Daniel E. Hastings SM ’78, PhD ’80

INTERVIEWER: Today is July 9, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. We are talking this morning with Daniel E. Hastings, dean for undergraduate education at MIT and a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems. He earned a Master's degree and PhD in that department after completing his undergraduate education as a math major at Oxford University in 1976.

From 1997 to '99, he served as chief scientist to the US Air Force. After he returned to MIT, he was associate director, co-director, and director of MIT's engineering systems division before becoming dean.

Dan, thank you for speaking with us today here.

HASTINGS: Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: On one of your websites, you mention that your favorite book is Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times. What makes it your favorite book?

HASTINGS: Well, he was a great president, and the book is short and it's pithy, and it has lots of insights, that if you read some of the history of Lincoln, you realize he was actually using some of these things as he was making decisions in what were obviously tough times for the country and for him. So I've often used some of those because I like it. It's a quick read, but it's a knowing history because one of my interests is actually history. So knowing history, you realize, boy, now I understand what he was doing.

INTERVIEWER: How did you come across this book?

HASTINGS: Oh, I think somebody recommended it to me who knows about my interest in history. Because it actually is a combination of two things, I mean, it's got interesting history in it, but it also has got basically management and leadership techniques. Given the jobs I've had, I need to have a lot of those.

INTERVIEWER: Are you interested in management books, generally? Are there other ones you've come across that you like also?

HASTINGS: Oh, yeah, yeah. I've read quite a few of what you might call leadership books. I mean, how is it that you think about leadership and how do you go about it. Yeah, I try to keep up with that kind of reading among the other kinds of reading I'm also simultaneously trying to do.

INTERVIEWER: Which includes beside your aero and astro and--

HASTINGS: Well, actually lately, I've been reading a lot of social science about education. I'm actually currently reading Christensen's book about innovations in education, Disruption in--

INTERVIEWER: He's a Business School professor up the river.

HASTINGS: Right. Disruption in Education. I've been reading a number of books about how is it that minority students are being treated in elite colleges, the Bowen and Bok study, you know, Shape of the River. So, I mean, I've been reading a lot of those kind of books because I need to understand what's going on in a number of different places.

INTERVIEWER: Have there been any surprises as you've read them or things you've learned where you've said, hmm, that really helps frame something?

HASTINGS: No. Actually, unfortunately not, at least in that particular case. Because the issues that we see here at MIT, basically we see them across the landscape of elite higher education. So in that sense, there have not been surprises. I'm mean, all it tells me is that we're dealing with sets of issues which lots of other people are seeing. Actually, by working together, maybe we can actually help each other.

INTERVIEWER: You gonna write a book?

HASTINGS: I've had in my mind for a long time to write a book. I've written a scholarly book, which in the nature of scholarly books has not got a huge following, but--

INTERVIEWER: But about engineering or about education?

HASTINGS: No, no, no. About engineering. About my research discipline. So I wrote that several years ago, and actually, I've had in my mind a couple of science fiction stories to write, but I've just never got around to doing it. I keep looking to see if somebody else has come up with the same ideas yet, but not yet.

INTERVIEWER: You willing to share any?

HASTINGS: No, no, no, because I will write them one day.

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever tried writing a science fiction story?

HASTINGS: No, but I read a lot of science fiction.

INTERVIEWER: You have a favorite author?

HASTINGS: Well, I think actually Asimov over the years has done some really, really good stuff. So I've read a great deal of the Asimov writings, and I like Star Trek books.

INTERVIEWER: One of his nephews was a classmate here in the '60s.

HASTINGS: I didn't realize that.

INTERVIEWER: I think he's a math professor on the West Coast now.

HASTINGS: Oh, okay.

INTERVIEWER: So tell us some of the skills or strategies that the Lincoln book describes and how they apply to your job now as dean for undergraduate education or to the jobs you've held before that.

HASTINGS: Yeah, yeah. So here's one that I've actually used repeatedly. One of the things he did was, when things upset him, and of course, he had a job where lots of things upset him, right? You know, he had people around him who in his opinion didn't perform. He would write a letter-- I mean, this was before email or anything, right? He would write a letter, usually to some general about what they should do and why they hadn't been performing, and then he would put it in his desk overnight. Then the next day, he'd reflect whether he should send it or not. About half the time he sent it, about half the time he didn't.

But by writing the letter immediately, it got his feelings out and his advice out, and then he decided later on when he had the chance to cool down what he should do. So I've done that. I don't write letters, but by the various means which I communicate, when there's a lot of things going on and things aren't necessarily going well, I will deliberately say I'm just going to stop now. I mean, I have actually written long emails to people about what they should or should not do and not sent them.

INTERVIEWER: Not even by mistake?

HASTINGS: Not even by mistake. I just put them into draft. I mean, I'm very careful about what goes out of there, and sometimes I just get rid of them because, you know, I don't need to say that anymore. So, I mean, that's deliberately a strategy that he used. Here's another way. He points out-- actually, this is in the book that, you know, you don't need to respond to everything. So he said, you know, nine times out of 10, if you just wait, other people will figure out what to actually do. So I don't always respond immediately to what people bring me, and very often, they figure out what to do themselves.

Now that does mean, of course, that the things that they can't figure out tend to be fairly difficult problems, right? Actually, he did that, too. So he talks about it in the book, you know, just sometimes waiting before making decisions, just to let other people sort them out.

INTERVIEWER: Although waiting in this day and age is probably much shorter times than that--

HASTINGS: Oh, yeah, yeah. Of course.

INTERVIEWER: --because things are so speeded up.

HASTINGS: Because the communication system was the telegraph, of course.

INTERVIEWER: People think if they haven't heard back in three minutes, you haven't responded.

HASTINGS: Well, exactly. I mean, in this day of email, they send you an email and expect a response immediately, right? Well, they're not gonna get it.

INTERVIEWER: Do you answer email through the night as some people around here do?

HASTINGS: No, I try to sleep through the night.

INTERVIEWER: Sounds like a good thing to do.

HASTINGS: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: What does the dean for undergraduate education at MIT do? What do you do? What is the job?

HASTINGS: Well, I would say there are several different things. So in the sense of what people in management would call line, I have line responsibility for a number of offices. That is, they report to me. I set their budgets. The leaders are all direct reports to me. I'm the one who chooses them when they leave, and I do their performance evaluations. So that's the admissions office, the financial aid office, careers office, the registrar's office and so on. So there's actually 10 of these offices across MIT. So I'm the line person who's responsible for that.

So that's part of the job, but I'm also, I would say, responsible in a more strategic sense for helping-- working with the provost and the chancellor for helping set the directions for how one thinks about education at MIT. I spend a lot of my time trying to be more strategic in that, advising those individuals about what are the things that we should be doing or not doing and so on. So there's both a strategy role, and then there's also this line role of managing all these people.

Then there are some specific things that are in there. So part of the job is to recommend to the president what the new tuition should be every year, which I do, and how much financial aid--

INTERVIEWER: Zero?

HASTINGS: No. How much financial aid we should deal with. Part of the job is giving out curriculum development funds to the faculty and so on, so there's a range of those things. But I would say the two different aspects of it is this line responsibility and then the strategic responsibility for education.

INTERVIEWER: So you were moved into this job really from your engineering post. How do you begin to get your own bearings and think about strategy in an area where you had participated in some of those fields? But admissions, financial aid, I mean, those must have all been pretty new to you?

HASTINGS: Right. So as I've told several of the people there, I used to walk up and down the Infinite Corridor, which is where most of those offices actually are, and I literally had no idea what went on behind those doors. So it's an interesting question, how to get my bearings. At the level of strategy more generally, which is part of the job, part of what I was doing in the engineering systems division was helping set the strategy for how the division should actually operate. So at the level of doing strategic thinking, I know how to do that. I know how to help people move along.

But, of course, the focus there was on a particular kind of engineering. I suppose you might call it holistic engineering. Here, the focus is on the strategy, really more of education, and then, as you say, what the specific offices are actually doing. So the answer is I happen to be a quick study. I mean, get in there, talk to people. They're the experts. Tell me what you do. Let's set the tone and direction, which is what the leader does. I don't in detail tell these people who run these offices what to do because they're the experts. But I set the overall tone and the direction for the offices. We have lots of conversations. Lots of things I don't know, and they let me know when I don't know things. I encourage them to tell me.

INTERVIEWER: What prompted you to accept the job? Did you even think twice about, hm, this is moving out of engineering and science, and do I really want to take that step?

HASTINGS: Well, it's not manifestly moving out of Engineering, right? I mean, I still do the faculty duties in the School of Engineering, but that's not where most of my time actually goes right now.

INTERVIEWER: But do you think of it as a temporary detour or do you think of it as I may well not go back to real science or engineering research?

HASTINGS: Well, MIT, as you know, has a long history of people coming from the faculty to serve in administration and actually returning to the faculty. So if the-- let me call it the resistance to doing that was zero, then that would be-- that's exactly how I would think about it.

Now, of course, the reality is, you go do one of these administration jobs, and there's only so much time in a day. What happens is your ability to engage in teaching and research goes down very substantially. So the resistance to returning is not zero. It means you have to work hard at actually picking it back up again in doing what regular faculty actually do. But I guess my thinking was actually coming from the faculty and then ultimately at some point returning to the faculty.

INTERVIEWER: Are you still doing any science and engineering research now?

HASTINGS: Well, I have a small research group that has continued over the years. It is actually smaller now than when I started because there were a number of proposals that I had won and that had-- we continued to execute on, but as those students graduated, I didn't have the time to replace them so it's down to two students actually right now.

INTERVIEWER: Graduate students?

HASTINGS: Yeah, two PhD students. I like working with PhD students because you don't have to tell them what to do.

INTERVIEWER: You have time to read in the field or has that piled up?

HASTINGS: Well, you work with the students, right? I mean, the students are doing a lot of the (broad based) broadband reading, and the conversations with them help inform me. So it's the interaction with the students that actually helps me stay as relatively current. But having said that, I'm not going to deny that it's hard to do because the amount of reading I have to do in terms of both the scholarly work as well as, of course, the stuff I have to read as part of the dean's job is so large that I'm just continuously going at it. But then, of course, as I mentioned earlier, I'm also trying to read some other things because I have to be generally knowledgeable about what's going on in the whole business of higher education as part of this job.

INTERVIEWER: Are you doing any teaching at this point?

Well, I'm teaching a freshman seminar because I thought it was a good idea to do that. Since I'm the dean for undergraduate education, I need to have an independent way to access undergraduate students. I mean, not filtered through all the other people who filter it to me, but directly. So by teaching a freshman seminar, I get eight freshman in every year, and I directly talk to them about how life is going for them at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: What is the seminar focused on?

HASTINGS: Well, it's called The Engineer of 2020. Over the years, I've been fairly heavily involved in some national panels on how to think about the future of engineering, which is probably why I was asked to be head of the engineering systems division. So I'm cognizant of what's been in the national press, on the panels. I've actually served on several of them. So I put together a whole set of the readings associated with that.

In a structured 14 or so weeks, we go through all of them. We discuss them, we ask the question: What will the engineers of 2020 actually look like, which is now, of course, only 10 years from now, and what are the things that you, as a student, should be doing now to prepare yourself for that future? And the first sort of quick answer is it's way, way more than just technical stuff you need to know. You need to know about lots of what people call the softer skills.

INTERVIEWER: Such as?

HASTINGS: Communications, negotiation, broad-based contextual understanding of the role of engineering in the world, socio-technical issues, the impact of people upon engineering. You need to know a lot of that kind of stuff. So we go through all of that in a discussion format.

INTERVIEWER: As you think about that so explicitly and then you look at the MIT undergraduate education, how does it measure up? What do we do well, and what don't we do so well?

HASTINGS: Well, that's a very insightful question. There's some things we do exceptionally well. Part of my job is, you know, I have to look a lot of the data, so I see a lot of the data we collect on this. So it's extremely clear that we do exceptionally well in developing quantitative analytical skills in the students, much better than our peers, probably because of the way we press the students. It's also clear we do very well in helping our students develop how to think under time pressure and to think critically under time pressure. So we do that very well.

Now, some things we don't do so well: We actually don't do so well on communications. The ability of our students to communicate, not to themselves, but to people who are not themselves, people who don't come with the same mental framework is-- I'm not going to say it's terrible because I don't believe it's terrible, but it's not as good as it could be. And in this day and age, an engineer-- well, I would say anybody-- needs to be able to communicate what they're doing to people who are not themselves, because the world is full of people who are not themselves. So we have some challenges there. And we also have challenges in terms of our students being able to put what they're doing in a broader social context.

INTERVIEWER: Which is part of what the engineering systems division is about, actually?

HASTINGS: Yes, it is. It is part of what it was about. That's what the Engineering 2020 Studies actually very clearly show, and those are areas that we need to here at MIT actually substantially improve on.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think the students who come through your seminar and think about what they need to have so directly, as opposed to just assuming, handle the rest of their education any differently from their classmates? In other words, there are communications requirements for all students, but do these students then understand why they're there in a more powerful way, and therefore take them more seriously?

HASTINGS: So I have had the students tell me after they've gone through the discussions and the readings, and by having them read the national studies, the national data, they appreciate it's not just me saying this. There are lots of people in the country saying this. I have had the students tell me that they, first of all, appreciate more, as you said, why we have things like a communication requirement, but also they appreciate more the broader context in which they're thinking about that science and technology is actually done. In that sense, it's been being good for them. Maybe it encourages them to take some more courses in the humanities requirements. I don't know.

INTERVIEWER: Have you thought about how MIT could do better on this front? I mean, I think people have been grappling with it for awhile, the communications, in particular. There have been different iterations of communication requirements, but I don't think people think that they have reached an answer yet. Do you have any thoughts beyond about what might be done further or differently?

HASTINGS: Yeah, if I had a magic wand to wave here, I would actually decompress the schedule here. One of the things our students actually say-- they say to us, and we see it clearly in the survey data-- is that they don't have very much time to reflect. So reflection is not a skill as well learned here at MIT because the time pressures are so intense. I would actually decompress. If we insist on four years, the only way to do that, you understand, is to reduce the amount stuff that we actually require in the engineering and science departments, and then actually give greater freedom for students to make some elective choices within that. I mean, that's what I would do if I were king for a day.

INTERVIEWER: That's interesting because the humanities requirements have gone a little in the other direction after the latest changes were adopted by the faculty to be more restrictive in what freshman, I think, and maybe upperclassmen can take in the way of humanities.

HASTINGS: Well, no, I would say more coherent. I mean, they got to the point where they were offering for an individual, for an incoming freshman, 72 different alternatives. Freshmen don't know what to do with 72 different alternatives. I mean, I'm not sure I know what to do with 72 different alternatives. So that change was to make it more focused and coherent and provide bigger classes for students so that they could all collectively focus on big problems to address. So I think the focus was somewhat different than that.

INTERVIEWER: I'm interested, though, in your communications point. A lot of skills students pick up-- math computation, science techniques-- are taught by full professors, tenure track. The communications, there's a writing requirement, and there's a whole staff of non-tenure-track instructors.

HASTINGS: That's right.

INTERVIEWER: I wonder if that sends a message to students that even though we require it, it's somehow less important, and therefore, communications is important, but maybe less important. Does that make sense?

HASTINGS: I've never had a student explicitly say that to me. Now, could it send a message? I mean, unfortunately, that's what has become the culture in the humanistic disciplines, that a lot of the things that are seen as kind of the grunt work are taught by instructors and by adjuncts and so on. I suppose the students could deduce that, but I've never had a student explicitly say that to me.

INTERVIEWER: Coming back to the Lincoln book, it says that one tool he employed was to look at things first hand, and that he visited battle scenes and talked to troops. I think it's a skill that these days sometimes gets called management by walking around. Is that something you apply and are you able to get out of your office much and visit with students or faculty or even observe classes?

HASTINGS: So I said, that's exactly why I wanted to have a freshman seminar myself. So I could get direct access to, if you want, the front lines. You know, you're right. Lincoln actually did that. He would go visit the troops. There was one famous time, of course, where he almost came under fire or maybe actually did come under fire from the other side, because it was important to him to hear things, not just from his generals. The nature of the hierarchy of the military organizations, of course, is that they will tend to filter up the good news, and he wanted to hear what was actually going on. So, in the same way, I need to hear directly from the students. I spend a fair amount of my time having mainly meals with students, again just to get a sense of actually what's going on there.

INTERVIEWER: In residence halls?

HASTINGS: Yeah, yeah. Well, they invite me. Go to fraternities, go have dinner with them in the residence halls, so that's always interesting.

INTERVIEWER: They really sit and talk?

HASTINGS: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: What kinds of things--

HASTINGS: Well, they probably talk because I'm there, right? Oh, sure. So one of the things I always ask them is, you know, where else did they apply. Given that obviously they're here at MIT, are they glad they were here and what are the things they're actually learning here at MIT? So I always ask them that. That's always very interesting to get a sense. Then, you know, how's it going, and are they participating in the various opportunities that we actually provide for students? So I find those conversations actually interesting.

INTERVIEWER: Can you think of any policies that have resulted, or changes, or a feeling of, gee, I really didn't realize this before, talking to them, that have come out of these conversations over the years?

HASTINGS: Well, I'll give you one very specific one. I went to visit students at Cambridge University.

INTERVIEWER: In England?

HASTINGS: Yeah, we have a bunch of students in a Cambridge-MIT exchange. This was a few years ago. The entire time, they spent talking to me about the difficulties of the cost of living there. After I came back from that-- I went with the director of financial aid, and we actually came up with some more money to actually help them. That, I heard back from them, made a substantial difference to what they were actually doing. So that was a very specific return on those kind of conversations.

INTERVIEWER: Another chapter in the Lincoln book looked at how he handled criticism. You were talking a little about that before in sometimes ignoring it and sometimes challenging it. You end up dealing with a lot of delicate issues here, I guess, ranging from tuition increases and other unpleasant topics. What are the biggest hot-button issues that you've faced in the past years and what's on the table now?

HASTINGS: So the first thing I do, of course, is just what Lincoln, did, which is there are things that people address to me that I actually don't need to deal with. So I have the people who work for me actually deal with them. So the things that I do end up dealing with tend to be the more difficult problems, which is just what Lincoln did.

Now, so what are some of the issues that I've actually faced? You know, I've had parents call me very upset about various things. Often when parents approach me very specifically, it's about something that their son or daughter-- it's a very specific situation with regard to their son or daughter, and if I can help within the context of our policies, I'll see what I can actually do, right?

Now, actually, on issues like tuition and financial aid, the criticism tends to be fairly generalized. It's not directed to me specifically, probably because they don't know--

INTERVIEWER: I wondered if it got personalized.

HASTINGS: No, no. But we have faced criticism over why is it we're increasing our tuition at a rate greater than the CPI, to which we try to point out that our net tuition actually over the last several years has gone down because we've been increasing our financial aid actually much faster than the CPI. So that issue has come up. There has been various-- let's call it angst-- from the students about some of the new pedagogies that we tried, particularly the-- what's called TEAL, Technology-Enabled Active Learning. I've had students complain to me about that.

INTERVIEWER: In the physics area?

HASTINGS: Yeah, I've had students complain to me about that. I go through the data with them about how we believe it's a more effective way for teaching and so on. There's been, mainly, from students, also some discussion around the state of advising at MIT, and that's an ongoing debate that I keep having with the students. This is a very data-driven environment, at least at the level of the students. So I've just found if I can present them with the data and have serious discussions, then, you know, the students are willing to have serious discussions.

INTERVIEWER: How important is the advising function and good advice from professors rather than from classmates?

HASTINGS: Well, this is the difference, of course, between reality and what we say. So what we say is we would like the students to get their advice from people who are presumably knowledgeable, like, let's start with the faculty. This is academic and mentoring kind of advice. That's what we'd like. But what our survey data shows us is the first-- because we actually in the senior survey ask them where they got their advice from. The most common place is from their friends. After that, it's from their parents. Like number five is from their academic advisor, a whole bunch of other people are in there. So this is reality as opposed to what we think.

But we would say, and I actually do believe, that helping a student get positive mentoring advice, both mentoring and specific academic advice, is important to their development here. Furthermore, what we know is that certainly if you think that one measure of success is going on to graduate school-- I'm not saying that's the only measure, but certainly I'm feeling that's one measure-- we know there's a high correlation between students choosing to go to graduate school and getting good and appropriate mentoring advice from faculty. The students who have good, strong connections to the faculty are much more likely to make that choice than students who do not. The survey data clearly shows us that.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any measures of when and how students who think they got better advice got it? In other words, does it come through UROP or through the freshman seminar program or something else? In other words, even if it's number five, is there some way to tell what does work best?

HASTINGS: Yeah, so actually, good thing you mentioned UROP. So what students tell us about UROP, what's the value of UROP to them, getting to know a faculty member, presumably in part so that they can get some advice and recommendations from a faculty member. They tell us it also is valuable to them in terms of helping them to understand how to deal with ambiguity because that's the nature of research. Then also, another interesting one is telling them what they don't want to do because it helps them to think about-- you know, I mean, once you do a UROP in some area, and they say I don't like that area, well, okay now you've learned something, so you move on. So UROP in that sense is actually good for the interactions, that is, the interactions with faculty are one of the mechanisms.

INTERVIEWER: Do they recognize that? Is there a semantic issue? So many students have UROP experiences. It's something like 85 percent plus, and yet, here you come back to students saying advising faculty was fifth in your list of where they got their advice from. There seems to be a disconnect. Or do they say, oh, I only had one UROP advisor and I only saw them--

HASTINGS: So this is why I deliberately use both advising and mentoring. Because oftentimes, the students expect that what they will get from interactions with faculty is say, take this course, and don't take that course, and so on. The reality is that most of the faculty are not that knowledgeable about courses outside of their own courses. So insofar as the students look for that, they get disappointed. They say, but, you know, this person didn't tell me I should take this course and not take that course. So, they're getting that information from their classmates, from upperclassmen, right?

Whereas where the faculty are helpful is saying to them, you know, somebody doing as well as you should think about graduate school, or, you know, given your set of skills, you should think about shifting areas to focus in a different direction or something else. I mean, that's the kind of thing that they will not get from their classmates. But most of the students aren't sophisticated enough to understand that level of difference.

INTERVIEWER: Let's back up and talk about your own path as a student and what led you to MIT, starting with where were you born and where did you grow up and what were you like as a child?

HASTINGS: I was born in a place called Chardstock in Devon in England. My father was a dentist, working there. So I grew up in England, then we actually moved north, to a place called Widnes, which is just outside of Liverpool. It's actually seven miles from where the Beatles were at that time doing their thing. Then my parents moved to Jamaica when I was 10, so I moved with them. Then when I was 15, I returned to England to go to boarding school. So from then, I went on to college.

So what kind of kid was I? I was one of these-- this was the '60s right? So I was one of those kids who was very interested in the space program, the Apollo years, very motivated by-- I watched every single Star Trek episode at that time. Of course, that was Star Trek-- the original Star Trek, which only lasted three seasons, but nevertheless, I really enjoyed all those things, and that kind of motivated me. And I when I was in school, which, of course, was in the English system between England and Jamaica, which was also the English system, I was very good at science and mathematics particularly, and much less good at languages. I was actually reasonable at history, but languages, I wasn't facile with. So I struggled with languages, and I didn't struggle at all with science and mathematics.

So when time came to go to college, it just seemed to me-- I'm actually a firm believer in going with things you're strong at. It makes much more sense to do things that you enjoy than things you don't enjoy. So I wasn't going to choose to go to into kind of the more humanistic disciplines, although I actually enjoy history a lot. So I chose to go more into-- well, I chose to go into science or mathematics, and I had the choice of going into physics or mathematics or even engineering, actually.

Because when I was admitted to Oxford, they gave me a choice, so I chose to go to mathematics. So I did mathematics at Oxford, and when I my finished being a young man there, I wasn't entirely sure what to do with myself, so I thought why not go to graduate school. So I came to graduate school here at MIT. Given that I was a child of the space program, I came here to the aero and astro department to work on space things.

Now, this was 1976. I remember actually showing up here and talking to various people, and I said I want to work on space things. They said, well, six years too late. Because basically after Apollo landed on the moon in 1969, things kind of started phasing down, and the last mission was '75, as I recall. It was the Apollo Soyuz mission, and the last mission to the moon, of course, was actually canceled.

INTERVIEWER: So what was your reaction then?

HASTINGS: Boy, I gotta do something else. But you know what was phasing up at that time was energy. This is when President Carter had just come in and a lot of emphasis on alternative energy things. So I actually ended up starting to do research in energy-related work. So I worked in the-- I learned, as a discipline, plasma of physics. I worked in looking at magnetohydrodynamic energy generation and then looking at fusion energy generation.

INTERVIEWER: This all fit in aero and astro? It sounds like you should have been in physics and--

HASTINGS: Well, actually, no. It didn't quite fit in aero-astro. But MIT was sufficiently broad that I could actually do those things still while having a home as a department within aero and astro, which tells you a lot about the flexibility of the MIT system.

INTERVIEWER: But it's interesting that you were looking at space systems and applied to this department and we're taken in and then had this conversation about, well, here's my interests. That doesn't make sense it didn't happen before.

HASTINGS: Well, that I can't speak to. I mean, why did they admit me given that I clearly said I wanted to actually do that. Maybe it's because they just thought I was a good person to have around.

INTERVIEWER: Did the department have a question of redirection at that point? In other words, had they been focused on--

HASTINGS: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: --the same things you were interested in and they needed?

HASTINGS: Yes. Well, because the way at the graduate level in engineering things work is there are a few fellowships available, but, by and large, what happens, of course, is it's individual faculty and their research interests and that they can get research money in. I mean, that's what supports the students, right? So basically after 1970, the research money in going to the moon went away, and the money in alternative energy actually went up. So that's why I was able to change because I was offered a research assistantship to actually work in these alternative energy sources.

INTERVIEWER: With a professor in that department?

HASTINGS: Yeah, in the aero department, that's right. Because faculty are broadly available to do whatever they want, right?

INTERVIEWER: So there you were at Oxford in England. How and why did you think about MIT, and did you apply to other universities, too?

HASTINGS: So something I didn't tell you, along the way, actually as a science and technology person, interested in that, I had wanted to apply to MIT as an undergraduate. I thought, you know, this is the best place in the world to learn about this kind of stuff. I enjoy it. I'm good at it, so why not go to MIT? But my father looked at the sticker price, and he said, we can't afford this. Then it was much less than it is now. But, of course, one's income was much less. So he just said we can't afford this. What he didn't appreciate and what I didn't appreciate was financial aid. If we'd known that, how much financial aid was available, even then, I might well have applied. I might well have come here, but he just said no. He wouldn't let me apply because he couldn't afford to pay for it if I'd gotten in, thinking he'd have to pay the full tuition, and so I had to go somewhere else.

Now, I ended up going to Oxford. This was not a bad choice, you understand, right?

INTERVIEWER: But the communications, the whole difference between sticker price and real price--

HASTINGS: Yes, was not clear then.

INTERVIEWER: --was not clear?

HASTINGS: By the way, it's still not clear.

INTERVIEWER: That's the question.

HASTINGS: We still struggle with that, getting that across to parents and to students. Because they see our sticker price now. I mean, in today's dollars it's like $38,000 or something.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think there's anything more that MIT can or should do on that front?

HASTINGS: Well, you know, we try in every way we can to get out the message that we have a lot of financial aid, that we want people to come here, and we will enable it if they can't pay. There's still the case, of course, that we expect-- you know, the primary responsibility lies with the parents and the students, but if they can't afford it, then we will enable it. Of course, once we get people to apply and admit them, we can actually talk them through that. It's getting people into the pool. It's the people who don't even apply because they--

INTERVIEWER: Like Dan Hastings.

HASTINGS: Like me. That's right. Never applied. But to be clear, I have no regrets about my path because I went to Oxford. I got a first-rate education. I mean, a very different education than at MIT, but there's no question in mind that it was first-rate education.

INTERVIEWER: Different in what way?

HASTINGS: Well, The Oxford and Cambridge system, or the Oxbridge system, is based around essentially almost personalized tutorial interactions with students, which is very different from the MIT system. So I read mathematics, but I had two tutors, and we worked over several years through helping my understanding of mathematics. It was clear to me when I went in, at least in retrospect it was clear, that my ability to think critically was, well, okay, but not great, and by the time I came out, it was substantially better, and I'd also learned some mathematics as well.

This came about because of this twice weekly interaction, intense interaction, with tutors who basically sat and questioned me and said have you thought about this? Read this and let's discuss it. You know, when you're discussing something and at a level of detail with a very intelligent person who's responding directly to you, it very quickly sharpens your thinking. That's the Oxford system, which is actually a great system for the students who go through it. Then, of course, you build all kinds of networks at Oxford, and it's a very interesting environment.

INTERVIEWER: How do you think your preparation coming out of your boarding school in England was compared to some kind of average American high school graduate? And then how do you think your readiness or preparation at the end of your Oxford years was compared to, say, a student graduating from MIT? Sort of the inputs and the outputs?

HASTINGS: Yeah, yeah, right. Compared to a high school graduate. So that's an interesting question. I've never thought about that one, my preparation. So in the English system, you have to make choices much earlier than in the American system that's about what you'll actually do. So on the things that I did, which even in high school, mathematics and physics and so on, coming out of high school, I probably knew more than the average American undergraduate.

But on the other hand, my education wasn't so broad because all I had done since I was 13-- that's when I had to make the choice-- all I'd done since I was 13, from 13 to 17-ish, was mathematics and physics chemistry. So the broader-based education that an American high schooler could get I never got, and I've had to in some ways make it up with my own reading. I mean, I never got biology in any serious sense, and I've never actually made that one up. But some of the history I never got I have actually made up in a more substantial kind of way. So it's good and bad.

Then relative to when you say coming out at the end to MIT, again, in the Oxford system, I studied mathematics. That's all I did. That's all I did. I mean, here at MIT, even for the people who study mathematics here, half of what they do is general Institute requirements, and they have to do eight humanities and social sciences classes, and they have free electives and so on, and communication requirements. There was none of this freedom at Oxford.

INTERVIEWER: So if you were that specialized--

HASTINGS: Just specialized stuff.

INTERVIEWER: --given the tradeoffs, does that suggest that you covered a lot more ground in science and math because you were doing nothing but that?

HASTINGS: Yeah. No, no, it was very apparent to me when I arrived here, that at least in mathematics, I knew as much as a first year-- as a graduate student here at the end of their first year. Now, in many other areas, I knew much less. So in that sense, it's a question of time. I actually think, frankly, that the system here is better.

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything about your Oxford experience or even your boarding school experience that you thought was better that has influenced decisions or thinking about undergraduate education here as you go about helping make policy?

HASTINGS: Well, this is where it comes back to time to reflect. I definitely had much more time to reflect in my Oxford experience than the students have here. So that's why I continually emphasize it to students. Again, this is not just me making this up. I mean, first of all, I believe it's actually true. I had more time than the average students get here.

Secondly, we know from our data, survey data from students, our students that we send to Cambridge and then come back after a year, they say the same thing, that they found suddenly they had more time to think and to reflect. But there's actually something else we know. People who study what they call deep learning-- I mean, how is it you learn something deeply as opposed to in a shallow way-- will tell you time to reflect is critical to deep learning. So in that sense, it's a really good thing to actually have.

INTERVIEWER: Does it take a special skill or discipline to use that time well?

HASTINGS: Oh, you do have to be disciplined. You don't have to waste it. What you have to do is go back over the knowledge you're learning in several different ways. Again, because what the modern learning theory would tell us is if the more ways that you can actually try to process what you actually learn, the better off you actually learn it, because you're just looking at it from different perspectives. So reflecting and then attacking it again from several different perspectives is just a very important thing to do.

INTERVIEWER: Going back to your childhood, you talked about loving rocketry and the space programs, were you a tinkerer? Did you build rockets yourself?

HASTINGS: I tried. I tried, not just rockets, but various kinds of physical devices. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't. I built a lot of model aircraft. I liked to do that.

INTERVIEWER: Although you ended up doing engineering that was more theoretical than--

HASTINGS: Yeah, yeah. Because what I found out as I did that is that in building things with my hands, I was okay, but I wasn't that skillful at it. Whereas the more things which have theoretical-- well, mathematically-- I was actually much better at that. So it was the case of going with my strengths, I guess.

INTERVIEWER: Did you apply to other graduate programs besides MIT, or were you simply confident that you would be admitted?

HASTINGS: Actually, I did. I applied to Brown, as I recall, and University of Illinois, if I recall, oh, and Princeton.

INTERVIEWER: But all American?

HASTINGS: Yeah, yeah. No, all American because I decided after finishing at Oxford, I wanted to come to America, I guess. Seek my fortune in America.

INTERVIEWER: How much culture shock was there coming from England to the US?

HASTINGS: Actually, there was some culture shock. Now, not as much culture shock as going to, say, Texas or California. No, there was some culture shock. One of the things I noticed immediately was how much more expansive was people's sense of distance here. You realize-- you live in England, as I did, and before, I lived in Jamaica, right?

Jamaica is an island 144 miles long, 22 miles wide. In England, there is no place you're not more than 75 miles from the sea. It's a long island, but you can head off, and you'll hit the sea if you head off in the right direction there. The point is it's not that big a place. One of the things I observed very quickly in talking to people here is their sense of distance was so much larger. I appreciated that once I started to drive in this country. I mean, you can get in a car and drive for a whole day and you've just about reached some part of New York State. You won't be at the sea. Well, you would be at the sea if you drive towards Boston, but you won't be to the sea for many, many days. That sense of just distance, that was one thing.

The other thing I appreciated that I got to see pretty quickly was the sense of-- that at that time was, and still is, a young country, you know, certainly relative to living in England. So in England, there's just so much that's bound up by being an old country, and in terms of the social culture at that time, you know, fairly hierarchical.

Believe me, going to Oxford, I saw that in spades. Because Oxford and Cambridge are the places-- the elite universities in England produced most of the political and upper class, and so I ran into a lot of those kind of people. So there's a very strong sense of a class culture, at least I found at that time at Oxford, and coming here, there was just so much less of it. It was actually very enlightening, and it was a relief to me. The way I tell people now is, you know, in England, it was kind of who is your father, and what's your family line? Here it was what have you done for me lately? I came across that attitude pretty quickly.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it affected people's approach to science and engineering in any way?