Charles M. Vest

INTERVIEWER: Thank you very much for participating in this. Obviously, your voice is one of the most crucial.

We're starting with just some broad questions, before we just go over your history and all that. Because you certainly presided over a very interesting time at the Institute. There are rules and rule breakers at MIT. What characterizes those groups as MIT rules, or MIT rule breakers?

VEST: That's a very insightful question. Because I think the fact that we have rules and rule breakers, and that we have very deep, very fundamental scholars and scientists, and we have very highly applied, even industrially-oriented people that manage to coexist side-by-side at an equal level of excellence and respect each other, is one of the real secrets of why MIT has been as successful as it has.

INTERVIEWER: Is that a management challenge? Or is that something that works on its own without a lot of tweaking from above?

VEST: To be honest, it works on its own. As most important things do. It's certainly not something you want to try, even, to, to tweak from above. The only time that you think about that a little bit is when you're making promotion and tenure decisions and so forth like this, at the level of the Academic Council and provost and the president. You want to be sure that somebody is not getting short shrift, or not getting the right level of, of consideration because he or she may be in one or the other of those camps. But it's a pretty rare instance that becomes a question. We revel in having both.

INTERVIEWER: So balancing the rules and the rule breakers is one of the challenges.

VEST: It's a challenge, but it's pretty much a natural system.

INTERVIEWER: From the look on your face, it seems like it's like part of the fun.

VEST: Absolutely. And in fact, you know, if you look back historically at MIT, the areas that became great here, that were beyond the sort of core of engineering and natural science and architecture, they were almost all started by people who were big time rule breakers. So you got the linguistics building around people like Noam Chomsky. And you've got the economics building around Paul Samuelson. And he really saw the value of deep analysis and relatively advanced mathematics before other people did. And even political science, if you go back, Max Millikan people like that, who believe that academic political science, scientists, should actually know something about the real world of government. And they brought people with that kind of experience in.

All those areas grew because they had, as you put it, rule breakers. They had radical thinkers. They were deep thinkers, and they turned out to, to be right. And one of the challenges over the years since that is, as departments like that begin to mature, then they come under the same pressures as every other university, and ranking systems and things like that, that begin to put a little bit of back pressure on the radical thought. And that is an area in which I think the deans and so forth have to think a little bit about the balance.

Because we have to keep that, what I think of as intellectual entrepreneurship. Not in the financial sense, but in the intellectual sense. Keeping that balanced, I think, has been important in those areas that were not sort of the original core of science and engineering.

INTERVIEWER: You became president of MIT in 1990. Looking back from now, what was ending at that time, and what was just beginning for the Institute?

VEST: Well, what was ending was the Cold War. And that had a lot of ramifications for our research universities, public and private, and especially, in some sense, for MIT. Because since the end of World War II, federal support for research and advanced education in science and engineering in particular were largely driven by two things: advancing medicine and healthcare, and our national defense. And in fact, even if you look back, the National Defense Education Act, literally there in the title. And the primary reason people in Congress were interested in supporting things like physics and electrical engineering, and later on computer science, was because they wanted to be sure we had the technologies that would keep our national security strong through the more or less traditional defense department mechanisms.

So when that began to crumble, then all of a sudden there was not a lot of support inherent in the Congress. The Congress in that period turned over even more than usual. A sort of corporate memory was lost. More policy was set in Congress than it was in the administration.

And out of this mix, unfortunately, grew some real antagonism, real antipathy toward our research universities. And if I had to point to one thing that was very troubling for the nation, not just MIT, at that time, that was it. And that had a lot of ramifications for us. One, I personally committed myself to doing what I could as president of MIT, and use the inherent bully pulpit, to try to rebuild some of the trust and understanding in Washington and the importance of this partnership between our public and private research universities and the federal government.

And also, at the same time, things got even worse. Because you'll recall that we were getting whacked in our manufacturing sector, primarily by the Japanese. We suddenly had gotten fat and sassy, and were really not able to compete on the global stage. And MIT had, and I hope we always have, very strong relationships around the world, research and scholarly relations, including a lot with Japan. So Congress was also mad at us about that. Because they thought we were giving away the national treasures and so forth. So it was a real time of turmoil.

INTERVIEWER: Let's talk about the erosion. How does a research institution that, as you say, is so associated with preserving national security and maintaining a technological expertise that would appear to be vital to the health of the nation become surrounded by an era of suspicion? And what would you possibly have been doing that would be against those values from Congress's perspective in 1990?

VEST: Well, as most things that, that happened in Congress, this is not about logic or reality. It's about perception and underlying fear, and not enough mutual understanding and discussion, frankly. In my view, we were doing nothing that we should not have been doing. In fact, we continued to do work, not just sponsored by the defense department, but work that was very crucial to our national security.

And we had to get people to understand that national security meant more than just kind of military might. It was increasingly economic power, and the ability to innovate, and produce new products and services. And so a lot of the discussion was trying to get the government to understand that in the long- term, that was very, very important to the prosperity, and in a broader sense, the security of the nation.

So we were doing nothing wrong. The one thing that we really did get accused of was working with Japanese industries. And there's such a long history to that, and a very fascinating one. The first student to come from Japan to MIT came in 1869. Almost unheard of, during the Meiji Restoration period. And because of that, we had a sequence, over a long number of years, of Japanese students and scholars that came here.

But the big change came right after World War II. Because we had a professor here who had been captured by the Japanese during the war. Sam Goldblith was on the Battan Death March, is credited with using his understanding of chemistry and pharmacology to literally extract vitamins from grass and plants along the way that kept some of the, his fellow soldiers alive. And despite this horrible experience, when the war was over, Sam's attitude was, that is behind us. I do not believe these people are inherently bad. And he actually devoted much of the rest of his career to building bridges, bringing students over. And from that, we began to have some involvement with major corporations.

So this is a very long- term, healthy thing. And at the end of the day, I think we actually helped our nation by building those strong relationships, and by educating young men and women, particularly in engineering and management, who understood that part of the world, and what the coming wave of globalization was all about. So I think we had nothing to apologize for, but we had some things to explain, and to kind of rebuild trust.

INTERVIEWER: And so, in a sense, you opened an office -- actually you literally opened an office in Washington. But I suspect you would probably not call yourself a lobbyist, per se.

VEST: No.

INTERVIEWER: No. So how did that work? I mean, suddenly, you know, here's our office in Washington; MIT's in Cambridge. Not necessarily in the political game, but there was clearly some damage control that needed to be done.

VEST: Well, we were certainly not alone among universities that had offices and staff in Washington. But I think our philosophy of operation was a little bit on the unique side at the time. Because as I began to talk to people down there -- and I just made it my business to go down once a month and talk to anybody who would listen, whether it's a Congressman or a staff member or someone in the agencies, the White House, or what have you -- I began to recognize that we in the university community were as much to blame for this, for this sort of lack of communication and trust as were the people in Washington. Because we'd all gotten into the habit of going down and pushing specific pet projects, and forgot that what's really important is the whole system.

So our message from MIT and the things that I personally delivered were that this partnership, between the government and our universities, is key to our future. That we must strengthen it and recommit ourselves to it. And that it is not just about what project goes to the University of Illinois, or what goes to Washington. It is; how does the innovation system in the nation work?

And I believe that a rising tide raises, raises all boats. So we tried with, with some success -- because I think everybody began to agree with this -- not just to do this as MIT, but we built a lot of coalitions. And sometimes several of us would go down together and so forth. Just trying to keep the message very simple: that investment in research and advanced education in the sciences and engineering had a very strong import for our national future. And that we wanted to be partners again, and, and not antagonists.

And I think we've come a long way. Believe me, it's far from perfect today. But that level of trust and understanding is quite a bit higher than it was in 1990.

INTERVIEWER: When you were just starting out and you looked around the campus of MIT, what institute, what institutions, what departments, what units on campus were doing this communication job particularly well, and which ones maybe needed some work?

VEST: I don't think it's so much a matter of what department. What really had happened, in my view, is, at that time, MIT was the most wired-in university in the country. And believe me, Paul Gray did his share of going down to, to Washington, and working. But what happened was, we were wired in the traditional sense of, our faculty leaders were very engaged with the sponsoring agencies, with the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy. And so we were always called on for our expertise and our input, and working as reviewers of big programs, and called on... that was going very well.

But what happened, and I think it was largely because of this post Cold War shift, much of the real decision making moved out of the agencies where there's expertise and understanding, kind of, into the nitty gritty of the Congressional appropriation process. And that's where we had to try to figure out how to deal with this.

So I don't think that I could tell you, this department did well, that department did, did poorly. They were all pretty well tied into the right agencies for the kind of work they did, viewed as experts. We believe very deeply in merit review around here, so we never engaged in academic pork barreling. And so we were doing just fine, and it was really the ground under us that shifted, rather than us.

INTERVIEWER: There were places here at MIT that were experimenting with different funding models and partnership arrangements to produce revenue and support, the Media Lab being one of them. How different was that model, and did it represent an alternative, or was it sort of a boutique kind of operation?

VEST: The Media Lab model was really quite radical in that, first of all, they had a philosophy in those days that they did not want to become dependent at all on federal support. They had a little bit, but just miniscule. So they wanted to serve and be funded by the private sector. They built a model of sort of a grand consortium, where a large number of companies paid relatively modest fees to be part of the Media Lab sponsoring consortium, and intellectual property was shared.

And this is a very complicated thing. Because companies believed that they were far enough out on the curve, that they were, that the Media Lab was providing them with ideas and concepts and technologies that likely were going to be commercialized, and were going to benefit somebody. But it was yeasty enough that they were willing to sort of support the whole enterprise. And any remember of the consortium had use of, of that intellectual property.

And this served the Media Lab, and therefore MIT very well for a long time. After a while, the ground rules out there began to change a little bit. And there were a lot of tensions in the Lab, because, ironically, as the entrepreneurial era really became strong, that isn't exactly consistent with this open access to intellectual property. So a lot of interesting challenges occurred there, and Media Lab went through a certain maturation process. And now it's moving today I think very well, but in a somewhat, somewhat different format.

If you set the Media Lab aside, the only other part of the Institute that comes to my mind as having a rather different model in terms of their support was the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. This for many years was our largest single laboratory, in terms of its scope and funding and so forth. It funds a lot of very basic physics research, supported by the Department of Energy. And that has been an ongoing grant for literally decades now. So the people that worked in that laboratory did not have the same normal pressures of having to write 100 proposals every year. One might think of it a bit as a sweetheart deal, but it was really recognition on the part of the government of a very long- term investment in a very high quality operation.

If you set that aside, then I think everybody else was pretty much into more or less standard government funding, with a bit of private sector entrepreneurship and industry around the edges.

INTERVIEWER: In your experience in Washington, how far did you have to step into the fray to get the things accomplished you wanted to get accomplished? Were there periods where are you actually had to go toe to toe with legislators or committee staff, or White House science advisers to make things happen? Or was it pretty much social, you know, message communication?

VEST: I always referred to it as a steady drumbeat over several years. The answer is; we did not get into any fights or arm wrestling. And the reason is that our messages are very fundamental. We were not fighting over a specific appropriation, but rather just trying to rebuild the sense of trust, of important standing for, for peer-reviewed, merit-based decision making.

So things were really at that very fundamental level. And so I can't think of a time when we were literally in a fight or a big argument. Now, not everybody always agreed with us, and certainly I had many interesting conversations with people in the Congress who actually don't buy into the whole peer-reviewed, merit-based thing. In fact, I remember visiting the then-junior senator from South Carolina for the first time. And he looked at me, and the first thing he said was, "I used to work with one of your predecessors." And I thought he was going to say Paul Gray, and it turned out he said Karl Compton. You know, this really went back decades. And then he said, "Now I'm interested in what you have to say, but I can tell you right up front there's one thing you and I are going to disagree on, and that's peer review." He says, "Let me tell you how we think about peer review in South Carolina. We think you guys in Massachusetts get all the peers, and we get all the reviews."

So you did have that kind of conversation. But it was on a friend, a very friendly basis. And indeed, he ended up being a very prominent supporter of a kind of science and engineering agenda in the country.

INTERVIEWER: There were a few high stakes issues for you: need-based grants, research grants during the Clinton administration that were either being cut, or the rules were changing on them. Can you describe specifically how you and partners with the same stakes attempted to change policy, or change legislation that was, in your view, damaging to the Institute?

VEST: Well, let me suggest two things we might discuss. The first one was actually my first foray into a big issue in Washington. The first year of the Clinton administration, which was of course very early in my presidency, we learned that the administration was putting its first budget together. So imagine they're all in their offices for the first, literally, few weeks. And they have to do the budget for the next year.

And we learned that they were planning to put a uniform indirect cost rate for all institutions, whether public, whether private, big, small, whether focused on science or not. This is a complicated issue we don't need to go into, but the point is that one size does not fit all. And that kind of a formulaic approach to indirect cost accounting would have done great damage to our private universities, especially those like MIT, who have very large portions of their budget and student population and faculty in expensive areas like science and engineering.

INTERVIEWER: Basically just, without going into detail, we're talking about overhead kinds of expenses. That's another way of looking at it.

VEST: Overhead. So we wanted to get the message across this is a bad idea. Not just a bad idea for MIT, a bad idea for the country. And I had no idea how to reach the president of the United States and actually get him to look at this. So my assistant, Laura Mersky, got on the phone. I said, "See if you can find a fax number that might get somewhere close to the president."

So she called around and she got a secretary to answer the phone in the Press Office, in George Stephanopoulis's office. And Laura said she was calling on behalf of the president of MIT, and we were wondering if they could give us a fax number, he had a letter he'd like to fax to the president. And this young woman, who I'm guessing was 18 years old and probably second day on the job, said, oh, here's the number Mr. Stephanopoulis uses to get to the president, and gave us the fax number. So this goes right to his desk.

So sure enough, we put the letter on, faxed it to that number. And a couple of weeks later, I actually got it back from the president with his marginalia scratched on it. And he said, "We've decided not to do this." Now, whether there's cause and effect there, I don't know, but I'd like to think there was. So that was, that was an easy one, and, and a very important and fun one.

The difficult one was the financial aid issue that you have referred to. MIT, for a long time, had, literally all of its modern history had been very dedicated to the fact that if students were smart enough and aggressive enough and eager enough to come to MIT and benefit from an MIT education, and MIT would benefit from their presence, we'd somehow see that we met their costs.

So the kind of vernacular for this is that we have need-blind admission, which means when we admit kids, we don't know whether they're rich, poor, or in-between. And second, that we gave our financial aid from our own resources only on the basis of family need. So if you were really smart and wealthy, you would pay the full ride. If you were really smart and came from a family of very modest means, we'd find enough financial aid to get you through. Deep in the culture of MIT.

Well, a few years before I came here, while Paul Gray was still president, the United States Justice Department began an investigation of the eight Ivies, MIT, and actually 30 or 40 other schools and colleges, initially. They wanted to know if we were doing price fixing. Were we conspiring to set tuition? And they investigated a while, they concluded no.

So then this got a little deeper. They began looking at financial aid, and realized that we had something called the Overlap Group. The Overlap Group was a group of 30 some schools that would meet once a year, about the time admissions had been done, financial aid applications were coming in. And they would get a computer printout.

And if a student was admitted, say, both to Princeton and MIT, then we would look at how we measured the family's ability to pay. How did we assess how much this family could reasonably afford to pay for a university education? And if there was a great difference between the way Princeton and MIT had evaluated this, then they'd sit down and say why. And usually they'd find, well, you didn't realize this factor. Or sometimes they would probably just compromise and come to the middle. But we would look at how we assessed a family's ability to pay. We did not agree on how much financial aid the person should get. We certainly didn't agree on what the tuition should be.

But the government, in I think a very bizarre application of thinking about the Sherman Antitrust Act, decided to come after, ultimately, the eight Ivy League schools and MIT. And put huge pressure on us to sign a consent decree. Now, a consent decree is a legal document that basically says we didn't do anything wrong, but we'll never do it again.

And somehow between the brashness of being a naive new young president who didn't know why he shouldn't do things, and the fact that I had a deep personal belief in this system, and also knew this was a very important part of MIT's culture and operation, I decided that we were going to fight this in court. And the other eight schools signed the consent decree, and we went to court.

And it was a very long and complicated thing. We had the original trial in Philadelphia in circuit court. There were three legal, basic legal points in question. And there, and at the lower court, we lost. And we actually did not think that the judge understood the rather detailed economic analyses that we had to go through to show that this really wasn't disadvantaging students in an unfair way. So we appealed.

Now, if the Justice Department was stunned when we went to court, they were really stunned when, in three hours after the judge's decision, I had a press conference and said we're going to appeal this. So now it went to the appellate court. And a couple of very interesting things happened.

To get ready for this, the young attorney, Thane Scott, who worked for Palmer and Dodge here in the city, who represented us and was going to represent us at the appellate court, decided to hold a moot court at Harvard. And one of the people that they brought in to serve as a surrogate judge in this moot court had actually been the chief judge of the panel that was going to hear this until about two months prior to this. And he became so convinced that our case was right that he asked us if he could present the amicus briefs to his former colleagues when we went to trial.

So we had a lot of very interesting things like this. But at the end of the day, there were these three key legal points, three judges. And we won everything, except one judge disagreed on one point. And this was enough to cause them to remand it back to the lower court. So for all practical purposes, we won the case.

Which was almost of historic import, because my understanding is, that it was the first time the government had ever used the anti-- used the Sherman Antitrust Law against a not-for-profit organization. So lots of people trying to make their legal careers and reputations on this. And what this then evolved into was a slight face saving agreement with the Justice Department, and then ultimately some changes in the Higher Education Authorization Act. We never really got back to, to where we were, to this sort of mechanism that really enforced among our peers staying true to the idea of need-blind admission and need-based only aid, but we got a close approximation to it.

INTERVIEWER: Did any of the other presidents of the Ivies say anything to you, when first of all you realized you were on your own on this, both in the lower court and the appeal? Did they scratch their heads and have any advice for you, or say more power to you? Any, any recollections there?

VEST: I certainly have very strong recollections. Because I actually had a couple of phone calls, in one case a conference call, with two or three of the Ivy presidents, all of whom were people I had enormous respect and admiration for. And they politely but firmly asked me not to go forward with this. That their assessment was the risk was too high.

And there was risk. And that risk was that if we had truly lost this case, then these schools, as well as ourselves, would have been open to treble damages from any student who decided to go to court and show that he or she should have had financial aid because they were so smart, and didn't get it. There was a real serious financial risk. And the question I kept asking our attorneys all the way through as we were deciding whether to fight this was, I want to fight this, because I think we're right. But I keep asking for a little assurance that I wasn't going too far in putting other institutions at risk. And I'll tell you, it was borderline.

But we stood up for principle, and we won. And I must say that none of these senior colleagues put anything that would approach being untoward pressure on me. They simply made their case, and I respectfully disagreed. And after it was over, I can assure you that all those people came by and congratulated us, and thanked us for, for standing tall. But it was a scary time.

INTERVIEWER: How is it that the one school without a law school is the one that goes it alone?

VEST: Well, I'm going to do a little one-upsmanship, because most of the other presidents were lawyers. And I actually think that that had a lot to do with the fact that they made the decision they did. I almost am certain that, had the next generation of presidents of those institutions been in place, I imagine half or maybe all of them would have been in the same place we were.

INTERVIEWER: Except, intuitively, I don't quite grasp how a mechanical engineer trusts a lawyer on an outcome that was so financially high stakes. Was that a little tough?

VEST: You mean our own attorney? Well, let me tell you about that. MIT at that point had no general counsel. Paul had believed very much in this; I agreed with the idea. Because general counsels all too often, after the office matures, tell you what to do, rather than doing what you think needs to be done.

So we always worked with a local firm, mostly Palmer and Dodge. And we were very pleased with the attorneys there. They knew us as well as a general counsel would, but it's a different kind of relationship. And the then quite young antitrust attorney I mentioned, Thane Scott, who ran our case, obviously was deeply invested in this. He believed we were right. He was passionate about it. He was very detail-oriented, and he'd obviously done a terrific job in the original case.

Well at this point, a number of our trustees began being very concerned. As they should be; that's what a trustee is supposed to do. Had some very detailed discussions with the executive committee of our Corporation. And at the end of the day, they basically said, "We're going to support you. We're not so sure, but you're our president, and we're going to support you. But you have to let us go and hire a really high profile New York or Washington attorney to run this case. This is big deal, high stakes, you need a big deal, high stakes lawyer."

And the mechanical engineer in me thought about this a while. And somehow I knew, or at least felt I knew, that if we went after a big star attorney, that this would be one of a hundred things they were doing. And they might know a whole lot and have a lot of people working for them, but it'd be one thing on their plate. And I knew that Thane, this was his career. This was his reputation, career-building case. He'd served us well, he understood us.

And so I told them no. I really want to go with Thane. And at this point, I'm sure they thought I was crazy. But at the end of the day, they went along with it. And I think Thane served us extremely well.

INTERVIEWER: So let me just get into the mind of a mechanical engineer here for a moment. The rule is, you trust the pilot who's not wearing a parachute?

VEST: I don't know that I would put it that way. But I trusted this man very deeply.

INTERVIEWER: Well, that's quite a story.

One of the other really amazing narratives of your tenure as president is the change in the student body at MIT. And to probably as significant a degree, the change in the makeup of the faculty here. First of all, what kind of a community did you find at MIT in 1990 when you arrived? And what did you set about to do to change or improve it?

VEST: Well, first of all, I discovered an amazing community. I mean, people here are really bright and driven and terrific. Somewhat ironically, it's not a place where there's a lot of cutthroat competition. People actually help each other. They want everybody to be good.

If you looked at the graduate students -- remember, I was coming now from the University of Michigan -- if you looked at the graduate students, they didn't look that much different than they did in Ann Arbor, or they would have at Berkeley or at Yale or what have you. There's sort of uniformity, a uniformly high quality. It was stronger than it was in large public institutions, but they sort of came from lots of different university backgrounds, and the feel was about the same.

The undergraduate culture, very different. And the undergraduate culture had evolved in very complicated ways that people have literally written psychological treatise, treatises about, and probably more to be written. We, you will recall, had started in Boston as an engineering and architecture school, and migrated across here, across the Charles River to Cambridge in the 1916 to '18 period. But it was a very engineering culture, filled with almost all male students, all having, through the '50s and '60s -- and I don't want to overstate this, but broadly speaking, rather similar outlooks about what was important.

They were deep technologists. They worked incredibly hard under enormous pressure. It's a tough place. We're kind of proud of that, because we think that the students gain a lot from this rather high pressure, tough, constant work, solve problems that are harder than you think you're capable of solving. It's part of what we actually give to students.

But, as the student body began to change -- and I'm going to be very quick to say that the student body changed remarkably under Paul Gray. What I did was really continue on with trends that, that started with Paul's commitment, to bringing more women here, to having a greater racial diversity, and so forth. So we began to do that. Economic backgrounds changed, racial makeup, obviously gender changed a whole lot. But the underlying culture, the fraternity system, all these things were sort of the same as it had been in a very different era.

So this set us up for some, some real tensions. And many of us -- and I think that includes the vast majority of the faculty; not all of it, but the vast majority -- felt that we were not kind of engaging the students in a broader academic community as undergraduates. That their loyalty was to small housing groups -- that might be an independent living group, it might be a floor in the dormitory, literally, it might be a fraternity or a sorority. But because of the pressure, they sought out these small groups. And historically, they had gotten very great support out of that. It had, and still has to this day, some sort of positive value.

But still there was just some underlying things, and some sort of social trends that had started back in the '70s and had never quite been given up, that just really didn't fit the nature of the people coming in. So there were a lot of pressures there. And it takes a while for culture to change. And that was an area where we had to do some things, sort of from on high, if you will. In particular the decision that all freshman, all first-year students, would spend their first year living together on campus, and after that could join an independent living group or a sorority or fraternity.

So there was a lot of that that had to be done. And a bit of what I just called sanding down around the edges. You know, you want this to be an intense, rigorous education. That's what we do at MIT. But you don't want it to become a parody of itself. So we did feel that we had to do some things to kind of brighten, lighten up the environment a little bit, in recognition of the new kind of students we had.

And that ran through things like the housing system. It ran through being more deeply dedicated, perhaps, than we had been before to the arts and the humanities. It ultimately, at least in my view, was a driver of some of the changes we made architecturally. It's a long shift, but it's a response to the changing nature of the students, as much as it is trying to impose change. It's trying to bring these things together and have a little bit more congruence to them. And I think we made some progress.

INTERVIEWER: So it's fair to say that the undergraduates following these changes were maybe having a little more fun, along the lines of what you saw at the University of Michigan, but it fell short of, maybe, the all-nighters at Flood's that you'd find at Ann Arbor?

VEST: Yes. I mean, kids are proud of how hard they work here. And the way I always learned about these things -- well, two or three things my wife Becky and I did for most of my presidency. We would spend several nights a month just going to a dorm, or going to a fraternity and just eating. And I really preferred that to meeting with sort of formal, organized student government. Just get out, eat, talk. So I kind of learned these cultures, learned to know the, the kids.

But then the second thing is that we continued a tradition that Paul and Priscilla Gray, I believe, had started, of inviting all the graduating seniors to the president's house for dinner. And they would come. Sometimes we had as many as 14 straight nights with about 80 students, get a fair percentage. And we'd just go around and ask everybody to stand up and say just one or two sentences, what they valued about MIT, or what they were going to remember, what they disliked. You learn a lot by, by doing that.

And that -- you know, they always talked about their all-nighters. They were, they were proud of that. But they also talked about community service, and helping in the Cambridge schools, and it was some of these things around the edges that were very, very meaningful to them. And so I think we were just kind of helping that to, to move forward a little bit, as we shifted from an all-male, virtually all-male, largely, almost exclusively engineering culture to something considerably broader.

And the art form in all of this was that we don't want to be a.. we don't want to be a substitute for Harvard, or be a second or third class Harvard or Princeton or Yale. We want to be the best MIT in the world. So it was, you don't want to go all the way this way, but you want to go a little bit.

And ironically, during this same period, let's talk about Harvard in particular, our next door neighbor here. They were actually coming a little bit closer us. Because they were beginning to understand that the kind of interdisciplinary work we do here so well, a little more emphasis on science and technology because of the way the modern world is working, was very important. So we're kind of coming a little bit toward each other this way. But you never want to go too far.

INTERVIEWER: One of your legacies, certainly, is how you saw the architecture piece as part of MIT's sort of core values, core identity. How did you come to add to that legacy, and what did you think was either -- needed to be built, built on, was lacking? Or what, what was the opportunity to explore the architectural identity of MIT when you came?

VEST: Well, when I first literally was interviewed, a little bit to my astonishment, as a possible candidate for the presidency here, I stayed in the Marriott Hotel here, just off campus, up on the top floor. And kind of look down and see campus. And for some reason, it always made me think of a Navy base. Well, you'd think a mechanical engineer would like all this symmetry, which in fact I do. But you sort of had this gray, massive set of buildings, very rectilinear, the flag flying in front of it, and so forth. Somehow, this was an image in my mind.

The second thing is, and because it's all changed now I can get by with saying it, but the first time I visited here and drove down Vassar Street, the backside of the campus, I was actually appalled. I could not believe it. This was the famous MIT. We had, still, buildings that had been built during World War II that were made out of asbestos shingles, and chain link fences, and it just looked miserable. The front door of the campus is, of course, the wonderful iconic view of Killian Court and the great dome, and the columns and so forth. Absolutely beautiful. And I could never, sort of, in my own mind, understand how these could both be part of the same great, great institution.

So there was a little something in me that said, you know, wouldn't it be nice to change this a little bit. And that began to be build upon by the things that needed to change a bit in the student and community culture. But in the early '90s, I was convinced -- in fact, I said publicly several times -- I'd probably never see a building built on the campus while I was president. Because the financial situation just was such, I didn't think it would happen.

But as time went on, and we had the desire to make some of these changes, we had the very important report issued by a task force on student life and learning that talked about the importance of building a better sense of community. We had almost no communal spaces. And so all these things were, were churning in my mind when the day arrived when the stars began to align, and the economy strengthened. And our, a lot of hard work on the part of a lot of people to begin building the private funding base for MIT. Because we couldn't expect the federal government to continue to be 80 percent of our income forever. All these things began to come together.

And at that time, we had Bill Mitchell as the dean of the architecture school. And I involved Bill a lot in these discussions, and I learned a lot from Bill and from his colleagues. He began to educate me a little bit, and I began to get a little more adventurous in my architectural tastes. And finally concluded, in my own heart and mind, that at the beginning of the last century, the original complex was built over here on the Charles River, designed by William Welles Bosworth. This was an amazing, heroic architectural accomplishment in 1916. There was no university built on this scale, with this grandeur and this much forethought, and imagery about the new age of industry and so forth. And while I wasn't sure we could match that, I thought, Look; it's the turn of a new century. It's a century in which technology and the kinds of things we do here are going to be absolutely central. We should represent that somehow.

And it was in this sense that, working with Bill and others, I began to understand that there was a need for some brightness, some adventure. That we needed a few buildings, not all of them, that were as exciting on the outside as what was going on on the inside, and maybe signaled a little bit of the creativity. And in fact, some of the disparity that you mentioned earlier about rule -- those who follow the rules and those who break them. I wanted to sort of represent that, lighten, brighten a little bit, and make buildings that make people think a little bit.

And that's what we did. And it certainly wasn't a one-man show. We worked with a lot of people. All these things were designed with good client committees from the community and so forth. But I think they've made a huge difference. And it's not that you want every building on a campus to be a Frank Gehry, star architect kind of unusual building. But you need some.

And I think it really has changed the image and the feel of the campus. And I get comments all the time from people who will come up and say, "Gee, I hadn't been back for 20 years to MIT. What a different place! Wish it had been like this when I was there."

So it was a tough investment. And as we were completing the part of the construction that was done on my watch, the economy turned back down, and there was, of course, a lot of tension with the trustees about spending levels and so forth. But I think everybody hopefully will learn that these were wise investments, and that, you know, excellence begets excellence. And it's made a very positive change.

INTERVIEWER: What first told you that the Stata Center was going to be a success as a communal space for this MIT student body? What did you see happening there?

VEST: Well, first of all, let me say a little bit about the design of the, the Stata Center. We got Frank Gehry at just the right time. Yes, he had become famous, primarily because of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. But he had also done enough buildings that he and Jim Glymph and others in his office knew how to construct them. And you know, some of his early buildings were pretty tough to construct, and huge cost overruns and so forth.

Frank wanted to build a building on the MIT campus. Enormous respect for MIT. And when we were examining several different candidates to, to design the building, we sent teams of our faculty out. And they all came back saying, man, you know, you, you go into Frank's studios and talk to these guys and gals that work for him, and it's just like being here in the lab for computer science. There was a real simpatico at the kind of working level.

And Frank wanted to try some new materials. He was enthralled over the idea of building in Boston. You know, this building's largely brick, and that's his homage to the traditional Boston architecture. So he was quite invested in this building. Spent a lot of time understanding how the students and the faculty live and work, and what we'd need. He conceived this "student street" idea that would, would bring people together.

But what the world was seeing in the early days was the sort of helicopter view, of photographs of models and things. Believe me, a lot of people didn't like what they saw. And I'll never forget that one of the people who didn't like what he saw was, was Alex Dreyfoos, who was one of the primary donors to the building. And he called me up one day and said, "Chuck, listen." He said, "We, you know, we get along really well, and so forth. And I really want to support this building." But he said, "I don't like what I see." And he said, "I think you need to maybe think about restarting."

So I said, "Alex do me one favor. If I buy you a ticket, will you fly out to the West Coast, go to Santa Monica, go to Frank Gehry's actual studio and look at the models?" Because I knew that the experience of seeing these models, you know, that fill half a room, that look like the real building, is totally different than seeing these pictures we were all seeing.

Well, Alex went out. He's a great technologist. He built the business that processes color photography for Kodak. So he went out with a camera, and on the camera he put a little fiberoptic and a lens. And he ran the lens around through the building and all that stuff. So he could produce pictures that looked like it would really look at human scale. And he came back 100 percent total convert. He had religion. He said, "Boy, was I wrong. This is going to be the best building in the world." So I knew when that happened, that the experience of the building was going to be very different than people were, were concerned about.