David A. Mindell PhD ’96

INTERVIEWER: Today is September 23, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. We are talking this afternoon to David A. Mindell, the Dibner professor of the history of engineering and manufacturing, head of MIT's science, technology, and society department, and chair of MIT150 Anniversary Committee. He's also a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, housemaster for Edgerton House, a graduate student residence hall, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, an honor given for outstanding teaching.

He earned undergraduate degrees from Yale in both literature and electrical engineering, and a PhD from MIT in the science, technology, and society program. His research and writing have ranged widely, including the history of aviation and space exploration, the archaeology of deepwater shipwrecks, and the social implications of automation. He's also a private pilot. David, thank you for talking with us today. A couple of years ago, you were named chair of the committee responsible for shaping the program to mark MIT's 150th anniversary. Do celebrations like this matter, and what purposes do they serve?

MINDELL: Well, obviously they matter. We're putting a lot of effort into it, and a lot of time into it. And there's actually a small literature in the history of science on commemorations and anniversary celebrations. It's a little bit unsurprising, they're used as moments of definition and looking back as often a way to look forward as well, in that how you define the past, any moment sort of reflects how you want to define your own future, as a person or as an institution.

So yes, these moments matter. One hundred and fifty years as a long time, it's a sort of round number. Sesquicentennial, which is nice word, somehow people have trouble saying it, but I hope they say more of that as the time comes. And when Susan Hockfield asked me to do it, she was very clear. She said, you know, this is a chance to help the Institute define its vision for itself for the next century or so. So that's why I was willing to do it. I'm a historian, I'm interested in the history of MIT, but simply celebrating the history of MIT was probably a little too small a topic, and of mostly interest to all of us who are here and who have gone here. Whereas hopefully the future-looking part of it is of interest to the rest of the world, also.

INTERVIEWER: Did you start, as a historian, looking into this literature? And were there any particular celebrations that caught your interest, and you said wow, if maybe we could--?

MINDELL: No, I didn't look at the literature. I was already aware of the mid century convocation that MIT held in 1949, which I think was a very important moment. And I think I even gave a talk about it, at one point, to the alumni, 10 or 15 years ago. So that was the closest model that I had in my mind.

INTERVIEWER: The mandate to help the Institute define its vision of itself going forward is a big one. Do you feel that that's going to happen, and do you have more of a sense of what you think the vision is, or should be, going forward, now that you've been through some of the planning process?

MINDELL: I do hope it happens. I mean, I hope it happens intellectually as much as anything. You know, there's any number of administrative issues that people deal with, and that they will have to deal with in the next 50 years, are more of inside baseball kind of topics, I think, for administrators. But you know, what is the role of a place like this in the world we live in? It seems to have a role. I don't see the place dying on the vine. It seems to be thriving. But a lot of other great institutions are withering, and we're not immune from that. And I think things will change a lot, even in the next 10 years, much less the next 50. So it depends a little bit on how much the community takes up the task, and how they take up the task.

INTERVIEWER: You've been here about 20 years, now. How do you think about the role of this place, and has it changed over the time you've been here, your thinking about it, as as well as the role?

MINDELL: Well, they're both changed. I got a PhD in the history of technology, a fraction of which was a study of various things that had happened at MIT. So my understanding of the place has changed a lot in the last twenty years. And MIT has changed, too. I came here first as a grad student in 1991. The Cold War had just ended, or was ending. I didn't even know it at the time, but Chuck Vest was just also becoming president. And at the time, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the federal patron, particularly the defense part of it, going away. What would MIT do and be? How would it contribute to the competitiveness crisis that a lot of people felt the US was in the 1980s? And you know, this was before the internet, this was before a lot of the sort of prospects in biotech, these things were all happening, but under the surface, really. So in that sense, a lot changed.

I think it started before then, but there has been an explicit understanding of, and also articulation of, the role of the research university in economic growth, as much as anything, that's gained traction in the last 20 years. I think it started in the '80s, but it really became widespread. And MIT was a key node in the emergence of that idea, in the last half of the 20th century. And that really wasn't so much around when the '80s got started, I think. And we see that in our class that we teach on the history of MIT. They are not talking about the university as an engine of economic development really up until about that point. They're talking about supplying engineers to industry, and invention, and there are plenty of entrepreneurs around, but that sort of phrasing was a product of the '80s and then the '90s, and then it became very widespread.

So that's a huge change. And it has its problems and its tensions. It's not only for the better. So that's one big way I think of changes. There's a big swing toward industrial support for research, and there was a swing sort of back away from it, toward the federal government, again in the last 10 years. So of course, a lot has changed.

INTERVIEWER: So who else was on the committee, and how did you work together to think about what you wanted to do in the spring of 2011, and what did you wind up with that think are going to be important pieces?

MINDELL: The 150 Steering Committee?

INTERVIEWER: Correct.

MINDELL: Well, the actual list is a matter of record. But it was basically actually the broadest representation of people from the Institute on committee I've ever been on. President of the Graduate Student Council, president of the Undergraduate Student Council, alumni representative, associate deans from, I think, at least four schools, associate provost, the secretary of the Corporation, you know, very many of the sort of constituent groups on campus were represented. You don't see that that often on a committee.

And it was interesting, because we started our work in the fall of '08, and then there was this huge financial crisis. And I remember very distinctly, you know, as that was unfolding, hearing from people who had their eye on the endowment in real time, which I certainly don't claim to, really saying, this is a change in lifestyle for a generation. I first heard that in October of '08. And that really raised the question of, what should we do? Should we do anything? How should, what's appropriate?

That was really a huge question early on. And in a way, that was, I think, a good question, because it was focusing. And until that point it was a little overwhelming, in sort of classic MIT style, of the sky's the limit, you can do anything you want to, and we didn't have a budget developed. That was part of what we did for the first year. But there were many wacky ideas on the table, some of them very good ideas, and a few of them just didn't survive because of the financial crisis.

And over the course of that year-- and we were also handed a lot of things that had already been started. So this was not something, we were not the first people to think about the 150th. Is the book projects had already been commissioned and started, the oral history project had already been started. We weren't starting from scratch, by any stretch, but I think there was a feeling that we were hoping, literally, to be a steering committee, and coordinate and steer, and then formulate a few things. And I have endless lists of ideas that we'd come up with.

And you know, of those, both the projects that had been started and the ideas that came up, I felt that, certainly for me as chair of the committee, but it was also true for the faculty on the committee, that we had an obligation to make sure that the-- there are many things you can celebrate about MIT. Many of them are worth celebrating. But ultimately, the business of the place is ideas, and research, and education. And we felt an obligation to ensure that those ideals, and there's lots of variants of them, but we all pretty much agree on the core, were given a quite central place in the celebration.

And that's where the symposia series came out of. We can have symposia on the history of department x and the history of department y, and those will be fascinating to the people in or who graduated from those departments, but not that much interest of the rest of the world. And so the symposia are really, what's the best way to celebrate the things that we're good at? Get the people who are good at them to think them through, and talk them through, and focus on big problems, and think about, and hopefully make a little progress. And some of those may be from MIT, and some of them may not be, but if people walk away from the 150th and say, you know, wow, that was really the moment when issues of economics and finance really got hashed through and there was some progress made, that's, to me, the best tribute we can make, to--

INTERVIEWER: That's one of the symposia topics?

MINDELL: Yeah, that's the first one, actually. Finance, Economics, and Policy.

INTERVIEWER: Out of five or six, you decided?

MINDELL: Six, there are six.

INTERVIEWER: While you were chairing the committee, you mentioned that you've also been teaching a course on the history of MIT. What have you learned about the Institute and its history? Were there many surprises to you?

MINDELL: I should say a little bit about the background of that course because, I began, the first thing I asked for when I agreed to chair the committee was a copy of every book that's been written about MIT. And I have, it's about two shelves' worth. And I had read a few of them, but not too many of them. And you know, that's a big task, to read two shelves' worth of books while you're in the regular throes of your semester, anyway.

So often when I'm faced with a task like that, I say, I'm just going to teach a class on it, and then we'll all learn. And then I sort of started thinking about that, and thought it would be good to teach it during the spring term of the actual 150th. And actually, Roe Smith, who's a close friend in my department, he almost independently came to a similar, it was really a thought. And I said, I've been thinking about that, too. And then we got together and we realized, it was a couple of things.

First of all, there's been enough professional history written of MIT that you could teach a course on it. Because you couldn't really do it with just memoirs and commemorative volumes. That's not MIT-quality for the students to read. But there's been journal articles and other things, and not just us, in fact, very little of it is written by us MIT faculty, but our colleagues around have written a lot of good work that bears on the Institute. So there's enough there, which I think, 10 years ago, there wouldn't have been.

Secondly, it's a really good way to teach the history of American technology for the last 150 years. And Roe is a specialist in the 19th century, and I've more specialized in the 20th century, although I've done some 19th century, too. So we had a nice kind of joining of expertise. And you know, just the more we thought about it, the more it seemed like a no-brainer, really. And students, that was hypothetical at the time, now we know it for sure. Students are interested in the history of where they go to school. They really care about that.

And one thing I learned from teaching with Roe over the years, is, every class has an overt purpose and a covert purpose. The overt purpose of MIT is, you can talk about the dorms, talk about fraternities, and student organizations, and great presidents and things, and the covert purpose is a more subtle history of technology in general, the history of American science and technology viewed through the lens of what happened here, and the history of MIT viewed through the lens of larger-- And you have all the topics that, not all the topics in American history, but most of the stuff that Roe and I love. You have the Civil War, the First World World, you have big business, you have World War I, you have the '60s, the moon project, there's a lot of good stuff to encompass there.

So what have I learned about it, teaching it? One is that, I mean, I knew this for the 20th century, but I had not read much about Rogers. But the degree to which his own, the degree to which the founding of MIT was wrapped up in the great problems of the day, and in a sense all the issues of MIT have always been wrapped up in the great problems of the day. You know, William Barton Rogers, he was teaching at the University of Virginia. There's every reason that if he was such a visionary, which he was, that we should be celebrating the 150th anniversary of Virginia Institute of Technology. We're not. He decided that that was not the place he wanted to found his Institute.

And he moved to Boston, and he married a Boston abolitionist woman, and he became part of Northern-- you know, at the time, Boston was a hotbed of very, actually, radical abolitionist culture. And these things were all sort of wrapped up in how the Institute got started. And then, and we'll see this next spring, the poor guy finally gets this charter signed, and his thing is created, and two days later, this country falls apart into the most bitter conflict it's ever had.

And so the proximity of this very forward-looking vision with these very sort of concrete, real, political, cultural, racial, problems at the time, is profound. And then also just the basic, there are things that are embedded in the Institute from that original period, and his original vision, that are still there. And some of them are tensions that aren't going to go away. They're animating tensions. Some of them are just the culture of the place, and the things that you walk around, and you see on a day-to-day basis, that one deals with, positive or negative, or in one form or another have been around in every generation, in a way.

INTERVIEWER: Animating tensions like what?

MINDELL: The appropriate role for industry is a really good one. You know, how much of the Institute be focusing on fundamental problems, science problems, you know, although I like the word fundamental better, versus how much it should it be solving problems of immediate relevance to industry. And that's a pendulum that swings practically like clockwork on a 10-year time cycle. And there are advantages and disadvantages to both sides of that. And then the sort of educational mirror of that is, Mens et Manus? How should we be training our students? What is the right mix of practicality and theory, or classroom learning, or however you want to put it?

INTERVIEWER: Has that been a pendulum, too, or has that been more a sort of secular shift from one--?

MINDELL: I think it's been a pendulum. You know, all the emphasis on engineering science at the end of the Second World War, which was responsible for many great things, also left many graduates, and a lot of people felt, American engineering at the highest level, disconnected from the problems of American industry. And then a move, sort of beginning in the '80s, more toward thinking about systems, thinking about design as a component of engineering education, which are moves that go back to things that were done in the '10s and '20s, really kind of brought back in, a lot more practical kinds of things, and reconnected a lot of the engineering work with--

And you know, again, the compliment to that pendulum is the defense and the federal government pendulum, which has also been there from the beginning, and what is the relationship between the federal government, what is the role of military training on campus, what is the relationship between the armed services. You know, what is the relationship between big business. These are all things that have been there. And what are the demographics of the student body? Along class lines, along gender lines, along race lines. Those are all things that, one hopes there's been a progressive progress there, and I think there has. But it's also been sort of there from the beginning.

INTERVIEWER: In looking at one of the annual reports you have in the list of documents for the class, I was surprised by how many women there were in the earlier years. Not just one Ellen Swallow Richards, but a whole bunch of them quite early on. I think they were mostly special students, but--

MINDELL: Yeah. They were special students, I'm actually forgetting when they were formally fully admitted, but--

INTERVIEWER: 1880s, maybe, 1870s.

MINDELL: But that's certainly the case, yeah. When you look at the Ivies, my alma mater accepted women in 1969. And at MIT, there were never a lot, percentage-wise. But they were pretty consistently on campus, from--

INTERVIEWER: But there were a lot more in those early years, I think. And then, I don't know whether the numbers dropped as the number of special students went down, and they didn't become regular students in same numbers.

MINDELL: Yeah. And there were the home economics programs and things, and the special laboratories. I mean, the laboratory as a teaching unit is also something that you see from quite early in the beginning. And you know, and the tension between MIT and Harvard. You know, again, I think it's an animating tension to this day. People are very tense about it, sometimes, when we try to compete for faculty and stuff. But it probably makes both institutions better.

INTERVIEWER: In your two bookshelves of documents and writings about MIT, were there any that you particularly loved, or found especially interesting?

MINDELL: Well, I would go back to the first one I read, actually, which is the 100th anniversary volume of the electrical engineering department. Which is a remarkable book, for a commemorative book. A, because it was written by participants, but people took a lot of care with the articles in there. And I read the book when I was a graduate student, and it really helped me shape what became my dissertation book. And actually, one thing they did when they wrote that book, was they kept the original drafts of the articles, which are considerably longer, in the archives, and so I was able to use those. And you know, that's just a random example about how a book that was sort of handed out at the 100th anniversary party sort of survives as a great resource. And not too many other departments have those books.

I'm actually, my head has been away from the class for six months at this point, so it's hard for me to remember them.

INTERVIEWER: How about the student research projects, if we could stay on the class one minute longer? You had students find areas of student life that they wanted to research the history of. Did they focus on any areas that were not well-studied previously, and did they turn up anything that surprised you, or anything that actually seemed to add to what was known knowledge?

MINDELL: Student life hasn't been well-studied previously, in general. In fact, it's very hard to find out too much about student life before the age of our current alumni, in a way, when you can ask people, what did a dorm room look like, what was the background composition of the students who were here, what did daily life look like. That's not very well-documented. I hope it will become better documented as we move through the 150, and we're collecting some films and other things. But it's not been a subject of hardly any history.

You know, the best piece of the students was about the, I'm going to forget the actual name of the organization. The Arab students at MIT organization. This really interesting piece about all the ways that the politics of the Middle East, and the politics of U.S. relationships in the Middle East, brought certain students here at certain times, and the way that those politics helped sort of cement the core of that organization, how they related to Jewish students on campus, what those people then went back, in some cases, some of them stayed here for their careers, others went back to their home countries, and, you know, what that interaction is. It was a really interesting paper. That was just things I didn't know at all.

INTERVIEWER: Do you plan to do anything with those papers? Will they be put up on the web for the sesquicentennial?

MINDELL: I think we'll try to put some of them on the web. They are student papers. Not all of them are publication quality. That one happened to be. And there's, the MIT Rifle Team has a really interesting history. Because it used to be, all students had to take military training. So, you know, shooting pistols and rifles is an old part of an MIT education, and not just one more varsity sport that we have. That's, I'm sure, true of many--

INTERVIEWER: And why did students have to take guns?

MINDELL: That was part of the original idea of the Institution, and its national service component.

INTERVIEWER: From the 1860s?

MINDELL: I believe so, yeah. I mean, it was obviously obvious early on, and--

INTERVIEWER: I wonder if women were required.

MINDELL: I don't think so.

INTERVIEWER: There weren't very many. The phys. ed requirement for women didn't come along until, I think, the 1970s.

MINDELL: And I think the phys. ed requirement came out of this military training requirement. I think that's what it morphed into.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Are you planning to do any articles or a book about MIT? You've been delving so deeply into it, and thinking about it. Is it a tempting topic for you? MINDELL: Not necessarily. First of all I don't, I mean every-- not the first book I wrote, but the last two books I wrote had a big component about MIT in them. Partly because it's important, and partly because it's easy for me to study. But I'm wary of spending too much of my scholarly career writing about the place that I work. I don't have a whole lot of perspective on it at this point, and-- I mean, I am writing a series of articles and things for the 150th, and I'm sure there will be more of that. And I hope, maybe even one retrospective one about the process, and what we've learned in the process. So no, I don't--

INTERVIEWER: Advice for the 200th?

MINDELL: Or the 800th? Do I have advice for the 200th? Ask me in a year.

INTERVIEWER: Your course has a substantial amount of reading. In many weeks there's more than 150 fifty pages. Is that typical of humanities courses at MIT, and are students surprised by that?

MINDELL: Students are always surprised by the amount of reading in humanities courses at MIT. For some reason, they expect them to be easy. I don't know why that is. So I think that probably is typical for a humanities course at MIT. We always debate about how much we should cater to the students' expectations, versus hold their expectations high. Because that's what, humanities students read a lot. That's what they do. And if we want to be the best, we want to be MIT-quality in the humanities, as well as in sciences and engineering, we have to teach the way that excellent places teach the humanities. And you can't do the humanities without a lot of reading.

INTERVIEWER: And writing. You also require a substantial amount of writing. You have short papers almost every week, and two longer papers. How do you find your students' writing skills, and are they much better by the time they finish this class than when they started?

MINDELL: I find the students' writing skills generally pretty adequate. There were freshmen in the class, but there weren't a lot of freshmen. All of MIT puts a heavy emphasis on communication, so that I do think the Institute is mostly successful at bringing the level of the writing up.

It's always a funny line you get into, about how much remedial-- if someone really can't write, we refer them to a writing tutor, and we try to help them. But it's not, per se, a class that teaches writing. But we mostly ask them to write response papers, so they get in a practice of writing on a regular basis. And we don't grade them very harshly. We just want them to have the chance to communicate their ideas. Again, and this is something that goes back to the beginning, MIT's always had a big part of its requirements that are humanities and communications. And it always could be better, but I think that we do reasonably well on that score. Because any scientist and any engineer recognize the importance of those skills.

INTERVIEWER: I think the outside world thinks of MIT students as being so math and science-oriented that they don't think of them as capable of being literate, and writers. And yet their SAT scores on verbal are almost as high as on math. They're very high.

MINDELL: They only become narrow once they get here. They're not narrow when they come in.

INTERVIEWER: You've won prizes for your writing. What kinds of advice do you give your students about writing generally, and about writing about technical subjects, both for techie audiences and for lay audiences?

MINDELL: Use the active voice. Subject verb object is always a good structure. Can't go wrong on that one. I'm a pretty mechanical kind of thinker that way. And I actually think MIT students like that. I give them a little rules, follow these rules you're not going to go that badly wrong.

INTERVIEWER: The Mindell version of Strunk and White?

MINDELL: Yeah, some of them are just derived from Strunk and White, and similar kinds of things.

INTERVIEWER: Did learning more about MIT's history give you any ideas about where you think it should be headed in the coming years, for yourself?

MINDELL: You know, I used to be more hopeful than MIT would broaden his horizons beyond science and engineering. I've become less hopeful about that in the last seven or eight years or so. And if anything, I think the history makes me less hopeful about that. I don't think there's too much desire to do more than excel in science and engineering, pretty traditionally defined. I hope that changes. I think there have been times that it might have changed. And so learning about the history, I realized the ways that's come up before have been rejected, and the one or two times I've seen it were part of that longer story.

INTERVIEWER: And yet, MIT differs from a place like Caltech in that it has tried to make sure that its humanities and social sciences were first-rate, the same as the engineering and science. And I gather that there are new NRC rankings coming out next week, and I'm hearing that MIT has, in fact, continued to do really, really well in those non-science and engineering areas.

MINDELL: I think there are many, I mean, when you talk about social sciences, you have economics as a social science, and MIT's been incredibly strong there. Ditto for linguistics. The humanities has been a tougher one, and how you really think about truly integrating that in the engineering education, as opposed to being marginal to the kind of science core. And there's a whole other story about the attempt to revise the GIRs that I, and many people, poured many years into, then went pretty close to nowhere. People just didn't, enough people, at the right moment, really didn't want to change.

INTERVIEWER: So what would your MIT look like? In other words, you were talking descriptively in terms of, it hasn't, and you don't expect that it will. Normatively you sound like you think it should be different. What would your MIT look like?

MINDELL: Oh, I think properly structured, this is an example more than the whole thing, but engineering is a wonderful basis, is a sort of new liberal arts education. Where if you really have a good dose of the humanities and social sciences integrated with how you learn engineering, then that is a tremendously powerful way to send people into the world to do their thing. Much more so than a traditional liberal arts education, where there's a little bit of Physics for Poets added in. A lot of other places do it.

And there are ways that I think graduates, some of our engineering graduates are always going to be just tremendously outstanding people, and real leaders. And that will continue to the case. But on a broader scale, there's always still the same phenomenon, that they do very well in their careers for a while, and then they don't move up into the upper ranks, either of management or different kinds of leadership, or, count the number of engineers in Congress, and you know--

INTERVIEWER: How much do you think that's a question of education, and what does or doesn't happen while they're here for four years, and how much do you think it's a question of who gets admitted, and what kinds of skills and instincts they show at the front end?

MINDELL: Well, we have our choice of who we admit, so the admissions process is part of how you think about the education. We are the place that attracts the students who are most narrowly interested and narrowly excellent in the sciences and engineering. And you know, students know that. And students who aren't interested in that go to Stanford, or Harvard, or other places.

We could change the way that we are perceived in that. The admissions' office would be a big part of that. That sort of thing comes up, especially now that even the undergraduate population is going to be increased a little bit. Is there any attempt to rethink who's being admitted? No, is basically the answer that I've heard. So that's a chicken and an egg kind of thing.

Culture is a very difficult thing to change, I don't think you could change it top-down, but there is a strong culture among young graduates that hardcore, here's your science. And we enforce it by what we set as the requirements. How we schedule them, what kind of classrooms they go in. We went through all this with that thing, that these are the important things, and then all this other stuff is nice.

INTERVIEWER: That was part of the task force discussions?

MINDELL: Oh yeah. I mean, I don't have that experience in my personal teaching, but the individual experiences is different from what you select as the overall.

INTERVIEWER: You use the word integrate a couple of times. How would you go about integrating the humanistic education with the science and engineering in a way that's different from what's being done now, and have you tried it?

MINDELL: Yeah. I mean, that's a tall question. There's a lot of pieces to that. And you know, for example, the physics that we require now-- and, well, there are people who do this in ways. You can teach those subjects with an eye towards the applications, or the historical development, or the context. And where you treat those pieces, again, not as external but as core. And some people do. And a whole curriculum of that looks different, though. The requirements are such that the students have a common experience of the science subjects, and a very uncommon experience of the humanities and social science subjects. That's potentially something you could change. So there are all these different kinds of levers. And I don't want to get into the, because really, there's a lot of minutiae in those rules, which, some of them I've blocked out. But we're all much more familiar with it than we want to be from that experience.

INTERVIEWER: Right. Although there are very few colleges today that have a real common core of anything. MIT's an exception. But unless you go to St. John's or Columbia, it's hard to find a common humanities, arts, social sciences--

MINDELL: Absolutely. But the fact that here, it is in one area and not in another-- the two cultures divide is more healthy here than it should be.

INTERVIEWER: Let's go back to your own personal history. Tell us about where you were born and raised, about your family, and your childhood, what your parents did.

MINDELL: I was born on Long Island, and moved away when I was four. My father worked, he's an electro-optical engineer, and he worked in the defense industry building sort of aerial cameras in the '60s. And then, partly because of the post-Sputnik responses, a lot of that industry got converted into educational technologies, and at that point, we moved to Rochester, New York, which is a big optical city. And my father became a chief engineer at an old camera company called Graflex, and begin building educational filmstrips and slide projectors and things. And my mother was a teacher and writer, and later, an entrepreneur.

And so I grew up mostly in Rochester, New York, and benefited from a confluence of two things, maybe you could even say three things. The confluence I was going to speak of, was my father ran a big engineering lab, among other things. And they used to discard their old equipment. And he would bring it home, and we would fix it, and then we could use it. And also, right about when I got into junior high was when the Apple 2 came out. And the company my father worked for, he was trying to convince them to get into personal computers as educational technologies. So those things were around the house from very early on.

And the second confluence-- you know, it's always hard to look for roots-- was the confluence of the bicentennial and growing up in Pittsford, New York, which is a Erie Canal boomtown, which had a real sense of history around the bicentennial, but also more in general. And so I was always very interested in American history, and interested in machinery, and in particularly computers, and then I got into electronics from computers.

Because I started programming computers in seventh grade, but I never found the kind of hermetic world of the programmer itself interesting, and I started poking volt meters into the back of the computer, and gradually got the computer programs to flip switches on and off, and that got me very interested in electronics. And so I've always been, then, starting through junior high and high school, very interested in the borderline between analog and digital electronics, and the borderline between hardware and software, and in electronics. And I quit all my music lessons, and sort of found a level of attention for that that I'd never had before.

And my history with MIT is funny, because it starts right around then, too. Which was, my father took a summer course offered by the ILP in 1981, with what was then the Architecture Machine Group. And it was Nick Negroponte, and three or four of his other core people. And it was in August, and our family lived here for two weeks. Mostly my brother and I were sailing on the Charles River, and then one or two days my father had to go somewhere else for a business trip, and we sat in his place, and sort of saw this thing as it was just getting formulated.

INTERVIEWER: You were how old then, approximately?

MINDELL: I was fourteen. And that was my first contact with MIT. Although my father, he went to Brooklyn Polytech, so to him MIT was always the citadel. And the next year I actually came to Harvard for summer school to study electronics in the summer. But then when I started looking at colleges, I was very interested in the humanities, still. And I didn't come here because I didn't think it was broad enough.

And I went to Yale, because Yale was one of the only places you could study engineering as a major, without enrolling in a separate engineering school. Even at Princeton, you couldn't, it's a separate school, I think. And I went to Yale to be an electrical engineering major. But my freshman year, I had a really great, truly inspiring literature professor, who sort of suggested that I might think about that, and I ended up doing a double major in literature and electrical engineering. Which is, you know, my mom is a writer, my father's an engineer, it's not that surprising.

INTERVIEWER: Did your mother always work with you on your writing?

MINDELL: My mother taught me how to write, I never learned it on school.

INTERVIEWER: You were very good by that time you entered college.

MINDELL: Well, she always told me, which I sort of believe, I'm not a naturally good writer. But I've learned the discipline of it in a lot of ways, I can make it--

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any career goals as a child, or going through college?

MINDELL: Yeah, that was also-- my father worked for a big company, and his company got bought also right about 1981, and he basically was out of a job at age 50. And he consulted, and it was a very uncertain time. My brother and I were both heading off to college. And that was really what spurred my mother to start her business, which then supported the family for the next 20 years, for the most part.

INTERVIEWER: Some kind of educational technology?

MINDELL: Yeah, sort of doing corporate education, high-level reading and writing training skills, for people in companies. And women's classes, on women's communication skills. And actually, eventually, my father always did some engineering consulting, but he sort of folded it and did a lot of the back-office work for that business. And actually, so I always had this sense that I didn't want to work for a big company, because I thought they would turn their back on you at any time. And it's interesting, because a lot of my colleagues, my peers, are now learning that lesson in our forties, which I learned somewhat in my teens.

I did work for Xerox all four summers I was in college, and had very good experience there in these sort of corporate internships. I had a great mentor, you know, I got to fly all over to the world, and do this kind of work, but I never really wanted to do that when I finished college. But I really love engineering, and I love machines.

And I was always interested in aerospace and aviation. Hard to work in aerospace without working in defense, which I didn't really want to do, although I didn't mind parts of it. But a lot of that, too, is big corporate stuff, or was at the time.

INTERVIEWER: Where did the love of airplanes come from? Anywhere in particular?

MINDELL: My father always loved trains, and still to this day. But I think there were a couple experiences that he took us to, that I just became enamored of airplanes. And I flew in high school. I worked at a flying school and got paid in free flying lessons. So you had your pilot's license pretty early? No, I never finished my license till I was, about, after I got tenure. It was one of my few regrets, is that I didn't finish my license and start flying more when I was younger.

And so, you know, I always knew through college that I could support myself. I didn't have a lot of anxiety about making a living, and I always consulted on programming and stuff. It was easy. And so I wasn't just worried about getting a job. That wasn't a big concern. And actually, took a year off and was a ski instructor after I was in school. Because I knew I needed a little time to just let my education settle in, and think.

And around that same time, I became aware of the engineering stuff that was surrounding Woods Hole, and the robotics there. I mean, they had discovered the Titanic there. I sort of knew about it. I didn't pay a lot of attention. Oceans were just not my fascination. It just wasn't something I had grown up following, or being fascinated by. My brother's a biologist, he always loved that stuff. But the more I looked at the undersea world, the more it seemed very appealing. I had spend a little time in Wood's Hole as a kid, and it seemed like a way to be outside, and have some adventure, and do really interesting engineering, without-- I liked the idea of having a job in a research environment. That was not being a student. I didn't want to do that. I wanted a job at a university, and Woods Hole was very much like a university. And so it took me a year of lobbying, but I finally sort of talked my way in there.

INTERVIEWER: And what were you doing for them?

MINDELL: You know, there I was building computers, and building sonars, and building electronics. Which is everything I loved. I learned a lot very quickly. The guy who was my mentor, who I worked with very, very closely, still someone who advises graduate students from MIT, his grad students would struggle to get to see him for a couple hours in a month, and I was working with him eight hours a day, Dana Yoerger. He was just a first-rate, still is, engineer and engineering mind.

And we would go to sea three, four times a year, as part of this group, that was Bob Ballard's group, and also there, I mean, literally the Cold War ended there. I remember being in Woods Hole when the Berlin Wall came down. And that was a huge crisis for them, because the Navy was really the prime sponsor until right about then.

It was very technical work, and unlike space flight, which it was similar to, you got to take things out and try them. It was very experimental, and there was not a lot of formalism around it. So if something broke, you just brought it home, and you brought it back to sea three months later. And it was a very fortunate time I was there. I think there just a very tight group that worked together very closely, and somewhat to my surprise, most ocean engineers are mechanically trained, and mechanically inclined. So someone who could do electronics was a rare commodity for them. And so I just--

INTERVIEWER: And increasingly useful.

MINDELL: Yeah. And also, I could program, too. And for a while, quite a while, I was the lowest person on the totem pole, so I was cheap, so I got to go on all the really exciting trips. And so for a few years, I just traveled all over the world.

INTERVIEWER: But somehow you didn't see this as your career path. You didn't say, how can I stay in it? You veered off.

MINDELL: Yeah, I never expected to stay in that. And one thing I liked about it was, I felt like I wanted five years of real, serious engineering expertise. Because I didn't expect to stay in it. And from Dana, I really got two things. One of them was, he was a PhD who really knew how to use his knowledge in the world. Which was very attractive to me. Until then, I never really saw that I would be interested in getting a PhD.

But I didn't want to get it in engineering. I could see the career path there. Running a big lab and shoveling grant money in, it just seemed too predictable to me. And I'm not an academic engineer. I'm a very hands-on kind of industrial engineer. I am an academic historian, and I think about those things as an academic.

And then also, Dana was an MIT grad, and I used to go on ski trips with his fraternity brothers. And that was my first introduction to the sort of technical culture of MIT. And that was when I sort of began to put my eye on the place.

INTERVIEWER: To come back to your undergraduate experience at Yale, how similar or different do you think it really was from MIT undergraduate experience?

MINDELL: I think it was quite different. It was very much, and still is, a sort of basic science engineering education. You know, there were maybe 16 faculty in electrical engineering, there were 16 required courses, each one taught the thing they do. A lot of sort of basic theoretical work, not very good lab facilities, not very hands-on. I had a lot of that. I knew how to build electronics, and I did that on my own, all through college. So that was good for me, because I wasn't going to learn the theoretical stuff on my own. But it was not-- you didn't have colleagues starting companies, or going to work for interesting technology companies.

There were maybe six or eight electrical engineering majors in my year. It was much smaller and more peripheral as an engineering. It wasn't really an immersion in the culture that you get here. And you know, I think academically, intellectually, it was just as good as I would get, not quite as broad, in some ways, technically, as I would have gotten here. But it didn't have the same ties into it. Like the Woods Hole thing. I found that on my own. I didn't really find that through--

INTERVIEWER: But the rest of your Yale experience, your other courses, and your friends, and your activities. What was that like?

MINDELL: Well, you're always a little bit of an outlier as an engineering major there. But you also had to be more well-rounded, because the requirements for everybody, they're exactly the opposite of what they are here. They were lots of humanities and a little science. But most of my friends were not science majors. They were literature and other, and English majors and whatnot. I didn't really like it there all that much. I'm not sure I would have liked it anywhere when I was 20.

But I got a superlative education. And I knew it at the time, and I was ready for it. I didn't need two years to party after high school. I had had my fun in high school, and I was really ready for the kind of serious engagement. So I feel like I took very good advantage of what that place that offer. And you know, I remember my sophomore English class, the one with this guy, where I would walk out of his seminar, and say, wow, that was mind-blowing. I'm never going to think the same way again. And I did that every week for a whole year.