Eugene B. Skolnikoff ’50, SM ’50, PhD ’65

INTERVIEWER: Today is November 18, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. This interview is part of the MIT 150 Infinite History project.

We are talking this morning with Eugene B. Skolnikoff, emeritus professor of political science at MIT, whose focus is science and public policy and international affairs.

He headed MIT's political science department, and was director of its Center for International Studies. He was a member of the Pounds Panel, appointed by MIT's president Howard Johnson in 1969 to examine MIT's two special defense-oriented research laboratories. And later led a study of MIT's international posture when it was coming under attack for work with Japan.

He also chaired the committee that set up the annual Killian Lecture and was on the Faculty Committee that advised on the presidential search that resulted in the appointment of MIT president Charles Vest.

Professor Skolnikoff earned three MIT diplomas -- Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering, and 15 years later a PhD in political science. He also studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and served in the White House science advisor's office under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Carter.

Gene, thank you for talking with us this morning.

SKOLNIKOFF: Delighted.

INTERVIEWER: You have been called the pioneer of science diplomacy. What is science diplomacy and how did it come about?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, there's no easy answer, and I'm not sure what pioneer means. The idea is that science, international science and international scientific relations, can make a difference in international relationships among nations. A lot of rhetoric is given to that and very little actual substance over the years. I guess what I did more than others is to reduce it to something that could be analyzed or studied or dealt with academically.

That had led in part to variety of activities, not just mine, but the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and others have tried to capitalize on that idea of science diplomacy. It's not a very precise term, and more to the point I think is that I've tried to look at how science and international relations interact, not necessarily with the idea of diplomatic relations, just how they interact. Really nobody was doing that at the time I started doing it.

INTERVIEWER: Which was when you were working on your doctorate or when you were down in Washington before then?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, when I was in Washington. When I joined the White House office of then James Killian, who was MIT's president and the first science advisor in the White House, my assignment was to work on international scientific relationships. It was a very small staff, maybe four or five people. The same office today has several hundred. So it's not the same situation. We were more powerful than we realized, in fact. It was a wonderful experience.

But I began to realize in that experience that here was a whole unexplained area of international relations, and one that was potentially very important.

INTERVIEWER: How much have various presidents used science diplomacy?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, they all use it to some extent, usually in rhetoric -- they don't mean it. Henry Kissinger used to, whenever he'd visit some country, would promise there would be some kind of scientific cooperation treaty or agreement after he left. Most of those were absolutely empty, that is no money was allocated, nothing happened.

In some cases, especially with regard to nuclear issues and larger issues, there was an attempt to use scientific relationships to build something and build something serious. And particularly, this was in the nuclear era when the relations between the American scientists and the Soviet scientists was a very important factor in reaching some modus vivendi about nuclear weapons.

INTERVIEWER: Is there a president that you think has used it most effectively?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well actually, given the history of what I just said about nuclear relationships, I think Eisenhower and Kennedy both used it more consciously and effectively. President Carter I think tried but didn't do very much.

INTERVIEWER: Which is interesting because he had more of a technological background than almost any other recent president.

SKOLNIKOFF: He thought he was his own science advisor. He was a nuclear engineer, so he kind of sidelined his actual science advisor on a lot of things.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think Eisenhower and Kennedy trusted the scientists they were talking to more than later presidents, or that the problems loomed larger?

SKOLNIKOFF: I wouldn't try to make that comparison, but they certainly trusted them. Eisenhower called -- there's the President's Science Advisory Committee with 18 scientists that would meet once a month for two days a month, and several times in between. Eisenhower started calling them "my scientists," and he loved them. Because they provided him something he wasn't able to get out of the regular bureaucracy, which is an independent view.

INTERVIEWER: Did he come in to the presidency, do you think, having any particular grasp of science? I guess he had been a university president and a general. Had he leaned on science--?

SKOLNIKOFF: I don't think so, except that he was very close to a physicist at Columbia, I.I. Rabi. I think Eisenhower, as president of Columbia, had many conversations with Rabi -- Rabi was a very active political individual, policy individual, and I think he had a real influence on Eisenhower.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that was where the idea for the science advisory office came from? Do you know where it came from?

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes. To some extent it actually existed before, but not in the White House -- not reporting directly to the president. It was set up several years earlier, and in fact, I.I. robi was chair of the previous committee. And it did several studies -- important studies. One of them was headed by Jim Killian, which is why he ended up as the first science advisor. So it was already having some influence, and Eisenhower had some sense of what they could provide.

Then he moved it into the White House, partly as a public relations move after Sputnik. But it was serious because he needed help. He needed to challenge the military.

INTERVIEWER: There seemed to have been some precedence for science advice in Washington, if you look at Vannevar Bush, for example, had a big impact on policy. But he wasn't right in the White House?

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh yes, he was.

INTERVIEWER: He was. But he wasn't called the science advisor?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, he just didn't have that title, but he was basically the same thing. He had enormous influence. And in some ways more because he would allocate the resources to MIT and other favored institutions and got others a bit angry.

INTERVIEWER: These were informal earmarks that didn't come out of Congress?

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes, that's basically right. They didn't originate in Congress.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think that there can and should be more reliance on science advice down in Washington than there is now?

SKOLNIKOFF: Sure. The trouble is that the public has come to think of scientists as just another group of experts that is biased. I mean if you look at the debate over global warming at the moment, the scientific community is overwhelmingly convinced about the issue. And the Congress simply doesn't accept it, or at least some of the Congress does not accept it. We're headed for trouble as a result.

INTERVIEWER: You've had a long association with MIT, both as student and teacher. Let's talk about the path that brought you here. Where were you born? Where'd you grow up?

SKOLNIKOFF: Born in Philadelphia, grew up in New York City. My father and mother moved to New York after he was fired from General Electric Company in 1929 or '30. Then he opened his own little drafting design business. My father was, in some sense, not a failed engineer, but he wanted to be more of an engineer than he was. He transmitted that to me. I mean I lived the life he wanted to live, as far as engineering was concerned. Not as far as politics was concerned. He considered politics as dirty -- something that you don't take seriously.

INTERVIEWER: He and your mother were both immigrants?

SKOLNIKOFF: They both were immigrants. My mother directly from the Ukraine, my father from Crimea via Argentina -- family went to Argentina first and then came up here. They met in the United States and married here.

INTERVIEWER: Did he grow up speaking Spanish?

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Do you speak Spanish?

SKOLNIKOFF: No. Nor Russian, unfortunately. It never occurred to them that it would be of any interest, either one, especially Russian -- why would I need to know, have any interest in speaking Russian? As a matter of fact, they were so unhappy about living the life in Russia at that time that they wanted to stay as far from it as they could. My mother spent, at one point, a little time trying to teach me some Russian language, but not seriously.

INTERVIEWER: Did either of them ever have any college or did they finish high school?

SKOLNIKOFF: Neither of them had college. My father had a vocational college experience in Argentina. My mother would have because she was admitted to Pembroke, but there wasn't enough money. Her older brothers were favored and went to Carnegie Tech. But my mother who wanted to be an artist, and was a good artist, was cut out from it. She never got over that. She was pretty upset.

INTERVIEWER: What were you like as a child?

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh, I don't think I was anything unusual. except they thought I was probably headed for engineering because I liked gadgets. Well, we lived in the Bronx and I was admitted to a special New York school -- I've forgotten the name of it.

INTERVIEWER: Bronx Science?

SKOLNIKOFF: No.

INTERVIEWER: Stuyvesant?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, it doesn't exist now. Mayor La Guardia abolished it.

INTERVIEWER: So another one that was--

SKOLNIKOFF: Yeah. It was a very special school, not just science, right after I was admitted he closed it down. So we moved then to Queens and I went to regular junior high, and then I went to Brooklyn Technical High School, which is 4,000 boys, half of them headed for college, half of them headed for jobs. Not the most satisfactory environment. I never really liked it or disliked it.

INTERVIEWER: But you were good at it?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, I guess so, more or less. I wasn't that good because when I applied at MIT I was put on the waiting list. I was admitted to Cornell and several other places, but not in MIT originally.

INTERVIEWER: Why did your father think engineering was good and the social sciences weren't? I mean I guess the social scientists were less developed then.

SKOLNIKOFF: He didn't know anything about the social sciences. He knew about engineering. And as I say, I think he saw me as living, in some sense, the life that, or fulfilling his goals, which was a problem all my life, I think.

INTERVIEWER: Were you conscious of it when you were in high school or college?

SKOLNIKOFF: Not at all. This all is after the fact. For example, he was very anxious that I apply at MIT because he knew that was the best. And I basically didn't. I mean not that I disagreed, I just didn't know MIT. But he was hell bent on my coming here and I did. So, I was fortunate.

INTERVIEWER: What were your years -- well, let's stay on your childhood. Did World War II affect your life very much?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, except by happenstance -- a lot of my life is by happenstance, because I graduated from high school in 1945 while the war in Japan in the Far East was still on. A year later and I would have had to compete with veterans and I would never have gotten in. And a year earlier I would have ended up at the Battle of the Bulge, which all the 1944 high school graduates did. So I sneaked in between those. But other than that, I was not politically aware particularly. I read the newspapers, I read more of the newspapers than my friends did. I was more conscious of the world, but I don't--

INTERVIEWER: So it interested you in some way.

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh yeah. There was no question that I was interested. But not in that you asked did World War II influence me directly, not especially.

INTERVIEWER: Had you ever visited MIT before you arrived as a freshman in 1945?

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes, once. When I was on the waiting list, my mother who was very activist this way, made me, against my will, come up here to talk to the admissions office. I thought that was silly but I did.

INTERVIEWER: And it may well have helped.

SKOLNIKOFF: It may well have helped, I don't know because they couldn't find my file. And it turned out to be on the top of a filing cabinet. So I don't know whether it meant that they were reconsidering it or just what. No, I didn't pay much attention to that.

INTERVIEWER: What were your first impressions of MIT?

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh, I thought it was wonderful. I mean as I think any college I would have felt that way. I was going to a very controlled high school that was not a lot of fun one way or another, and suddenly I'm free. I think every freshman has that sudden realization that all of a sudden you're your own master. I was happy to see my parents leave after dropping me off, and immediately found a girlfriend. It was a liberation.

INTERVIEWER: Were you an only child?

SKOLNIKOFF: I was an only child.

INTERVIEWER: It was a liberation of sorts, but you certainly had a challenging curriculum--

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes. But I didn't have a sense of the MIT academic demands that everybody has today. I mean I knew it was going to be difficult -- I seemed not to have much difficulty.

INTERVIEWER: You were well prepared.

SKOLNIKOFF: I was, well, reasonably well prepared and responded to what I was learning. I actually enjoyed the classes. So I felt I was in the right place.

INTERVIEWER: Any classes in particular that you recall or liked especially?

SKOLNIKOFF: Curiously, and I imagine we'll come back to it, but yeah, I chose electrical engineering and that was a good choice for me.

INTERVIEWER: Because?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, I was responding to a whole -- electrical engineering was just taking off in 1945. The Radiation Lab was closing down, so it was an exciting, new engineering discipline. It was changing very rapidly.

Also, and more to the point in later terms, MIT had then and still has, this requirement that every student spend at least a fifth of his or her time -- there were almost no women in our class -- in the humanities and social sciences. To me they were eye-opening, even though I don't think the faculty was particularly illustrious -- I barely remember some of the names. I do remember some. But reading Dostoevsky, all of a sudden there was a lot of things that I didn't know anything at all about. I found that very exciting -- much more so than did my classmates.

INTERVIEWER: Did you take any social science courses?

SKOLNIKOFF: There was no such thing. Almost no such thing.

INTERVIEWER: Probably a little economics.

SKOLNIKOFF: I did take -- yes, excuse me. That's quite right. I didn't think of economics as a social--. Yes, it was important to me later. We had one political scientist on the faculty, Norman Padelford, who was actually in -- we didn't have a political science department, but he was in either humanities or probably more likely economics and social sciences was what they called the department.

INTERVIEWER: And did you take classes with him?

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: More than one?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, just one. He taught a class on the UN and international relations. And he was a very good teacher. Economics I found I liked very much. I would have, I think, done more -- in fact, later I had an opportunity and I regret not having done more.

INTERVIEWER: Did you do much in the way of extracurricular activities when you were--?

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh yeah, too much -- everything.

INTERVIEWER: What?

SKOLNIKOFF: I was on the crew. For a period of time I was on the The Tech, the newspaper. I was in a whole variety of organizations, not political ones, but the -- you know, Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi and the others.

INTERVIEWER: The honorary societies for engineering?

SKOLNIKOFF: The honorary societies, but I ended up being vice president or president or something of them. I mean I ran for office all the time. Oh, on the radio station we had, for a period of time, I was a music director. So a lot of things.

INTERVIEWER: You were exploring or you just loved them all?

SKOLNIKOFF: I don't know, I just liked it, yeah. And I seemed to have time to do it. So I did.

INTERVIEWER: Did you study many hours? You certainly weren't hulled up in your room at that point.

SKOLNIKOFF: No. Frankly, I don't remember spending a lot of time studying. I'm sure I must have. But I got a reputation for being able to fix radios because I learned a very simple fact, which nobody seemed to know. It was that most of the trouble of little table radios was what is called intermittent -- there was some loose connection. So if you kicked it or banged on it, you fixed it. So I would take their radios and close the door and bang it and give them back a working model. I had a reputation. It was ridiculous but it was funny.

INTERVIEWER: Where did you live when you were--?

SKOLNIKOFF: In what's now we call East Campus dorms. I guess those were the oldest dorms on the campus. That's how I started anyway. And then much later in Senior House and so on. But mainly in East Campus, Hayden something, 4.01. That's it, Hayden 4.01.

INTERVIEWER: And you were in this co-op six-A program and worked at General Electric?

SKOLNIKOFF: I joined the five year Master's program , a joint Master's/Bachelor's program. I think partly for financial reasons. My parents didn't find financing easy, even though I got some scholarships here, but by today's standards the tuition was minuscule. But that made it a little easier for them and also gave me some industrial experience. That was interesting. Some of it was interesting, some of it was a complete waste of time.

INTERVIEWER: What parts did you like and what didn't you like?

SKOLNIKOFF: There was an electronics lab in Syracuse that I actually did my Master's thesis at, and I got a patent in the process for which I got paid $25 by "Generous" Electric Company. And in fact, it was a very good patent, it's just that technology advanced and made it unnecessary. So I still remember it. I really learned a lot about how industry works in the process.

INTERVIEWER: Along the way you applied for the Rhode Scholarship. How did you happen to decide to do that?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, as so many things in my career, that was not a considered decision on my part. That is, so many things happened accidentally or because of concatenation of events. But a professor of electrical engineering, a man, Murrey Gardner said to me one day, why don't you apply for Rhodes Scholarship? And first of all, though I'd heard of the Rhodes, I knew very little about it. I thought he was slightly mad. But I looked into it and I figured well I had very little to lose, so I did.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea why it crossed his mind? Had he been a Rhodes or had he had other students who had been?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, he wasn't. There where a few MIT faculty that had been Rhodes Scholars before. There was a chemist, Stockmayer and some others. I think just reputation, and I was -- what do they call it -- a star in the department I guess. So they wanted to--

INTERVIEWER: Plus you had the broad interest and you were an athlete.

SKOLNIKOFF: Yeah. I don't think he thought very much about that. I think they just thought that I was the fair-haired boy in the department, so why not capitalize on that.

INTERVIEWER: Was MIT good on pushing students to--?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, not at all.

INTERVIEWER: So this was kind of out of the blue.

SKOLNIKOFF: Yeah. We are now, by the way. I'm part of a Foreign Fellowship Committee that actually promotes and helps students apply and very successfully. But curiously though, MIT didn't push. There were two that year from the same department. Herb Benington being another, and I didn't even know him.

INTERVIEWER: The same teacher had approached Herb you think?

SKOLNIKOFF: I don't know. I never quite found out how he ended up applying-- I never got to know him at Oxford. I was surprised. Everybody was surprised.

INTERVIEWER: Had you ever travelled or lived outside the United States before you went off to Oxford?

SKOLNIKOFF: No. And I always wanted to, so that was part of the appeal.

INTERVIEWER: Had you thought about what you might do had you not won the award?

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh yeah. I was just headed, partly under my father's influence, headed for industry. I was going to be an engineer in General Electric Company -- or no, I would never have gone back there. But I was going to be an engineer.

INTERVIEWER: Did anyone at MIT help you with your application or prepare you at all for the interviews?

SKOLNIKOFF: I have no recollection of it, especially compared to what we do today, which is a lot of help, holding mock interviews and things like that, which would have made quite a difference. I had no idea what was ahead.

INTERVIEWER: But it worked out.

SKOLNIKOFF: It worked out to my astonishment.

INTERVIEWER: So what was your experience like?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, the way the Rhodes worked then, it's still more or less the same. You either apply in your home state or your university state. And because Herb Benington was applying in Massachusetts, I applied in New York, which is home. First you go through a day-long set of interviews. Out of about 15 or so people they pick -- I've forgotten now -- yeah, they send four down to the regionals.

So I went down and it's intriguing to me at the moment. But after my NY interview, which was about an hour long and perfectly comfortable, I then went back to my father's office and there was an uncle there. Remember I'm Jewish. And the uncle said, why are you letting him apply for this? He'll never get it, he's Jewish. He just was totally sure that was the end of the story. Then to my surprise I did end up going to the regional, which is in Philadelphia. There they take, it was four from several states, and you have 12 and they pick four.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think the fact that you read newspapers and were interested in current events helped you in the process?

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh sure, yeah. Remember, I was applying as a scientist. And because I applied to study physics for a doctorate at Oxford, and the MIT education was sufficiently theoretical, even though I was not a physicist in a normal sense. So a lot of the questions -- I had no idea if there was any other scientists on the day-long session-- this was a real set of interviews for literally a day. I have no idea whether there was other scientists on the panel or not. But I got a lot of questions about current events, and about what kind of a scientist was I going to be, and how serious was I about science.

INTERVIEWER: And you told them you were pretty serious because you were.

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes, I was serious. Turned out later I wasn't, but no, I was serious. But I did get a lot of questions, as you say, about current issues. And since I did read a lot and kept up with current things, I think I answered many of them. A favorite question was to explain for a non-scientist how a particular piece of equipment works, the cyclotron in my case. And I explained very simply and straightforwardly how a cyclotron works, and that obviously impressed them.

INTERVIEWER: What happened when you went over to England?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, that was the big change. First of all, that was a full -- you're elected in December and you don't go until the following September. By the time I got to Oxford, I realized physics was not what I wanted to do. But I didn't know it consciously, so much as just knew it.

Meanwhile I had been in contact with the physics laboratory in Oxford and I had everything set up -- the research I was going to do and with whom. Because at that time, especially, it was just a research degree -- you didn't take any courses. I was sure I was going to work in low temperature physics and why. It wasn't a particular field I knew, but it was easy to master it.

I got to Oxford, went into the lab to meet the professor and the others, spent an hour there and walked out and said I'm not going to do that. But I just said that's not what I want to do. It's not what I want to spend two years doing.

INTERVIEWER: What was the thought process? What was going on in your mind do you think?

SKOLNIKOFF: It's hard to -- I think I had, by then, a strong sense that Oxford was giving me a very special opportunity that I didn't have at MIT or any place, which was to get an education. So all of a sudden the idea of being in a laboratory for two years didn't make sense. I rationalized it -- well, for two years I wouldn't do it, then I'd go back to it. Well, I knew damn well I wasn't going to do that, but nevertheless that's how I rationalized it. And actually, curious, because I made the choice very firmly. I walked out of that lab and that was it. But I had no idea if I had to give up the Rhodes, I had no idea if my college would accept the change. I found out they accepted me originally because I rowed at MIT, not because of academic anything.

INTERVIEWER: You were on crew.

SKOLNIKOFF: I was on the crew. By that time it didn't make any difference. I had the choice made and that was it.

I went to see the Rhodes office, the Rhodes warden they call him -- warden of Rhodes House, and went in with some trepidation, and he said oh no, that's wonderful. If we can save somebody from science, all to the better. So that was no problem. Anyway, it turns out there's no impediment to changing your field, but he was happy I was doing it.

And then I went to the college not knowing how they would react. And I won't go into a long story, but I had a very strange interview with the senior tutor that I didn't understand at all. Who asked me the most outlandish questions about my family life, about relations with my mother, relations with women. This is my first time in England -- what are these people doing? It was like a caricature of an Oxford.

Well, it turned out that in the immediately preceding two years, there had been an American who was doing exactly the same thing I wanted to do -- switched from science to what they called modern grants PPE, and then had a nervous breakdown. And the college had a terrible time with this and they got very angry about students seeing psychiatrists and things like that. A month after this was finally settled, I showed up with the same story. So he was trying to probe how uncertain, how unsettled I was. But he accepted it and--

INTERVIEWER: And so you studied philosophy, politics--

SKOLNIKOFF: Philosophy, politics and economics, with the emphasis on the economics, actually. The politics at that time in England wasn't political science, it was British political history until 1918, which was kind of fun but of no deeper interest. Actually, I enjoyed the philosophy more and the economics more.

INTERVIEWER: But you didn't become a philosopher or an economist.

SKOLNIKOFF: No. The economist I almost did, but I ruled it out foolishly. I wasn't enough of a philosopher to become a philosopher. I had a very good philosophy tutor and we got on extremely well and I enjoyed my essays and readings with him. But it was not a field I would have gone into willingly. But I stayed in close touch with the tutor for as long as he lived, we got along well until he died.

INTERVIEWER: You wrote an article about your Oxford experience for the Technology Review in 1953. In it you described your transition into this new program of study--

SKOLNIKOFF: I have to go back and read that.

INTERVIEWER: --as "rather violent," is how you called it. Do you think that was hyperbole or do you still remember the transition as a time of painful upheaval?

SKOLNIKOFF: I wish I'd read it again, re-read it.

INTERVIEWER: I'll give you a copy later.

SKOLNIKOFF: I said it was--

INTERVIEWER: You called the transition rather violent. You talked about--

SKOLNIKOFF: Transition from the science to the humanity.

INTERVIEWER: I think you were suggesting that you were really not prepared for any of those -- that you hadn't had the precursors or whatever.

SKOLNIKOFF: I clearly had not, and that was why I wanted to do it.

INTERVIEWER: But you remember it really as a very good two years.

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh yeah. In fact, I should have stayed a third. No, no, I remember that as absolutely a fantastic period of my life.

INTERVIEWER: In what way? What do you think made it--?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, part of it was the change in fields. So that it opened up just a whole new world to me that I knew very little about. Part of it were my colleagues, classmates -- not necessarily other Rhodes, but the English classmates that I enjoyed, thought I got on with very well, enjoyed the life. And as a matter of fact, I'm much closer now to my Oxford classmates, including some of my English friends than I am of my MIT classmates, which I think was simply a reflection of the fact that my interests had changed. Nothing wrong with my classmates at MIT, it was just that we no longer had much in common.

INTERVIEWER: Did you row crew while you were at Oxford?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, other than what they call a school eight the last week of term. No, and a matter of fact, the warden of Merton College, which is the college I was at, was a crew enthusiast, which is why I was admitted to begin with, to his college. And he never forgave me for it. Because I first actually had a chance to talk to him several months after I arrived, and when I introduced myself, he said, oh, I know who you are. Why did you not go out for the boat club? And turned on his heel and walked away -- never gave me a chance to respond. He was mad, he was crazy -- he was a Hegelian scholar. It was very typical of some of those, at that time, some of the Oxford characters.

INTERVIEWER: How did you find the tutorial process after coming from MIT where you probably had lots of lectures?

SKOLNIKOFF: It was fantastic because you write a minimum of two essays a week. I learned how to write and I learned how to express myself, and that stayed with me the rest of my life and was a very important factor. It was hard. I mean it wasn't something that came easily, because I certainly did not have much writing experience while at MIT. But that was, and still is, by the way -- Oxford still maintains the tutorial system. It's getting very expensive but it's doing it.

INTERVIEWER: Have you been able to use any aspects of the Oxford approach to teaching in your own teaching over the years?

SKOLNIKOFF: It's an interesting question. Nothing that I would single out quite that way, but I certainly demand a lot in terms of writing for students.

INTERVIEWER: And you've made students go back and rewrite.

SKOLNIKOFF: Rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and write clearly. That reflects more overseeing theses and things than it does in class. But still, yes, it has some influence of it.

INTERVIEWER: Given the importance MIT and other universities are now placing on the need to teach students writing, do you think there's any magic or any entryway, particularly, for teaching students who are very analytical how to go about learning to write or how to write better, or is it just practice, practice, practice?

SKOLNIKOFF: I would start off by saying it's practice, practice, practice. But more importantly, perhaps, is somebody who reads and comments and critiques and doesn't let things just go by. So in other words, as always it's the teacher that makes a huge difference in this. Certainly for my PhD students, I would spend a lot of time critiquing their writing, the best ones especially. That's part of the trouble too, because the ones that aren't so good you don't spend as much time with.

INTERVIEWER: When you were head of the political science department, did you lean on other faculty members to do that?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, no. It may come to that, but I was an accidental head of the department, just as I was an accidental head of the Center for International Studies. First of all, I came to chair the department without having a previous history in political science -- I mean I didn't grow up as a political scientist, let's put it that way, and that makes a huge difference in how you think about it. I didn't lean on the other faculty members. We were all engaged in the times of troubles and the student problems.

INTERVIEWER: This was during the Vietnam War you mean?

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes, this was in the late 60s I guess. At MIT there was a big research strike in 1969 that became national. And we had on the faculty several who were very prominent proponents of Vietnam, Lucian Pye and Ithiel de Sola Pool. The student cry is we won't die for Pool and Pye. Well, that took up a lot of--

INTERVIEWER: You weren't focused on did they know how to write.

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes. And the best students, a lot of them were in the SDS, the Students for a Democrat Society, and they knew how to write.

INTERVIEWER: Let's go back to Oxford. As you were finishing up your two years, what did you plan to do next?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, it was uncertain, and again, remember -- not remember, but part of my rationale changing fields was that I'd go back to doing what I had been planning to do, because I knew my father, who was a very important influence in my life, I knew he would be unhappy with the choice. He was very unhappy with my leaving science. I had to go 3,000 miles away to get away with it, so to speak.

But I figured, well, I'll go back to industry, if not right away, soon. And I applied for a couple of jobs from Oxford. I was offered a position in the Defense Department, and then I was offered a position at MIT, just on the administrative stuff. But I was vulnerable for the draft and I wanted to get the draft over with. So I figured rather than go to Defense, I'd come to MIT, spend a little bit of time and then go in the army and then go into industry. I kept on putting it off.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have a chance to stay at Oxford longer and do a doctorate?

SKOLNIKOFF: It wasn't so much a doctorate. When I finished with the two years, and I was remarkably innocent about a lot of things, and it turned out you could have a third year under a Rhodes and I didn't realize it. But my economics tutor, who was very good, said was I interested in an economic fellowship for next year. Well, I must have given 30 seconds thought to it, and I've never forgiven myself for that ever since, because I would have benefited from a year of an economics fellowship. I would have enjoyed another year at Oxford. I was so blind to so many of the things that other people would say--

INTERVIEWER: But this was a fear of your father's wrath if you spent one more year?

SKOLNIKOFF: It wasn't fear, it was just you're setting down a path and you followed that path. I ruled out all kinds of potential careers for no bloody reason. I mean I had a certain predilection to legal things -- a lawyer? God no, I don't want to be a lawyer. And that was silly, but I only came to that realization later. So why I was so--

INTERVIEWER: You didn't go back to law school at that point.

SKOLNIKOFF: No, but why I was so blinkered about other opportunities still--

INTERVIEWER: Even after your two years at Oxford.

SKOLNIKOFF: Yes, still puzzles me today.

INTERVIEWER: So you chose to come back to MIT of all places.

SKOLNIKOFF: Came back to MIT to work on the administrative staff in the industrial liaison office, which is not a career job really. But it was, as I say, it was intended as a stop gap before I went into the army. I tried to get into the CIA -- MIT had a special contact in the CIA. I asked him to explore the possibility of two years in the CIA. And they came back and said no, I couldn't get a clearance. Why couldn't I get a clearance? Because I still had relatives in Russia. Which, of course, is they didn't want to bother.

But, of course, this is what happened in so many other parts in my life, by happenstance I was working for Jim Killian to some extent. So I got to know him and I traveled with him a little bit. So when he ended up in Washington as the president's science advisor, he offered me a job on his staff. I think if I hadn't had that personal experience with him, I'm not sure I would have -- that he would have asked me.

INTERVIEWER: So you were traveling with him as part of your responsibility for the Industrial Liaison Program?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, he was fundraising. He was the master fundraiser, and he sometimes liked to have somebody along.

INTERVIEWER: And how did it end up being you? I mean you were on staff at the ILP office.

SKOLNIKOFF: Good question. I don't actually remember that.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know him from your student days?

SKOLNIKOFF: Very, very slightly.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think he was aware of your Rhodes?

SKOLNIKOFF: Probably. I suspect people were more aware than I thought.

INTERVIEWER: Did you and he ever talk about -- he ended up I think as a kind of science humanities major, as opposed to a--

SKOLNIKOFF: No. He was a editor of Technology Review. He was a business grad of what was Course 15 then, as a business management undergraduate -- the most unlikely background for the superb president he became.

INTERVIEWER: Right, and he didn't have a doctorate when he came.

SKOLNIKOFF: Did not have a doctorate. Well, no, as a matter of fact, when he was named to be the president, they immediately hunted up some university to give him an honorary degree. So it was Dr. Killian after that. But he never would have been a president of MIT if it hadn't been for World War II, because basically Karl Compton who was president spent much of his time in Washington on nuclear issues and science issues. And Killian ran MIT. So when the war was over and Compton was ready to retire from the presidency, Killian was -- I wasn't around then in any substantial sense, but Killian had been a successful manager of the place and trusted by the faculty. He was wonderful man.

INTERVIEWER: And the Corporation probably.

SKOLNIKOFF: And the Corporation, yeah. He was a wonderful person, much misunderstood I think -- a very shy southerner. And people had the impression that he was not very activist, but in fact he was. And a very emotionally warm person. But he buried it, so it took a while to get to realize that. I thought he was great, I loved him.

INTERVIEWER: So how much of your time did you spend traveling with him and working with him, as opposed to working for or with the industrial liaison--?

SKOLNIKOFF: Not much.

INTERVIEWER: So you did a little with Killian and mostly at the ILP?

SKOLNIKOFF: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: What was the ILP program like when you were in it?

SKOLNIKOFF: It just got started.

INTERVIEWER: It wasn't that old yet.

SKOLNIKOFF: It's 1948--

INTERVIEWER: Right, that it had been founded.

SKOLNIKOFF: That's right. I joined it in--

INTERVIEWER: '53?

SKOLNIKOFF: '52.

INTERVIEWER: '52?

SKOLNIKOFF: Yeah, '53. It was very different I'm sure than it is today. It was unformed in many ways, it wasn't clear how the faculty would respond. Immediately, because I had some writing experience, I put some material together for the companies and for the faculty about it. So I played a role, but--

INTERVIEWER: But you seem to have a sense of the vision for it. You did one other article for Technology Review on ILP, and in it you called it a new and important plan for industry university cooperation. And you discussed how important the young program was to bring in long-term, unrestricted revenue for MIT, and as a medium for the exchange of ideas between MIT researchers and industry.

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, it sounded good.

INTERVIEWER: It sure did. I wondered was that the language they used, or did you make it up yourself?

SKOLNIKOFF: No, that was the language. I might have smoothed it a little bit, but that was the language. That was the rationale and the justification, which was that it would be good for both sides -- for industry, for new ideas, and MIT for industrial relationships.

INTERVIEWER: And it seemed to be taking off. I mean you were having some success.

SKOLNIKOFF: It actually was started by a man by the name of Bartz, B A R T Z, who started and then went to Cal Tech and started the same program, same thing. But he disappeared from sight, for me at any rate. But I think it was a successful program at MIT. I think it's a very important program to MIT now. How well it's doing, I don't follow it.

INTERVIEWER: Around the time it was created, MIT and other private universities were actually struggling financially, and some business leaders were publicly calling on businesses to help colleges. You recorded this in the article. Did you find it surprising at the time, and do you think that kind of attitude still holds -- the business saying we've got to help MIT and other places?

SKOLNIKOFF: I don't think it's surprising. I think some of the more far-seeing industries realized how much they depended on the graduates.

INTERVIEWER: Like Sloan.

SKOLNIKOFF: Not just Sloan, I mean the engineers, engineering and science graduates. You'd say that was, obviously well understood, but it wasn't well understood at all. So the idea that industry might have some responsibility for themselves, not just for the universities. So that was just really taking hold.

INTERVIEWER: In the article you also seemed very aware of MIT's finances. You talked about how the industrial liaison income was equivalent at that time to about $25 million of endowment, which was big money then. I wondered how you had this awareness, and it may have come partly from traveling with Jim Killian.

SKOLNIKOFF: No, not especially. I think that was just one of the rationales for why the program was important. So when there were faculty, and there sometimes were challenges to spending time with these dolts from industry, which was, by the way, not a common reaction. As a matter of fact, many of the faculty really liked their industrial relationships, and many of them built on them -- you know, became consultants and benefited from it personally. I think this is just one of the rationales in the program to look how much it needs.

INTERVIEWER: Were you responsible for particular companies or industries?

SKOLNIKOFF: Yeah. We divided up -- there was a staff of about at that time maybe four or five, and there was somebody in chemistry, somebody in electrical engineering. There were no computers then, so yes, we had our own special relationships, companies we would visit with information or arrange visits for them and things like that.

INTERVIEWER: Was being a staff person at MIT very different from being a student there? Were you conscious of seeing it in a different way?

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh sure. I mean I didn't have the same challenges as a staff person than I did as a student. I used to hate the exams. I mean I was delighted when I would walk into a building that I hated to go in to at one point because it always meant an exam was coming up. And I could go in now and there was no exam. But it was different. In that process, again, it paid off accidentally later, but I got to know several faculty members "very closely." I got to know them and they began to know my strengths and weaknesses and it turned out to be important later.

INTERVIEWER: After your work in the industrial liaison Office at MIT you did enter the army. Were you drafted?

SKOLNIKOFF: I asked to be drafted, which turned out to be, I thought, foolish because this was the summer of 1955, because Eisenhower had on his desk in Denver an order that they would stop drafting anybody over 26. And I just turned 26. So I would not have been drafted.

INTERVIEWER: But you didn't know that.

SKOLNIKOFF: But I didn't know that, he had a heart attack, and that's why in never got promulgated. But so much of my accidental life -- a funny phrase to use; accidental in the sense of unplanned -- it turned out to have all kinds of unforeseen benefits for me. But I hated the army. I mean I just hated it.

INTERVIEWER: What did you do?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, I was in the army security agency, which is the National Security Agency of the army based in Arlington, Virginia. When I got assigned there I was very unhappy because I wanted to be at the Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. This was much better, but I didn't know that. So I was based in what was called Arlington Hall Station. They were running tapes, so listening in to Russian Soviet communications.

Actually, during that period I took delivery of the very first videotape recorder, what we now call VCRs, which was done under contract with Federal money by a company called Ampex. I did the first tests of it and so on. And everybody understood at the time that if that could be miniatured -- it was a great, big console thing -- that you'd have a fantastic consumer product. Well, Ampex tried and tried and tried and couldn't do it. The Japanese did.

INTERVIEWER: But it was your science and engineering background that really put you in a position to be able to do a job like that?

SKOLNIKOFF: Well, remember, the army is the army, so I had a degree from MIT. That meant I was an engineer, period. It didn't make any difference what I did later. The fact that I couldn't have done any engineering designs anymore, they didn't know and didn't care. So obviously, just by the name, the prestige at MIT got me into all kinds of things.

INTERVIEWER: More than the Rhodes at that point.

SKOLNIKOFF: Oh, yes. In the army, the army didn't know what Rhodes was. The only recognition I had in the army was you take an exam when you enter, and I missed one out of 100 questions. The people giving the test never had seen that. I don't know what I missed, but that was kind of an experience. And I was in basic training in New Jersey, Fort Dix. I was thrown together because I was older, so I was the uncle thrown together with kids from the slums and so on. It was really quite an experience. I hated it, but it was a fantastic experience.

INTERVIEWER: And near the end of your two years you--?