Isaac Colbert

INTERVIEWER: This is the MIT-150 Oral History project interview with Isaac Colbert.

COLBERT: I'll respond to either one, but Colbert is what I grew up with.

INTERVIEWER: June 18, 2007. Interview starts at 9:00 a.m. So maybe we could just start with your background, where you grew up, what your family was like.

COLBERT: I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. I was born at the end of World War II. I'm one of the baby boomers in that wave that began after the soldiers began to trickle back home, or flood back home from the theaters of war. My father had actually done two stints in the Army. He was very patriotic, but he was injured in a jeep accident in Belgium after the hostilities had ceased. From everything that my folks told me, his jeep ran over a landmine, an unexploded landmine, and he was the only survivor. He and three of his best friends were in that jeep. He survived after a fashion, but he spent most of the rest of his life in hospitals.

We used to visit him every week. Some of my earliest memories are of mom taking my brother -- there's just two of us, my older brother and me -- packing us up and taking us first to Walter Reed for awhile, and then the Army moved him to Perryville in northern Maryland. We used to go up there quite regularly to visit Dad, and sometimes he'd know us, sometimes he wouldn't when he could come down. Most of the time I was too young to go into the ward, so I had to sit there while everybody else went upstairs to visit dad. So it was a really curious weekly event for many, many years. Then my father passed away in 1959.

So essentially, I was brought up by my mom, her sisters who lived near by, and the kind of close-knit community that formed the kind of village that is hard to find anymore in urban communities. But there were elderly people around and professionals and working class people, et cetera, in the neighborhood in northwest Baltimore. Everyone took care of everyone else, really. I remember many, many times when I was doing something or my brother and I were doing things we weren't supposed to do, some neighbor would say, "Aren't you Rosalee's boy? You wait until she comes home." I knew what that meant. It was an interesting neighborhood.

My parents actually really grew up in Baltimore. My mother was born there. Her family of five girls had moved up from Pensacola, Florida in the 1920s. They don't talk about it very much, they never talked about it very much -- clearly it was painful. I pieced together over the years that Klan activity had something to do with the decision to move north. They settled in Baltimore. My father's family was already there. My father and mother met in high school, and the rest is history and I'm a part of it.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any memory of any major events growing up?

COLBERT: Oh, lots of major events. I certainly remember the first TV, which was a console model TV. We were maybe the second family on the block to get a TV. My mother and sisters put together so that we could have one -- it was a little black and white picture. There wasn't an awful lot on, but I remember a show called Western Trails. It was a whole lot of westerns with Gene Autry and Pat Buttram and that whole group. Then at some point there were a couple of comedy shows, Milton Berle to keep everybody laughing. I do remember that.

But the first serious thing I remember was watching some of the McCarthy hearings on TV. I remember seeing this relentless, rather humorless guy on TV pressing people about communism -- do you know or have you ever known anybody who was a communist? It was just pretty upsetting. I remember my folks were really upset with him about that. They thought this was just terribly un-American and that he was persecuting people and he was. I just happened to have been watching at the time when Edward R. Murrow -- used to watch Edward R. Murrow show quite regularly -- at the time when he really called Senator McCarthy to task. I clearly, clearly remember that. Even then I knew this was something important. This was something really important. So I remember that.

I remember Sputnik very well. I thought it was both cool and scary that the Russians had actually put a satellite up in space and it was beeping above our heads. But there was certainly a kind of call to intellectual and scientific arms that went out. I benefitted from that in being in a city that was still around that time intensely segregated. Most people don't understand how segregated the city of Baltimore was. I clearly remember separate drinking fountains. I clearly remember the back of the bus. I clearly remember not being able to go into -- well, it really was an awful little place called the White Coffee Pot -- on the way to school on a cold day because blacks couldn't go in there for many years.

It wasn't until at least the late '50s, early '60s or so before the Civil Rights Movement brought an end to all of that, and it kind of crumbled pretty quickly. Once I did get into a White Coffee Pot and tasted that awful sludge that they called coffee. It was one of those be careful what you wish for kinds of things, but the point wasn't how good the coffee was. The point was that everybody had an opportunity and a right to go to any of the businesses that were there to serve the public.

So I remember that, and in fact, had my own little role in the Civil Rights Movement in Baltimore, too. I found out very quickly that despite all the training, et cetera, I was not exactly non-violent. When somebody came at me, I went back at them. Good old urban survival came to the fore. After that I supported the movement from behind the scenes and out on the front line, so it was really interesting.

INTERVIEWER: What was your high school like?

COLBERT: I should say first that the elementary and junior high schools I went to were neighborhood schools, and therefore, they were all black schools. The education and preparation I got there was absolutely superb. One of the by-products of the kind of segregation that we had was that a lot of teachers, superbly trained teachers, could only teach in their communities. So there were lots of teachers in junior high school, for example, who had Master's degrees and doctorates.

In fact, my homeroom teacher, Mr. Moore, who was a big influence on me, spoke many languages -- he spoke French, German, Spanish, Latin fluently and Greek fluently. He taught all those languages. I just thought he was an amazing human being. He always wanted to be a college professor, but he just couldn't get the jobs. But he always pushed us to excel academically, to push ourselves as far as possible. We did benefit from the national mania, really is what happened after Sputnik went up, to develop kids with interest in science and engineering and math.

So, the class that I was in, which was a pretty sharp group of 28 boys and girls, we were privy to a very special educational curriculum. I don't remember an awful lot about it except that we were always "accelerated." We were tested every year. Somehow or the other we knew we were getting something that others weren't getting, so we had much advanced material. I realized later on that by the sixth grade or so, we were being taught trigonometry, but it wasn't called that. I didn't realize what this was until I really got to high school. I've seen all this before, I know how to do this stuff. So it was a superb preparation.

INTERVIEWER: So, this accelerated program with Dr. Moore, so multi-lingual, they were products of--.

COLBERT: Oh, they were products of a public education system that largely doesn't exist in this country anymore, dedicated teachers, lifelong teachers in classrooms that were full of stable individuals from stable families who wanted an education. There really wasn't -- and maybe I'm being rosy in my recollection -- but there weren't drugs in the schools, there wasn't a need to deal with mental health issues, broken families, communities in distress. There wasn't a need for the teachers to deal with this whole complex of social and psychological issues that are in the schools now. They really are a product of a tremendous amount of social change and breakdown of traditional communities.

No, the teachers could focus on education. They didn't have a whole lot of trouble keeping us in order either, because we were sent there to learn, and parents made sure we were there to learn. There was this contract between, both spoken and unspoken, between parents and teachers that if there was some trouble, the teachers would get in touch with the parents or the parents would get in touch with teachers and that kid would be straightened out.

Today everything is different, and largely because they have guns. They have guns, they have drugs, they have bad images surrounding them. There are more distractions than there were in my day. So the teachers taught, and the students tried to learn. I found that my preparation was second to none. In Baltimore, there are two of the oldest public high schools in the country; Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and Baltimore City College. Poly had the reputation of producing the engineers, City had the reputation of producing doctors. Both were exam schools. I took the exams, I was interested in City College, it's called Baltimore City College. I was among those who were admitted to the 10th grade class. Found out there was a ninth grade class, but the black kids didn't hear about that. It's okay.

This was the special college preparatory curriculum, and the kids in these three classes, these three homerooms or maybe four, were on our way to college, to good colleges. So we were the intellectual, the lead of the school. In my homeroom class there were six or seven black students. Most of the students in that school were Jewish, in those curriculums were Jewish. A lot of good friends are made out of those kids, a couple of them I still am in touch with.

I found high school to be one of the first of two wonderful arenas. I was sort of in my element. I was well-prepared, so I knew I could keep up, hold my own with any of the other well-prepared students there. I was in everything. I found that I really enjoyed student government, I really enjoyed drama, because I had been involved outside in stage productions, et cetera, so I loved being on stage. I was in every kind of club and extra curricular activity you can name, and most of them I ended up being president of, so it was really quite something.

My only challenge in high school was my homeroom teacher who I had a running battle with the entire time. He kind of saw me as smug and out of my place, and I saw him as a jerk. We just had a running battle all the time. I had a sharp tongue back then and wasn't afraid to use it, and he didn't quite know how to deal with that. He wasn't quite used to having certainly a black kid talk back to him and tell him that you're not being fair and I'm not taking it. We had a shaky peace. We were at a shaky peace. When I graduated at the end, I remember him telling me he was trying to be hard on me because I had to be prepared for a hard world.

INTERVIEWER: What year did you graduate in?

COLBERT: 1964, class of '64. I remember telling him that clearly I can make my way in the world and I didn't need him to make it more difficult for me, but thank you for what you tried to do and goodbye.

Then I went onto Johns Hopkins to undergraduate school, which was four years of boot camp.

INTERVIEWER: The reason why you chose Johns Hopkins was the--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

COLBERT: Yeah, it was the best place around. My vision didn't extend much beyond Baltimore and Maryland. I was not a world traveler. The family couldn't afford to travel much, and most everybody I knew was in Baltimore. The best place to go was Johns Hopkins. So I wasn't interested in Morgan, I wasn't interested in the University of Maryland, I wasn't interested in any of those other things. I said I'm going to go to Johns Hopkins or I'll go into the Army. I've never forgotten my interview with the director of admissions who looked at my -- I had a little CV at the time that I put together with all these things I'd done, and great grade point averages and all that kind of stuff.

He looked at it and complimented me on how well I'd done in high school, in a tough high school. But said, I'm not certain that Johns Hopkins is prepared to accommodate Negro students. Why did he have to tell me that? I said to him you don't accommodate one or we're going to be in court. Then he looked down at my papers again and discovered that we have the same birth date, December 7. We got to talking about Pearl Harbor and Pearl Harbor Day and all of that. The long and short of it is that I got admitted to Hopkins with a full ride. Sometimes, sometimes it's the accidents of fate that get you where you need to be.

So I matriculated at Hopkins in the class of '68, and thus began a couple of years of hell. I thought I was going to major in chemistry. It didn't take me very long in my freshman chemistry course to realize that they didn't like me and I didn't like them. The faculty member who was in charge, and I remember his name to this day but I will not state it. On the first day in class just sort of came over to me and said, young man, it's going to be very difficult for you to make a good grade in my class and I knew exactly what he meant.

I stuck that class out. I ended up making a C -- that was the first C I'd ever made. I was not happy. I decided that I was not going to stay in a department that didn't want me. So I can switch to biology very quickly where I was doing fine. So trudging along with the rest of the students in a time when everything was so intensely pre-med with all of the cut-throat competition that that entailed.

INTERVIEWER: Pre-med?

ISSAC COLBERT: Oh, it's much better now. It's so much better now. It was amazing to me how unscrupulous some of my fellow students were. They would razor their articles out of the journals and go to the library and just tear or razor their articles out so the other students couldn't get them. These were days when the faculty would publicly post the exam grades on the door and everybody was crowding around to see the exam grades. There was always somebody looking to see who made a bad grade and would yell out the name -- oh, Feldman, you made a D. You idiot, Feldman. Colbert, how did you make a B? Those kinds of things. It was just abysmal, it was abysmal.

But that was life then and I slugged my way through Johns Hopkins like the rest of them. My freshman class had only four black students in it. Three of us were from City College, and one was a young man from Grambling, Louisiana, who lived in the dorms. He didn't survive. He didn't survive his first year, he left after that. The rest of us had the benefit of going home to receptive and supportive communities. I think it is that -- on the positive side, living at home made Hopkins bearable for me. So I'd commute in every day. On the negative side, living at home meant I was still with mama with all that that entailed in my life. But I got through Hopkins.

INTERVIEWER: Was that their first class of black students that were admitted?

ISSAC COLBERT: Oh no, there had been a few black students here and there over the decades, actually. But we had probably more in our class, in the class of '68 than ever before, and we proceeded, of course, to agitate for change. It wasn't just the few black students who were there. The times wherein Civil Rights was in the air, Vietnam was heating up, people were looking down and saying this could get to be a mess. Even in '64 as we were sending advisors over to Vietnam, and it got to be really nasty by the time we graduated. I'll get to that in a minute. And by '66 it was really heating up quite a lot. My goodness, I remember President Johnson helicoptering in from Washington on several occasions to give major policy addresses at Hopkins. He really liked Hopkins because Milton Eisenhower was president then and they were apparently on very good terms.

So the air of change was in society. Civil Rights was prominent. There were many voices saying that Hopkins needed to be more diverse. We didn't use that word back then but that's what was meant. So subsequent classes brought in more students of color. But Hopkins has never been and never become the kind of diverse institution even that MIT is right now. It was kind of grim in that regard, so I could go back to my community and see people of color, see affirming, hear affirming messages, et cetera. It really wasn't until the end of my sophomore year, beginning of my junior year that things really turned around. Quite by an accident, because of an accident.

In that time, the government made available to college students summer employment opportunities. You had to take the civil service exam, and for those who did well there were employment opportunities, summer employment opportunities, at up to the level of GS-4 in a GS system, government HR system, and GS-4 was something like $4,000. $4,000 a summer and back then that was, my gosh, a fortune. So of course I took the civil service exam, did extraordinarily well -- I actually thought it was a pretty silly exam. So, I did extraordinarily well.

I found that I was offered and then kind of assigned to a job at a place called Edgewood Arsenal. It turns out they had misclassified me as a psychologist, but they offered me a job at GS-4 level, the Edgewood Arsenal up in northern Maryland. I sort of said well, why not, let's see what this is. So I went up there, it was in the experimental medicine division, the psychology branch. There I met my first real mentor, who is a close friend, his whole family is like a second family to me, even now. I was in a lab that was involved with chemical warfare, and we were testing chemical warfare agents in blind and double blind experiments on animals, ranging from rats and pigeons to monkeys and apes.

In a lab a little ways from us they were using humans, but I wanted no part of that. We had quite enough arguments about the ethics and morals of what we were doing. Bill would pick me up -- Bill Wagman was the head of that lab -- and he would pick me up from the house in the morning and we'd drive out there arguing all the way about the ethics of what were doing. It was a lot of fun.

In that lab, I got my introduction to computers and digital logic circuitry. I did my first real experiments actually on my own. I won an award for the summer research that I'd done. Got a publication out of it, which was promptly labeled top secret, so I've never been able to get it even since then. And I was invited to come back the next summer. Outside of that program they wanted to classify me as a psychologist at GS-5 and bring me back the next summer, which was wonderful. What it did with the lab wrapping itself around me that way was convince me to change my major.

So I went back to Hopkins and talked to the dean about changing my major at such a late date, which required taking a huge overload. I think the dean was more than happy to let me do that because he thought I was going to fall flat on my face. But what I did was then enter this department, the psychology department, and found a home. The faculty there -- for the first time in my experience at Hopkins the faculty was happy to see me. The faculty members were absolutely welcoming and delightful. In fact, kind of conspiratorial about my social education.

They would take me over to the Faculty Club and we'd have some real fun experiences with this black kid coming in the Faculty Club for faculty and sitting in one of the big high chairs and saying I'm with them -- instead of serving them, I'm with them. They told me a lot about the field. As I look back, I got my first real interest in organizational behavior because of them. That wasn't what I majored in, but they told me a lot about the politics and inner-workings of academia and the departments.

INTERVIEWER: Were they organizational, experimental, social--?

COLBERT: They were experimental psychologists. It was a little of everything there, but mostly experimental psychologists, social psychologists were there. I happened to walk into one of the faculty member's office. He was doing these wonderful experiments with rats and their licking behavior, and he had invented a little device called a lick-o-meter. When rats lick, their tongues are very fast and you can actually condition that. So anyway, he invented a device to measure that. It's called a lick-o-meter. It was carefully controlled with lots of electronics at the time, so I thought this is neat. I said I want to work for you, can I be in your lab, can I do something for you? He looked at me and he said come on downstairs, let's see what you can do.

We went down to the basement where a couple of his graduate students were-- had a piece of equipment, hooking up digital logic circuits in the [UNINTELLIGIBLE], and I looked at and said I know how to do that. I've been doing that for a couple of summers and pitched right in with it, pitched right in with it, and was who is this kid? Where did the kid come from? And really made a bunch of friends right away. So I became one of the darlings of the department.

Both they and Bill Wagman at Edgewood Arsenal were saying you're going to graduate school, kid you're going to graduate school. I'm sort of saying well, why? I can go to work, I need to go to work. You're going to graduate school. They decided where I was going to go and I was going to go to Brown. Since I was in experimental psychology, it was at that time the number two ranked department in the country. Experimental psychology, the number one ranked was out, some were in Boulder doing things that I was interested in, and I wasn't interested in going across the country. So they sent me to Brown. They wrote these wonderful, obviously, these wonderful recommendations, and I'd done extraordinarily well in the department, and I was admitted to Brown, Brown's graduate school.

Which started another chapter in my life, because I didn't even know where Brown was at the time. They said we're sending you to Brown, and my reaction was what is that some black college out in the middle of nowhere. I remember Jim Deese, Professor Deese sort of saying, you've never heard of the Ivy League colleges? I said yeah, Harvard and Yale and Princeton, yeah. He said well, Brown is one of the Ivy League schools. You little fool, it's up in Providence. I said where's Providence? So I went and looked up Providence and saw it was in Rhode Island, the littlest state in the union. You're sending me up there? Okay, all right.

So I actually arrived in graduate school sight unseen. I had not gone to visit before. They had sort of sent forth the word, you gotta take this kid. I arrived in Providence in the summer of 1968, and found wealth that I had never seen before. My gosh, I'd never seen so many Maseratis and Lamborghinis and Porsches, et cetera, and this is what that undergraduates had, and in a place with these big old Victorian houses of a sort that I'd never seen before. There are very few places like that in Baltimore. And the city that was different than anything I'd ever imagined before. First of all, I instantly fell in love with Victorian houses. I thought oh my gosh, these are beautiful, these are absolutely beautiful. And saw what real wealth was like with some of these students who were at Brown.

Then walked into my department -- the Walter Hunter Laboratory. Walter Hunter was one of the great psychologists and the lab was named after him. I walked into my future advisor's office, Alan Schrier, who was standing with his back to the door and he was looking out a window in his office. I kind of walked in and cleared my throat and said Dr. Schrier? He turned around and looked at me and said, may I help you, with a little suspicion in his voice. And I said you're Dr. Schrier? He looked at me and said yes, may I help you? I said I'm Isaac, I'm your new student, Issac Colbert, and his eyebrow just shot right up. His eyebrows shot right up -- I've never forgotten this moment. Then he caught himself and said, oh, I didn't know. I said you didn't know that I'm black, did you? Well, it doesn't make any difference, doesn't make difference. Just the revelation that nobody in any of my recommendations had said anything about my race, and nobody in the department knew that they just admitted a black student.

So there was all of this jiving for a week or so where the department head, everybody realizes now they've got an African American student. Oh my gosh. Department head wants to give me a personal tour of the lab, and he's walking me around introducing me to people. Then he walks me down the main staircase of the department, and it's one of these grand staircases and it goes up in two in either side. In the middle of this grand staircase on the wall ahead is this large picture of the founder of the lab, Walter Hunter.

He had his arm around my shoulder, and Jake said to me, this is Walter Hunter, the founder of the lab, and I have tell you, he was no great lover of your people and he's probably turning over in his grave right now, the fact that you're here. I'm sort of why are you telling me this? So what I thought to say at that time was, well, that's good Dr. Kling, because I'll make sure I walk by the old bastard's picture every day. It was sort of he realized he'd said something really bad to me. I said it's okay, it's all right. However, that was the only sour note in four years of joy and I just proceeded to have a wonderful time in graduate school.

Once again, there were 10 of us in my intering group. We all got along together pretty well. It was clear that I was at least as well prepared, if not better prepared, than the other students. So very quickly I established that I knew my stuff, and that calmed things down really quickly. Plus, I'm a bridge builder, so it wasn't long before I got to know every faculty member and chatted, what do you do. Found things of interest with lots of people. It wasn't long before I was pretty well-known and accepted in the department, and I had a wonderful time in grad school. It's that experience that influenced my vision for what graduate school here ought to be like, and the kinds of experiences that our graduate students ought to have.

Our faculty told us two things at the very beginning. You're not competing against one another. We brought you here with the expectation that each one of you will complete your degree. And two, we expect you to work hard, but we also expect you to have lives, and we're going to do everything we can to make sure you have a life. I thought hey, great. So interaction with faculty was very cordial.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have an idea that you weren't supposed to have a work-life balance or that graduate school meant giving up-- I mean, sacrifices?

COLBERT: From seeing people at Hopkins, yes, because they were just total workaholics, total workaholics -- they were like robots, actually. The intensity was just not to be believed, and that sort of is going to be my life, I don't know. That's why I'm not going into medicine. In fact, the psychology curriculum as an undergraduate, if you really wanted to go into psychiatry it was extremely easy. We had some wonderful people. In fact, everybody back then did a psychiatry rotation sort of, we call it rotational psychology classes. We did the anatomy and physiology classes, the cadavers, and all that that entailed, people passing out all over the place and throwing up all over the place. It was kind of fun, actually.

But I knew I didn't want to go into medicine because as I looked at the way those people looked, worked and conducted their lives, it didn't seem like what I wanted. So I went off to graduate school, and this was this is what we were told, basically, at the beginning, you're going to have lives. I thought that's the way graduate school's going to be, that's the way it should be. I had no other examples to counter that.

So we faculty come down to the room where many of the graduate students had offices, it was a big circular place called the circus. They put a table tennis setup in the middle and they'd come down and play ping-pong with us, and take us out, you know, say, what are you doing, we're going down to the bar and to have a beer. They taught us how to drink. They wanted to know what was troubling us. A couple of faculty members in particular were just very close to the grad students, and they wanted to know what our issues were. There were times when we would be invited to a faculty member's home for dinner, and one of the rules was no shop. So we worked very hard, we really pushed hard -- we had to write lots of papers, we'd give lots of presentations. It seemed like every month there was a defense of something or the other, or a presentation after which you were grilled thoroughly to see how well we knew stuff. So we were well-prepared.

INTERVIEWER: It was in spring '69, right?

COLBERT: That's right. I do remember the astronauts landing on the moon.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me a little bit about what campus was like? COLBERT: Yeah, that was a time of great change. When I arrived at Brown, there were seven other black graduate students in the whole university, and about 26 undergraduates, most of whom were young women up at Pembroke. This was before Brown had formally merged with Pembroke, they were talking about it. All of us embarked on recruitment. We were pretty militant at that time because that was the big Afro kind of days, lighting matches kind of days. We realized that with the war heating up -- actually, the war had really heated up by then. There was a whole draft issue that I haven't talked about.

But I did get to graduate school despite the several attempts of my draft board and local draft board to send me to Vietnam as cannon fodder. I had seven -- seven, visits to the recruitment center, seven. They were really trying hard. It was Edgewood Arsenal that really worked it for me, made sure that I didn't get drafted. They said if I had gotten drafted they would have made sure I got to Knoxville to do more chemical warfare research rather than into Vietnam. I wasn't having any of it. I wanted to go to grad school. Anyway, the long and short is I got to graduate school.

But when I got there, there were, once again, very few people of color. We all got together and we decided we needed to do the recruitment and we needed to make the administration pay attention and give us resources to do it. So there was the usual storming into the president's office, storming into the provost's office and the deans' offices, acting militant and saying this university needs to do something or we're going to do the recruiting and you're going to pay for it and blah-blah-blah. Sure, okay. So we spent lots of time.

Actually, when I look back on it, it's not clear how we ever got our work done because we were off recruiting, and to great effect. The next year those numbers tripled, and then they continued to grow. Even in the department, even the psychology department, the undergraduates and I and the other black graduate student, Juarlyn Gator, we did a march on the department to say that the department should be able to find a faculty member of color, and we helped recruit a faculty member of color. It was part-time in that department and in medical.

So we did all that and still got our stuff done. I actually, I look back very, very fondly of those years in graduate school. The campus was -- it's one of the most beautiful campuses in the country, and especially in the spring to see Brown's campus is amazing. It was a very liberal place. In fact, I can remember the undergraduate curriculum where there were no majors, taking whatever they want to take. I chalked it up to all these rich kids, Buffy and Muffy coming to campus, coming to college. There were some bright kids, but they knew that the trust funds were there, lots of them. But nonetheless, nice people.

There was a lot of turmoil around the war, opposition to the war. There were marches. There was Civil Rights marches, and the black students were demanding rights and equality and attention, et cetera, and all of that was swirling around us at the time. Social change was in the air, free love, pop, experimentation with psychoactive drugs. All that, it was being young at a time when everything was changing, and it was wonderful, it was absolutely wonderful.

I do remember an occasion in which it was very clear that two people who sort of insinuated themselves into our group had to have been federal agents. They were older than us, it was a black woman and white man and they were supposedly together. They wanted to know everybody and all kinds of stuff, and we kind of thought these two are a little funny. As we started to freeze them out, they just sort of disappeared. But we all realized in retrospect they were agents. They were seeing who was who in this group. I've never forgotten those two because they were just so much older than the rest of us, and trying to pretend to be students. Oh well, but there was a lot of suspicion in the air those days.

INTERVIEWER: Did you live with anyone at frat? Did you have a roommate?

COLBERT: Yeah. Well, the first year, in '68, Brown had just opened the new graduate center. That cohort of students was the first to live in a graduate center. It was a horrible building, a horrible building. Just the most abysmal construction. You could hear -- this was like a seven story, eight story building -- you could just hear everything going on in that building all the time. The walls were thin as crepe paper. It was just a terrible place. After that, I and a good friend, Chet Lupton, who was one of my contemporaries in the department, and Jim -- gosh, I forgot Jim's last name now. But anyway, one of the other undergraduate students decided we'd move off campus and get our own apartment.

So, we moved off campus and got a fantastic apartment nearby and roomed together for awhile. Then Jim met his girlfriend who eventually became his wife, and then they went to move off. I found this wonderful legacy apartment in one of the named houses on the hill. There was this lovely old woman who was a real character. She was in her '80s at the time. She drove a green Nash Rambler and could wheel that thing around on two wheels up and down the hill. She drove like a mad woman, never got into an accident.

She passed that apartment on to me, because it was recommended. The only thing that she required for whoever was in that apartment was that you had to once a month have tea with her and her friends. This is where it really began sort of a formal education in gracious living was having tea with this wonderful group of old women who just were the most delightful, and sometimes delightfully foul-mouthed people I'd ever -- just some of the dirtiest jokes. And these were society women, and I had a ball with them. Of course, there was no tea to be seen anywhere. It was all cocktails and sherry and stuff. I just found myself looking forward to that every month to go up and have conversation and a few drinks with this lovely bunch of old women who were just so much fun to be around. Of course, they had a young man who was giving them attention. So it was mutually beneficial.

But through them I kind of met some other people of means who would invite me to dinners, invite me to places where there were these table settings like out of a magazine. When I was a kid, if we had a fork and a knife and a jelly jar for a glass, we're doing fine. But here's a glittering table with four or five forks and knives and glasses and stuff all over the place. It was in those settings that I learned really about how to live well -- which fork to use, which glass to use, how to go to a cocktail party, engage in small talk. It was wonderful.

Most of the time I ended up being the only person of color there, but I got back pretty quickly, real pretty quickly. It was odd a few times, particularly in some of those places down around Darien and Fairfield, Connecticut where everyone talked with their teeth clenched. But I learned to really enjoy it, and found out it was pretty easy to meet people if I met them halfway. And had a great deal of fun, and learned about foods and wines and things that I had never had any opportunity to experience as a kid.

INTERVIEWER: Can I ask, did that sort of launch your interest in cooking?

COLBERT: Launched my interest in cooking at a very high level. Launched my interest in food in a very high level. I remember saying to my mom that I'd really like -- my mom was actually a good cook, and her sisters were excellent cooks. I said I really should learn something about cooking. So she sent me a Fanny Farmer cookbook and said you go through this and you'll know the basics and the rest is up to you. And that's what I did. I went through that book and started learning the basics of how to cook.

Then along came Julia Child who just changed my entire perspective on food. This sort of wacky giant of a woman who could just do the most amazing things with food, and that really took it to another level and I got really serious about cooking. To this day, I still love to play with food and wine -- I love wines too.

But it was a combination of that group and that group of people who were introducing me to a lifestyle that I'd only sort of read about and seen glimpses of in movies, et cetera, and there I was in it. And realizing that with this high level of food that was being brought out, hey, I can do that. I can do this, and began to cook, which opened up even new social avenues.

INTERVIEWER: So after you graduated, did you take some time off?

COLBERT: No. No, in fact, if there was one mistake I made was to leave graduate school without having finished writing my dissertation. I was about two-thirds written, and then I ran into a glitch, which ultimately turned out to have been a programming error that it took months to find. A simple minus 1 where there should have been a plus 1 buried in an equation. It took months and months to find this.

But I had been offered a job at Northeastern on the faculty. I was really under some pressure from the department to take it -- that was the job of the year for everybody. I thought maybe I ought to stay and finish this thing and then go, but everybody kept saying it'll only take you a couple of months to finish up. Well, no. Once I got to Northeastern and found it was on a quarter system, and I was teaching, I quickly became a teaching drone. Four courses a quarter. Four courses a quarter. No graduate assistance whatsoever, an imperative to start up a research lab, and oh, by the way, finish up that dissertation. The dissertation quickly dropped into the background. It wasn't until spring of '73. The fall of '72 I left. Spring of '73 I realized I need to get this thing done.

So I remember taking a rowboat out -- I lived in Canton at the time -- and I took a little rowboat out to the middle of this little lake and dropped the anchor there and I sat there and forced myself to finish writing my dissertation. I got to Brown with my completed dissertation to hand in five minutes after the office closed. It was in May of '73, and they wouldn't open that door for anybody. I ended up having to wait another year, which really ticked me off. They get all the people in an office, they would not open that door. So, formally, I finished in '74, but everybody was involved knew that I finished in '73 and should have finished in '72. But by that time I was teaching.

I never went to my graduation. In fact, it was in the middle of a lecture, and I kind of looked up and said to my class, oh, I think Brown is having its commencement and I'm formally being given my diploma today, and the crowd applauded and I just went back to my lecture. A few years later I had them send it. So that was a mistake not to do that, not to go to that. It was a mistake to leave before absolutely finishing everything. It was a mistake not to go to my commencement, because I never got that closure. It was a mistake to take that job at Northeastern because it was not a good place for me. Huge, too many students in a class, no support for junior faculty whatsoever. I found out that they really weren't interested in my field, which by that time had become cognitive psychology. And that the people of interest, the people doing stuff that I was interested in were here at MIT in the psychology department.

So I wandered across the river one day. I just get really frustrated because I couldn't talk to the faculty rat and pigeon runners in my department. So I wandered across the river and looked up Molly Potter in the psychology department, it was in building E-10. The building doesn't exist anymore, they're building the annex or a new part of the Weisner Building, the new building there. But the little psych department was there. I wandered into her office and introduced myself. She had no idea who I was. I remember her telling me well, I have about a half an hour. Three hours later we were still sitting there talking and we worked out some joint research with a graduate student named Barbara Ertel, and really saved my sanity. I was actually going bananas over at Northeastern feeling I'd made all the wrong decisions, was in the wrong place, I don't want my career to go like this, I'm not going to stay at this place for tenure, I don't like these people. On and on and on and on.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have the thought you were going to turn back in Baltimore?

COLBERT: Oh, they wanted me to come back. I have to give the Hopkins' faculty due credit. They'd been watching my career, watching me silently, and they said come back, come back, we'd love to have you on the faculty. They had me come down and give a seminar, and gave this wonderful party afterwards, just an amazing party afterwards. The only problem was my folks live a stone's throw from campus. I love my family but they're overwhelming and there was no way I was going back to Baltimore to be that close. Four hundred miles has been just far enough. Those who know me well know that my mother and I are both very strong-willed people, and we've struggled for decades.

So there was no way I was going back home, even though I greatly to this day, I appreciate the effort that Hopkins made to try to get me to come back. Instead I came here. I came here actually not to do research as I thought I was going to do. I came here to do a consulting job. So I had this opportunity to be senior consultant and trainer in the Office of Personnel Development. It's now called OED, Office of Employee Development. It was called Office of Personnel Development, OPD then. I thought well this will be a nice opportunity to sort of figure out what I really wanted to do with myself. Maybe go back to Hopkins, maybe go on somewhere else. But spend a couple of years doing this, have MIT on my resume, it'll look good. They'll spit me out in a couple of years, because it's a tough place.

INTERVIEWER: What had you heard about MIT before you had come here?

COLBERT: Nerds and geeks. Those were the first two things, nerds and geeks. Intense. Absolutely intense, and all focused around engineering. Those were the things that I had heard. Poorly socialized individuals. I heard all those things about MIT. And brilliant, brilliant misfits all over the place. Of course, when I came here I didn't find much of the sort. Of course, there was some. The place was so poorly understood from outside. What I found was that I had fallen into, stumbled into a place that was just right for me. It was just very clear that if you have ideas, energy, willing to work hard, willing to engage other people, try to build bridges, it's a wonderful place. Very affirming. Very entrepreneurial. Celebrating ideas. I just found wow, this is great.

INTERVIEWER: This was in 1977?

COLBERT: '77.

INTERVIEWER: What was the campus, what was the atmosphere like?

COLBERT: It was a much smaller place. It was really a small place. Kendall Square was hardly developed. In fact, it was across from E-19 now, where Legal Sea Food is now. There was an old electroplating factory there, electroplating business there. There was one restaurant up the street towards the river, it was the F & T Diner. I used to go in and joke about, I'd like a hamburger and I'll take my cup of grease on the side, please. But everybody was there.

There were fewer students at the time, certainly fewer graduate students. In fact, the balance was more towards undergraduates than graduates, and certainly the feel was undergraduate. The administration was smaller and very tight. I use this in a good word -- paternalistic, but in a good way. People cared about one another. They wanted to know who you were. You expected to get to know people, and to do it kind of independently and aggressively. So I spent much of my first year making the rounds of people, just introducing myself and saying what do you do, how can I help you? It was easy to get to know people that way. And the work that I did for OPD were mostly at Lincoln Labs doing a training program, that since became known -- that became called charm school.