Charles Stewart III

INTERVIEWER: Today is June 29, 2010. I'm Karen Arenson. We are talking with Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin distinguished professor of political science at MIT, who is just finishing a five year term as head of the Department of Political Science. His focus is on American politics, political institutions, and elections. He was a member of the Caltech- MIT Voting Technology Project that was put together following this furor over the 2000 presidential election results in Florida.

He founded the MIT Washington Summer Internship Program in 1994 and has been its Faculty director ever since. He is noted for his teaching. He was elected a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 1993 and received the Baker Award for Undergraduate Teaching and an award for innovation in education. Since 1992 he has also been housemaster at McCormick Hall, the only all women's dormitory at MIT, along with his wife Kathryn Hess, an environmental scientist. He has also served as associate dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and has participated in or lead several initiatives on the MIT curriculum. Charles, thank you for talking with us today.

You almost became a Methodist minister and spent a year at the Yale Divinity School. What drew you to that? Why did you ultimately choose to enter academe instead and focus on political science?

STEWART: Well, the interest in being a minister just came from my growing up in Orlando, Florida So we moved to Orlando in 1960, and not a whole lot going on in Orlando, especially in the 1960s. The churches are a really important part of my life, and the Methodist church in downtown Orlando was, at the time, the largest Methodist church east of the Mississippi. So although the place, overall, was very conservative, the church itself had a number of really interesting characters and a lot of really interesting ministers. I decided at a young age that I thought it would be kind of cool to run an operation like that, and to be among people like that.

So I went through my high school years thinking I would be a Methodist minister all along. I got interested in politics as the early as 1970s, and I discovered it was the perfect time in Liberal Protestantism to be interested in religion and politics. So these two things just sort of went along together.

In addition to being really active in the Methodist Church I was the president of the High School Young Democrats in Orange County and things like that, hated Richard Nixon with a passion, watched the Watergate Hearings, you know, soup to nuts, all those sorts of things. When I went to college, trying to get as far from Orlando as my parents would let me go, I went to Emory University-- which is a Methodist university, and I may be the only person that year who went there because it was a Methodist university --thinking that I would be a Methodist minister. They gave me a scholarship for pre-ministerial students to go there. So I went there and fell in love with political science, and continued some of the Methodist things and I was very active in the hierarchy and governance structure of the Methodist Church all throughout college. I remember waking up-- I had been already admitted into Yale and Harvard Divinity Schools, trying to figure out where to go --and I remember waking up on the February of my senior year thinking, oh my goodness, I don't want to do that. I want to be a political scientist.

It was too late to apply to grad school, and I thought, well, the Methodists have given me this money to go to school, something I've wanted to do for a long time. Let me go to seminary and spend a year at least to figure out whether this is really the thing I want to do or not.

So I ended up going to Yale, and on the one hand fell in love with the Yale Divinity School. I met a lot of friends that I've kept over the years. The best man in my wedding I met there. But I also was able to take classes in the political science department there at Yale. So on the one hand I loved Methodism, but then I realized the reason I loved the church was actually I liked the politics of it. I thought I was being strategic. I realized that that was the wrong reason for doing this, and other little things about myself like, I'm terrible about learning names, which I learned was because I'm not interested in people. I don't care what their names are. That's something I've worked with overtime, but little things like that made me realize that was not quite the path. The political science classes I was taking; I cared about that.

So after a year, it was difficult but I applied to some graduate schools and decided that this wasn't quite the way I wanted to go, the Methodist part. But the academic part was the thing. The academic part was for entirely the wrong reasons, which is to say that I thought it would be a cool, low-pressure lifestyle. I get to sit around reading books drinking coffee and writing things, which turned out to be entirely delusional thinking on my part.

So my first path was based on delusional thinking. That is, through thinking that being a Methodist minister was basically being a politician. Then going into academics thinking that it was a life of leisure and reading and not a whole lot of stress.

INTERVIEWER: But you didn't end up writing about or focusing on the politics of the church?

STEWART: No I didn't, although I thought about doing that. Methodism is actually interesting because it's a distinctly American denomination. Actually its structure is very American. Its federal in structure. It has a supreme court, it has legislatures at various levels, and I was elected to a couple of those over time. At the end of the day it's highly political in kind of the popular sense, but it's also political in the political sense. People have ideologies, they have interests, they're strategic in certain circumstances, they make appeals to wider audiences. So it could be done.

INTERVIEWER: Have political scientists done it?

STEWART: A litte bit. Every now and then, about every four or five years, I think there's some arbitrage to be done here.

INTERVIEWER: There's still time

STEWART: There's still time. No, I'm not dead, yet. I'm actually kind of easing back into that. So this is one of my phases where I'm thinking, well maybe I'll go do that. When I end up getting into it, I've ended up being drawn back to studying Congress and elections. Because it's my experience that people who study religion and politics are often times more interested in the religion part than in the politics part, which is the thing I end up being more interested in.

INTERVIEWER: You talked about in high school being part of the organization and being political. When you moved into political science it sounds like you moved into the sidelines. In other words, some people use that as a springboard into politics and running for office, but you didn't do that.

STEWART: I didn't do that. Sometimes I actually regret, for instance, I'm even registered as a Democrat, although that's where my sympathies lie. In part because I quickly learned that the comparative advantage of academics, especially of political scientists, is not our political beliefs or values. It's the understanding of the political process. Most people interested in politics just get in it and aren't very reflective. So there are millions of people doing that. What's one more person being unreflective and being emotional, and basically trying to pretend like their private values are somehow transcendent? That strikes me as not a good use of my time as a political scientist. There's only a few thousand of us as political scientists. There's only a few hundred of us in top research universities, and the amount of straight analysis, and I would even say facts about politics, is pretty rare-- and that's the rare commodity --and that's the part where I think I'm better than most. I'm happy to be on the sidelines. Because I think, you know, with millions of people doing the other stuff and they don't need another one.

INTERVIEWER: One other theme that it seems to come up in your writings and thinking and values is community.

STEWART: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Why is that important to you? What about it?

STEWART: Yeah, a couple things. You could psychologize about it, maybe. I'm a Southerner and I keep trying to run away from being a Southerner, but I keep realizing that one of the things about the South, for all of its warts and all, is people care about who your daddy is. Just care about where you're from and who your people are, and just about you as a person. So that's part of it. But I think really, to me, when I went to Yale one of the things I discovered was what it's like if you're in a community of scholars or people who care about a single purpose, care about learning, care about each other, and learned how the two can really reinforce each other. So I'd have to say that my biggest learning from going to Yale, actually, was what it's like when you're living with people that you're also studying with and what happens to your life. So one of the reasons why I have this reputation for setting a record for the number of Faculty and another committees I've been on at MIT is that it just strikes me that the community aspect of education is of high value. It's actually of even higher value now that we have so many things pulling us away from each other, especially Internet sorts of things. So to have people come together seems to be an even more critical thing.

The final thing is I'm basically a shy person, and so I've also discovered that if I'm not led to community, that is if I'm not induced to go and sit at dinner with people or to just chat people up, I'm not going to do it. So the Yale situation taught me the value of setting up circumstances where you can't avoid it. So the Divinity School was basically away from the Yale campus, about a mile up Prospect Street up on the top the hill, and at dinner there was nowhere else to go. If you were hungry you had to go into the refectory and that was the only thing to do for two hours. So you might as well sit at a table and talk to folks.

So that's what I want to see more of at MIT. Because I think MIT is full of people like me. Basically shy people who want to get to work done, and if they aren't led to circumstances of being together to talk about things, well, maybe talk about work. That leads to other things. If you aren't led to those sorts of things you won't do it naturally. So I would say that if I had a mission at MIT, it's to try to encourage the things that bring people together so that they can have more serendipitous interactions with each other.

INTERVIEWER: Are there particular ones that you have found to be successful in that respect?

STEWART: Well, I think the dormitory. So being a housemaster. I remember the thing that drew me to be a housemaster- and again, I'm glad to do things for delusional reasons. I remember driving along Memorial Drive sometime in the late 80's and it was a Sunday morning. I looked to the right-- we were going by Baker House --and there was a lone person in there, I guess they had breakfast at the time, sitting at the table reading the newspaper. I thought, you know, what a great thing to be able to, in a college environment, to be able to do something like that.

Now it turns out MIT is not the sort of place that people sit around reading newspapers quietly on a Sunday morning. But it kind of planted the seed in my mind that MIT had these resources where people could get together. I've discovered by being a housemaster that the dormitories are enormously valuable for this sort of thing. In fairness I would imagine, as well, the independent living groups, sororities fraternities, which I have a number of students who are in. I don't have direct experience of that, but it strikes me overall that the fact that students basically live with each other for four years forges really deep friendships, a deep support network. All sorts of value that comes out of the education that wouldn't be there if most people weren't living on campus, or if we were moving around people all the time. Doing a number of other things that happen at other universities.

So that's the big one. There are other things. I mean, I think it's great that we have the Z Center. People just kind of get sweaty around each other, that's a good thing. I'm hoping that we're going to be, we are in fact going to be reopening the dining halls in the dormitories, at least once they have them, for full service in the next couple of years. Again, that's another thing where I think MIT has the resources, we have the physical layout. Why don't we bring people together?

Then finally, my activity on the Task Force on Student Life and Learning in the 1990s. That was committee work done at a time when universities were thinking that they would be virtual entities within 20 years. That work opened my eyes to the importance of getting people together. I would say that from that point on I've been looking for ways to make sure that MIT doesn't just try to put everything online.

So, you know, keep the libraries open. Avoid doing things that encourage distance learning, and avoid things that discourage students from going into the classrooms. Encourage things, whether they be really great lectures or great hands-on experiences or great dining experiences to get people together, either students alone or students and faculty together.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any sense of whether the community or the togetherness at McCormick Hall is similar to or different from other dorms? Do women gather differently? Or is there something about McCormick?

STEWART: I think they do and they don't. You know I went into McCormick expecting to hear like spontaneous choruses of I am woman, hear me roar type of things. Again, I was deluded, that didn't happen. So I've learned a lot about late adolescent women. It does strike me that the mode of living is more low key, more on the one hand, kind of even keel. So people getting to know each other. Not a lot of highs, not a lot of lows. Not always terrific organizers of large events, but great organizers of smaller events. So going out to a movie or going out shopping or just having a study break or people around just talking.

When I see what other dormitories are doing, which often times involve large parties and large organizational things-- I don't want to essentialize anybody, but it strikes me that there's probably something about women or women at MIT or women in society that make it more likely that the community building is kind of more face- to- face and more experiential.

INTERVIEWER: Who chooses to live in and all-girls dormitory in this day and age? Is it their choice or their parents?

STEWART: It really varies. You can kind of break it down and there are some who choose it only because it's close and it's clean. So it's sort of a second order affect that in 40 years of having women live in this place, you know, not too many holes have been punched in the walls. You know, all sorts of nice stuff about the building.

INTERVIEWER: Do they still call it McCormick Hilton? That's what they called it originally.

STEWART: I believe that.

INTERVIEWER: People on campus, not MIT.

STEWART: But freshmen still come in and I have to disabuse many of them the first time we meet with them because there's this rumor that McCormick used to be a hotel, that's why it's so nice. No. Haven't been to too many hotels lately, have you?

So there is that sense of just, the facilities are great. Some people just want this great facility close to the main campus, regardless of, and they've kind of put up with it maybe, with it being single- sex. So there's that.

There are undoubtedly some parents who push their daughters to live there. There are some young women who've read the research on women in science, and how it looks like women learning science among other women do better. So either they or their parents read this research and some want to live among women scientists. So there's that.

Increasingly I'm discovering that there are women either from South Asia or the Middle East, or whose parents were from there, who are choosing McCormick. So I would say-- I don't have an exact count --but nowadays, about 2/3 of our students are either from South Asia or ethnically South Asian or from the Middle East.

INTERVIEWER: Which is much higher than the general population.

STEWART: Much higher than the general population, and it's certainly much higher than 18 years ago when I became housemaster, where there was a little bit of that. In fact the first woman I ever encountered who was fully-scarved and-- was actually Aafia Siddiqui who is this terrorist now who was a McCormick resident, --I mean, I just encountered her. But even at the time there were a few very conservative South Asian women. But mostly I would say conservative kind of Midwestern women, the kind of trucking stereotypes, who chose McCormick at the time. So one consequence of this, you see, is-- I don't know how was it in your time, but --the big controversy at the beginning of every year is the vote on whether to make the bathrooms coed or single- sex. There's a black-balling vote, basically. One vote keeps it single- sex. When we started in 1992 I think we had one single- sex bathroom in this whole building. I don't think there any single- sex bathrooms anymore. Maybe one. So the expectations of the women, for whatever reason, has really changed in more conservative direction socially. I wouldn't say in terms of ambitions or excitement or any of the other things. So socially it's a little more conservative these days, just for a lot of reasons. But it still makes it a really interesting place. I wouldn't discount the place because of that.

INTERVIEWER: In the first six or seven years in McCormick's history women couldn't live anywhere else. There where very few of them and making bathrooms coed was the last question. I mean the boys were barely allowed upstairs. After dorms were made coed and MIT became much more open and boys were allowed upstairs many more hours, it became more of an issue.

STEWART: But one of the things that is going on in MIT that I don't think is quite reflected in the thinking of folks in student life, or even the Institute more broadly, is that it's my sense that there's an under supply of these sorts of living facilities at MIT. So now, as you suggest, women can choose wherever they want to live in any of the dormitories. Many of them don't want a full coed environment, but they still want a coed environment close to men. I think there's one or two floors or entries that are kind of single- sex floors or entries, but by and large, if you don't get into McCormick and you want that experience, you're out of luck. It's my observation that there's more women who want that experience now. Just kind of tired of putting up with guys, for whatever reason, and want to get on with their lives. I don't think MIT has quite come to grips with that.

Sometimes I say that women, by and large still at MIT, seem to be living here under the sufferance of men. In the other dormitories men like women living next to them. So there's a resistance in the coed dorms to carve out single- sex areas, although my guess is more women would want single- sex areas in those dormitories.

INTERVIEWER: What does the housemaster do and has it changed during your tenure? Are you typical in any way?

STEWART: Well, housemaster. What does a housemaster do? I sometimes flippantly refer to it as the morale officer of a ship. We're kind of just responsible for making-- we have formal responsibilities, and we can check off the list of formal responsibilities --but I think our big responsibility is to make sure that the undergraduates, in our case, are getting from MIT what they came here to get. That's in part to be rested and ready to go to class, and to have the other experiences that you associate with college. So whatever it is that needs to be done to make that happen, we help to do.

Practically speaking, what this means is we work a lot with the house government. In our view, if other people are doing their jobs, that's good. So we don't intervene a whole lot directly. So we meet a lot with the house government, give them advice, help to problem solve. Sometimes we'll take the heat. It's very hard for 18- to 20- year- olds to stand up to each other. So sometimes we'll just take the heat if it has to happen. So work with the house government. We work with the graduate tutors who live every other floor in McCormick They really know the residents better than we ever could. So we meet with them regularly.

INTERVIEWER: Do they report to you or to the dean's office?

STEWART: Yeah, they formally report to us and we make sure that they do. Because we want to make sure that there's nothing between us and students. There have been times, happily not recently, but really in our time as housemasters where there were attempts by the dean's office, at the time, to basically have the tutors report to them. We resisted that. I would resist it again. But they report to us. So we help to choose them and we meet with them very regularly. We take care of them. You know, we give them some money so they can do things on the floors.

So in our view if the house government is doing their thing, and if the tutors are getting to know their students and catching a lot of the normal stuff happens, then we can be there to intervene if there's really serious problems. Every year there's one or two students who have really serious problems that we have to get involved in. We can also do fun things, like have big pizza dinners and barbecues and things where we just get to know students. So another goal in this program is for students to get to know a faculty member well. In part, well. Paying couple hundred thousand dollars, you should just get to know one well.

But sometimes there's an advantage to knowing a tenured faculty, who can't be fired. So sometimes students will off knock on my door, knock on our door, and say I'm having this problem with my department or with the TA. What can I do? Can you call? Can you help out? So there's a bit of that.

INTERVIEWER: So you don't say, why don't you go see a counselor in the dean's office?

STEWART: Sometimes we'll do that. Sometimes we'll do that. It sort of depends on what the thing is. But I remember this last year, where there was a student who felt like that she wasn't being treated fairly by a tutor or TA who thought that she was plagiarizing, or not quite plagiarizing but not quite doing her work on her own. So I gave her some advice about, this is what I would do. This is the perspective of the TA and the teacher. This is what you need to think about. Which are things where-- I mean, we do have very good counseling deans --but I think sometimes you need the perspective of the faculty member who can think like a faculty member.

INTERVIEWER: How paternalistic is the university and it has that shifted in the 18 years you've been housemaster? To what extent, if any, do the housemasters help think about issues like that and where MIT ought to be.

STEWART: Yeah, we are pretty paternalistic and I do think the housemasters have a pretty good role in helping MIT think it through. I think it's a difficult issue for the Institute because there's no way of thinking about universities in general, which is the in loco parentis.

Even after in loco parentis went away, there's still the sense that we're like the old medieval fortresses or the old monasteries where what happens at MIT stays at MIT, and it's kind of a cozy place. There's kind of a deal between us and society: you take care of your business and we won't bother you. That understanding is breaking down. So on the one hand MIT wants to be very paternalistic, you know save students against their own worst impulses. On the other hand nowadays in society if you show up-- I don't know, pick a random example --at an airport with a circuit board on your shirt of a wire sticking out, you can't do that. So what does MIT do then, in that circumstance. Do we help sanction the students? Do we protect the students? What do we do?

Those are issues on the boundaries. Actually, way beyond the boundaries, in my view. But within MIT one of the things sometimes we say is, we'll let students skin their knees but we won't let them break their arms. So to that degree we're being paternalistic. So we understand people are on roofs. We understand people, maybe, are kind of pilfering things from labs to build cool things. Okay, there's a little bit that goes on, we understand that. But we do also have to watch out to make sure that students don't get close to those boundaries. Those boundaries are coming in nowadays even more so.

I have to say, happily, that at McCormick that's not an issue that comes up so much, quite frankly. I know that my colleagues in other dormitories have to worry about it a lot. Whether it be behavior in the university or whether it be the drinking or showing up at Logan Airport with circuit boards on their chests and stuff like that.

INTERVIEWER: Have the McCormick students changed much in your 18 years living there? You were talking a little.

STEWART: I mean ethnically they have and socially they have a bit. On the other hand they're still MIT students. The demographic of MIT students is changing. Students in general are changing nationwide. They're becoming, I think, more social. More communally oriented, more public service oriented, those sorts of things. You see that at MIT. INTERVIEWER: MIT is choosing differently to some extent?

STEWART: The world is changing. High school education, secondary education is changing. Everyone has to do community service projects now. Read the New York Times: there's always kind of, you know, what's the latest social trends? You know, people aren't dating so much anymore, they're going out in groups. Just kind of all these things. They show up at MIT. So to some degree MIT might be choosing differently, but my understanding of the best evidence is that the best minds in science and engineering are social, are literate, are articulate are those sorts of things, too. MIT, by choosing the best scientists and engineers, are getting a different type of type of student. That grates on some people, as you can imagine. It's not the old MIT. It's not kind of nerdy, pocket protector MIT. But that is changing, and so that's reflected in McCormick. Otherwise I think you know, college kids are pretty much college kids.

INTERVIEWER: What do you see in the way of McCormick, the women thinking about careers versus family? Is that something you and your wife get called on to discuss with them?

STEWART: A little bit. I think my wife more than me. In fact I know a one instance where she's actually gotten calls after someone's graduated. This is it's what's going on my life, what do you think? So we get a little bit of that. I would like to think that we're role models for the students. So a couple trying to work it out. She's an environmental scientist, and here's someone who can do it and that she's actually personally helped people on the career path, as well in her own area. We do try to encourage alumni to come and have dinner and to talk to students just about life in general. In fact, about Ten years ago we encouraged the house government to create position called the alumni chair, which we need to energize a little more right now, but the idea there is a few times every year to invite alums back. To sit around an informal dinner and just talk about how they navigated through MIT and then their careers.

There are also a lot of other opportunities I see going on. So SWE, for instance, Society of Women Engineers. There's a lot of McCormick residents who are active in those things as well. So I know career and family or issues, they probably are not heightened as much as they were maybe 20 years ago, for whatever reason.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any data or a sense of whether the women are as focused on, say, engineering as the men? Or on engineering and science as the men or whether they tend to major in different things?

STEWART: Well they do tend to major in different things and it is reflected in McCormick as well. A little less on the engineering side. A little more in biology and life sciences. A little more on management, as that's become more prominent at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: How about students in your political science department? What kind of trends have you seen there?

STEWART: Well, you know, I wouldn't say trends. So I came here in '85 and I think by then student activism had kind of run its course. So from there and to the present the students coming through political science have been more or less interested in whatever that four-year chunk of students is interested in. So for instance, right after 9-11 we got this big surge of majors who were interested in terrorism and international things. That kind of subsided a bit. I know we've gotten, the last few years, students really energized around Obama, and I don't know if that's going to continue or for how long. So I would say no trend. Just it's very episodic, it's very episodic. Usually the students we get, as well, are not always academically focused on political science. So they come into political science second, often times. So either as a second major, or double majoring, and that's just gotten easier. Or because, well you know, they discovered that well, maybe physics didn't work out. Then maybe math didn't work out and maybe economics didn't work out. Maybe political science will work out. So there's always a little bit of that. But that's been pretty constant, too, across time.

INTERVIEWER: Let's go back to the path that brought you to MIT and your growing up. Were your parents involved in either the religious aspects of your interest or in the political aspects?

STEWART: They really weren't interested in politics at all. I mean they read newspapers and would talk about things. They were pretty conservative and I ended up not being conservative. But they were very aware of the world. My grandparents, especially my mom's parents, who were from south Georgia and not particularly well educated-- but they read the newspaper everyday and they watched the news --and they were the ones who I stayed many summers with them. I remember my grandmother sitting me down in front of the TV at the summit that was held in New Jersey-- what was the university? I'm blanking on it now --when Khrushchev came and had a summit with Lyndon Johnson. There were TV reporters there following the limousine. My grandmother just plunked me down and said, you're watching history. So she did that and there were the little influences like that they got me at least aware of the larger world, and I think that was the important thing.

They were all church-going Methodists or Baptists, and so certainly the religious aspect of things was encouraged by them. But I think the politics side was more influenced because they read newspapers and wanted me to pay attention to the history as it was marching in front of me.

INTERVIEWER: What did your parents do?

STEWART: My father was an accountant. Did international accounting for Tupperware, which is in Orlando. My mom stayed at home while we were very young, and then she was a school teacher after that. So it was a very standard suburban upbringing.

INTERVIEWER: What did she teach?

STEWART: She taught elementary, lower elementary. So second to fourth grade. In fact I was once assigned-- she actually taught in the elementary school when I was in it --and I was very momentarily assigned to her class and then she got me out of there.

INTERVIEWER: You had siblings?

STEWART: Yeah I have a sister whose name is Joni, who is three years younger than I am. She went a very different path. I mean she wasn't so interested in academics and things. But she owns a tanning studio in Orlando. I never thought in Orlando there would be things like tanning studios, but there she is. A very different thing.

INTERVIEWER: Did you love school?

STEWART: I loved school. I totally loved school. I wasn't always top student, but I loved my teachers, I loved my friends. I would hang out with teachers after class. All the way up. School was just one of the best places to be.

INTERVIEWER: How did you choose where to go to college?

STEWART: Part of that was I was particularly aware of the United Methodist Colleges, of which there are 12 universities. I ended up applying to Duke and Emory, kind of the two Southern ones that-- yes, Duke is a Methodist school, too --kind of fell in love with Emory after a visit. Two other things. One is I did want to get as far away from Orlando as possible. My family was quite resistance to the idea that I would leave the South, so Emory was about as far as I could go. But there's also the case then if you're from Georgia, where all my family's from, every doctor in this little south Georgia town went to Emory to medical school. So the idea is that if you're really smart and you eat all your vegetables, you, too, will be allowed to go to Emory one day. So it was like, the place to go.

INTERVIEWER: But it sounds like you had a very transformative experience at Emory and it came out of your class work and professors? Or out of student friends? Or just welled-up?

STEWART: All of it. It was all of it. I took a political science class my very first quarter there, and I learned not only that I liked politics, I was good at it. So I just began to take a lot of political science classes. My friends were in political science, and hung out there with the professors and, you know, they recognized me as someone interested in political science rather than law. Most of the majors in political science go to law school. I was interested in the political science side. So they probably paid more attention to me for those reasons.

But then I also got involved in student government. So I was for two years the vice president of the Student Government Association and chaired the Student Legislature. So that got me running legislature and worrying about how that works. That got me interested in studying legislatures. It allowed me to observe how universities work a little bit. It got me in close proximity with the president and some other people.

Yeah it was transformative. You can sort of see the building blocks of the academic interest in political science, the interest in legislatures, and interest in figuring out how universities work were all there at Emory. Then you know, of course, then friendships kind of make it all happen.

INTERVIEWER: How similar is Emory to MIT? What are the biggest differences?

STEWART: Well I would say there's almost-- I can't quite say there's no similarities--

INTERVIEWER: They're both research universities.

STEWART: They're both research universities. But it is interesting that the Emory faculty in the early part of the 20th century were the faculty who took the lead in founding Georgia Tech. The history of higher education in America is such that in the early years respectable universities didn't have science and engineering. So Yale had the Sheffield School that it eventually incorporated and stuff like that. With Emory, the choice was well, let's help the state of Georgia do this because we don't want to dirty our hands in science and engineering. So in that sense it allowed itself to remain a liberal arts place, although it has very good science. Especially science related to medical school types of things, very good chemistry, very good biology. But then its real strength, I would say, was in the traditional liberal arts. So in that sense it's very different from MIT.

Roz Williams. I'm forgetting which relative it was. It was a relative who, I believe, the music library is named after, has a degree from MIT and Emory. Roz says something like hearing him say something to the effect of, well, I got trained at MIT, but I got educated at Emory. You know, I can see that a bit.

Most liberal arts colleges or universities, even research universities, they are dedicated to educating the whole person. They're dedicated to educating people who are unlikely to pursue their major in their later life. They're seeing the major really as a stepping stone to doing the next thing. So there's no worry about making sure you get all the English you need. Or all the political science you need. Because there's just an assumption that, we'll teach how to read, we'll teach you how to use the library, we'll teach you how to think and write and mix it up with people, and then you're on your own.

At MIT we try to do a lot of that. There's a lot of rhetoric, but sometimes there great anxieties among the faculty and students that you only get the four years at MIT. After that it's all down hill and you'll never learn a thing again. So we have to cram as much as we can before we let them out.

INTERVIEWER: But I wonder if both of them have moved toward each other. That MIT is more about educating the whole person now, and that Emory is maybe more about giving them some tools now than it used to be. Without knowing specifically.

STEWART: I think that Emory is, to the degree that I follow them, and I think that--

INTERVIEWER: That many universities.

STEWART: Many universities are, especially the ones that you know, trying to survive in the modern world where liberal arts education is being called into question. Absolutely. In fact, their curriculum is actually a much better curriculum. When I was there, all you had to do was take three social science, three humanities, three sciences. That was it in terms of requirements. Now their requirements are much more, not quite like MITs, but they are much more structured to make sure that you have a set of tools. You can't get out here without the set of tools.

So MIT, that's what we've started. You can't get out here without this set of tools. At least the rhetoric, and in many times the action, is around just making sure you're ready for the next thing. But I think the debate around the last round of curriculum reforms still showed that MIT, at the grassroots level, isn't always clear where it wants to lie down. Is MIT the last place where we really can give it to you all before you leave? Or do we have less of a heavy hand on what you do later in life? So I don't think MIT is quite comfortable, although we have gravitated more towards where liberal arts colleges are.

INTERVIEWER: When you talk about MIT it's a collection of the faculty who are making that decision and maybe the administration plays some role, but that you have some shift in faculty and divisions within it?

STEWART: Yeah. So observations. So the political scientists standing on the edge and looking in. There's clearly interests and there's clearly attitudes that show up in thinking about the curriculum. The interests are oftentimes fairly transparent. In fact in many ways not really even interesting. We want people taking our classes, we don't want to lose enrollment, those sorts of things.

Attitudes are really I think more interesting. I think at MIT there is a generational shift. There's always a generational shift, but I think it's particularly pointed now for two reasons. One is, it strikes me that there is what I've called the old MIT view, of kind of the narrow engineering view. Try not to be pejorative, but kind of, we're engineers and don't expect a whole lot more about us. We make things and we're really good at and don't make us do anything else. That view is rapidly retiring out of MIT.

There's another view that is more the faculty who came through in the 60s and the 70s, which is a bit more libertarian. I think reflective of the times during the 60s and the 70s. Which is, we have a lot of smart kids. We'll give them a bunch of tools, but other than just giving them the basic tools, we don't want to get in the way. I think there's a new generation coming along that says, well, yes MIT is valuable because you get a bunch of tools. You get a tool kit. But that we need to be a bit more intentional about helping students understand what social needs are, for instance. So maybe it might be more valuable for you to spend time at an internship that's not engineering. Or maybe a little more valuable for you to do a little more public service or say, service learning. Non-traditional ways of doing education and linking education to later life.

INTERVIEWER: But I'm surprised you used the word libertarian. I would have expected it to be liberal or communitarian, maybe. Or socialistic, even. Coming out of the team and community of Anti-War movement, the teamwork and systems.

STEWART: I'm surprised at that, too, but it's just my sense that there's a libertarian streak at MIT. At least on the curriculum side, that doesn't want to structure a whole lot, other than everyone has to take a year of physics and a year of calculus, the traditional science core. But after the science score, well students are smart and the can do whatever they want to. Outside the science core in their living environment and those sorts of things, they can do whatever they want to. If they don't want to live on campus, they don't have to do that. If they want to drink themselves silly, they can do that, well, that's probably not fair. But if they just want to make all sorts mistakes, fine.

I don't think that's the reality of the modern university. I think the reality of the modern university is the faculty needs to be a little more concerned about social responsibility and making sure our students are ready to take those social responsibilities.

INTERVIEWER: So coming back to your own experience as a political science grad student at Stanford, how similar was that to the experience of your grad students today? Did you know going in what you wanted to focus on in political science?

STEWART: In terms of the experience, it's been so long since I've been a graduate student. So I came here as an assistant professor right after I finished my PhD and so the grad students were my friends. So I had a sense about what it was like to be a graduate student here then. Now I'm kind of the old guy who kind of wanders in and so who knows what life is really like? However, the thing about graduate school, especially a PhD program, is that you learn the most from your colleagues, from your peers. That still is definitely the case. Now grad students still travel in packs and they still read things together and they still do those things that we did.

Stanford particularly, there is something about Northern California, I have to say, that's not the Northeast. So there are two things. There is a difference, at least in political science. Well, I know about political science. There's a difference between West Coast and East Coast research universities. The West Coast is very informal, it's kind of the California way. There's fewer boundaries between grad students and faculty members, and there's more of a willingness to share say, research and other things that are kind of half-baked. So there's a lot of informal brown bags at Stanford, just a lot of just sitting around sharing.

On the East Coast in general there's more of a tendency that we have to protect our reputation. We always have to exude the fact that we are the smartest person in the room. So there's less of a tendency to share half-baked ideas. That was something I really didn't notice when I came from Stanford to MIT. My graduate student seems a little more worried about looking like idiots than we were. Maybe we should have been worried about looking like idiots at Stanford, but we were less concerned about that than here. I don't know about my graduate students, but I still notice in the Harvard, MIT orbit that there's a little resistance to just letting it all hang out and showing what you have and letting your colleagues help you with your work.