Joel Moses Interview

From: MIT Infinite History

INTERVIEWER: Today is December 14, 2009. I am Karen Arenson. Weare talking with Joel Moses, who earned a PhD in mathematics at MIT, andwhose interests over the years have focused on computer science,artificial intelligence, and engineering systems. He started his career as aprofessor in Course 6, which, at the time was called electrical engineering,and is now electrical engineering and computer science. He becamehead of the department, dean of the School of Engineering, and MIT’sprovost. He is currently one of only 14 Institute Professors and is actingdirector of the Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development.Joel, thank you for talking with us today.

You’ve described your life as inextricably entwined with MIT. What do youmean by that?

MOSES: Well, I came to MIT in 1963. That was the third time I actuallyapplied. I couldn’t come here as a freshman because we couldn’t afford it,unfortunately. And then, when I was graduating, I applied again and Imade the mistake of accepting a fellowship at Columbia, rather than aresearch assistantship. And then, finally, I saw the light and I came here in’63 and I’ve been here ever since. When I applied for faculty positions in’67, about to finish my PhD thesis, one of the department heads said,”Can you cut the umbilical cord to MIT?” I guess I haven’t. I just couldn’t.It’s been so great.

INTERVIEWER: What made it a good match? Is there something about thechemistry between you and this particular research university?

MOSES: That, I don’t know, but what was amazing about the situation wasI didn’t think much about what I was doing. Things were fun. Math wasfun. Doing computer science was fun. I didn’t really start thinking about — what was I doing? What’s been my goal? What have I accomplished? — until I became department head in 1981. So, it was a tremendous ride.

INTERVIEWER: Did it remain fun all along the way? Or were some thingsmore fun than others?

MOSES: Yeah, I mean, most faculty don’t particularly care foradministration. I happen to like it more than most. But there are times asan administrator that are tough and not as interesting, if you will, asothers. But I found even administration, especially committee work, whichmost people don’t like, I found that interesting.

INTERVIEWER: Why?

MOSES: Well, I don’t know. There’s some times you get ideas in theprocess of a discussion that goes on for a while. You really get at theessence of issues, surprisingly, and ideas come forth that you wouldn’thave expected. And that’s happened to me on several occasions while Iwas an administrator.

INTERVIEWER: But, they’re usually different kinds of issues from the onesyou worked on as a scientist or mathematician.

MOSES: Yes, indeed, the administrative issues. But, nevertheless, I’vefound it interesting.

How did I get into administration? Well, it’s almost a trap. You have earlysuccess and you get excited about doing more for the Institute, for thedepartment. I’ve had early success.

INTERVIEWER: Tell us about the path before you got to MIT and what ledyou here. Where were you born? What was your childhood like? Yourfamily?

MOSES: I was born in Israel — well, at the time, it was called Palestine — two weeks before Pearl Harbor. And I lived, for the first five years, in avillage of farms. So I was born on a farm, if you will. And, my parents werenot great farmers. In the midst of World War II, they came to Palestinefrom Germany. My father was a businessman. He was very successful inGermany. And so, he, basically, became a businessman for the farmcommunity. He sold the produce better than anybody else could sell theproduce in the nearby city called Netanya. After a while, we moved toNetanya in 1946–1947, I think — and we lived there until 1954. Netanya,when I left in ’54, had a population of maybe 30,000. Now, I think itspopulation is about 200,000. It became a major place for people tovacation.

In any case, ah we left in ’54. Arrived here on September 1, 1954.Actually, we were supposed to arrive on September 2, but the Israelicaptain thought that since July had 31 days, August must only have 30days. So, we quickly had to telegram everybody waiting for us that we’darrive a day earlier on September 1. In any case, we wound up inBrooklyn, New York and stayed there for a number of years going throughjunior high, high school, and then at Columbia College.

INTERVIEWER: What was it like to come to a new country? Did you find itexciting or frightening or?

MOSES: Neither exciting nor frightening. Much of it was, sort of, surprises.My mother decided to prepare me for coming here. She bought me tenpairs of pants that were short. Well, in the ’50s, we didn’t realize that thekids in Brooklyn weren’t wearing shorts. So, that was a surprise. I didn’tspeak the language much at all, so I had to learn a lot. That was difficult — took about nine months before I was reasonably acclimated to thelanguage. A lot of things were surprising — we didn’t have supermarkets inIsrael. You had to go to a milk store, you had to go to a meat store. Bakeryshop — that was what people expected to do. Here, it was all in one store.Big surprise.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think coming to a new country shaped yourwillingness or ability to deal with new experiences later on? Orapproaches to creativity or research or anything or?

MOSES: It’s possible. I don’t know. What I think, as I reflect back on whatshaped me, it was my parents’ background, more than anything. Myfather was born in Germany and stayed there until they left in ’39. Mymother was actually born in Romania and left Romania as a result of WorldWar I. Wound up in Berlin. That’s where she met my father in ’38. Theirattitudes toward family, toward, actually, problem solving — I didn’t realizethat — that had a major impact on me. Possibly more than my 12 years orso in Israel. Again, yes, everything shapes you, and I was shaped by all ofthese countries. But, the surprise was how much my thinking was affectedby my parents’ German background.

INTERVIEWER: And how would you characterize your approach toproblem solving?

MOSES: Well, problem solving and organization — a little morehierarchical than the American classic approach. In any case, a differentkind of hierarchy. In the ’50s and later decades, most American thinkersabout organization thought in terms of what you might call a treestructured hierarchy, where you have a president and vice presidents etcetera, et cetera. There is more of what I call a layered hierarchy, inthinking of Germans. It goes back, in some ways, to the Middle Ages. Thatapproach to organization and also problem solving, it turns out, had animpact on me and makes me different from a lot of people in this countryat this time.

INTERVIEWER: Were you always drawn to science and engineering? Orwhen did you first, as you think back, when did you first recognize thatyou might be? That you like these subjects or were good at them?

MOSES: I realized that early on. In the fourth grade, when the teacher hadto leave town, they had me grade the papers in the class. Math came easyfor me. It was enormous fun. In fact, I was on the math team in my highschool. I went to a regular high school. It wasn’t one of the exam schoolsin New York. Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech,were the exam schools. I went to Midwood High School. But in thecompetition, we beat Bronx High School of Science. A real surprise forthem, I suspect. It was fun and we worked at it. Every lunchtime, inaddition to eating lunch, we would solve problems.

INTERVIEWER: You and your classmates?

MOSES: Yeah, and the team members, yes.

INTERVIEWER: But, did you have a faculty member who sat with you atlunch and threw problems at you?

MOSES: Aaron Shapiro was the faculty member who was in charge. And Ijust read about him recently. You get all this information, now, on theInternet. He was treasurer of the American Math Association branch for allof New York for many, many years. He was wonderful. Really, a greatteacher. I had him, not only for the math team, but also for calculus lateron.

INTERVIEWER: Did you think you would become a mathematician at thatpoint?

MOSES: No, because my parents convinced me I was supposed tobecome a doctor. And why that? Well, my father’s cousin, he was afamous doctor. He was one of the leading doctors at the HadassahHospital in Jerusalem. He created the rabbit test for pregnancy andbecame very well known as a result. Certainly, in that generation. Youngpeople don’t seem to know about that. And then my mother’s brotherbecame a doctor. I once asked him, Uncle Sam, — that was his name — how did you learn seven languages? He says, Oh, that was simple. I gotthrown out of six countries. In the process of leaving Romania, thenGermany during World War II, he wound up in a number of countries. Helearned a language in each one.

So, basically, I was supposed to be a doctor. When I went to college, theydidn’t have a pre-med major. So, you have to put down a major. I didwhat was easy; I put down math. Then, next year, I put down math again.Finally, I said, this doesn’t make any sense. I’m not ever going to be adoctor. I’ll be a mathematician. And then, I wound up being a computerscientist.

INTERVIEWER: Did the medicine part really attract you at all or?

MOSES: Well, I hadn’t really thought about it much, as it turns out.Nowadays, actually, we do research in my center on health care policy. So,it’s a turn around, if you will. But math was just too attractive, easy, andcomputer science was even more attractive and even easier, in someways. So, I really went for it.

INTERVIEWER: What was your life like as an undergraduate at Columbia?

MOSES: Well, actually, I lived at home. We couldn’t really afford for me tolive in the dorms. What makes Columbia different from MIT is that a largenumber of required subjects in the humanities. And you have to thinkabout Plato and Aristotle, music and art and things of that sort. Probablymore so than MIT students really tend to do. That’s the difference that Ifind between Columbia and MIT. On the other hand, when I came to MIT,I was blown away by the level of work in mathematics and in computerscience. It was just much, much higher level than I was used to atColumbia. So, I came to the right place for those fields.

INTERVIEWER: Finally.

MOSES: Absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: Did you imagine yourself becoming a professor when youwere in college? If medicine wasn’t it, did you begin to try to think aboutwhat might be your career path?

MOSES: No. It just fell in place to me. For example, my last year of doing athesis, I didn’t apply anywhere. I got these calls. How would you like togive a talk at Carnegie Mellon? How would you like to give a talk at Bell Labs? How would you like to give talk at Stanford? The head of thedepartment at Cornell called, said, “I guess you’re not really thinkingabout us, but if you are, Cornell would be a good place to go.” Basically, Igave talks everywhere but I really didn’t think about a faculty positionmuch until I was in the corridor one day and Bob Fano, who was runningthe lab then, Project MAC, computer science lab, said to me, “I hopeyou’d stay as a faculty member.” Oh, okay. That was it.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. When did you first encounter computers andwas it love at first sight?

MOSES: First time I saw a computer was in 1957, I would guess. I got ajob in the summer at Wall Street. I was a runner.

INTERVIEWER: So you were still in high school?

MOSES: I was still in high school. I was a runner. But they gave us a tour ofthe place and I saw this big, humongous machine with a huge amount ofhot air being blown away, et cetera. And they told me what it did was itadded and multiplied. That’s all it did! This humongous machine. And Iwas fascinated by this idea. Nothing much happened until about 1961,when I was able to take a course in programming. And boy, that was fun!Enormous fun!

INTERVIEWER: You were in college then?

MOSES: Yeah, now I was a third year in college, but it was actually my lastyear. I graduated early. And I guess I did so well, they gave me a jobworking in the center, there. Working for IBM on weekends and thenduring the summer. And that’s how I got into it. So, I moved frommathematics to computer science just because one was more fun than theother.

INTERVIEWER: And did it strike you, at the time, that this was aburgeoning field and that maybe you could make your way in it?

MOSES: I don’t think so. I wasn’t planning in those days. You just wentwith the flow. You went with what was most interesting. So, whathappened was I got the idea after I graduated college and while I wasdoing my Master’s. I could combine the mathematics and the computingby using computers to do mathematics. And I read a PhD thesis donehere under Marvin Minsky at MIT, by a student, Jim Slagle, who did a PhDthesis on doing integration problems in the calculus. I read it and I said,gee! I could do better. I think I should go work at MIT, work for MarvinMinsky, and redo that, building on what Slagle had done.

INTERVIEWER: And you were an undergraduate when you were —

MOSES: I was an undergraduate when I first heard about it and then allthrough my next year, into my Master’s year, I was thinking about how Iwould go about doing it. As it turns out, I didn’t do anything like that. Notwhat I’d planned, initially. But it was the same topic: integration problemsin the calculus.

INTERVIEWER: And so, for your Master’s, you were still in the mathdepartment at Columbia working on what kind of problem?

MOSES: Well, basically, no problems. You have to do a number of coursesand then at the end of the year, they gave you an examination to seewhether you could go on to the PhD or did sufficiently well to get aMaster’s. The department head saw me in the corridor and he said, “Westopped grading the exam when we decided that you did sufficiently welland that’s because we know you’re leaving.” So that was the end of that.

INTERVIEWER: They knew you were going to MIT at that point.

MOSES: Yes, they knew in May of that year that I was leaving.

INTERVIEWER: When you moved to MIT, though, you stayed in the mathdepartment.

MOSES: Correct.

INTERVIEWER: Why?

MOSES: Well, the options were going into electrical engineering, whichwas building up its computer science at that point, or in the mathdepartment which had some computer science but not much. But since Ihad degrees in mathematics, I figured I could do the required coursesand examinations in mathematics. If I’d gone to the electrical engineeringdepartment, they would’ve asked questions about electrical engineering,which I wouldn’t have been able to answer. So, the math department wasquite flexible and it was a great experience because pretty much, what Iwanted to do, they let me do it, and I enjoyed myself.

INTERVIEWER: Were the professors in the math department aware thatyou and maybe others were increasingly interested in the computerscience field? Did it show? And did they care?

MOSES: Well, Minsky was in the math department for a while, then hetransferred over to electrical engineering. So, they obviously knew that. Atsome point, they appointed Seymour Papert in the math department, sothey knew that they needed to build up a little bit. But it didn’t become amajor issue, as far as I could tell, until the mid ’70s, when Ken Hoffmanwas department head and he felt that he needed to build up theoreticalcomputer science. And he did so, slowly. And now, they have a verystrong theoretical computer science program in addition to thetheoretical computer science program that we have in the EECSdepartment. So, they all work together in our CSAIL laboratory — Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

INTERVIEWER: But in two different departments.

MOSES: But in two different departments.

INTERVIEWER: Is that an effective way to go about it? Are there pluses andminuses to doing it that way?

MOSES: It works for us. It really does. I remember once asking the guywho’s currently head of the math department, who’s a theoreticalcomputer scientist. I said, “Why did you go to math instead of EECS?” Hesaid, “Well, when I interviewed in math, the head of the department wasso relaxed, he fell over in his chair.” He said, “Any department where thedepartment head is so relaxed, that’s the department I should join!” Now,he’s head of the department.

INTERVIEWER: What were your first impressions of MIT when you camehere?

MOSES: Oh, jeez, this place is tough! It’s so much harder. The level of thecourses that I initially took in mathematics was so much higher than what Iwas used to. So, I started immediately taking courses in the EEdepartment, where the computer science courses were. Things that Icould handle reasonably well and I enjoyed. And the math departmentallowed me to take a number of computer science courses in the EEdepartment as well as math courses in mathematics. And so, my firstimpression was, tough! Oh, my God, am I going to be able to do this? Butthen, later on, it turns out, it was okay. It worked.

INTERVIEWER: How many of your classmates came in with the samereaction you did? If everybody, or almost everybody, came from theoutside, did they all tend to feel, “Gee, this is hard!?” Or were most of thestudents from MIT, and so they were just going along? It’s interesting thatyou would have come from a very good university and have that reaction.

MOSES: Good point. I didn’t know many. Some of the ones I did know inthe math department who were Columbia graduates, had an easy time ofit. They picked up a field, a subfield, in mathematics and did a PhD withintwo years, even. So, I can’t say what the general impression was. I justdidn’t know that many graduate students in the math department. So, Ican’t really say.

INTERVIEWER: What did you do your thesis work on?

MOSES: Eventually, it took a while to convince Marvin Minsky to allow meto do it, but I redid Slagle’s thesis using more mathematics to start with.He was, I think, trying to see if he could, in a sense, do it the wayfreshmen did it. Well, I was trying to see if I could do it the way expertmathematicians did it. So, I read up the literature, which was reasonably — well, not fully developed — on how to think of this as a mathematicalproblem. And then, I did a computer implementation of that.

INTERVIEWER: Which was to use computers to —

MOSES: To do a symbolic integration. And, not the way freshmen mightdo it, but the way experts might do it. Maybe even better, in some cases.Later on, we figured out how to do it in a way that surprised professionalmathematicians.

INTERVIEWER: And why did that question interest you? Did you feel like itwas important? Or, what about it tugged at you?

MOSES: It combined my various interests. So, on one hand, mathematics,and the other hand, programming, and the third could be viewed even asAI, or at least initially, was AI — artificial intelligence. So, by combining allthree into that one problem, yeah, gee, it seems like a good thing to do.

INTERVIEWER: Artificial intelligence became one of your strong interests.How did you get into it? And, where did you think you would go with it?What about it fascinated you?

MOSES: Well, Minsky supervised the first thesis — Slagle’s thesis — onintegration. And so, I went to work for Marvin. He was one of the fathersof AI. There are, essentially, four: Minsky, McCarthy, Herb Simon, and AlanNewell. So, I took his courses and I learned about AI from him. And, I triedto advance that part of the field as well as understanding of integrationand build, if you will, a mathematical laboratory so that engineers,scientists, could use it to solve their problems. So, it had a useful aspect toit. It had an AI aspect to it. It had a mathematical aspect to it. Allcombined.

INTERVIEWER: And, the feeling that it was sort of a technical step by stepapproach as opposed to sort of being fascinated in some grand wayabout what machines would do in the world or sort of not a science-fictiony love.

MOSES: No, it wasn’t science- fictiony. This was real, practical stuff. Now, Ihave to tell you, there was another graduate student of Minsky’s in the EEdepartment, Bill Martin, who was working on creating what he called TheSymbolic Mathematical Laboratory, which allowed us to understand andwork out step- by- step processes that engineers or scientists might use inorder to do symbolic calculations. So, we had to differentiate andintegrate and simplify and all kinds of things that people do. And, he wasworking on the step by step process. He was also working on a beautifuldisplay of expressions which didn’t exist at the time. And, I was workingon differentiation, integration, a little bit of simplification on my side. Andwe combined forces after we finished our theses.

So, we had a very practical aspect to it. In addition, of course, the rest ofthe Marvin’s students were mostly interested in the larger issue of artificialintelligence. And, I was, too, but I parted company a little bit fromMarvin’s approach partly, now, I think, because of my Germanbackground, because I created what was, later on, called expert systemsor knowledge based systems. And, that was a different approach than theone that was initially used in AI. AI, at the time — say, mid ’60s — thefeeling was that you had to solve a problem by not knowing much aboutit and just looking at the statement, some axioms, et cetera. Do it verylogically. Work out the details, et cetera, et cetera. I said to myself, “This isnot likely to work on hard problems.” Are you going to be able to re-derive Einstein’s Theory of Relativity without knowing something aboutphysics and some of the experiments that people have done? I didn’tthink so. I thought you really have to know something. That was a surpriseto people, I think, to people in AI. I pushed that for a while, but then Idropped out and I became more of a pure computer scientist.

INTERVIEWER: To what extent is that premise accepted by people in AInow and to what extent has the field moved away from it?

MOSES: Well, it’s complicated. To some degree, I think, the notion thatyou have to know something is certainly accepted. A lot of AI, nowadays,is what you might call Modern AI, which is, to people who are interestedin certain parts of the problem, computer vision, robotics, learning theory,speech understanding. These can be combined, but they usually are not.People create rather deep specialties in each one of those areas and thegoal is, largely, to do very well and be helpful. The goal of trying tounderstand how the mind works is lost a little bit and we’re now trying toget back to it, I think, for example, using some ideas from cognitivescience. My own particular pet idea, which is not necessarily widelyfollowed, is to, essentially, try to understand what you might call theorganization of the brain. How does the brain do it? And then, try to seeto what extent we can use that to utilize computers to better solveproblems.

INTERVIEWER: Are you still working in this field now?

MOSES: Very little. It’s not one of my major areas, at this point, but I mightget back into it.

INTERVIEWER: When you first moved to Boston, even before you startedclass, you worked for a summer at Lincoln Labs.

MOSES: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: How did that happen? And, what was that experience like?

MOSES: Well, I knew at that point, say in May or June, I knew that I wascoming to MIT and I was looking for a summer job. And, lo and behold, Ifound out somebody was interviewing that day from Lincoln Lab. Oh, gee,I think I know something about Lincoln Lab. So, I got on the schedule. Iwas the absolute last person he saw. And, he asked me, “What would youdo? “ And, I said, “Well, I know something about the computers you use.Something about the problems you’re interested in.” He was pleasedenough, he recommended me for the job. So, I went that summer to workat Lincoln. The supervisor said, “Well, we’re now developing a specialmachine with word length of 4,096 bits,” where as most word lengthswere 36 bits or 32 bits or whatever. This was huge! What could we dowith it in order to do language? Gee! And then, he left for the wholesummer! And, I was I left to myself to try to figure out what to make of it.And, I, basically, came up with an analysis of how to use 4,096 bits insearching records. Information retrieval it would be called today. Forwords as well as numbers. And, when he came back, he wasn’t thrilled.What can I say? He wasn’t there all summer.

INTERVIEWER: This was during the Vietnam War. It was a time when a lot of critics were protesting against MIT’s relationship with Lincoln and theinstrumentation lab because so much of their work was for the defensedepartment. Did this concern you at all? Were you aware of it? Did youthink about it?

MOSES: You’re jumping a little bit ahead. The major issues related toVietnam occurred, I think, ’68 to ’70. And so, it’s five years after I enteredMIT. Fall of ’63 or, if you will, June of ‘63.

INTERVIEWER: But the summer you worked there, did it cross your mind?

MOSES: At Lincoln, no. At Lincoln, it did not. Of course, you couldn’t helpit when you went on campus, as time went on, because it became such amajor national issue as well as a campus issue. I was somewhat involved init eventually, largely because of the young lady who became my wife. Shewas in Northeastern and she was chosen to represent all the Northeasternstudents in discussions about what to do about the war, et cetera. Someof those discussions took place here at MIT. She led me into that situationto some degree. We went to Washington a number of times.

INTERVIEWER: If you want to come forward now to the 1980s. I think you were beginning to refer to when you chaired a committee to reexamineMIT’s relationship to Lincoln Lab and whether it should be changed. Howdid that go and what did you conclude? And did your experience duringthat 1970s summer affect how you approached or how you thought aboutit during the committee work?

MOSES: Well, indeed. One of the department heads — the one who hiredme into the EE department, Louis Smullin — and Louis, in the late ’80s, hemay have been retired at that point. I think he was. But, nonetheless, hemade a point to question whether MIT ought to continue its relationshipwith Lincoln Lab. MIT supervised, if you will — well, not supervised; that’s the wrong word — effectively managed, but it didn’t, in any detail, theoperation of Lincoln Lab. And, following the situations in the early ‘70sthat we alluded to earlier, Lincoln Lab, basically, could not go beyond acertain point in developing technology. They couldn’t make war- fightingequipment, as Draper did. And, that’s why Draper needed to beseparated from the Institute and Lincoln. What had to be done is that thepresident had to promise, guarantee, if you will, to the trustees, thatLincoln was not building equipment beyond a certain point. In any case,Louis made a request that we reexamine this. John Deutch was theprovost at the time and he asked me to chair a committee to look into therelationship. I not only went and interviewed people at Lincoln, but I alsotook a tour around the country. I went to see what things were like atLivermore, Los Alamos, at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab, at Caltechand decided that, you know the committee decided basically, that not tomake a major change in the relationship but to make sure that there weremore faculty involved in understanding what was going on at Lincoln andthat there was more joint research between faculty at MIT and the campusand the staff at Lincoln. And, all of those things came to be.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s go back to when you were hired as an assistantprofessor. When you were approached in the hallway, or whatever, wasthat, essentially, an invitation to become an assistant professor as well as aresearcher?

MOSES: Yes, it was an invitation to become an assistant professor.

INTERVIEWER: Had the department voted on it or anything?

MOSES: I have no idea. I have no idea. Things were “loosey- goosey” inthose days. Searches were not national, necessarily. I don’t know to whatextent advertising was used. Basically, men — largely men — madedecisions who was good. And, they would call their friends in otherinstitutions, major ones like Berkeley, Stanford, and exchange informationabout who’s available and things of that sort.

INTERVIEWER: But after getting your degree in Course 18, in math, youended up as a professor in six.

MOSES: But that was natural.

INTERVIEWER: Was it?

MOSES: Yes, it was absolutely natural.

INTERVIEWER: They didn’t ask you if you knew any electrical engineering.

MOSES: No, indeed not. But computer science was a growing field at thetime. Where did the faculty come from? Well, Minsky came from math.Corbato came from physics. Many of them came from electricalengineering. And, the locus was in the EE department. And so, thetransition, which Minsky already made from math to EE, was natural forsomeone interested in computer science and AI and computer sciencetheory. Yes, all of those. And so, it wasn’t a significant transition.

INTERVIEWER: Was that fairly typical in other universities, too?

MOSES: Every university seemed to be dealing with things in their ownway. Probably, most complicated may have been Berkeley, where theyhad some computer science in the math department, computer science in the EE department, and then they combined faculty at some later pointthan we did. Let’s see, in ’67, there was just barely a computer sciencedepartment at Stanford. Just recently, maybe, one at Carnegie Mellon. Inthe next 10 to 20 years, of course, there was a significant growth in thenumber of departments of computer science. Now, EECS was an unusualmodel.

INTERVIEWER: Although, it didn’t become called that for a while, right?

MOSES: Yes, it didn’t become called that for a while, but having so muchcomputer science within an EE department was unusual and it led tointeresting events later on.

INTERVIEWER: Which were?

MOSES: Well, in ’73, Louis Smullin, the person who hired me, announcedthat he was going to retire. At that point, we had already hired quite a fewcomputer scientists. Barbara LIskov, Albert Meyer, and Jerry Saltzer. Theseare the new generation. I was in that generation. There was a move afootto split the department into an electrical engineering one and a computerscience one. Now, mind you, in the ’70s, the president, provost, thechancellor were all electrical engineers. Wiesner, Walter Rosenblith, PaulGray. The power was, if you will, in the EE- side and I thought that it wouldbe wise to stay as part of the EE department because of such atremendous history, such great strength, and so powerful. I didn’t buy thenotion that by splitting, you’d gain power, which was the key argument.And so, I worked against it.

INTERVIEWER: And, the three of them were predisposed to keeping ittogether? Or did they have any — Paul, and Jerry. I didn’t realize Walterwas in Course 6, also.

MOSES: Oh, yeah. I don’t know. I didn’t talk to them. Because, at the timethis happened, I was untenured. And it so happened that I got electedchair of a committee that Louis created called the advisory committee inthe EE department and I was elected chair. So, now the question is, howdo we advise a department head about what we should do about thisissue? And, basically, a number of us thought it would be wise not to split.And, I came up with a questionnaire which I sent to every faculty member.And, I said, “Well, some of us have thought about changing the name ofthe department and here are three options: electrical engineering andcomputer science, electrical and computer science and engineering,electrical engineering and science, — well, electrical science andengineering and computer science and engineering. What do youprefer?” I don’t remember the exact number but it was around 80 percentsaid electrical engineering and computer science. Only one person said,”Gee, can’t we keep the old name?” That was Louis Smullin. Anyway, so Iused that with the visiting committee — you know, these all powerfulvisiting committees of trustees and others that MIT has and is one of thereasons it’s so strong is because of this particular concept. And so, wepresented the results to the visiting committee but at that point, we had anew administration in the department. Bill Davenport was chair. Corbato,Penfield were the associate chairs and they took that suggestion forwardand more than a year or so, the name was changed. Electricalengineering and computer science. And, as a result, I think, the discussionabout breaking it up had pretty much died.

INTERVIEWER: Because you were giving fuller recognition to thecomputer science part of it?

MOSES: Correct.

INTERVIEWER: And, did you know that when you put that survey out?

MOSES: Absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: Had you thought that through?

MOSES: Yeah, oh, absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: So this was a political move, in a sense?

MOSES: It was a tricky political move.

INTERVIEWER: Your first one?

MOSES: No.

INTERVIEWER: No?

MOSES: That was the one that some people remember.

INTERVIEWER: Is that, do you think, the beginning of your path towardadministration?

MOSES: No, what happened there was the advisory committee wascreated in ’71, maybe. Maybe ’72 — let’s say ’71. And elected its ownchairman. It was Michael Dertouzos, who later became, for many, manyyears, head of our Laboratory for Computer Science. And, Michael calledme one day. I was in Michigan giving a talk. And, he said, “I’d like you tochair a committee.” And, the committee’s job was to figure out what theimpact would be on the department if it could no longer grow in size.See, what happened, apparently, — well, I looked at data, so it’s not soapparent — yes, what happened was, beginning in the mid- ’50s, the sizeof the faculty at MIT grew. And, it grew in the EE department, especially.So that, by ’68, we had 125 faculty. Unbelievable. Wow.

INTERVIEWER: In Course 6?

MOSES: In Course 6. And, that was not sustainable, given the budgetarysituation.

INTERVIEWER: The kind of growth or that size?

MOSES: The size and beyond that, the growth. Certainly not the growth,but even that size could not be sustained. And so, the question is, givenbudgetary restrictions, what was likely to be the outcome? And, I came upwith a fairly simple model that — one variable model — that said if theprobability of making tenure of the people we currently have is similar towhat it has been in the past, we have now, currently, 45 percent tenured.Within a decade, we’ll be 80 percent tenured. If the numbers don’t grow — total numbers — our ability to hire will be much reduced. May be able tohire two, three faculty a year as opposed to six or seven. It was so simpleand straightforward, people looked at it and said, “That’s got to be right.”Of course, it was right. It came to be and the dean of engineering, I think,sent it around, the Institute and people knew who I was all of the sudden.It was fun. Another fun thing to do. So, I became a creature, in some ways,of that committee — the advisory committee — to Louis Smullin. We notonly made suggestions about the name of the department — of whether itshould split or not. We made suggestions about what the required corecourses in the EECS should be.

INTERVIEWER: So this is the very same committee that Mike Dertouzoshad —

MOSES: Yes, he chaired it for a year, or so, and then, he suggested — ofcourse, he couldn’t impose it as well — he suggested that I replace him.And, I became the chairman the next year.

INTERVIEWER: And you were already on the committee.

MOSES: I was on the committee.

INTERVIEWER: As an untenured —

MOSES: Oh, absolutely. As an associate without tenure.

INTERVIEWER: And, did it ever cross your mind that perhaps being on thecommittee, or the outcomes, or what you said would affect whether or notyou got tenure?

MOSES: No. Basically, again, I didn’t care. Gee, I’m having a good timeand these are important issues and let’s do something about it. And if Iget tenure, fine. And, if I don’t get tenure, oh well. Remember those calls Iused to get? Well, they’ll call again. I just wasn’t planning for myself. And,I just did what seemed like a natural thing to do. Things were going wellon the research side, in my opinion. I was never an outstanding teacher — I was okay, I suppose. So, things were going okay in that regard. I wasspending more and more time on this thing and, hey, it’s doing good forthe Institute. I loved it.

INTERVIEWER: And, the research you were doing at that time was?

MOSES: Was an outgrowth of my PhD thesis and Bill Martin’s work. At thatpoint, Bill Martin had already separated himself from the projects. I wasrunning the project. We built a system called Macsyma. It’s a name that Iinvented because it means different things in different languages. Latinand it even has a Hebrew meaning. It’s related to the word, kismet.Maxeema — magical, wondrous. And so, when I realized the multiplemeanings, I thought, oh, that’s a good name. And, we were building thissystem and at that point, we were probably getting a lot of users on theARPANET, which was a precursor to the Internet. The ARPANET publishedthe leading sites and for a while we were the number two site in thecountry because people were logging in on our computer.

INTERVIEWER: The number one site being?

MOSES: I don’t remember.

INTERVIEWER: Another university one?

MOSES: I don’t know. It may have been something like BBN or, I don’tremember what the number one site was. And, of course, we weren’tnumber two forever. Just for a few — some months — or, maybe, a year orso. Again, people were having a good time using our system. Findingerrors, yes, every once in a while. They were publishing papers. They werepublishing papers.

INTERVIEWER: What did it mean when they used the site?

MOSES: Well, they had problems, let’s say, in engineering or in physics — often in physics — which, you’d have to use formulas. They had todifferentiate or, in some cases, integrate, simplify, do power seriesexpansions of one kind or another. All kinds of people using it. And theywere talking to us by e-mail. It was fun.

INTERVIEWER: Did they tend to use it because it would have been difficultto get the answers, otherwise, or it was just faster?

MOSES: It was faster. And, in most cases, more accurate. Now, every oncein a while, a bug would come in, so I can’t guarantee the accuracy. But,yes, the accuracy was an issue as well as the speed. Sometimes theywould calculate — this would have taken me six months of handwork, etcetera, and now I can do it in an hour or whatever. And now, it’s become astandard situation. In the field, you have systems that millions of peopleuse. The outgrowth of what we did in Macsyma. Systems like mathematica —

INTERVIEWER: Now, a calculator — a sophisticated calculator — can dosome of that or no?

MOSES: Yes, yes. For a long time, TI’s calculators were able to do some ofthat. But, again, the large systems — again, are outgrowth of work we didin the late ’60s and ‘70s.

INTERVIEWER: And, besides the committee work and then, this researchwhat was it like to be a young professor at MIT at that time?

MOSES: Oh. Good question. Teaching, of course, was another issue.

INTERVIEWER: How much did you teach?

MOSES: I taught a subject a term.

INTERVIEWER: Only one.

MOSES: Like everybody else. Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Undergrad?

MOSES: In the School of Engineering, the tendency was one subject a term. Later on, I found out that it wasn’t true everywhere. So, for example,in mathematics, they teach three subjects a year. One in one term, two inanother. In humanities, they teach four subjects a year. I didn’t know thatat the time. I thought everybody taught just one subject. Anundergraduate subject one term and a graduate subject another term.That’s what I was teaching. And, the undergraduate subjects were a lot offun. Especially, if you could get freshmen in the first term because theyhadn’t yet been inculcated into the MIT system and they were still quiteexcited about what they’re learning.

INTERVIEWER: And they weren’t later on?

MOSES: By second semester, they were already into the issue of, “Let’ssee. What’s the minimum I need to do to get an A or to do well in thiscourse?” Less so in the first term. Especially before Thanksgiving.Something happened around Thanksgiving. But, the key is that the olderstudents had a lot of influence on the attitudes of the freshmen. Yeah,that’s how it was. It still is.

INTERVIEWER: Did the existence of pass-fail affect attitudes at all, that you were aware of?

MOSES: I was there in the transition. Pass-fail came to be, I think, around1968. I started in ’67. My first semester of freshman was well before pass-fail.

INTERVIEWER: It may have been 1970, or so. I’m not sure, exactly.

MOSES: ’68 is when, I think, Walter asked Amar Bose to chair a committeelooking into either pass-fail or IAP, I forget which. But, those two issuescame out in the late ’60s so, I don’t know enough about the change thatoccurred because I only taught for one year — or maybe two — beforepass-fail came to be.

INTERVIEWER: What courses have you liked teaching the most? Are thereany that are just more fun?

MOSES: Certainly, in the early years, the undergraduate programmingcourse was fun. In fact, it’s interesting; in ’78 I was supposed to teach anew approach to the introductory course. And, Hal Abelson and I weregoing to develop this course. And then, it turns out, I became associatedepartment head and I wasn’t teaching. And, Abelson then changed toGerry Sussman and they developed this remarkable course, 6.001, whichthey taught it for 25 years, or whatever. It was one of the most popularcourses at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: And 6.001 is?

MOSES: Is, essentially, an introduction to programming using a LISP- likelanguage. LISP, being the fundamental language used in AI and Sussman,in the mid ’70s, figured out how to fix a technical problem with LISP and created a language called Scheme. That’s another story, in itself. How did it get to be called Scheme? In any case, it was extremely popular andmuch better than anything I could have been involved in. I’m glad that Igot out in time.

INTERVIEWER: So, it was actually about 14 years before you were pulledinto administration. It sounds like you were doing a lot of committee work.

MOSES: Actually, no, it was 11 years.

INTERVIEWER: I guess before you became department head.

MOSES: Yes, I was associate department head. Associate departmenthead, in that context, was, basically, a full time position. At least, I made itpretty much a full- time position. I was in charge of all the computerscience faculty. 30 to 40, I forget the exact number at that time. And,that’s a sizeable department in itself. So, Dick Adler was the associate onthe EE- side and Gerry Wilson was the department head, and he waspretty much — pretty amazing — what he got done in those three yearsbefore he became dean of engineering.

INTERVIEWER: And, what did he get done in those three years?

MOSES: Well, he started a lot of things, some of which I was able to finish.What a key issue was the department’s move into VLSI — Very Large ScaleIntegration. Because, it’s EE and CS department, the EE- side could dealwith the, if you will, hardware part of chip making, and the CS- side coulddeal with the design part of chip making. And, they could combine forcesreadily. Tremendous argument for maintaining an EE and CS department.We were looking for such arguments. The other thing is we got JerryWiesner to get some money for us to buy some computers. We reallydidn’t have educational computers worth beans! And he did it. It’s great.

INTERVIEWER: He didn’t tell you to go build them.

MOSES: He didn’t tell us to go build them. He made some calls and hegot, I don’t know, a million or so. Which, obviously, was worth a lot morein those days.

INTERVIEWER: These were from where? Digital Equipment?

MOSES: Yeah. Largely DEC. Yeah, largely DEC. And, we got a bigmachine from DEC. And, we got a computer center to put it into with airconditioning equipment and all that. All of that happened. That was aminor thing. And then, he started a number of things. The departmentwas going to have its 100th anniversary of electrical engineering. Not thedepartment. The Institute was going to have the 100th anniversary ofelectrical engineering education. It started in the physics department in1882 and in 1982 would be 100 years. And, in preparing for that, we dida history of the department and we hired a writer to work with one of ourolder faculty members. That book came to be. Gee, I’m forgetting one ortwo major things that he did. Oh, yeah, the EG&G building.

The department used to meet in what is called, the Bush Room on themain corridor. Well, the Alumni Association moved in there and theykicked us out! Well, there wasn’t any room where we could meetregularly. So, he told Doc Edgerton and Jerry Wilson. He told DocEdgerton, “You know, Doc, what are we going to do about this? We can’tmeet!” And Doc says, “All right! I’ll give you half a million dollars. Goahead. Build it now.” Gerry said, “Wow! I got half a million dollars. Now,let’s see what we can do with this. We have other needs.” So, he and Paulstarted working on trying to figure out what the total needs of thedepartment —

INTERVIEWER: He and Paul?

MOSES: Gray, yeah. Paul Gray had become president around 1981. Theycame up with a building that would cost [LONG PAUSE] $4 million. Nothalf a million. $4.5 million. It would have five floors. No, four floors. Fourfloors. The top floor would be the meeting room, a floor of classrooms,and then, a big lecture room. Paul went to try to raise the money. First, hegot Doc Edgerton to go, “All right, all right. I’ll give you $1.5 million.”Then, he went to Edgerton’s partner, Germeshausen, and Germeshausensaid, “All right, I’ll match Doc.” So, now you have $3 million. Finally, hewent to Grier. And Grier, in his lifetime, apparently had only given around$50k to MIT, so he was hoping he’ll get something. Something. Maybemore, but not much more. Grier said, “All right, I’ll match him.” So, now,he had $4.5 million. No, I was wrong. The cost eventually wound up being$5 million, because Gerry decided he needed to have a top floor oflaboratories for 6.001, among other things. And, so, Doc gave himanother half million and we got some from the company that theyfounded, EG&G.

INTERVIEWER: So, this was building —

MOSES: Building 34.

INTERVIEWER: 34.

MOSES: It was supposed to be there between 36 and 38. When Jerry wastrying to get the money for it in the early ’70s for that complex, he washaving a hard time getting a teaching building between 36 and 38. 36,being the Research Lab of Electronics. Thirty-eight, being the departmentheadquarters, largely. So, he put in just corridors combining the two. And,EG&G filled in the corridors, eventually.

INTERVIEWER: As associate department head, you were responsible forthe computer science half, or portion, of the department.

MOSES: Right.

INTERVIEWER: What was happening to the field and what were you tryingto do with the department? With that portion of it during those years?

MOSES: Well, it wasn’t clear to me that we had a clear idea. What wewanted to do was hire the best. And, unfortunately, the number ofopenings was very small. Like, maybe one a year. So, I was in charge ofthe search and it was difficult to make a decision. But, we did try to hirethe best we could.

INTERVIEWER: And you were getting more and more students during thisperiod?

MOSES: No, not yet. Yes, we were. This issue will come up when we talkabout when I was department head. What was happening is between ‘72,which was a low point, not only in computer science, but also inengineering. I don’t know if you remember the Route 128 area was in amajor recession in the early ’70s because we had gone to the moon. And,we were cutting down, to some degree, in Vietnam and the armysituation. The Department of Defense, which funded a lot of the work oncampus in the ’50s and ’60s was thinking that it couldn’t do so anymorebecause of the so-called Mansfield Amendment. The MansfieldAmendment was created by Mike Mansfield against the objection of JerryWiesner, by the way. And it, basically, said the Department of Defense canonly do research on things directly related to military needs. And, theyused to fund a lot of research but it couldn’t be said to be directly relatedto the military. So, there was a lot of reduction there. ’72 was a low point.It was a low point in the number of sophomores in electrical engineeringand computer science. We had two programs at that point. And, it keptgrowing and growing and growing. And so, by 1984, I was guessing,based on my analysis of the numbers, that we would be having 38 percent of all undergraduates major in EECS. And, I declared the crisis. Isaid, “We can’t do it. “ And, with the current faculty, we can’t, then, stillmaintain quality and et cetera. It became a major issue for the faculty andMIT, as a whole. And, Paul Gray was wonderful in dealing with it. Heactually taught while he was president. He taught a section of ourintroductory circuits course. He got the perfect score. Why? Partlybecause everybody knew he was the president and partly because henever used notes. The kids were absolutely thrilled by having someonewho really knew the material cold. Never having to use notes.

INTERVIEWER: And so how did he and you solve this? Or how did itresolve itself?

MOSES: There was a motion on the faculty floor. There were severalmotions, but, basically, the idea was — our view was either the numberssort of naturally went down, or MIT should require high school studentswho apply to indicate what they were going to major in and use that todecide how many electrical engineers, computer scientists they wouldaccept. Now, we didn’t like that idea. The committee that looked at it fromMIT’s wide perspective, basically said, “No, no, no. That shouldn’t be theway. What should be done is in the springtime of their freshman year,when students have to choose majors, have them declare what they weregoing to do and have them take an examination. And, you guys choosethe ones you want to keep.” Whoa! It puts the onus on us. Well, we didn’tlike that. In any case, it came to a complicated series of votes on thefaculty floor with Paul in charge as president. And, everything failed.Those motions, at least. And so, what we were left with was a notion thatthe number of students had better ratchet down over the next three years,otherwise, we’ll have to revisit the issue. Surprise, surprise! They ratcheteddown.

What happened in 1985 — I think it was ’85, could have been ’84, but Ithink it was ‘85 — the expectations of the computer industry was that thenumber of microprocessors or chips or whatever would double from oneyear to the next. Well, it didn’t double. It only went up 25 percent or somesuch thing. Well, a crisis! Okay. And so, the students — especially, womenstudents, I believe — who may have felt that this was a good way to avoidthe cyclical behavior of most engineering fields — because computers hadnever gone down. Okay, now they’re going down. We don’t want to major in that. It’s just as cyclic as, or near the others. We really lost a lot of verygood women who started majoring in computer science in the ’80s. Idon’t know — I haven’t kept up the numbers — we may have recovered, but,my guess is that it made a tremendous long term difference.

INTERVIEWER: Were you surprised when you were tapped to bedepartment chair?

MOSES: No.

INTERVIEWER: Did it seem obvious?

MOSES: No. At that point. with Gerry Wilson becoming dean. there werereally only two options. I thought I would be it. I’m pretty sure my EEcolleagues, some of them, were a little nervous because I didn’t knowmuch about electrical engineering. But, within a year or so, I think, it waspretty clear that it would work out very well.

INTERVIEWER: So, what other challenges did you face as chair of thedepartment besides the question of enrollment and getting to know thehardware side?

MOSES: First off, we had to finish the agenda that Gerry Wilson started.We had to get a major integrated circuits lab in Building 39. Paul wastremendously helpful — Paul Gray — tremendously helpful in kicking out thecomputer center and in dealing with our part to get us some financialrelief. Dick Adler did an outstanding job as the associate head on the EEside working with Paul Penfield, who later became department head. And,to build up a lab, and get the contracts for both the design and for theIC’s work, building up connections to the industry that gave us money aswell as equipment, that was a major undertaking. Again, largely, done byDick Adler, Paul Penfield. Of course, we had to have the celebration of the100th anniversary of EE education and the book. A lot of things weredone. EG&G building was finished. I remember one time, people weretelling me, “Hey, you gotta watch Doc! He’s putting in Coke bottles in theground!” EG&G building was right outside my office, so I ran all the waydown and there was Doc on the ground, sticking in these Coke bottles. Isaid, “Doc, what are you doing?” He said, “Well, when I go exploring inthe Aegean, I see these amphoras, and whenever I see an amphora, Iknow there was Greek civilization. A thousand years from now, when theyfind this Coke bottle, they’ll know there was an American civilization.” Hewas wonderful.

INTERVIEWER: What was he putting in those bottles?

MOSES: Nothing. He was just putting the bottles in! What does he have inthe amphora, by now, when you find them? Nothing!

INTERVIEWER: I didn’t know if they had oil in them, or —

MOSES: So, those were things that happened in the first few years of thatadministration. And now, I created a number of events, if you will — when Istepped down in ’89, someone came to me and they stopped me in thecorridor, and they said, “You know, I’m going to remember you forsomething.” I said, “what?” He said, “A four letter word. Food!” Whathappened is I created — once we had the EG&G building, we had regularmeetings of the faculty around lunch. I created a dinner for faculty andspouses just before registration day in the second term — the spring term.That was a great event.

INTERVIEWER: This is within your department?

MOSES: Within the department, yeah. So, we would have 100, or so,people. At the January event, usually. People would come to theselunches and find out what’s going on in the department.

There was one time people tend not to forget when I talked about a newhire we made. We tried to get this guy when he was graduating fromStanford in integrated circuits. He said, “I’m going to go to Japan. I’mgoing to learn how they do things.” Now, he was ready to leave Japan, sowe made him an offer. And, I told the faculty that I wrote him a letter. And,his name is — well, you’ll see. Jesus del Alamo is his name. So, I said, “DearJesus. Please come back to the Promised Land.” Signed, Moses. And,people laughed so hard! I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I didn’tactually sign the letter. And so, those were some of things I did for thedepartment.

Then, I broadened a little bit and I did some things for the Institute.

INTERVIEWER: Even while you were still department head?

MOSES: Yeah, we’re now talking about right after the relief on theenrollment side, I, basically, had the notion that what we ought to do isthe build collegiality at MIT. The way to do that might be to have groupsof faculty meet on a regular basis and talk about whatever — technicalissues. These would be from throughout the Institute. And so, I went withthis idea to the main Institute committee at the time called the Committeeon Educational Policy. I said, “Well, we should have 20 groups ofrandomly chosen faculty — about 50 people. There were about a thousandfaculty and each would meet, maybe, once a month at the faculty cluband, that way, almost every working day of the month would be used upand they could talk about whatever. And, this would build up collegiality,et cetera. And, people thought that was crazy. But, there was one guy thatdidn’t. He was the associate provost at the time. His name is Jay Keyser.And, Jay said, “Oh, Okay. I’ll try it. I’ll do one.” And, there was anotherfaculty member there, Allan Toomre, and, he said, “I’ll generate therandom numbers!” Well, it’s still going on. It’s variously called theRandom Faculty Dinners or the Keyser Dinners. And Toomre stillgenerates the random numbers so that he can choose people to attendthem. And, it’s been a tremendous success.

INTERVIEWER: Do you go to most of them? Or, any of them?

MOSES: No, no. He invites me, maybe, once a year — once every otheryear. Then he shames me by pointing out to my role in all of this. He hasmade it work. Not me. It was all Jay. He’s wonderful at doing that.

And, then at the same time, I created a couple of other things. One is nowcalled by Jay the Moses Seminar. And, that’s been going on for 25 years.

INTERVIEWER: Did you start when you were chair of the department?

MOSES: Absolutely. Yeah, at the same time.

INTERVIEWER: And what was the thinking behind that?

MOSES: The thinking is that we should have a group of relatively chosengroup of faculty but not changing all that much, from every school at MIT,at least, initially. And, we would talk about technical issues that we wereinterested in. And, other people were interested in and willing to discusswith us. We’ve been doing that for 25 years. It’s been quite successful.

INTERVIEWER: And is there really interest across all five schools in the same technical issues?

MOSES: No, there isn’t. And, for different talks, we get different peoplecoming. But, by now, we know who the core group is that would,essentially, come for a wide variety of talks. And, besides that, if JonathanGruber were to talk about health care policy, everybody would beinterested.

INTERVIEWER: Was he one of your recent speakers?

MOSES: A year, or so, ago.

INTERVIEWER: You would have Minsky on artificial intelligence?

MOSES: Minsky on AI. Chomsky on linguistics. That was probably the bestattended one we had. Weinberg on cancer. It just goes on and on. It’sbeen a tremendously exciting undertaking.

INTERVIEWER: So, do you get lots of people saying, “I want to come toyour group.”?

MOSES: We don’t advertise the group that much so that we avoid thatissue. But, what happens is that if you give a talk, then you get invitedfrom that point on. In addition to that, there was another thing that happened in ’85. A professor in literature, Cynthia Wolff, came to see me and, she said, “The power at MIT is in the School of Engineering.” Allright. Some power. “The humanities faculty feel like they’re not part of thecore of the institution. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could create a way ofgathering faculty, especially from the humanities and engineering andscience?” So, I said all right. We’ll do that. It’s called the symposium. And,it’s still going.

INTERVIEWER: And, it’s called what?

MOSES: symposium. Remember? Plato’s Symposium.

INTERVIEWER: How often?

MOSES: Well, I don’t know. That one works differently. You stay in it for a number of years and then you get off. I’ve been off a long time. But, myguess is maybe once a month.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, that often?

MOSES: Yeah. A member of the symposium would get up, talk about theirspecialty, and other people would comment. That one is a dinner event.The others are lunches.

INTERVIEWER: By the end of your term as department chair, were therepressures to cut faculty in your department or hold it down at that point?

MOSES: Yeah, that’s a good question. Budgetary pressure at MIT isnothing new. It probably goes back to ’68, when the MansfieldAmendment came into being under Howard Johnson. And so, it’s beenan issue that’s sort of simmering. Sometimes it’s not so bad butsometimes it gets tough. And, in the late ‘80s — the mid ’80s, I think — theidea was we needed to reduce MIT’s costs. Some way. Gerry Wilson,certainly, was playing an important role, there, partly because of hisinterest in manufacturing and how manufacturing in the United States hadto change given the pressure from Japan. And so, he, basically, said, “MITneeds to reduce the size of its faculty. To a first degree, the cost of theinstitution is a function of it size.” I said, yeah, that’s fine. Are the otherschools going to go along? He said, “Sure, we’re going to make them goalong.” It turns out, nobody else went along. But, Gerry Wilson reducedthe size of, not the effective faculty, but the ones on board plus ones thatyou could hire et cetera. He reduced the number of potential hires. I said,”If you don’t go along with the other deans, the School of Engineering isnot going to do well.” And, I really opposed that unilateral move on hispart. And, eventually, he wanted to clamp down on the size of the EEdepartment. He didn’t do that. He didn’t do that initially because of theenrollment issue we discussed, but, when he did, I resigned.

INTERVIEWER: You thought it would be less fun?

MOSES: Yeah, that and I thought it was an unreasonable principle.

INTERVIEWER: So, what did you do after your resignation?

MOSES: I waited for them to find a new department head, and that wasn’tas easy as they initially thought. But, eventually, they came up with PaulPenfield. And, I took a year off and spent the year at the Harvard BusinessSchool.

INTERVIEWER: Why the Harvard Business School?

MOSES: Partly, I couldn’t easily leave. My kids were going to school in thearea. I didn’t want to go anywhere without them. I really got interested inthe issue of manufacturing. Why we were not doing well relative to theJapanese, at least in the ’80s. I was interested in organizational issues,again, the issue of my German background, if you will. I knew of somepeople at the Harvard Business School, what they’ve done. And so, Iasked them, “Would you take me on?” They said, “Fine.”

INTERVIEWER: Did any of the Harvard Business School rub off on you?Did it influence your own management style? Or change your thinking in any way when you came back? A very different setting.

MOSES: Well, I was impressed — I hadn’t expected to be — by theirteaching. One of the people there whose work I liked George Lodge.George Lodge ran against Kennedy in 1962. He lost. And so, he becamea Harvard Business School professor. He did sociological comparison ofJapanese and Germans and other countries with the US, et cetera. And, Iliked that. And, I asked George. I said, “What would it take for you to missclass?” He said, “Never done that. 104 degree temperature and I’dconsidered it.” I was impressed. These guys travel all over writing theircases, et cetera. They get money from the school to do this traveling, butthey make sure to schedule it in such a way that they don’t miss classes.And, MIT, if you have to go to a conference, you get somebody to takeover for your class. That’s the reasonable thing. These guys don’t. And,the case study teaching really is not easy. It requires a lot of carefulattention to details and what the student is saying relative to what youthink is going on. I was impressed with the teaching. That, I had notexpected.

In terms of the research, I actually taught a course there. I was lessimpressed by them. Very good people, but not as mathematical, maybe.Not quite like my style.

INTERVIEWER: When you stepped down as chair, did you think aboutwhether that was the end of your administrative career?

MOSES: Yeah, yeah. I figured as much, yeah. But then, Gerry steppeddown about a year later. Gerry Wilson. And, they were looking forsomebody and I interviewed. I told my wife, “Nah. It’s never going tohappen.”

INTERVIEWER: Why’d you think that?

MOSES: I don’t know. Members of the committee were asking sort ofwhat seemed to be nasty or difficult questions.

INTERVIEWER: Like what?

MOSES: It’s a long time. I didn’t think it would happen. It did happen.Fine. Okay. Jerry stepped down on January 16 of 1991. I met with MarkWrighton, who was provost at the time. Actually, I was a candidate forprovost. I’ll be honest about that. I forgot — during the year, they involvedme a little bit in the search for the president. But, Mark Wrighton becameprovost did very fine work. But, he interviewed me, I think, after the 16th.And, he back dated the appointment a few days. Okay. There was no timelost, if you will.

INTERVIEWER: Did you and he know each other very much?

MOSES: Not much.

INTERVIEWER: He was from chemistry?

MOSES: Chemistry, yes. I think people knew of me as department headbecause of the crisis on the enrollment that we discussed. I think that’swhat, mostly, what people knew about me at the time. Maybe they knewother things.

INTERVIEWER: So, what were the challenges on the table or the problemsfor dean?

MOSES: Well, before I answer that question, I’ll put it this way. Thestructure of MIT is department heads, not chairmen. Department headshave a lot of power. The provost and president have a lot of power. Theprovost usually runs the budget for the Institute. Department heads havea lot of authority. They have to do hiring, et cetera, et cetera. The deans,ah, not so clear. At least, then. The dean of the Sloan School, who was,really, a department head of a very large department. That’s one thing.But, the dean of engineering, dean of science, and other deans, had lesspower than, let’s say, they do at Harvard, where they’re all powerfuldeans. They control the endowment for that school and all that jazz. Thedean here could do things which he or she found interesting. And, GerryWilson did Project Athena, which, actually, I had a major role in. He led us in manufacturing, which I had a very minor role in. I thought, one of thethings we should do is do something parallel to the Leaders forManufacturing in the area of design. And, that became the System Design and Management Program. So, as dean, you can do interesting, usefulthings partly because the standard issues of dealing with the faculty arenot as big as a dean as they are for department head or the financial issues are not as big as they are for a provost. So, I had fun. I hadenormous fun as dean.

INTERVIEWER: Did you?

MOSES: Absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: One issue, I think you had to face was questions aboutsome of the smaller engineering departments in the school, which werecoming up, then, because of financial issues?

MOSES: Again, we were all constantly looking for ways to reduce costsand, if you ask yourself, which department in the School of Engineering — were not as easily justified. Well, there were two of them. Pretty obvious.Everybody knew which they were. Nuclear engineering. Oceanengineering. And so I, in concert with the provost, president, agreed to tryto see what I could do about nuclear engineering. The issue there, then,was that there hadn’t been a new plant on order in a couple decades. Itwasn’t clear if things were going to change. What’s the future going to befor that department? The department said they were going to go into bioarea. Nuclear plus bio. That’s fine.

INTERVIEWER: Because they had the radiology. They had fission andfusion and radiology?

MOSES: That was their three areas. Fission, fusion, and radiology. Fusionis always going to be the technology of the future. It’s not clear how manyfaculty you need, because, in many ways, physics, also electricalengineering, were heavily involved in that. Fission was the fundamentalproblem. So, I thought, maybe what we could do is combine thedepartment with mechanical engineering as had been done in manyother universities. And so, we had a meeting over dinner. And, Isuggested this. Of course, they were opposed.

INTERVIEWER: You had a meeting with whom?

MOSES: The faculty in nuclear engineering. So, I came back and I talkedto the department head extensively about the idea of reducing the facultysize over time. We also talked to the visiting committee. Again, these areextremely important committees for the Institute. visiting committees. Wetalked to them about the issue. So, people knew that was on the table.And, the department was willing to undergo a reduction in size over aperiod of a decade, or so. And, having gotten that through, the oceanengineers came forward and said, “Okay. We’ll take a similar deal. Areduction in the size of ocean engineering over a period of a decade or so.” And, both things came to be.

INTERVIEWER: And, the plan was to reduce out of existence? Or just tobring down costs —

MOSES: Bring down costs by reducing the size of the faculty from, let’ssay, 20 each to — I don’t remember the exact number. Let’s say 10, 12 to14.

INTERVIEWER: Would those have been efficient administrative units oncethey got that small?

MOSES: No, that’s a good question. Nuclear engineering managed tostay and is a viable institution and it’s now, presumably, grown somewhat,as nuclear option has come to the floor again, which I’m pleased with.Ocean engineering, which is a unusual department because it’s not clearin terms of foundation They have foundational issues from mechanicalengineering. They have foundational issues from electrical engineering.The get it from all over. It’s a rather different sort of department. In anycase, they eventually agreed to be combined with mechanicalengineering. And so, one of the associate heads in mechanicalengineering is an ocean engineer at this point in time.

INTERVIEWER: Did you also look at issues of how engineering students — undergraduate — should be educated and the balance of what they weretaking? At some point, you were involved with that.

MOSES: Yes, I was. What Gerry Wilson started was the notion of a long-range plan of five years. Five- year- plan. The first one, maybe ’82 or ‘83,led to Project Athena. The second one led to a notion called Large- ScaleSystems, which you’ll probably get to in a minute. I started one when Ibecame dean. Maybe in ’92, ended ’93. I wrote a report called,”Engineering with a big E.” Where did I get that idea? Well, Leaders forManufacturing viewed itself as Manufacturing with a big M, meaning itgoes across manufacturing into design and other aspects of the firm. Amanufacturing firm. And, I wanted to indicate “Engineering with a big E”is broader than just engineering. It involves the social sciences. It involvesmanagement and things of that sort. How did that come to be? When youthink about the major change in engineering education in the 20thcentury, one of them was the effect of World War II, which led to theEngineering Science Movement. Gordon Brown was head of the EEdepartment in the ’50s and he played an important role in creation ofengineering science. The idea being that they learned in World War II,especially here at MIT at the Rad Lab, they learned that physicists,scientists generally, are better at fundamentals. More flexible, as a result inbeing able to deal with new kinds of problems than engineers who weretaught from the books of the ’30s, if you will. So, they wanted a morefundamental approach which emphasized more math, more science. But,something had to give. What gave, I suspect, was largely emphasis ondesign, emphasis on management, actually. Management of engineeringfirms was a subject taught a number of years in the EE department.Anything having to do with environment or manufacturing, et cetera, justwouldn’t come up. So, by the ’80s, when we knew that manufacturing wasan issue, it seemed like having such a strong emphasis on math andscience is good. But, at what cost? So, there were two ideas around. Oneis that we ought to see if we could require a fifth year for every student. Atthe end of five years, I’ll get a Master’s all right. But, we’ll try to get themto take that extra year and then we can broaden them as well as deepenthem somewhat. And, if we knew that the student’s going to do five years,we could start some of this earlier on. So, “Engineer with a big E” was anattempt to broaden engineering education to deal with some of theissues that, in some sense, were allowed to slip by in the EngineeringScience movement, which was extremely successful, no doubt. And, itmade MIT’s EE department. We wrote the books. The Red Book. Oh, no,not the red. The Green Book Series in the ’50s was, essentially, anengineering science series and it put the EE department on the map morethan ever. And so, now, this was a more risky kind of a move. Two parts:it’s a fifth year and the other one is the broadening.

Paul Penfield, in particular, when he was head of EE department, tried toconvince other heads, other chairmen — chairwomen — of the EEdepartments to I adopt this fifth-year approach and they wouldn’t. But, wewere able to do that, certainly, in the EECS department through what iscalled a master’s of engineering degree. Which is in a fifth year, you do aproject and you get a Master’s as well as a Bachelor’s degree. A key ideafor that that came in one of these committee meetings in the mid- ‘80swhen someone pointed out that the students who were in our Co-opProgram, 6A, so-called, were relatively successful having done aBachelor’s and a Master’s in five years. So, why don’t we see if we can doa Co-op- thing on campus for the rest of the students? And, that’s whatthe master’s of engineering is, to some degree. You do your Master’swork project on campus rather than at the company site.

INTERVIEWER: And, did this apply to all the engineering departments orwas it mainly Course 6?

MOSES: It could. But, it turns out to have been most successful in Course6. It was tried, I think, in aero. Wasn’t that successful. It may have beensaid to have been tried in civil. Again, not that successful. And,mechanical absolutely refused to do it. So, yeah, it really works for us. Yes,it has side effects because the introductory graduate courses had to bechanged a little bit to meet the different quality standards of the MITEECS students and the entering doctoral students. But, yeah, on thewhole, I think, people would say it’s been a success. And, it’s still not anational thing. And, furthermore, the broadening hasn’t been quite asstrong as it could. It’s become more so over the years. Mind you, thisprogram’s been around, now, for 16, 17 years, or whatever. So, we’vedone some broadening but not as much as I had hoped. There’s alwaysanother administration.

INTERVIEWER: Tell us about your time as provost.

MOSES: Things happen all the time.

INTERVIEWER: How did you —

MOSES: The big issue while Mark Wrighton was provost was what wouldbe the effect of RA and TA? Now, let me explain a little bit of whathappened. In the early ’80s when John Deutch was dean of science, heworked out a deal where the tuition for research assistants and teaching — I think, teaching assistants, as well. Yeah, RA, TA was essentially added onto the pool of employee benefits for all MIT staff including ones atLincoln. That was one of the issues at the Lincoln Lab Committee that wediscussed earlier was to figure out what the effect would be. Whathappened, in effect, was that Lincoln was paying for the tuition of 700students that they never saw through this employee benefits addition ofthe tuition to the pool. And, we had a very high EB pool. EB rate. And, so did other universities. Stanford, Caltech, Columbia, and Johns Hopkinscome to mind as the other institutions that did a similar thing. And then,the accountants working for HHS said, you know, we don’t like thisbecause some institutions can do it and, of course, they were never — HHSdominant institutions. Always Office of Naval Research dominantinstitutions. Our HHS institutions can’t do this.

INTERVIEWER: This is Health and Human Services in Washington D.C.

MOSES: They said, you know, our institutions can’t do it. Now, we’d like tohave a standard approach all universities should follow. We argued, counter-argued, and said, “Do you realize that the federal government, asa whole, does better under this scheme than it does under the standardHHS scheme?” “No, we don’t care.” And, the reason is why would aprovost agree to do something when it costs them more? The answer isbecause they’d reduce the cost of a research assistantship to our faculty,significantly. Therefore, to make them happy, he was willing to pay some.

INTERVIEWER: So you lost that and then the Institute had to pick up the cost.

MOSES: The Institute had to pick up the cost because there’s so manypeople who are directly paid by the provost, if you will, who are not RA’s,TA’s, or researchers. There was this proposal to eliminate this inequity,they might call it. Mark created a committee chaired by Bob Weinberg. Ithad the dean of science, the dean of engineering, dean of HASS, anumber of others. And we tried to figure out what the impact would beon cost of research. We said, “Oh, my God. It’s going to cost so muchmore for a research assistantship. We’d lose out completely. All thestudents would go to other institutions. And so, we had the provost kick insome money in order to keep the amount lower. In particular, pay asignificant part of the tuition.

INTERVIEWER: And so when you became provost, financials were one ofthe big issues.

MOSES: Yeah, but before we get to that. The last few months of Mark’sadministration, he came up with an arrangement which he said would,essentially, work out so that the Institute would not be as affected by, andthe bottom line is the Institute wouldn’t be so heavily affected by thechange-over which would occur three years hence. Well, when I becameprovost, I looked at that issue once again. And, my conclusion was thatthat wasn’t going to work very well. That the base budget was going to bein the red for several tens of millions of dollars a year and maybe evengrowing as we went forward. And, that became a major issue for mewhen I was provost is how to deal with that.

INTERVIEWER: And, did you figure out a way? Was there any way?

MOSES: There was a way, which was the pay-out of the endowment hadto be increased. Now, at the time, my estimate was that the endowmentwas paying out a little over 3 percent. Most people assume thatendowments pay out 5 percent. And, the difference in 5 percent and 3 percent is so large to take care of a lot of issues. But, it took a while toconvince the trustees to go along with that.

INTERVIEWER: And this was in a period of a growing endowment.

MOSES: The endowment was growing and the payout, in terms of dollars,was only increasing a little — 5 percent — but, the increase was 5 percent.

INTERVIEWER: It lagged.

MOSES: It lagged the growth in the endowment by a lot and, mind you,this was a process that had been going on for 20 some odd years. Andso, the lag was significant. My hope was that we could go to a morereasonable payout rate and deal with some of these issues.

INTERVIEWER: And they ultimately did change?

MOSES: Yeah. Working with Bill Dixon, who was my counterpart, seniorvice president in charge of Administrative Services. We wrote a proposalto the trustees that was bought in. Allowed us to deal with almost all thefinancial issues by increasing the payout in the endowment significantly.

INTERVIEWER: Are there one or two other major issues that you grappledwith as provost?

MOSES: Well, as always, the provost deals with almost everything. Spacewas an issue. Always an issue. It’s a significant issue, I think, MIT goingforward. We, for many years, just didn’t put enough money intomaintenance. We have a deferred maintenance between half a billion anda billion dollars. It costs us in many ways. One is that a new facultymember comes in and she needs a lab. You make a slight change inanything, they say we gotta bring it up to code because we haven’t beendoing it. Well, all of a sudden, the cost of the lab grows enormously.Makes it difficult to hire experimentalists of any kind. That’s an issue.

An interesting thing that happened was a campaign was announced orabout to be announced.

INTERVIEWER: A fundraising campaign.

MOSES: A fundraising campaign. And, it was my job to figure out what touse it for. I looked at Deutch’s analysis of the previous campaign. And, Isaid, “Gee, we have to be careful not to put too much into the categoriesof gifts that we want to see. We have to recognize people give us moneyfor the things that they want to see.” So, when I did the differentcategories — chairs, scholarships — I knew I had to do fellowships morethan I expected to see, but we really needed to have fellowships.

INTERVIEWER: Graduate fellowships.

MOSES: Graduate fellowships.

INTERVIEWER: To cover the RA, TA tuition —

MOSES: A little bit of that. Fellowships are a good thing because it allowsyou to attract some of the very best students that you might loseotherwise, even if you could hire them as RA’s without any difficulty. So,those were usual categories. Then, I said, “Listen, they’re going to give usmoney for research which we don’t control because they want certainresearch done.” I put that up a little higher than it would have beenotherwise. And, I think my estimates were done right. Very close to beingright. We eventually settled on a figure of a billion and a half, and whenwe made that, as we hoped we would, they raised it to two billion andthey made that.

And, a thing that was tricky and, maybe, I didn’t handle as well as I shouldhave, was the notion that over a long period time, we hadn’t beenbuilding much. And there was pent up demand. Of course, every deanhad their favorites. And, of course, for 25 years, I was pushing for a building on campus for computer science. One argument being is to getthe EE and CS faculty closer to each other. And, the other one is thatbeing across the railroad tracks, as we were in Technology Square formany, many years, we were developing a culture that was different fromthe rest of the institution and I didn’t like that. Deutch actually helped inthis regard by pointing out that Building 20 had to be replaced because ithad all of this asbestos. I spent the money to get rid of the asbestos. Notan easy thing. And then, we built a building on top of that space. And, wehad a big party for the building. When we came down from Building 20.Paul Penfield did a great job in that party. And, we built the Stata Center.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that’s changed the culture of engineering orCourse 6 very much?

MOSES: I don’t know about engineering. EE and CS are much closer, Ithink. We’re also across the street from the brain and cog and we’reworking with them a little more closely than we would have otherwise.And, the students have an easier time getting to the faculty. And, ofcourse, the Student Street is a wonderful thing in the Stata Center. I won’tgo into the negotiations over that architects. I’ll tell you one story aboutStata — INTERVIEWER: This may be our final story. We have just two orthree minutes.

MOSES: Oh, I’m sorry. I was on Ray’s board for 20 some odd years.

INTERVIEWER: Ray Stata.

MOSES: Ray Stata’s board, Analog Devices. He knew about this need for abuilding and he was also chairman of the visiting committee. Finally, he came and he said, “I don’t want to hear anymore about this. Here’s $10million.” Sounds like Doc. “Here’s $10 million. Start building this, already.”We said, wow! After all these years of talking about it we actually have $10million. So, we actually priced out the building and it was a lot more than$10 million. Well over 100. At one point, we had a meeting with Chuckand Ray and others. Barbara Stowe, probably, was at the meeting, vicepresident for Development. I said, “Why don’t we have a building whichhas two towers? That way, we can get three gifts. One for each tower, one for the overall thing.” And, at that point, I think Ray had already agreedwith Maria to give us $25 million. And then we got $20 million fromGates. $15 million more from Alex Dreyfoos.

INTERVIEWER: Alex Dreyfoos.

MOSES: He was the one who gave us the money for the other wing, or —

INTERVIEWER: So, the tri-part system worked well.

MOSES: It worked very well. And, of course, we were able to get someadditional monies for special rooms, part of the first floor, things of thatsort. So, it added up to, maybe a gift total of around $90 million. Plus allthe money we saved in not paying rent on Technology Square. But,nevertheless, the building is larger than I anticipated. Partly, because ithas huge garages underneath. But, it has this wonderful Student Street.

INTERVIEWER: And what are you most involved with now? As a closingnote.

MOSES: Systems engineering is an attempt at — the School ofEngineering has about 50 faculty. A dozen of them from the Sloan School.All but one or two of the engineering departments are thinking aboutissues like complexity and energy. But, from a slightly differentperspective than the Energy Initiative. And, we have a lot of researchsupport in other countries. Portugal, Abu Dhabi, Colombia.

INTERVIEWER: This is systems design.

MOSES: Design is one issue. But, it is more operations, all kinds of stuff.

INTERVIEWER: Was this ESD?

MOSES: Engineering Systems Division.

INTERVIEWER: And the Center for Technology, Policy, and IndustrialDevelopment?

MOSES: Is a sort of research on the arm of ESD to a first order. CTPID hasbeen around for longer. ESD’s been around for a decade, or so. But, theother one’s been around for 20 some odd years.

INTERVIEWER: Is there a particular problem that’s engaging your mind at the moment?

MOSES: Three things that I’m particularly interested in: foundationalissues in engineering systems: Complexity, flexibility, robustness. Thoseare foundational issues. Health care policy. Dealing with infrastructure,roads. Of course, the Internet. Electric power. Seeing what therelationship is between them and how to avoid getting into serious issueswith adversaries or, just simply, loss of electric power due to rain or, whoknows what? It’s a fascinating set of subjects. Much broader than whatmost faculty here tend to do. Involves us with social sciences more thanever and business school faculty.

INTERVIEWER: So, if you were going to graduate school now, what wouldyou study?

MOSES: Ah! Yeah, I’d study that. Of course, the alternative is biology.Everybody says biology. Okay, so let me not say biology. I think I’d studysystems. It is the set of issues which the world faces more and more all thetime.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you very much for chatting with us today. Good luckwith solving those problems. We’ll all be better off.

MOSES: I hope so.

INTERVIEWER: Thank You.