Dana G. Mead PhD ’67

INTERVIEWER: Today is May 28th, 2009. I'm Karen Arenson, we're talking with Dana Mead, a West Point graduate who earned a PhD in political science at MIT and is now finishing his sixth year as chairman of the MIT Corporation. Thank you for talking with us today Dana. What do you do as chairman of the MIT Corporation?

MEAD: Well, I perform most of the traditional duties of a chairman of a board of trustees. I conduct the meetings, which we hold four times a year of the entire Corporation. At MIT we have a somewhat different organization in that we have 30 visiting committees. A visiting committee for nearly every department, lab, and center at MIT. And they're creatures of the Corporation, so they technically report to me. And I in turn, of course, report to the full Corporation. So I manage those. In fact, right now we're going through what we call our annual draft where we make the assignments to the visiting committees. It's a two-day process where we evaluate every Corporation member who sits on the visiting committees. There are five or six on every one. The presidential appointees, who are appointed at large, which bring the expertise in a particular area to these visiting committees and then five or six alumni nominations out of the Alumni Association. That's a big part of my job. I also chair some of the major committees of the Corporation. I chair the Membership Committee, which some would say has a lot of influence over what happens in the Corporation. But the Membership Committee also has responsibility to name and to nominate members to the Audit Committee, to the joint committees of the Corporation, to this Development Committee, and others as well as the Executive Committee. So although I don't chair the Exec. Committee, I sit on it and play a role. The Executive Committee is chaired by the president because it needs staffing and I have a very small staff and the president has a large staff, which can provide the kind of staff support that it needs.

I spend a lot of time in communication with members of the Corporation. Some of it is rather routine. Some of it is less than routine where a particular question will come up, a problem might arise, and the like. And then I spend a fair amount of time as-- for lack of a better term-- an adviser to the president. And we spend a couple hours a week together by ourselves and then discuss everything from things as mundane as the street scape across the street to curriculum reform to publicity concerning MIT to liabilities and things like that. I'm also, for lack of a better term, the shepherd of the bylaws of the Corporation. Bylaws of old institutions, you know, atrophy with time and I've spent a fair amount of my time in these six years picking through our bylaws and trying to bring us into the 21st century. Particularly in indemnification as well as in the way we conduct meetings and so forth. So it's a very full plate. It's advertised as not more than 50 percent of your time. In fact, it takes about 110 percent of your time.

INTERVIEWER: That's how many hours a week?

MEAD: It's a lot of hours. But it's a very rewarding and I think a very useful position. I know a lot of chairmen of other trustees. I've been on other boards and I think this particular chairmanship has-- first, it has broader responsibilities. Secondly, it has more authority in the process of MIT being successful.

INTERVIEWER: You've had an unusual succession of careers and leadership positions in very different sectors. The military, the corporate world, nonprofit arena, and even there I mean, West Point, the National Association of Manufacturers in the business roundtable, Royal Shakespeare Company, how is this different from most of those? I mean, running a university, this one in particular?

MEAD: You know, clearly it's different. It's hard in some ways. I'll give you a couple examples of how I see it being different. That litany of jobs, you left out one and that was I was also a tenured professor at West Point for a number of years. And I sat on the academic board at West Point and I often remind my colleagues around MIT that I'm used to arguing for years over five minutes of cadet time, which is very typical of an academic institution because student time is one of the really most valuable resources that you have. So I was not particularly surprised at what I found at MIT in the way that an academic institution makes decisions. But clearly-- and if you talk to anyone who's run a business who comes into this type of environment-- the first thing they say is it's excruciatingly slow. It's a highly quote, in quotes, democratic process in that everybody gets a cut at what is done.

It's an institution, and this is any academic institution in which the power is very diffused between the faculty, between the administration, between the oversight bodies. Whether they be-- in this case-- we call it a Corporation, but the trustees. And so that diffusion makes it difficult and slow to make decisions. On the other hand, it assures that when the decisions finally bubble up through the process that because everyone's had a cut at it; some are happy, some are unhappy, but no one can basically claim they haven't had a shot at it. So there's a broader sense of support. It's less top down than in a company. You know, in a company if the CEO speaks, whether it's intelligently or otherwise, it still gets done and the pieces are kind of picked up afterwards. So that's one thing. And of course, coming from a military background where you have very hierarchical set of authorities you know, if you wear Colonel's eagles the Captains will say, yes sir. And, how high? When you want them to jump because that's the way the military is structured. So those are different, but because I'd been in this academic environment most people believed that West Point is run pretty much as a military organization. It is in some regards, but the academic board at West Point is made up of all professors who are out of the Allied Army, who are tenured for life and have a relatively independent role to play in running their departments. The dean is similarly, the corps of professors and so the superintendent and the commandant who are the administration and come out of the Army are continually working with this academic board. Which represents the faculty and the departments, so it's not dramatically different than in a civilian institution.

INTERVIEWER: Let's talk about the path that brought you here and back way up to some biographical information. Where you were born? Where'd you grow up? What were you like as a child? And, were you a leader then?

MEAD: Well, I was born in Iowa. In a very remote corner of Iowa, the northeast corner. In a town of 3500 that's very famous in the state of Iowa for wrestlers. One of the biggest names is Dan Gable, an Iowa wrestling and Olympic champion and so forth. He wrestled in the same conference that the town I was born in, called Cresco, is in. My dad's cousin was the NCAA champion in '36 and '38 as a heavyweight. My dad roomed in college with the fellow that later coached the University of Iowa in wrestling. I grew up until I was in fifth or sixth grade with a couple of friends then soon to be national champions in wrestling as well a state champions. My family were owners of small newspapers and in the old days if you ran a county or a town newspaper you controlled the means of communication. And so most newspaper owners became politicians or became politically influential and so my family, my grandfather was a state senator from Cresco. And his secretary was a very smart, attractive young lady, who was first in her class at this small high school and so forth and my dad decided to marry her. And so that was my mother. And so she once work worked for my grandfather in Des Moines at the state capital.

At the end of the war we sold all the newspapers because it had been a rough time. My mother learned how to run the Linotype actually. She can do it Linotype. And moved to southern Illinois, where she worked for a publisher and my father worked for another company. And I went to high school in southern Illinois. I had a successful high school career. I was all state in three sports. I was president of the student body and you know, all the other good things. Captain of two teams and--

INTERVIEWER: So you were a leader then?

MEAD: --And other things. Yeah, I guess so. I ran for governor in Boys State and got beat in Illinois, but I came close. And on the football field I did well and I got a phone call one night from a young lady that lived across the street from me in the suburb where I lived and said, my boss saw you play football the other night. Would you be interested in going to West Point? And I said, well, yeah, I'd be interested. So one thing led to another and pretty soon I had Red Blaik on the telephone, which in those days was like having Bear Bryant calling a kid in Alabama or whatever. Because Blaik had just--

INTERVIEWER: So this was the football coach at West Point?

MEAD: Yeah, and had won a number of national championships. Coached Blanchard and Davis and so forth. And one thing led to another and I found myself in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, just north of Chicago, in March. In below-zero weather taking my West Point exams and my physical. And got admitted to West Point. I'd never seen the place, but I knew Blaik. Also Blaik flew to my high school, which was a big deal. One of the top coaches in the country flew into Wood River. And anyone that goes to West Point-- and of course I had no military connection in the family-- anybody who goes even if they've come from a military family of a long geological string of West Pointers-- the first day at West Point's quite a shock. You walk through that sally port and from then on your life has been transformed. Most people lie in bed the first night staring at the ceiling and say, what in the world am I doing here?

INTERVIEWER: Did you think about that before you went? In other words, that this would mean a military commitment and--

MEAD: Well, not really. Because I didn't come out of a military family. I was interested frankly, although I was the salutatorian of my class and the only reason I wasn't the valedictorian the chemistry professor got mad at me because he thought I was dogging it. So you know, and I had a lot of other opportunities. Harvard and Yale and other places. And I could have played football there, too. University of Illinois, University of Iowa. I was being recruited by a lot of places. I was interested in going to a place that had some discipline or more structure. And I found it.

INTERVIEWER: Why?

MEAD: I don't really know. I mean, I just felt--

INTERVIEWER: It just appealed to you?

MEAD: It just appealed. There's an old saw about West Point that I used to ask my classes when I taught at West Point, those of you that are getting married raise your hand. There'd be about half the class that raised their hand. I'd say, who is your wife marrying? You think she's marrying a cadet or a second lieutenant? And most of them would raise their hand and say a cadet. And I'd say yeah, unless they came from an Army family, it's going to be quite a shock when they find out they're marrying a second lieutenant who makes $222.30 a month when you graduate. And I think that's true of people when they enter West Point. They're entering to be quote, West Pointers. And the Army socializes those classes. And by the time you're in your junior year you're very committed to the Army. Or in my case, my class could still go in the Air Force, because the Air Force Academy hadn't had a class yet. And so most people don't think about it, and there are a lot of people like myself that went not really knowing what it was all about. I knew you got an engineering degree, which was fine.

INTERVIEWER: Everybody?

MEAD: When I went everybody got a general engineering degree. I had two electives in my class in my senior year. One of them was taught by a skinny, little, balding Air Force captain named Brent Scowcroft and he taught me Russian political history. The other was taught by a fellow who was a friend of Al Haig's, class of '47. Al Haig was one of my tactical officers. He was a major when I was a cadet.

INTERVIEWER: [INAUDIBLE] 1956, '57?

MEAD: This is '53, '54, '55. And I later worked for him a number of times, but he was a tactical officer of mine. And the other professor later became a four star general also and they were both in the social science department, which was also proselytizing cadets. Because what we did-- and this has a pertinent MIT connection for this week-- the social science department would identify cadets when they were in their junior year. And they would have your first steak dinner somewhere and say, if you get out in the Army and you do a good job would you be interested in going to graduate school and coming back here to teach? And we would pick off the Rhodes Scholars and the Truman's and the Marshall's or whatever. We didn't have the Truman's and the Marshall's then, but we had the Rhodes. And so we got very good people lined up and then we would contact them five years into the Army and say, you know, are you ready to go to graduate school? Some were, some weren't. Sometimes their branch that controlled their assignments wouldn't permit it. But we sent really terrific people to graduate school. And one of them is going to be here for graduation, Petraeus, who was recruited by the soc. department. Sent to the Woodrow Wilson School and came back to teach in the social science department. And Mike Meese, who's Ed Meese's son, is the head of that department now. And he's played a big role in Petraeus' strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. So you know, there's a long history of this.

INTERVIEWER: Were you tapped like that too while you were in college?

MEAD: Yes, I was called in by the guy that ran the department. We called him Abe Lincoln, but he was General Lincoln who gave up a star after World War II to come back to run the department. These are all colonels. And he was Marshall's planner in World War II. He's a Rhodes, class of '29 West Point. Brilliant man, very country. Family were apple farmers in Michigan. And in my case, in my junior year I was called over to his house one night with a classmate of mine who also went to MIT with me here and was killed in Vietnam. He's a pilot. But we had dinner and they said, well you know, would you like to come back some time to teach? And I said, yes. And five years later I was at Fort Knox commanding a tank company and I got a call from a fellow named Bill Knowlton, who then was the executive officer of the department, which was really the prime job in the department. I was an executive officer when I went back the first time to teach and then went in. And my executive officer, when I was running the department was another fellow you've heard of, Barry McCaffrey, who was a major at the time. So they said, are you ready go to graduate school? I said, yeah I'm ready. What do you want me to do? They said, we're going to send you to Harvard. You're going to go to-- then it was Littauer before the Kennedy School had cranked in-- and we want you to go in January. And so I said, I'm ready. So send me the orders. And they called me back and said, you've been admitted to Littauer. You're all set. Lincoln could write a slip of paper out and send it to his buddies here, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, anywhere in the country and say, this is an Army officer I want to send to graduate school. Boom. Please admit him and we'd get admitted.

INTERVIEWER: Does it still happen that way?

MEAD: I can't vouch for that, but the reputation of the place is pretty strong. It probably is pretty close.

INTERVIEWER: So there you were slated to head to Harvard--

MEAD: So I'm headed to Harvard. And one of the great things that happened to me, my branch, the Armor branch said, wait a minute. You've only commanded a tank company for eight months or something. You have to command this company for over a year. And so I called and they said, well Harvard will not admit you midterm now. We found that out. So if you can't go in September you can't go at all. So I said, oh what am I going to do? So Lincoln said, I'm going to call my buddy, Lucian Pye at MIT. And he called Pye and said, I've got this captain and he's got good board scores. He can handle the work. Will you admit him? And Pye said, yeah. So I got a call back saying, would you want to go to MIT instead? I said, oh, sure. Sounds good. And they sent me a little propaganda. And this was right as the department-- department had been in existence, I don't know, three or four years--

INTERVIEWER: It had been part of the--

MEAD: It was still part of econ.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

MEAD: Still Course 14. So I showed up here in January of '64. All they had was my name. And I walked into the department office and said, here I am. What's your name? I gave them my name. So I had to fill out everything. And of course, the military guys under that program if they can cut the work, are very welcome because they pay full ride. So they were happy to see me. And this other fellow, Harper Keeler who was a classmate of mine was already here. He'd been here for six months or one semester. And so we kind of worked our way. And after I was here a year and a half Bill Kaufman and Pye and Gene Skolnikoff, who's still here-- called me in and said, would you be interested in going for a doctorate?

INTERVIEWER: Oh, the original plan wasn't for a doctorate?

MEAD: No, no. These were all Master's degrees. And I said, well, you know, I'd have to get another year. So I called Lincoln and said, you know, I can stay for a doctorate. I'd like to do it. I'd like to take my generals this spring and then I can research the dissertation. And he said, I'll get you a year. He said, I need you back here to teach, but I'll get you a year. And he did get me a year. In exchange for that he said, but you're going to pay a little price for me. I said, what's that? He said, I want you to audit Samuelson's econ courses. And he was teaching at the time, Paul Samuelson was teaching his book, basically. And MIT in econ was teaching Samuelson. I knew my first year at West Point or first semester anyways I was going to have to teach econ to juniors. But I stayed a year. I got the generals passed. I researched my dissertation at Washington.

INTERVIEWER: Was that dictated too or were you free to choose a topic?

MEAD: Bill Kaufman and I chose it.

INTERVIEWER: Which was?

MEAD: The Army didn't even know what it was. It was on peacetime strategic planning. What I did, I analyzed the war plans between World War I and World War II. And of course, Kaufman, brilliant guy, you know, just died recently. He was the father of counterforce. He's the guy that really, when he was at RAND, convinced the Pentagon that there was a different strategy to be used in nuclear war and counterforce made a lot more sense than just kind of the huge just massive exchange.

So he had a method in his madness. What he wanted was for me to analyze how we made decisions in the face of uncertainty. We didn't know one, if we were going to have another war. Didn't know if we were going to have one, with whom it would be. We didn't know where it would be. We didn't know what the weapons would be. We didn't know what the technologies would be for communications, airplanes, and everything. And of course, there was a huge evolution between 1918 and 1941. My dissertation is about that thick. And I had a great little technique. I'd researched it all. Most of it in Washington at the World War II records division. You've done a lot of interviews, you'd be interested in this. I was working on what they call the Victory Program, which near the start of World War II the US got worried about-- we may end up having to fight Japanese and Americans. Japanese and Germans together. What would it take to fight a two front war? And they said, well, how are we going to figure this out? They said, well, there's this major walking around the hallways who went to the German General Staff College. The only one in the US Army who'd ever gone. So he understands mechanized warfare. Why don't we have him work up a plan? So he-- and I'll tell you why I know this-- he said, with a reporter's notebook he walked the halls of the then new Pentagon and asked anybody that knew anything about the war what it would take to do this and do that. And he came up with this huge plan. 11.5 million men under arms, 200 divisions 25,000 airplanes, you know, 100,000 aircraft engines. You know, on and on and on and on. Everybody thought he was crazy. The guy that ran the World War II records division said to me one day, this was in Alexandria in the old torpedo factories where they had them. In fact, they had all the German records too. They finally gave them back to the Germans 25 years after the war. But he said, aren't you working on the Victory Program? And I said, yeah. He said, well, the guy who wrote it, General Wedemeyer, is in the next cubicle. Why don't you go talk to him? So I spent a whole day, you know, talk about a primary source. And of course, Albert Wedemeyer was a major in '38 or '39 or '40. And he later became a four star general. He went to China, the Wedemeyer mission to China before Marshall and others.

But anyway, what happened to the Victory Program, it was leaked to the Chicago Tribune. And there's proof that Roosevelt was taking us into a two front war. It was leaked on the 5th of December, 1941. Congress went berserk, going to have hearings and going to do the whole thing. And then of course, on the 7th it all became moot.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting.

MEAD: But anyway, that's the kind of stuff we were working in. And so that was my trip to MIT. And the way I did it, every Friday night I would write a chapter. Nancy would type it on Saturday morning, and then I'd kind of go over it and then we would mail it to Bill Kaufman on Sunday. By the next Friday I would get back that chapter, annotated. If I had to rewrite it or do something I would start on that. She's typing the next chapter on Saturday and we just rolled this over for a semester and then I graduated the next summer.

INTERVIEWER: Was that the fastest PhD on record?

MEAD: Well, it was probably pretty fast.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

MEAD: Over the years, I was close to MIT. In and out. I had a lot of people come down from the department to talk because from here I went back to West Point to teach for three years. And so I had a lot of people down there. Henry Kissinger used to come down from Harvard as assistant professor and sit there. Herman Kahn and I got to be good friends over the years. So I knew most of the intelligentsia. Brzezinski was down at Columbia by then. Bill Odom, who died not too long ago, who was head of NSA was in the department then.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think of yourself as a social scientist?

MEAD: Well, I'm kind of a quasi. I mean, I know how social scientists work and think, but I'm not a real professional in that regard. You know, the dissertation in some ways is history more than social science.

INTERVIEWER: Were you ever concerned that going off to do the graduate study and the teaching would take you off a track, a leadership track?

MEAD: Well, it's a great question because every officer who does this faces that. It's proven not to be a problem. But it's always held up as a problem. We always had a lot of problems getting officers released to go to graduate school. We would fight the Army pretty hard and even occasionally one of our alums would end up being the DCSPER, the person in charge of personnel at the Army, three star general, and even then we would have trouble. It was a tug of war a lot to get these people to go. But you know, for instance, here's Petraeus; it didn't seem to hurt his career. And of course, I'm really on the far side of this thing. I think there's nothing, nothing better for these army officers if they aspire to higher command than to have this intellectual grounding that they get by going to graduate school.

INTERVIEWER: But most of them do a Master's, not a doctorate like you do so it's a shorter--

MEAD: Right, most do a Master's. Most do a two year Master's. Some stay for PhDs. And you know, the Army has a whole set of schools, but they're professional schools, Command and General Staff College, The Army War College.

INTERVIEWER: So what was it like to be a faculty member at West Point?

MEAD: Well, it's great because these cadets are fantastic students. You have small classes in the soc. department, I think the largest classroom we ever had was 18 cadets. But it's hard work because you're teaching like four sections. So say you've got 70 kids and we were very rigorous. We made them write a lot of papers, we did a lot of exams. You can do a lot of other things. I coached football while I was there, I coached lightweight football. I ran the cadet ski program. You know, so you can get involved in a lot of other things there that were fun.

INTERVIEWER: Does your experience having both been a student at West Point and a tenured professor there color the way you think a college should be and that a university should run? Because that was so embedded as a model, how much does that affect?

MEAD: Well, it does in a way. It's a good question because well, I was there. I was there twice. I was there for three years then I went to Vietnam, came back, spent four years in the White House. Then I went back again. And I was an advocate of one concentration in other areas than just the pure general engineering. And also, concentrated engineering courses. You could get an electrical engineering education if you wanted to. You could get civil, you could get mechanical--

INTERVIEWER: You mean, at West Point?

MEAD: At West Point. Because when I went, I mean, I took it across the board. I could not have worked as an engineer in any one of the disciplines without a year or two of graduate school yet, probably. And also, you could concentrate in some of the social sciences. Predominantly history, political science, which would encompass international relations and economics and other things. So I fought very hard for that. But at the same time-- and here I like MIT for exactly this reason-- I also was very strongly in support of a broad distribution requirement in the first year.

INTERVIEWER: At West Point?

MEAD: At West Point. And in fact, when Bob Silby ran this recent curriculum evaluation here one of the places they looked at was West Point. Because basically all the plebes take almost the exact same courses. They have very little option in anything. They take massive amounts of math. They start on the sciences, they take some physics just like we do here. They took languages also, were required. So you know, gave everybody a grounding and then they could begin to branch out. Now when I was there you didn't branch out till your senior year. Everybody in my class took the same courses their sophomore year and their junior year and only in the senior year did we get any kind of electives.

INTERVIEWER: So MIT is a little bit unusual in having such a strong set of core requirements, but it sounds like in that sense it's similar to West Point.

MEAD: Yeah, and I think they accomplish the same thing. You know, I'd say that the West Point distribution requirement is somewhat more rigorous than MIT because we fold in the language in the first two years at West Point, we don't do that here. But they're very similar and they accomplish the same thing.

INTERVIEWER: Which is?

MEAD: A lot of the cohesion in these classes is because everybody took 802. I don't have to tell you, you know, and so yeah, the pain has been shared throughout the organization, in that regard. Now West Point has other ways of cohesion. You live in the same living group your whole four years. You get to know everybody in your quote, it's a military company and the like. But you know, years ago I was asked, I complained so much about leadership here at MIT that finally Chuck Vest said, well, why don't you come here and do something about it? So I came and I taught for six months. I had two letters, one from the dean of Sloan and one from the dean of engineering, which basically were my credentials. Which meant I could go and do anything I wanted or talk to anybody I wanted. And at the end I wrote a paper about what I saw were the differences in leadership development here and some things we ought to do. Most of which we're doing now by the way.

INTERVIEWER: Which are?

MEAD: Well, the one thing I pointed out was that almost everyone we recruit here is a leader, has been a leader in either one or a number of regards. Some have been student government leaders, some have been leaders academically, some have been in civic, you know, we just looked at some applications the other night together and you see what kind of students we get, and we do the same thing here at MIT that West Point does. They get all these leaders too and they grind them down to kind of dust to use an expression. There's a lot of humility involved. There's all the kinds of things you go through. And these are young people. And at West Point however, after they do this they have three years of very carefully designed, time-tested ways to begin to rebuild you as a leader in their own image. And they've been at it for over 200 years, so they're getting halfway good at it.

At MIT we didn't have those kinds of programs. You had to kind of fend for yourself and wind your way through the process and maybe find a mentor or find something that interested you where you could be a leader or you could begin to exercise your notions of leadership or what needed to be done. And I said, what we need to do is start thinking in terms of providing more leadership opportunities, even for a freshman, for our sophomores and then really start taking it very seriously for our juniors and seniors. And a lot of the programs that we've put in, including some the academic programs, particularly at Sloan are the result of that. And every now and then someone will call me and say, You still have a copy of that thing you wrote? And I'll say, I can't even find it. I don't know where it is. But the other day Tom McNaty called me, said, I want to see that. I said, Tom, I don't even know where it is. I can't find it. And he called me back, said, I found it.

INTERVIEWER: He's now digitized it and put it the--

MEAD: I don't know what he's done with it, but I hope not. So you know, there were a lot of parallels.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think the grinding down first is necessary or useful or is there a way of avoiding that? Or wouldn't you avoid it even if you could?

MEAD: No, I think there's a way to avoid it. I do think there's some things that happen during that, that are good. I think some ways of inculcating humility and kind of a better sense of how you fit in, I think those are positive in a way. Because you know, you're walking a very fine line, you've got to be very careful because people are young, they're impressionable and I think also cohesion is a good thing. Living with the same living group, doing things like that, I think are--

INTERVIEWER: Which most MIT students do.

MEAD: Right. Exactly. So I think that's all positive. You know, I remember-- you'll get a kick out of this-- Hop Keeler and I used to on Thursdays walk down here in the Infinite Corridor and go down where they were posting the answers to the problem sets. And we'd sit on the steps and we'd watch the agony that would take place. It was kind of entertainment, you know?

INTERVIEWER: This was when you were a student?

MEAD: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: It doesn't happen now?

MEAD: No, you don't see it anymore.

INTERVIEWER: I don't think it happened when I was an undergraduate.

MEAD: You don't see it anymore. But it was exquisite agony to watch people do it.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think to the extent that you focus more on inculcating leadership or emphasizing that, do you think there's a trade-off between that and the technical expertise? That there's any kind of zero-sum game. In other words, is there a risk that the more you focus on developing leaders that you lose a little bit of the strength that MIT's traditionally had?

MEAD: Well again, I encountered this. I had actually some professors say to me, hey, lay off the leadership stuff. I'll teach them differential calculus.

INTERVIEWER: When you were here?

MEAD: Yeah. When I came back. I'll teach them differential calculus they can learn leadership when they get out of here. And I would say, too late. What I wanted to see more, particularly in the technical side, I wanted to have kind of a consciousness about leadership. I'm an MIT graduate. I've been given one of the finest technical educations in the world. I'm going into a society where understanding of science and technology is going to be critical to the success of the country and the society. I have a responsibility to be a leader of some sort and I wanted to raise kind of the consciousness level about leadership in the student body. I didn't want to compete with being a great research scientist, and I didn't feel it had to be a zero-sum game. For instance, I talked to number of professors and say, hey, you're a role model. I'm not a role model. No, I'm a [INAUDIBLE] the blackboard. I'd say, no, no. You are. People look at you and they see themselves in 15 or 20 years and you have that responsibility. And I said, It doesn't hurt to kind of talk or kind of exhibit leadership of some sort to these young students. Some of them agreed with me, so you know, you got a point. And this whole mentoring thing is very much part of that.

INTERVIEWER: Mentoring of?

MEAD: Of students and of junior faculty.

INTERVIEWER: And of junior faculty?

MEAD: That's the other thing. There's a leadership responsibility there, also. Most of the really top senior faculty understand that and do it. But you know, in the visiting committees one of the kind of central themes throughout visiting committee discussions is that we're not really good at mentoring. MIT is not good at mentoring. And it comes out in two-thirds of the visiting committees. And the department heads will agree and say, I'm working on it. We're trying to get people committed to it. So my first complaints in leadership were at Sloan because I was recruiting and hiring Sloan people when I ran Tenneco and also at IP. And I would say, these people have great, great technical educations. They're smart and focused, but I said, most of them can't lead me out that door. It's not because they can't. They're not interested.

INTERVIEWER: How could you tell?

MEAD: Interviews and I mean, after we hired them. And I used to tell students when I was here, look, if you're sitting in a paper mill in Androscoggin, Maine and you're a chemical engineer, MIT graduate and you're surrounded by a lot of engineers from a lot of great schools, when you're sitting around this table discussing it all the heads eventually are going to turn to you. You know why? Because you're the MIT graduate in the room. You've got a certain responsibility to uphold as a leader in that regard. And they'd kind of go oh, you know? I had one student who was a student leader here who was a terrific young man. He said, well, leadership isn't important because we all work in teams. I'd say, have you ever done a project in a team? Well not yet but... I said, well after you do I want you to come back and tell me if you thought leadership wasn't important and what it was. Five years later he was wandering around the hallway here and he grabbed me, he said, you know, you remember when we had breakfast? I said, yeah. You're right. That's all he said. You were right. I've had that interest in this.

INTERVIEWER: And once you catch their attention, how do you facilitate or foster? How much is it you know, it has to be in you, you're born that way and how much can you teach?

MEAD: Well, I used to use this as an example-- my numbers may not be right, but-- I said, Look, I know the West Point classes very well. In any West Point class 10 percent of that class are what you and I, under the current vernacular would call our natural born leaders. Nothing you do to them or for them is going to change that. You can go through a terrible experience in college or whatever and at some point they're going to be leaders. Another 10 to 15 percent of every class are never going to be leaders. They may be individual contributors, may be technologists or whatever, but they're not interested in people. You know, they're just not. The great middle, maybe 60 to 70 percent all have some leadership capability. It may be very latent and it doesn't come out till later. There's where you have to concentrate and you have to do it in different ways. You have to use experiential, give them experiences in leadership. That's what West Point does a lot of. It doesn't hurt to be intellectually cognizant of what leadership is. It doesn't hurt to talk about what values are important to leadership. Whether it be integrity or whatever. To include professional skill and talent, capability. And you can develop that group. And who knows what will pop out of that, you know? My class at West Point had a number of four star generals. It had a number of corporate CEOs. It had a chief of staff of the Army.

And I would say that if you took that group and you kind of put them in those different categories I went through half of those people would have been in that top 10 percent. The other half would have been in that other group. And they developed and they got opportunities and did it. And you know, you read the history of West Point. It's one I'm more familiar with, but you know, you can read about the class of '15, which is Eisenhower and Bradley and Van Fleet and those guys. You know, maybe two of those three would have been in that kind of top 10 percent, but maybe not. You know, George Patton would be in that top 10 percent and he was a terrible cadet. You know, he was turned back one year academically. And MIT's come a long way I think in this regard.

You know, the graduate students run the Leadership Conference every year where they bring in people from outside. You know, a lot of the programs we have now, I used to say another thing you can do is bring leaders in so people can see them and listen to them and see how they think and what they've done and why they make decisions the way they've made.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Do you think that having been a tenured professor has given you any greater understanding of faculty issues or made you any more or less sympathetic to faculty concerns?

MEAD: Well, I'll take it backwards. Yes, I think it's made me more sensitive to faculty concerns. I'm quite sympathetic with the faculty, frankly, because I think the faculty is where the rubber hits the road. I mean, that's where you have most of the contact with the students. That's where most of your academic expertise resides. It's where a lot of your reputation resides. It's where your ability to recruit the succeeding generations of excellence resides. So I'm quite sympathetic. When we did the presidential search I was insistent that we had one, a large faculty advisory committee, which was as representative as we could make it. And secondly, that it be directly involved with the search at every level of the search. Because I thought one, the faculty views and the faculty support of whomever we chose was going to be critical. And the faculty brought a lot to the process for us. So I've been pretty supportive. You know, there are all these things about faculty, and it doesn't have to be faculty, in a large industrial organization it's the same thing. There are all these things that you're not going to particularly support that they want to do or things you want to do they're not going to support. But that's part of running an organization.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you leave teaching?

MEAD: Well, that's a good question. When I went back to West Point from the White House I was going to-- one, I was going to do some writing. I'd been involved in a lot of interesting things in Washington and I was going to do some more teaching. The job itself is a highly administrative job. You sit in meetings constantly, remember I said--

INTERVIEWER: This was as a dean--

MEAD: Well, I wasn't a dean, I was a head of a department.

INTERVIEWER: Head of a department.

MEAD: I actually went back as a deputy head of a department. And then my head was gone for a year, year and a half, so I headed the department. And then, this third year I was there-- well, the start of the third year-- the superintendent whom I'd known as also when I was a cadet he was an instructor of mine in the soc. department. Very incestuous group. Called me in and said, I think there's something wrong with the honor system and would you and another colonel named Harry Buckley-- who just recently died, who's a few years ahead of me at West Point. Maybe class of '53 or '52-- He said, I want you and Colonel Buckley to put together a group study group. And you can have cadets, you can have junior officers, you can have anybody you want and I want you to study the honor system for me. And you've got carte blanche, you can do anything. You can quiz cadets, you can go through the honor committee-- which is a group that's elected by each company that supervise it-- and find out and see if anything's wrong. Well, we did that. At the end of a year I went into the superintendent and I had a bunch of print outs under my arm and other things. And I said, We've got a problem. And the problem was with what they call the toleration clause, no doubt. The cadet honor system is, a cadet they do not lie, cheat, or steal nor tolerate those who do. And the only sanction for toleration, in other words, if I knew you committed an honor violation and didn't report it, I tolerated it and someone found out about this and I went to the honor committee and they basically tried me the only sanction would be dismissal. And in that day and age things had changed so much that there were very few cadets who were actually willing to see someone dismissed because of toleration. So the place was kind of crumbling.

This guy was a lieutenant general. Very outstanding officer, fantastic combat and management leadership record. He was working hard for his fourth star. And he said, look, I'm leaving in June. So why don't we wait till the new superintendent comes in and we'll work on this. About two weeks later the head of the electrical engineering department came into my office in Thayer Hall, closed the door, sat down and said, we have a problem. They'd given a take-home exam in electrical engineering and 140 exams came back of the 600 or 700 hundred cadets who took it. And they all had a unique solution to a problem on the zener diode. And one cadet had done what you're instructed to do if you receive help on something. You asterisk it and down at the bottom you put a footnote, I received help on this from cadet Arenson on blah, blah, blah date. And you're not guilty of an honor violation, but you don't get credit for the answer. And only one had done it and he had done it on this unique solution. So they started thumbing through these writs and they found 140 that had this unique solution. So that was the genesis of the famous honor scandal of 1977, '76. I ended up being the guy who wrote all of the letters for the superintendent to the alumni. I wrote all the testimony before the Senate and the House. I coached the cadets that had to testify to this thing. I basically ran the process for about two years. And I didn't get in a classroom for two years, although I never felt it.

You know, something just kind of soured me. I was the West Point representative on the Borman Report and, you know, they got Frank Borman and they put together a group to come up there and do it. And you know, we were on the cover of Time Magazine. Guy from the New York Times decided to make it a crusade to bring the academy down. Tom Downey was a young congressman on Long Island who decided to try to do the same thing. And so you know, we had a pretty interesting fight on our hands. They sent Andy Goodpaster up to be the superintendent. He'd retired as a four star, they took away his star, they put him back up there. Andy and I went back forever. We were appointed from the same district in southern Illinois. Abe Lincoln was his mentor also. I used to write exams for the National Work College and send them down to him to use. So we were very close. But I went in and told him that I was thinking of retiring, and he said, well, he wasn't real happy. But he said, you know, I don't think I'm surprised. He said, I think you got too much horse power for what we have you doing. And my wife thought I was crazy. You know, we had a big home on the river up there. I was chairman of the athletic board, so I was hiring and firing coaches. I was still the offensive coordinator for the lightweight football team, which was great. Interestingly enough, the fellow who I knew from my White House days that hired me at International Paper was another name you've heard a lot of, Paul O'Neill.