with one another. Charlie studied what individual cells or groups of cells in the immune system did. They weren t necessarily cells in a dish they were cells in an organism. At that time, molecular biology techniques couldn t address a heterogeneous mixture of cells. In any case, when Charlie finished his seminar, this agitated person, who was Jim Watson, said, Well, why don t you just clone the gene? Now, no one had cloned immune system genes at that point but it was exactly the right approach. But you had to be [laughs] in Jim Watson s brain to understand that that was the answer. In 1980 I think that was the year Cold Spring Harbor held the first symposium on molecular neurobiology. There was very little molecular biology in neurobiology in 1980 and, just at the

13 Hockfield 1 11 time, the first brain genes were beginning to be cloned. It was the acetylcholine receptor it doesn t make any difference what it was but it was very hard, again, to use molecular biology approaches to study a complex tissue. And one of Jim Watson s comments was, All of the electrophysiologists and the neurophysiologists should go on vacation for ten years and then once molecular biology has given them some really good stuff to work on, then they should come back. [Laughs] That s not exactly what happened, and Jim often overstates the case, but both of those are examples of Jim being able to think beyond where most other people were thinking or certainly everyone I knew was thinking at the time. Q: So how did he influence your style of teaching? Hockfield: Well, he influenced my style of thinking enormously. He s a bold thinker. And he said at the time and I think he still says it that he likes to spend time with people who are smarter than he is because it s very exciting to spend time with people who are smarter than you. And I think that s a great point of view because frankly I mean, maybe there are people who are broadly smart but no matter how smart you are, there are people who are smart in ways that you re not smart, who have insights that you don t have. And keeping your mind open to ideas from the people around you enlarges your world, increases your understanding. This is probably not how most people would characterize Jim Watson, but I found him to be an incredibly broad thinker with a remarkably open mind.

14 Hockfield 1 12 Q: I want to talk a little bit about your decision to come here to MIT to serve as president. How did you become familiar with MIT as an institution and ultimately decide to serve as the president? Hockfield: I ll tell you a little bit of MIT history. I first knew of MIT as a biologist. MIT was the beacon because much of modern biology, much of American molecular genetics, molecular biology, happened here at MIT. At one point, there were a number of departures from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of people leaving to come to MIT, and one of the very senior scientists who was trying to retain people as they were leaving for MIT said, [imitates sarcastic tone] What is MIT, the mecca of biology? And all of us just kind of nodded and said, Yes, that s exactly what it is. What had happened, astonishingly, was in the 50s, people at MIT decided that the future of biology was in molecular biology. This is very early Watson and [Francis H. C.] Crick s Nobel Prize [shared with Maurice H. F. Wilkins] was in, what, the late 50s [1962]; the description of the structure of DNA was in 1953; this was very early days. But the decision was taken here at MIT that the biology department here would become a molecular biology department. And I don t know what they did with the biologists who weren t going to go along with that, but somehow they cleared out the territory, brought in a group of young scientists who became the legends in molecular biology. That kind of decision and ability to focus on the problem of the day the problem not of the day, the problem of the century or the half century was what created this sense of MIT being the mecca of biology. So I knew about the biology part of MIT. I didn t know much else about MIT. At Yale in 1998, I had accepted the invitation from President [Richard Rick C.] Levin to serve as dean of the

15 Hockfield 1 13 Graduate School [of Arts and Sciences]. My own graduate education holds enormous importance for me; it was a transformational time in my life. So when I was asked to serve as dean, I felt that I really owed it to the graduate students at Yale at that time and in the future to do what I could to make their graduate experience as wonderful as mine had been and as transformative as mine had been. As dean of the graduate school, I had oversight responsibilities for all of the science and science-like departments: engineering and mathematics and then the social science departments that were more scientifically, more mathematically inclined, and also, engineering. I got to understand where the best physics in the world was being done, where the best electrical engineering in the world was being done, and seeming in every discipline, MIT was the topranked school. So I became quite aware of MIT s power and excellence. The other thing I became aware of, again partly from the molecular biology history I told you about, is how important MIT had been in providing leadership and in serving the nation. And serving the nation in a variety of ways probably among the most profound, the development of radar and other technologies for World War II, which happened on this campus and there are any number of other ways that if you kind of dig in a little bit into the history of post-wwii technologies, you see MIT fingerprints all over it. I was very happy being provost to Rick Levin and had declined a number of entreaties to be president of other schools because being a provost under Rick Levin s presidency, which had a very strong part of his agenda was increasing the strength of science, medicine and engineering at Yale. So it was exciting, and quite marvelous. He s a great guy, a great leader. So it was pretty easy for me to say no to other places that had asked me about my interest. But MIT was a very different place. I really came to MIT with a sense of service and responsibility, not just to the

16 Hockfield 1 14 Institute but also to the nation and the world because MIT plays a very different role from, frankly, most other universities. The nation is blessed with an array of stellar institutions of higher education. But MIT has a very, I would say, unique role that is different from the rest of the very, very great universities. Q: It seems like a very quick amount of time to go from being an administrator at Yale for just a few years and then being invited to serve as an administrator as a president of other institutions. So what strengths do you think that you exhibited at Yale that were the sort of thing that made you desirable as a leader elsewhere? Hockfield: You flatter me. But I was four years as dean of the graduate school, two years as provost. So six years in academic leadership is generally considered to be sufficient. [Laughs] Q: If you make it, then [laughs] Hockfield: Yes, six successful years. [Laughter] Hockfield: There s an age piece also I was kind of the right age to move into a presidency. And under the tutelage of Rick Levin, we had tremendous success. These academic leadership jobs are very complicated. They re very difficult in ways that it s hard to appreciate until you re inside them. What I often say about universities is that the great luxury of being at a great

17 Hockfield 1 15 university is, as long as it s functioning well, which most do most of the time, the faculty and students have the luxury of not having to really pay attention to how the place works. Then when you actually get into the center from how the lawns get mowed to how the buildings get built to how that endowment gets managed these are complicated places. The MIT community has twenty thousand people on this campus. It s a huge number of acres. We are involved not just on our own campus but with our fair city, with Cambridge, with Boston, with Massachusetts, with the nation, and now increasingly with the world. These are, as I say, complicated jobs with a lot of tough issues that come along, some wonderful and exhilarating and some just hard and emotionally difficult. The episode at MIT recently of our police officer [Sean A. Collier] being murdered [by the presumed Boston Marathon attack bombers Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as they fled police] these are so complicated, and you re not just the head, you re the heart of the Institution also. So I m not sure how I got off there but I can t tell you why the search committee chose me. But I learned a great deal from Rick Levin, and I like to think that my leadership style and his leadership style were very similar: very collaborative, very collegial, and a sense of being able to move quite rapidly to get things done how to bring the community together to make decisions about what direction to go in and making that happen. Q: What did you do when you first got to MIT? What was on the agenda? What did you recognize as maybe an issue that needed to be addressed that the university maybe wasn t aware of?

18 Hockfield 1 16 Hockfield: One of the things that I appealed to the search committee (actually, I wasn t that interested in leaving Yale even when I first talked to the search committee) was to increase the visibility of MIT. My first conversation with the search committee was quite unusual, which made me understand that I needed to pay attention [laughs] to the possibility of becoming MIT s next president. One of the things I asked them was, whatever direction MIT took, that part of the agenda could be taking the basket off the lamp, figuring out how to get MIT s beacon to shine more brightly. Because in this nation not so much out around the world but certainly in this nation the power of science and engineering, of mathematics and technology, for empowering people and driving us toward a positive future is insufficiently appreciated. MIT seemed to me to be the ideal place to let people know all the cool stuff that happens and increase the nation s enthusiasm. So after I had talked about taking the basket off the lamp, they chose me, and so then I had to do it making MIT s beacon shine more brightly and giving people a source of inspiration. When my appointment was announced I used a particular phrase: my hope was for MIT to be the dream of every child who wanted to make the world a better place, and of every scientist, engineer and scholar who understood the power of science and technology to fuel the furnaces of intellectual advancement and invention of the future. Q: Around this time, you started as a board member on the Carnegie Corporation. So what was your introduction to the Carnegie Corporation? Hockfield: I knew about the Carnegie Corporation, not so much as a scientist, because most of my funding came from the NIH or the NSF [National Science Foundation]. But when I became dean of the graduate school, I began to understand the topography or geography of funding and

19 Hockfield 1 17 came to understand the importance of private foundations and how critical their support is for the ecosystem in science, as well as even more dramatically in the social sciences and humanities, in law, in the arts. There is I wouldn t call it a niche because it s not a niche it s an entire kind of system of work that can t be supported by any means other than these great private foundations. So I became aware of the Carnegie Corporation as Yale s dean and then provost and, of course, as president of MIT. Among the many sources of funding that support work at MIT, the Carnegie Corporation really stands out because of its unique approach to funding and, frankly, because of the kinds of projects that it has supported at MIT. The Carnegie Corporation and other private foundations do what I often think of as kind of venture funding. If you ve got a great idea, a really great idea that s really new, it is very hard to get it funded by the major sources of funding. And it s not the major funders, NSF, NIH, DOD [U. S. Department of Defense], want to be conservative. It s just that they get a lot of fabulous proposals for really big projects, and peer review, I think, is probably the best way of reviewing things. It s not perfect. But if you have a new idea and you need just a little bit of money to get started or you need a little bit of money to do something that s very unusual, as a kind of proof-of-principle, the private foundations have more alacrity and greater ability to jump on something early, to fund something in its start-up phase. And that particular piece is really important. I ll give you one example from MIT. The Carnegie Corporation provided the funding for a project when I first heard it at MIT, I mean, I was just astonished called ilabs. Recently we ve heard a lot about MOOCs, the massive open online courses, and we can come back to that.

20 Hockfield 1 18 MIT did pioneering work in that domain through OpenCourseWare, and OpenCourseWare was funded by private foundations Carnegie a little bit but mostly by others. It s a huge service to the world to send educational material anywhere where people have to have an internet connection to receive it. But a critical element of an MIT education is not just sitting in a lecture, but working in a lab. One of our students in electrical engineering and computer science was working on his microelectronics lab. Microelectronics uses equipment that is so expensive, students are not allowed to touch it. It s operated from a computer monitor. And so the student was doing his experiment, looking through the window at the machine that was invisibly doing the experiment [laughs] because it s microelectronics, and he had the insight that if this was being run by a computer monitor, he didn t have to be sitting next to the machine. He could be running the experiment from his dorm room. So he started running experiments from his dorm room. And then the next incredible insight was that if he could do it from his dorm room, he could do it from anywhere in the world. And not only could he do it from anywhere, but anyone could do it from anywhere. And that gave birth to the ilabs project. The idea behind it is that the kind of state-of-the-art research that so animates the very highest quality higher education, that kind of laboratory research work can also be shared. It s not just the lectures from the leaders in the field that can be shared. The laboratories can be shared. And the ilabs project Carnegie funded has been very generous in funding developed a particular focus in Africa, providing students and schools in Africa with the ability to conduct microelectronics experiments on state-of-the-art equipment at MIT. So the equipment now works, I think, twenty-four hours a day. It used to only work during a couple of hours well, MIT students hours were probably midnight to four in the morning [laughs] but in any case, it

21 Hockfield 1 19 was underutilized. Now there is a system that allows people to participate in that kind of experimentation. And the idea is being generalized some of the kinds of lab work or problem sets that are in the edx courses out of MIT use the same kind of ideas that were really germinated in ilabs, thanks to support from the Carnegie Corporation. That s a crazy idea. That s a totally insane idea. You can say Oh, that s kind of cute, but until you actually demonstrate it works, it s cute. And very few frankly, no funding source, except for an entity like the Carnegie Corporation, would be willing to put up the venture funding to really test whether that idea works and keep it going up to the point where it can get support from other sources. Carnegie, also, is fast. With the very difficult [2000 U.S. Presidential] election with the hanging chads, it became clear that we needed to understand voting technology in the United States, and a project collaboration between Caltech [California Institute of Technology] and MIT, a voting project, was put together. I think it came together within weeks of the election the alacrity I spoke of. Carnegie has a broad set of interests and funds people with great ideas and projects that advance those interests and ideas. In any case, I got to know about the Carnegie Corporation probably more profoundly when I arrived at MIT than I had before, partly because of the nature of my being the president rather than the provost. But also I think because of the kind of funding that Carnegie provides. Q: What was your introduction to Vartan Gregorian?

22 Hockfield 1 20 Hockfield: When I arrived at MIT, several people asked me if I had met him [whispers to imitate shock] and I hadn t yet. And there was a look of horror on their face: You have to know Vartan Gregorian! Q: Now, was that as the university president Hockfield: University president Q: or as a fundraiser? [Laughs] Hockfield: As the university president. So on one of my very early trips to New York, we managed to have a meeting. He has a very full schedule but he s very generous with his time. And it was true. I should have met Vartan Gregorian probably twenty years earlier, and I would have made wiser decisions [laughs] with the benefit of his wisdom. He s a remarkable individual. Obviously he s intelligent, but he is immensely wise and has a way of delivering a message that is not just compelling but amusing, kind, gentle. Whether the message is a good message or a bad message whatever Vartan Gregorian tells me I walk out of his office feeling that I m not walking on the ground. I m elevated by six or twelve inches because I m floating on this buffer of clouds that have, you know, kind of come out of his office. He s just a remarkable human being. I ve never met anyone even remotely like him, never mind just like him. I wish I had met him earlier in my career because his wisdom is immense, and I know that it would have

23 Hockfield 1 21 helped me understand what I was doing and also helped me understand how to approach whatever challenges I had met. Q: You had said in another interview that when you first came to MIT, being an outsider allowed you to see what was a little bit off-kilter. So when you came to the Carnegie Corporation board, what did you see that you thought needed some adjustment? Hockfield: Nothing. [Laughs] Nothing. The Carnegie Corporation works wonderfully. And I m flattered and honored to be on the board, and I hope I bring something to it. But Vartan Gregorian provides extraordinary leadership, and he has put together a staff of extraordinary quality. He has an excellent board and he understands how to get that board involved, as individuals or as a board, in ways that further the benefits that the Carnegie Corporation provides the world. But I don t think there s anything I ve seen at the Carnegie Corporation where I ve felt, Oh, you know, we could probably make this better. Q: Can you give an example of where he maybe called on you to mobilize you around a particular grantmaking area, or other board members? Hockfield: Well, I was involved at least initially on an education project, with Michele Cahill in leadership, and I have to say it s an example of what the Carnegie Corporation does exceedingly well there are a couple things in my own mind that stand out about the Carnegie Corporation. There are some just impossible problems in the world, and they re impossible because they re too complicated, they re impossible because they cost too much money, they re impossible

24 Hockfield 1 22 because no one understands what needs to be done. I mean, there are just some impossible problems, and I would say that the pressing need to improve the quality of K-12 education in the United States is close to impossible. But the Carnegie Corporation, again, under President Gregorian and Michele Cahill, has just, in an incredibly deliberate way, taken it on piece by piece, step by step: now what can we do? What are the projects we might get involved in that can really move the needle? Oh, there s a project in New York City schools. I m blanking on the name of the project. The Carnegie Q: There s a New Century [High Schools Initiative], a New Century II [High Schools for College and Career Success], and New Visions for Public Schools that have been Hockfield: Yes. New Visions for Public Schools, I think is what it s called. And for the Carnegie Corporation to find these non-profits that have really made a difference I mean, it s very hard to measure differences in schools and then also to put together the kinds of study groups that provide the intellectual backdrop. You have to have a report [laughs] that says these are things that need to be done before you can actually do those things in an impactful way. So understanding the balance between studies and action and funding the action projects that will have a big impact, I think, has just been wonderful. I m very excited about the Common [Core State Standards Initiative] curriculum and the progress that s been made. Of course there s a lot of what I would call hysteria in the media

25 Hockfield 1 23 questioning whether it s the right direction. I just think that s wrong. And for the Carnegie Corporation to have figured out how to help advance a common curriculum, to participate in actually designing that curriculum, and then most importantly sorting out the politics of getting that common curriculum to advance across the nation, is huge. An impossible problem that actually is being solved, I hope although there ll be pushback. And the wonderful thing is, they re not daunted. They know that it s two steps forward and one back and that if you do five experiments, maybe three of them aren t going to work, but they re willing to do that, rather than saying We re only going to invest in things that we know are going to work. Q: You mentioned the common curriculum. Can you talk a little bit about developing new approaches for STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education in schools? You re a person who appreciates an interdisciplinary approach to research and learning, and so how do you think that this could benefit students by integrating these things? The language arts and? Hockfield: Well, it s another very hard problem. People need organizations. There s a reason that there are cities and different kinds of organizations; you can have some impact as an individual but you can have a larger impact as group. And so if we think about a university, we have departments and the departments are disciplinary. Now, the disciplines haven t always looked exactly the way they look today. Pretty much, there s been a mathematics department for a long time. We actually don t have an English department here at MIT but most schools have an English department. We have a biology department. We also have a brain and cognitive sciences department.

26 Hockfield 1 24 But what s happened, and I ll just use the field that I know best: biology is a great example. Up until the 1950s when molecular biology really took off with the elucidation of the structure of DNA, biology was taxonomy. Looking at things and deciding, by how they looked, what groups they sat in. And that changed. It changed with biochemistry coming into it, with molecular biology coming into it. And what do you do about a discipline that has changed? You have to teach some of the old and you want to bring in the new. Well, how much chemistry gets taught in biology? What is that boundary between biology and chemistry? And now, a tremendous amount of engineering is coming into biology. What s the boundary between engineering and biology and how do you provide an education that gives people the vocabulary that allows them to understand biology and chemistry and the synthesis of the two? Or biology and engineering? The faculty are always a generation behind and it s one of the reasons why research and education at universities have to go together, because you want to be teaching for where the students are going to be. And for K-12 education, biology has changed, chemistry has changed, mathematics has changed in the sense that they re increasingly intersecting with one another. And so devising new curricula that reflect what we think at the present day about the field is important but it s really hard. And the K-12 teachers aren t in the lab every day, and we re asking them to incorporate things that were discovered maybe not the day before yesterday, but certainly five or ten years ago. These fields are developing very fast. And so figuring out how to integrate disciplines and not to necessarily change the names of the departments [laughs] but change the way we show students make it possible for students to understand, for example, that there s mathematics in

27 Hockfield 1 25 physics. We actually crossed that bridge a while ago, and most physics is taught with a lot of calculus in it, right? But that was an evolution. And equipping teachers with the information, skills, and materials to help their students understand the crosstalk among disciplines is really important but it is very difficult. And I think these new curricula are working in that direction. Q: Do you recall how you were taught the sciences and math when you were growing up, and was there any integration? Or did you do that yourself in your own mind? Hockfield: In retrospect, I realize how much math I figured out on my own. And I only understood that because our daughter we had her do math outside of school, online very early in the development of online learning technologies, probably ten or twelve years ago. And the quality of education now, partly it s because I already now understand the concepts but to see how they were taught in the online mathematics courses was breathtaking. I thought, wow, I wish someone had taught me how to understand math concepts this new way [laughs]. I just puzzled them through on my own because whoever taught it to me didn t teach it well, didn t understand it well. And so I think math is very hard and you ve got to do it yourself, in a sense, to understand it. I mean, you always have to do it yourself to understand it. The integration, I don t know actually, I loved all my science classes. I loved my science classes and I don t know how much integration there was, but whatever I got was enough to keep me hungry for the next.

28 Hockfield 1 26 But K-12 education is very difficult. I think we ve done a huge number of experiments in the United Sates and we have been less good at figuring out which of those experiments are successes, which of those successes are scalable. And this is part of the mystery that the Carnegie Corporation is trying to sort out, figuring out what works and what can work again and again with different teachers. [Interruption] Q: I d also like to talk about, from your perspective as a trustee, how have the international education projects that Carnegie has worked on, how have those played out particularly the Centers for Advanced Study in Education [CASEs] in Russia and Eurasia and also the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa [PHEA]? Hockfield: Yes. I know more about the Africa projects than the others, and I want to say, there again, this is an extremely hard problem. You know, I meant to mention this before when we were talking about President Gregorian he has been an absolute genius in partnering with other organizations to increase impact. I talked about it in terms of how partnerships worked at MIT, how it worked in leadership, but he does it at a level that I think we have hardly ever seen before. And so this Partnership for Higher Education in Africa addresses a very, very hard problem, and no single institution, no single organization or no single foundation, could do it on its own. But it s one of these great problems where someone s got to step up to do it and understand what parts of it were successful, what parts weren t successful, and then step up and do it again to expand the dimensions that have been successful. I think there s a lot of impatience. I mean you

29 Hockfield 1 27 see it all over America. If something doesn t work, it s a little bit similar to how the [President Barack H.] Obama administration is being beaten up for investing in a [photovoltaic] company that failed. Of course, one company might fail, but other companies have succeeded, and if you have to bat a thousand you might as well not go to the plate. It s just not going to work. And so I think the boldness of putting together consortia around huge problems like education in Africa is breathtaking and important. And not every piece of it is going to work out. What is important is understanding what pieces did work out, why they worked out, and picking those pieces up and designing the next stage. Q: So can you talk about those partnerships, either with the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa and there were a few other projects where funding partners were involved, like the [Future of] Journalism [Education] Initiative Hockfield: I was just thinking about the Journalism [laughs] Q: with the [John F. and James L.] Knight Foundation? Hockfield: Initiative. Q: Yes Hockfield: When I first heard about it I mean, I know so little about it, only what they showed us in slides at the board meeting. But it s hard to get the different parts of one school to work

30 Hockfield 1 28 together, never mind getting your school to work together with some other school. So this idea that journalism schools across the nation might come together around a common set of goals, a common set of aspirations, I think is absolutely brilliant, because that s the way you can amplify your impact even so, allowing each school to do its own idiosyncratic thing but together understanding, We ve got a national problem and how are we, together, going to address it? Which is far more effective than having one school try to bravely pioneer the direction and think everyone s going to follow. Well, that might work. The timeframe of that approach is a little bit longer than the timeframe of the approach that the Carnegie Corporation has led. And I think that s true also for the idea of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa. A tough problem any organization alone could do some good but with enormous risks and this kind of sharing the impact, as well sharing the risks, is important. Q: So being someone who s focused on repeating the things that worked well and letting go of some of the things that didn t work well, do you recall what of those partnerships were really the strengths? Did those partnerships mature over time or did some of them fragment? Hockfield: I don t know enough about it and I feel that I haven t been on the board long enough to actually see how things have gone in the longer term. I think, certainly in the education pieces that I ve seen, that the great pieces have gotten stronger, and there are things that I m sure that we talked about four years ago that have just evaporated from the conversation, but it s not as though they stand out. And so these are organic. These are iterative processes. And that s part of the exciting thing about being on the board: you come back and they ll present a project that perhaps we more or less glanced at or heard about and then all of a sudden, it has legs. It has

31 Hockfield 1 29 integrity. It has a force that it didn t have or, at least I didn t remember that it had when we heard about it previously. I want to talk a little bit about immigration. And I want to talk about immigration because of oh, I don t know if it s unique but it is certainly one of the most emotionally compelling pieces of Andrew Carnegie s legacy as an immigrant to the United States is his embracing of the idea that education is the key to success. His incredible gift of creating libraries and the ways that the Carnegie Corporation today continues that legacy it brings tears to my eyes. It is so moving. And the idea that people come to the United States and succeed in achieving their dreams it s great to have people come to the United States. It is a brilliant and central part of this nation s strength. And I think it s marvelous for the Carnegie Corporation to be advancing projects on immigration. It has been one of our strengths and I would say that right now we are at a critical moment for our country. I am very nervous about what s going to happen to the immigration bill in Congress. And the reason I say we re at a critical moment is that since World War II (and certainly before that, but if you just think back as far as World War II) this nation has benefited from people who come to this country because of our freedoms, because of our safety, because of the internal peace, because of the wise investments in education and research these areas I know well but also because of how business works, because of the rule of law, because of all these things. People come to this country because they know they can do things here that they can only dream about at home. And as recently as, I would say, ten or fifteen years ago, people would come to MIT, or any of our institutions of higher education, and their first choice for where they wanted to be after they graduated people from around the world would probably be to remain here, in the United States. And our immigration policies have been really not just