O Pioneers! Marcia McNutt & Judy Woodruff
Scientists and journalists have a lot in common. They dig for the truth. They yearn for and thrill to that Eureka! moment of discovery.
Two trailblazing women sit down at Carnegie Corporation of New York’s headquarters for a freewheeling chat. Both are super-accomplished, at the pinnacles of their pioneering careers. One’s a renowned oceanographer, geophysicist, and president of the National Academy of Sciences. The other’s a widely admired journalist and the recently named solo anchor of PBS NewsHour.
MARCIA McNUTT: So let’s talk origin stories first. How and why did you become a journalist, Judy?
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, I didn’t know I was going into journalism, unlike many of my colleagues who knew from the time they were in kindergarten that they wanted to be reporters. Neither of my parents had gone to college and my father was a career military man, so I grew up as an Army brat. My mother was a stay-at-home homemaker. She didn’t go beyond the 10th grade, so her mantra to me always was “Get an education! Get an education! And then you can figure out what you want to do.”
I was heading into high school as John F. Kennedy was elected president. I had some interest in politics, but I did well — coincidentally for this conversation — in math. So I headed off to college thinking I would major in math. But I didn’t know what I would do then. Somebody said, “You could become an actuary for an insurance company.” That didn’t particularly excite me.
McNUTT: That was still unusual, a woman in math, wasn’t it?
WOODRUFF: Well, I had fabulous math and chemistry teachers in high school, so I really thought the sciences were going to be the place for me. But in my senior year I had a physics instructor who never called on the two women in the class for the entire year. And then in college — a women’s college, Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina — the instructor basically thought women shouldn’t be taking advanced math. So I was pretty discouraged.
But at the same time I was taking a course in political science. And I fell in love with politics. I changed my major, transferred to Duke University, and majored in political science. I thought I’d work in Washington. So I worked for my congressman in Washington for a couple of summers during college and I thought that was the place for me. But the second summer, in 1967, the women I worked with on Capitol Hill said, “Do not come back to Washington. Women are not given any serious consideration in this city.” So I went back to Duke my senior year, crestfallen, you know — completely broken. I thought I didn’t have a career path.
Then my political science professor said, “Did you ever think about covering politics?” So the idea of that got into my head, my senior year in college. But when I applied for a job, the only job I could get was as a newsroom secretary for one of the television broadcast affiliates in Atlanta. And that’s where I started. But I didn’t go into it thinking I’m going to be a journalist. It happened very quickly after that.
McNUTT: So you didn’t do any journalism in college?
WOODRUFF: I didn’t. It happened so fast. I served in student government. I was interested in politics and policy, but the writing about it and the reporting was all brand new, and that didn’t happen until after I was a secretary! What about you, Marcia? How did you get your start in science?
“My mother was a stay-at-home homemaker. She didn’t go beyond the 10th grade, so her mantra to me always was ‘Get an education! Get an education! And then you can figure out what you want to do.’ … So I headed off to college thinking I would major in math. But I didn’t know what I would do then. Somebody said, ‘You could become an actuary for an insurance company.’ That didn’t particularly excite me.” — Judy Woodruff
McNUTT: So my experience was just the opposite of yours, Judy. I had a chemistry teacher in high school who honestly should have been fired. But I had a teacher for physics in my junior year and calculus my senior year who was so inspirational that I decided to major in physics in college. And as I was graduating, I was very much encouraged by the faculty at Colorado College, where I went to school, to go to graduate school. But I couldn’t quite figure out what to specialize in. I should back up a little and say my first plan was that I was going to take a year off and be a ski bum in Sun Valley with my best friend.
I had gone through college in three years and I thought I deserved a gap year. And this wonderful physics professor said, “No, you should not take a gap year. You’re going to get used to having money in your pocket, you’re going to get out of the study routine, you’re going to meet a bartender named Sven, you’re going to get married, you’re going to settle down, and five years from now you’re going to be in some cabin in Ketchum, Idaho, with laundry hanging out on the line and two little kids, and you’re going to be wondering whatever happened to your dream.
“So,” he said, “this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to apply to graduate school right now.” And I said, “But my parents have just spent all this money on my college education. I really don’t know if they should pay for graduate school.” And he said, “No, you’re going to apply for this National Science Foundation Fellowship. Here’s the form. You fill it out. You’ll get it.” And I said, “Well, I don’t really know what area of physics I should study.” He said, “No. You’re not going to graduate school in physics. Read this article.” And he handed me the very first Scientific American article that was ever written on plate tectonics.
WOODRUFF: Wow!
McNUTT: By John Dewey, an earth scientist. It was the first one that was accessible to anyone who was not already a PhD. And although I had taken geology courses I thought earth science was this arm-wavy sort of mess. But I read this article and my jaw dropped. It was so beautiful. The theory was so expansive in its grandeur. It explained everything from the uplift of the Himalayas to the motion of the San Andreas Fault to the Ring of Fire around the Pacific — all by the motion of a handful of rigid plates on the Earth. I said this is so simple, it has to be right. So I decided right then I would go to graduate school. But I had to go to an oceanographic institution because most of the plate boundaries were under the deep sea.
“For me, plate tectonics was like getting in on the ground floor of evolution the day after Darwin writes Origin of Species. Or on the ground floor of genetics right after Watson and Crick publish about the double helix. I felt like all I had to do was step on that elevator and ride it to the top.” — Marcia McNutt
WOODRUFF: Wasn’t that a relatively new theory then?
McNUTT: Yes. For me, plate tectonics was like getting in on the ground floor of evolution the day after Darwin writes Origin of Species. Or on the ground floor of genetics right after Watson and Crick publish about the double helix. I felt like all I had to do was step on that elevator and ride it to the top. I guess I just always liked solving puzzles. I was always the kid that, you know, would go to a birthday party and everyone else is outside playing pin the tail on the donkey and I was the one collecting the frogs.
WOODRUFF: [Laughing] Yes! In many ways that’s what journalists do too, I think — solving puzzles, using your eyes and letting the facts tell the story. At least that’s what I was told journalism was when I started, but today the definition has shifted, and it continues to shift.
McNUTT: I see a connection between science and journalism done right. There’s this whole issue of fake news and fact, and there are scientific hoaxes and facts all over the Internet.
WOODRUFF: What strikes me is that both of us, in our own ways, were kind of in at the beginning. There weren’t many women covering politics in Washington when I started as a secretary, and there weren’t many women in geology and hard science at that time, were there?
McNUTT: No, not many. We were lucky in having great professors in our lives at the right moments.
WOODRUFF: Yes, I’m reminded yet again of the importance of teachers. They can make such a difference in the life of every single student, both in a positive and a negative direction. I think if I had had a professor who was excited about physics and wanted women in the field — who knows? I might have taken a different turn. Clearly you were affected that way. And I did have that political science professor who just made me so excited.
“I’m reminded yet again of the importance of teachers. They can make such a difference in the life of every single student, both in a positive and a negative direction. I think if I had had a professor who was excited about physics and wanted women in the field — who knows? I might have taken a different turn.” — Judy Woodruff
This was the fall of 1964, right after the assassination of President Kennedy. So it was a time of a fair amount of turmoil. Then my college years were Vietnam and my senior year was 1968. Martin Luther King was assassinated that spring, and then Bobby Kennedy that June. And so, speaking of tectonic plates, we felt that the political and cultural plates were shifting underneath us. I was just determined that I was somehow going to be part of reporting on how our country and our politics were changing and how we were dealing with this moment of crisis in our country.
McNUTT: But wasn’t your mother also a major influence on you?
WOODRUFF: Yes, my mother’s father died when she was 14. She had to stay home and help take care of her siblings while her mother took two additional jobs, so her mother had three jobs. She was an enormous inspiration. I’m sure you had some moments like that, didn’t you?
McNUTT: Oh, yes. I had a great experience when I first got to college. It was the first year of an experiment, which continues to this day, called the Block Plan system, where students only take one course at a time for a concentrated immersion in a subject for a month or two, and then you take an exam. Then the next month you take another course. So as a freshman for my first two months at Colorado College I signed up to take geology because I thought what better introduction for someone who is coming from the flatlands in Minnesota to Colorado than to take geology and get out and see the mountains?
Our professor, John Lewis, had us roll up our sleeping bags, pack up our backpacks, and we went out in the mountains for two months. We had to pretend we were the first geologists on Earth. We took no books. We did no lectures. We had to figure out the geologic evolution of the southern Rockies over the past 1.6 billion years from first principles. And it was an amazing experience just to use our eyes.
That experience taught me first of all that I had a knack for that. I really had an aptitude for sitting back and letting the observations tell their story. The other thing I learned was that I really wanted to do science outside.
WOODRUFF: Right. As you’ve said, and I’m quoting here: “As a scientist working in a lab, publishing papers that only a few specialists in the field really cared about, it felt to me like being trapped in a box canyon.” Tell us about the journey out of there.
McNUTT: Well, for a scientist there is no greater joy than that Eureka moment — you’ve had some hypothesis and you go out and make some discovery. So I spent most of my active science career as an oceanographer. I remember one expedition when we were out in a place where the only other ship tracks were those of Captain Cook. And we made amazing discoveries. It was like, “Oh my God! We know something about this place that no one else has ever discovered!” That’s an amazing feeling. But then I realized that I can probably count on two hands the number of people who cared about that. Even convincing my mother that she should care about it was getting to be a heavy lift.
So I got an invitation to leave MIT and go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute [in California]. That was a laboratory founded and funded by David Packard as a technology incubator, to create new tools to explore the ocean in new dimensions. As its director, I set it on a new course. Rather than just doing free ocean discovery, we set out to use those tools to answer questions that people really cared about: How are we polluting the oceans? What can we do about it? How is the ocean changing in response to climate change? These questions had been difficult to answer because we didn’t have the wherewithal to get information from the ocean. I found that researchers at the institution really enjoyed working on problems that people cared about.
From there I went to lead the U.S. Geological Survey. My portfolio expanded to problems in energy, minerals, ecology, problems in water, and mapping. USGS is a primary science provider to many other government agencies, so it was a thrill to be working with talented scientists like Steve Chu and Jane Lubchenco and John Holdren. After that I became editor in chief of Science, which is a premier journal that publishes across all fields of science, including astrophysics and microbiology, materials science and chemistry. And now I’m at the National Academy of Sciences, which is a great place to be, an institution that was chartered by Congress during the Civil War to be science advisors to the nation.
WOODRUFF: Which brings us back to fake news. Scientists working on projects or doing research with real-life implications like to get media attention because these are things people care about. But there’s so much suspicion of so-called expertise now. Which experts do we believe? Who gets to decide what is scientific truth?
McNUTT: Yes, there are so many conspiracy theories out there. And with all these social platforms, everyone’s a journalist, everyone’s a pundit. How do you make the facts resonate?
WOODRUFF: This is a huge question. So much more is known in the world today than when I started out as a reporter in 1970. There are more facts coming at us, more research, more surveys, just more information on top of what we already have. And of course most of us have easier access. How do we know what to believe? As the country has grown more politically polarized, people focus on different parts of the set of facts that are out there.
If the vast majority of scientists who work on climate change say human activity is having an effect, then we’re going to reflect that in our reporting. We’re going to say, sure, there are people on the other side, including a number of people in very central positions in government, who are skeptical. But I think the public nowadays has to take more responsibility to inform themselves about these issues than they used to. But it’s still up to us to decide what we’re going to report, what we’re going to leave in, what we’re going to amplify, what we give context to.
McNUTT: Perhaps the point of confusion here is that science is not a belief system. Science is a structured way of uncovering the rules about how the natural world behaves. Anyone can be a scientist. Anyone can uncover and recreate for themselves those rules and behaviors. So it’s not that scientists believe that the globe is warming. Scientists know that the Earth is warming, and they know it is from the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels. And they know that because they have independently confirmed it from several different approaches.
Perhaps the point of confusion here is that science is not a belief system…. So it’s not that scientists believe that the globe is warming. Scientists know that the Earth is warming, and they know it is from the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels. And they know that because they have independently confirmed it from several different approaches.” — Marcia McNutt
For example, they have been tracking the release of CO2 from burning fossil fuels and watched CO2 levels rise, both in the atmosphere and in the oceans, ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. And they have seen that when they take out CO2-forcing from the models, it’s impossible to recreate the current warming. You can’t do it with solar impacts. You can’t do it with rotational perturbations in the Earth’s orbit. You can’t do it with anything else but CO2 burning. So when people say, “Oh, well, the models might be wrong,” I’m sorry. The models may have small errors but it is only the CO2 in the models that creates the current warming that we see.
We can also look back through the Paleo history of the Earth and see that every time there’s a CO2 spike, the planet warms. So scientists don’t believe this. They know this. And they know it because they have a structured way of investigating the laws of nature. The greenhouse effect is solid physics. You might not want to believe it but you’re going to have to live with it. And in fact if it weren’t for the greenhouse effect, this planet would not be habitable.
WOODRUFF: We know this and yet there is this political divide that is determined to continue the debate.
McNUTT: I think arguing about the evidence of climate change is being used as a distraction to prevent taking action on it. You know, most Americans cannot name a living scientist, so it’s hard to deliver trusted messages.
I have many Republican friends I go camping with every summer in the High Sierra, for almost 20 years now. We’ve seen changes in these Sierra meadows and the amount of water, with more frequent droughts. We talk about how we would love to have our grandchildren be able to enjoy the same experiences we’ve had. And when I bring up what we should do or what corporations and individuals should do, rather than government, they’re completely on board. They know that these changes are happening. And deep inside they know that we are at fault. But they don’t want this to be imposed by government saying, “You’ve got to do this.” And yet it’s hurting their quality of life.
WOODRUFF: Reaching across the divide — that has to be the way to do it. But with so many social platforms and places people argue, it gets overwhelming. I mean, it’s the Year of the Woman and yet here we have the divide over that, the #MeToo movement, and the terrible stories we’ve heard since last fall when we learned about the sexual harassment charges against Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer.
The fact that it happened in Hollywood with a celebrity quotient gave it lift. If it had happened in a — I don’t know, in an accounting firm, it might not have gotten so much attention. [Laughing]. Sorry, accountants out there. But a lot more people paid attention and started looking around and saying, “Has that happened in my workplace?” And sure enough, we found out that in a number of newsrooms, some names we thought were going to be carved in the mountaintops of journalism were in trouble.
McNUTT: You know, harassment came out in the sciences before Harvey Weinstein. And yet it got no play in the media or outside of science or anywhere, and it wasn’t getting a lot of action. But the Harvey Weinstein case brought a lot more out and allowed the scientific community to realize that science really had a problem too.
“Harassment came out in the sciences before Harvey Weinstein. And yet it got no play in the media or outside of science or anywhere, and it wasn’t getting a lot of action. But the Harvey Weinstein case brought a lot more out and allowed the scientific community to realize that science really had a problem too.” — Marcia McNutt
WOODRUFF: Yes, and I feel so horrible for all those women whose lives or careers were ruined because of what he and so many other men have done. I know for a fact that women turned away from journalism because of what was done to them by a colleague, usually a senior colleague, whom they thought they could trust. And instead this person turned out to be a predator.
What we’ve got to do now in newsrooms — and I hope in every other workplace in the country — is look at how they are organized. How do we make sure that when this kind of situation arises, people can speak up and be taken seriously? We need to make sure young journalists coming into the profession right now are supported and know what to look out for, and that they don’t put up with these kinds of behaviors. We need that in every profession.
“We need to make sure young journalists coming into the profession right now are supported and know what to look out for, and that they don’t put up with these kinds of behaviors. We need that in every profession.” — Judy Woodruff
McNUTT: In science, what makes it different from accounting or entertainment or journalism is that it still operates on almost an indentured servant model. Graduate students and post-docs get their funding, their advice, and any possibility of future employment from the personal intervention of a single person. That person provides their support, their scientific project, their recommendations for future work, et cetera. And if that person is a harasser and the student turns them in, the student’s career is sunk. There’s nowhere to go. Too many victims cannot be whistleblowers because they have no way out. Also, it’s often the case in science that the harasser is the golden goose in the institution involved. They bring in the big research grants.
WOODRUFF: In many ways that’s what happened in journalism. Some of the people who’ve been found out were the ones who had their own shows: Charlie Rose. Tavis Smiley. Mark Halperin. Young people wanted to work with them because they were somebody you could learn from. You get a great opportunity, a great recommendation. So it’s a mentor system. It may not have been labeled that way but that’s what it was. And these young people just out of school, the young women were completely vulnerable.
McNUTT: I think this may be a watershed moment. There is no longer any tolerance, and there is also a recognition now of what it means to be a victim. So many of these young people felt, “I’m going to put up with this because of what I get out of it at the other end.” And now they’re being told, “No, you don’t have to do that.”
WOODRUFF: I certainly hope it’s a watershed, because so much has been lost, so many people have been harmed deeply. Year after year, decade after decade, and it’s time that we turned the corner. But we do have a terribly short attention span in this country. We tend to move from one crisis to the next, so I pray that this is one that women are going to keep talking about and not forget.
McNUTT: The National Academy of Sciences has a major report on all this coming out this fall, I think. It will make recommendations that I hope will work to change the culture within science, including how the funding agencies and the institutions handle harassers, because you really need to align all the players. One organization, the American Geophysical Union, has now redefined sexual harassment as scientific misconduct. So it is actually considered scientific misconduct if you are a sexual harasser, and that goes onto your professional record.
WOODRUFF: In journalism it’s going to be done a little differently because we don’t have the strict rules, the measurements that you do in science and academia. But we can set guidelines and we can shine a bright light on the way news organizations operate. My strong belief is that we can shame some news organizations into paying attention to this and holding people accountable.
McNUTT: It will certainly help when more women are in positions of power. It will be interesting to see, when the Academy report comes out, whether they find it to be true that fields with more women in leadership positions have fewer problems, and whether over time the growth of women in leadership positions in some fields has lessened sexual harassment. But the image in my mind is a road with an army of women marching down it, and some of the women just keep falling by the wayside, off the road. And not from enemy fire — from friendly fire, as it were, within our own community. So that the only women making it to the other end are so tough that come hell or high water they’re going to make it. But what a horrible waste of human capital to have a system that operates that way!
“The image in my mind is a road with an army of women marching down it, and some of the women just keep falling by the wayside, off the road. And not from enemy fire — from friendly fire, as it were, within our own community. So that the only women making it to the other end are so tough that come hell or high water they’re going to make it. But what a horrible waste of human capital to have a system that operates that way!” — Marcia McNutt
And that means here we are again at big divisions. Judy, you have said how important it is that politicians get along, and I quote you: “Because the challenges that demand our attention are huge right now and don’t show any signs of disappearing.” Are you optimistic about this? Do you think both sides can ever get along again? How can journalism help bring this rapprochement along?
WOODRUFF: I do believe it’s crucial that our political leaders are able to find common ground so that they can come together to solve the important problems we face. But do I think they’re going to be singing “Kumbaya” and holding hands and having cookouts together? No. I’ve watched the deterioration of the body politic in Washington for 40 years, maybe 41. The city has always had Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, but today so many of them just don’t want to give the time of day to the other side. And the other side is not just someone you disagree with but your mortal enemy.
What kind of country are our children and grandchildren going to grow up in? Are they going to have great educational opportunities no matter where they live? Are they going to be well fed? We have a tremendous problem right now with inequality. Our democracy was founded on healthy disagreement and healthy debate. The founders knew we were going to have different political parties with different approaches. So how do we get through this? I would love to tell you. The political pressures, the money in politics, the redistricting, the gerrymandering … I come back to the money in politics. I’m going to say it again. We are just awash in money and I think that’s a huge problem. We’ve got to find a way through it.
“I do believe it’s crucial that our political leaders are able to find common ground so that they can come together to solve the important problems we face. But do I think they’re going to be singing “Kumbaya” and holding hands and having cookouts together? No.” — Judy Woodruff
McNUTT: Is there a role in all this for the other kind of money, philanthropic donations? It’s been successful in supporting high-risk projects, cross-disciplinary projects, and some that fare poorly in conventional peer review. Private funders can also pioneer new approaches to problem-solving.
WOODRUFF: Yes, especially when they focus on education. It’s so important to make sure the next generations have the tools to understand the world in the way we’ve been discussing, to contribute to the advancement of their fellow human beings and to take care of one another.
McNUTT: So Judy, after all this, what is it that gives you hope? What keeps you from just throwing your hands up in the air and screaming and — I don’t know, getting on the first jet plane for Maui?
WOODRUFF: [Laughing] I’m an optimist by nature, but it’s more than that. I’m a believer that human beings are ultimately good. Not everyone, but I think most people are good and want to do the right thing when presented with alternatives. I have to believe we’re moving in the direction of getting better. I mean, we are having fewer wars, less disease as a planet than we did 100 or 300 or 1,000 years ago. Fewer people are dying in battle every year.
“I have to believe it’s going to get better. I just refuse to give up. I refuse to believe that my children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation won’t do a much better job than we’ve done.” — Judy Woodruff
We tend to focus on the bad things happening now, because that’s what we do as news organizations. But we are making progress. I tend to believe the human condition is moving in the direction of getting better, even though I’ve seen things fall apart time after time after time in Washington. I have to believe it’s going to get better. I just refuse to give up. I refuse to believe that my children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation won’t do a much better job than we’ve done.
McNUTT: Well, that’s a value I think we can all share. Maybe we can start there.
