J. Kim Vandiver

INTERVIEWER: This is the MIT 150th Anniversary celebration interview with Professor J. Kim Vandiver. And let me start by asking you where you grew up?

VANDIVER: I was born in Spokane, Washington and grew up in Yakima, Washington, which is right in the central part of the state; sort of the desert country. Worked in the apple orchards as a kid and spent a lot of time outdoors with my father.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me a little bit about your family.

VANDIVER: I have two older sisters, my father was an engineer with a telephone company, and my mother was trained as a schoolteacher, and in my growing up years taught piano in the home. So I grew up with piano music in the background all the time, and to this day I still just really enjoy hearing the piano.

INTERVIEWER: That's why your iPod list is all classical. Are there any particular influences in your childhood which you think contributed to the career path you took?

VANDIVER: Well, my father was an engineer with the telephone company. He was one of these people who grew up as a kid on a homestead; lived on the ranch. Very self sufficient, could fix anything, and he passed that on to me. And so my first car was a 1949 Willys Jeep, which I drove to school when I was in high school. But the condition was if you're going to drive it you're going to maintain it and fix it. So I grew up with that kind of a hands-on, doing everything attitude around.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have a particular interest in science when you were in school?

VANDIVER: I developed an interest in science and engineering kinds of things very early, it just happened, probably a lot because of my father's influence. He liked to build things. I started building things. I made my first go-cart out of parts from a push lawnmower and an old motor. So I enjoyed building things. I was very active in the late 50s, early 60s. When Sputnik went up in 1957 I was building rockets in the backyard and blowing the bottom out of the bathroom sink with firecrackers and things that my mother of course really enjoyed. I'm probably lucky that I still have all fingers and eyes and toes today because of my childhood, but I learned a lot.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you wind up at Harvey Mudd when you went to college?

VANDIVER: I knew I wanted to go to a school that had science and engineering. And I sat down in those days with the College Entrance Examination Board Booklet of Colleges book. It's this thick like a telephone book. I went through it page by page and I bumped into Harvey Mudd College. And I went there to visit; my brother-in-law dropped me off and I'm just walking down the street in Claremont and a white-haired gentleman in an old Chevy drove up and rolled down the window and he says, you look like you're new here. And I said, yeah. And he said, jump in, I'll show you around. And so he turned out to be a retired history professor from Pomona and I was on the wrong end of campus and he drove me all around to drop me off at Harvey Mudd. And I decided I kind of liked the place; if the people were like this, this would be a good place to go.

INTERVIEWER: And what made you decide to major in engineering?

VANDIVER: Well, I had a chemistry teacher in high school that I really liked, and so I arrived and my father was an engineer for the telephone company. And I thought his job was pretty boring, so I was not going to be an engineer. I thought I'd be a chemist because I liked my chemistry teacher. So I got to Harvey Mudd and it took my first chemistry professor about two weeks to convince me that being a chemist was a really dumb idea. And when I was a senior the dean of students got out of his little black book and said, Kim, would you like to know what I wrote about you when you were a freshmen? I said, sure. He opens his book and it says, if we don't get Kim interested in engineering, we'll lose him. They gave aptitude tests in those days. They knew what you were like and what you were interested in. And he was right, by the end of my freshman year I began to realize that engineering was really the right thing for me, and I started majoring in engineering.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it was just that you had the inherent skill set for engineering? What was it that made you a good candidate for engineering?

VANDIVER: In hindsight now, what made me interested and enjoy engineering is I liked that instant gratification that comes from building something, seeing it work, seeing it help somebody, seeing it please somebody. These are things that engineers appreciate, which don't always come in pure science where you can spend a long, long time working a problem. But I really like that more interaction and give and take that comes from working on engineering problems when you're working with other people and solving problems that help them.

INTERVIEWER: How did you wind up then from Harvey Mudd to MIT for graduate school?

VANDIVER: I came to MIT-- I got interested in ocean engineering because my brother-in-law was in atmospheric physics and oceanography. I did scuba diving at the time; I liked the oceans. I liked boats, but I didn't grow up with an initial passion for being an ocean engineer. As I was looking around for interesting things to do I decided being an engineer and combining it with activities in the ocean would be fun, and so I looked for schools, universities that had graduate programs in ocean engineering. And there were four or five at the time, and MIT-- it was in the Naval Architecture Department at MIT. So I applied here and came here in 1968 as a grad student.

INTERVIEWER: What was it about MIT that drew you?

VANDIVER: Well, initially when I was applying as an undergraduate to college, I'd grown up in the West Coast, I applied to no East Coast colleges. And the choice to come to MIT in graduate school was just really made by looking at the four or five different programs in the country and comparing them and decided that looking like the one at MIT was best suited to me. I really didn't know much about MIT, but I came to try it out.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember what your first impressions were of the culture, the students, the faculty?

VANDIVER: I was fortunate and so in my first impressions I applied for a summer fellowship at Woods Hole. So I graduated from Harvey Mudd in June of 1968 and two weeks later I arrived at Woods Hole for a summer fellowship. Now Woods Hole and MIT had no joint program at the time, but it was just nearby and it was related to the oceans. And I was thrown in with a bunch of other grad students from all around the country, had a wonderful time, met wonderful people at Woods Hole, so that was a fantastic start. So I arrived then, on campus, the end of August of that summer already knowing a number of people, being comfortable with living in New England. It was a great start.

INTERVIEWER: Were there ways in which MIT was different academically than what you were coming from?

VANDIVER: MIT and Harvey Mudd in those days in undergraduate programs were very similar. Lots and lots of required subjects, so I had at Harvey Mudd-- every engineer had six semesters of math, four semesters of physics, three semesters of chemistry, and then you just started taking your engineering subjects. MIT was a lot like that in those days. Very hard, you had to learn some real time management skills and discipline and get the work done. So I think they were actually very similar places. When I applied one of my favorite professors at Harvey Mudd wrote a recommendation for me, and I don't know if I asked him what he wrote, but he volunteered. He told me what he wrote. He said, I just told them you were as good as Bob Stuart. And Bob Stuart was a student who had gone the year before to the same department at MIT and he came here and got straight A's in all of his graduate subjects the first year he was here. And so that was a pretty good recommendation. So I found it similar, and I actually found graduate school easier than undergraduate school.

INTERVIEWER: What made you decide to stay at MIT for your PhD?

VANDIVER: Well, that year, 1968, 1969-- in those days, if you graduated from college in 1968 and you were healthy and able bodied, you were in the Army. It was before the draft lottery, but it was after all the loopholes had been closed in the draft. So I was holding off my draft board, desperately trying to get one year in as a grad student just to get a Master's degree and get started. So I knew I was on my way into the Army and so I turned my Master's thesis in the summer of 1969-- in August-- and 10 days later I had to report back in California for an induction physical. So then there was a break. I had a two and a half year break while I was in the Army and before I came back to graduate school. So if you don't mind me diverting, I'll tell a little story here.

And that is on the basis of having a Master's degree in engineering, I applied for a direct commission in the Army. And so later that fall of '69 I got my fifth notice to report to the draft. And in the same week I got a letter that said if you want to be an instant second lieutenant go down to your local army reserve and raise your right hand. And the letter said if you decide to become a second lieutenant, you must agree to go to Vietnam. That was the condition. So I went down. I said, I might as well be a second lieutenant, went down, and swore in. So in January of 1970 I entered the Army and went to Fort Belvoir, Virginia for engineering officer basic training. And then I served a year in Vietnam, learned a lot of really interesting things, was very fortunate, and arrived back here on campus in January of 1972.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe your graduate school experience at MIT?

VANDIVER: Hadn't thought about that in a long time. I did think about it when I was sitting at my desk in Vietnam saying, I have a Master's degree, do I want to go back and do all the work of a PhD? When I'd left I wasn't so sure, but Vietnam could be really boring and it did give you some time to think about what you wanted to do when you grew up. And by the time I'd finish my tour, I decided I really did want to go back, and by that time the joint program with Woods Hole and MIT had started up. That summer of 1969 when I was doing my Master's thesis, I actually did the research work at Woods Hole. And I needed a summer fellowship to help pay the way. And the head of the Department of Naval Architecture at the time, Alfred Keil, said, well, I'll pay your fellowship for the summer, but I want you to do something for me. He said, I want you to interview people at Woods Hole and find out how they feel about having a joint program.

And so I did. I went around and knocked on the doors of all sorts of people-- oceanographers and all kinds of people and found out about a third of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. They'd gone there to get away from that kind of the academics and teaching. About a third of the people were wildly supportive and about a third of the people really didn't care. So I reported that back to Professor Kyle but it got me interested-- I really began to know a lot about what this proposal of a joint program was. So while I was sitting at my desk in Nha Trang Vietnam thinking about whether or not to go back to grad school, I thought about the joint program. And by the time I was ready to come back, it was up and running, so I applied to the joint program from Vietnam saying I want to come back to the joint program and was fortunately admitted.

INTERVIEWER: How did you wind up joining the faculty at MIT?

VANDIVER: How'd I join the faculty? Well, I had a great three and a half years then on my second tour as a grad student. Came back, in fact, I didn't know what I wanted-- I didn't, let me start that over. Came back. In order to do a PhD you have to find a PhD thesis topic. And you go around and talk to a bunch of different faculty and find out what they have to work on. And I didn't like anything I saw. When you're entering your PhD program at MIT you have to take doctoral qualifying exams. And I took my exams in May of 1972. That meant my first semester back I was just studying like crazy, and I was going to take one subject though just for fun. And I went and talked to Doc Edgerton and convinced him to let me take his undergraduate high-speed photography course because I'd taken up photography as a hobby in Vietnam. And he said, you know, sure, I'll let anybody in. So I took that course and had an absolute blast taking it. I'd had lots of laboratory subjects, so I had a real advantage over the undergraduate students. It was just a lark to do that subject.

So that summer I had passed the doctoral exams in May, didn't have a thesis topic, and Doc Edgerton needed a teaching assistant for the following year. So this is one of those things-- life-changing events that happen. So I went to work for Doc Edgerton in the Electrical Engineering Department as his T.A. And when I arrived on campus from having been at Woods Hole for the summer, came and arrived in the first week of September and there's a letter waiting for me. And Doc wasn't in, but he said, Kim, I'll be back in a week or so but why don't you think about doing a project while you are being my T.A? He said, something I've never taken a picture of or a kind of photography is color schlieren photography. Now schlieren photography had been used by the aeronautics industry to take pictures in supersonic wind tunnels. So we can see those models where they have the shock waves all showing and that kind of thing. That's schlieren photography. So I said, OK, I'll give this a try. And so I went to the library and read up on the methods and built my first system. And by the end of September I'd taken my first schlieren photograph and I walked in and handed it to Doc Edgerton. And he had this little 10 power loop and he'd hold it up. These were 35 millimeter slides and he'd say, Van, looks out of focus to me.

And I went a month later, had another whole setup built and took the pictures. Van, I don't like the color. So January I was getting desperate, and I was looking at a copy of Scientific American and there used to be a wonderful section in it called "The Amateur Scientist" and a grad student in Tennessee had come up with a new way of doing schlieren. I tried it, set it up, built it, took the pictures, and in January walked into Doc and showed him I think-- I brought this-- this is the picture. Maybe this one or very much like it. That's a bullet passing through the heat above the candle and you can see the shock wave and all the hot air. Took that picture in, Doc holds up his loop and he says, Van, I think you've got it. So in five months of work, the most wonderful words I'd heard in years. So I took these pictures, Doc really liked them, and there's another story which I can tell behind that. I'll finish answering the question about how I got into what I did in joining the faculty.

That year gave me time to look around for a good thesis topic. And without a good thesis topic you don't do work that will really impress people. And I found a topic I really liked. One of my many mentors was a senior professor in ocean engineering named Harvey Evans. I was his last doctoral student and I had talked to him earlier. I told them what I was interested in and so many months passed. He came back to me and says, Kim, I think I have something. He had me write the proposal that went to the American Bureau of Shipping. They then funded it. As I did the doctoral work, he essentially trained me to be a professor. At least to figure out how to do research, how to write proposals, how to manage the budgets. And he had me do it all as if I were basically a junior professor.

And so he basically mentored me through what it takes to do research as a professor. So that topic happened to be on the dynamics, the vibration of offshore structures. And it lead to my first professional publication-- actually, my second. There's another story which I want to tell. So my second, but my first professional publication in ocean engineering then was at the Offshore Technology Conference in 1975. I had finished my PhD in January of that year and it turns out that the topic was a really hot one in the industry at the time. It had to do with developing methods that you could detect failures in members underwater of fixed offshore platforms.

In 1975 the oil well drilling was done from platforms that looked like big television towers sitting on the bottom. And if they developed fatigue or cracks they would become potential failure problems. And that was a hot topic. That my first paper drew lots of attention. Essentially, there was opening in the department at the time for an assistant professor position to which I applied, and that's how I got my first job. But you can see the sequence of events, if Edgerton hadn't given me the chance to take a year to find a really good topic, those things wouldn't have happened.

INTERVIEWER: No, all those other dominos.

VANDIVER: Yeah. Let me tell you another story. So Doc really liked these schlieren photographs. And I took a lot of them. We thought of everything we could take pictures of-- ice cubes floating in water, breathing-- you can see the air coming out of your mouth, and everything we could do. And then he said, Kim, you should write this up and go give a paper. And he said, the place you're going to give the paper is at the 11th International Congress on High-speed Photography. Well, Edgerton is the father of high-speed photography, and so if you get to go with Edgerton to that place you're with the man. And that was the situation I was in. So I wrote the paper and you had to present the paper. This was at University College in London in the summer of 1974 or 1973. And Doc said, you know, those pictures are really gorgeous. He had about a dozen of them enlarged-- 16 by 20's-- mounted, sent them ahead to the conference so when we arrived there they were all up in a gallery that anybody walking into the conference could go around and see. And I gave the talk and the talk was a very typical Edgerton talk. I mean I studied Edgerton and he was a wonderful showman. And so I just showed dozens of beautiful photographs, and after the talk a man came up to me and he'd seen the pictures in the gallery and he said, Dr. Vandiver, I'd really like to be able to use one your pictures. I said, sure. Let's talk. Well that picture ended up on the cover of Nature magazine. And my very first article ever was a little piece on the inside about how those pictures were taken. So that was in fact, my first professional publication. I was still a grad student at the time. And when it comes to getting positions as an assistant professor at MIT, it's not bad to have your first article be a cover photograph in Nature magazine.

INTERVIEWER: It must have been very heady experiences.

VANDIVER: Oh, it was. Actually, it was awkward at times because Doc was the father of modern high-speed photography, and everybody assumed that I was his protégé and I was going to continue in his footsteps. He was about 70 at the time. He was 73 or 74. No, he was 71. But I wasn't. It would've been absolutely foolish to do that. Nobody could replace Edgerton. And in fact, I was an ocean engineer, so it's a little different-- I just was more or less quiet about it with all these people at this conference. I'd just nod my head, but-- it was heady, but I knew that you can only take that just so far. Doc's influence on me and the things that he did that helped mentor my career were just stupendous.

INTERVIEWER: When you joined the faculty was it a different experience or a different view of MIT than being a student? Or did it seem like just a natural progression?

VANDIVER: I think it was a natural progression. It was different, I'd had this really excellent experience as a doctoral student because of the mentoring I got from Harvey Evans just showing me the ropes of how you would do it as a faculty member. I recall the hardest part of being a junior faculty member and the difference between being a faculty member and being a graduate student is that you have to become the mentor. And that's pretty new to you, so now you're choosing new grad students, and you're helping them through their PhDs. And you're having to sit back and let them do the work, and you're having to guide them through their first papers. That's the biggest change, is letting go of doing it yourself.

INTERVIEWER: Were there other mentors that you had at MIT?

VANDIVER: Lots of people helped me along the way. I value good teaching, and I studied people that I liked. When I was in class listening to them talk, you know, why do I like the way this person teaches me and what can I learn from this so that I can become a better teacher myself? There was a person who I just thought had absolutely beautiful blackboard and classroom technique of the style of class where you're putting things on the blackboard and explaining them. And that was Steve Crandall, who was a professor in mechanical engineering. And when it came to giving a public presentation, Doc was the master showman and I watched him and said, OK, what works when he's doing that? And like I said, Harvey Evans helped me become a professor. My first department head was Ira Dyer, and he was a really good department head and gave me great advice. Helped me find my first places to write proposals to and get my own research money. People like that don't often get much credit, but he steered me to places that turned out to be good steers and they paid off. Good help.

INTERVIEWER: Since you made that study of teaching, do you have a way that you define what good teaching is or the characteristics of a good teacher?

VANDIVER: I'm going to make you ask me that question again.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

VANDIVER: Because I want to tell a story that has to do with mentors. This one's really unusual. As I said, I've had many good mentors, but I had just joined the faculty. It was early in 1975 and Professor Doug Carmichael who was in my department said, Kim, I know you're interested in vibration and things like that. I have a project you might be interested in. And it was a project on a subject called flow induced vibration. So if you have a mooring line on a boat and the tides coming by, the line will sit there and shake. And that's because of the turbulence in the wake of that mooring line. And he was doing some work for the Navy, the Navy was interested on the vibration of cables and things like that. But he literally gave me this research project. He says, I'm too busy. I don't have time to do. You take it over. And he essentially made me the principal investigator. He and I went with a bunch of students to Castine, Maine, where the Maine Maritime Academy is. We had a summer research experience for our undergraduates, and I went along and helped with that, and did experiments on this topic. Well that topic has turned out to be my principle research topic for 35 years. I've been doing it ever since and I'm a world's expert on flow induced vibration of long, slender things in the ocean. And that was because that faculty member gave me a project that he'd written the proposal for.

INTERVIEWER: That's a great story.

VANDIVER: Yeah, and he gets a lot of credit. He's a wonderful fellow.

INTERVIEWER: OK, so I'm going to re-ask my question. Since you've studied techniques of teaching, what is it that you think makes a good teacher?

VANDIVER: Lots of things make a good teacher, but I think the most important one is you do have to care about your students and care about your students' learning. So that means you have to listen to your students and you have to become a good observer of your students. So if you're explaining something on a blackboard and you see-- you learn to recognize an I don't get it glazed look. And you can either just go on or you can stop and do something about it. So that's one of the things that I learned to do early, was read my students and figure out when they weren't staying with me. And I also, I think adopted an attitude very early that most lecturers at MIT, the lecturers teach to the top 10 or 20 percent of the students. And that means that in most lectures at MIT, probably more than half the students are not following it. That doesn't work for me. I still struggle with this after 35 years, of how to teach a group of students where you have the superstars who want to go fast, and then you have lots of students in the middle who need it at a little bit slower pace. How do you teach to the middle and keep the superstars happy? So I'm still struggling with that one.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, I was going to say, how do you?

VANDIVER: Well, with small classes-- Ocean Engineering was a small department and I had classes that varied in size from seven or eight to 50. And with the smaller classes you could give more individual attention. You could figure out ways to do it. You could work on it in recitation sections if they didn't get it in lecture. My teaching style also is, I learned early what is commonplace in K-12 education today. To realize that people have different styles of learning, and that some like the equations, that some like to see the real thing-- and I'm like that. I need to see and feel the real thing in order to understand it, and then the equations make sense to me. So one of the things that I taught for many, many years, and still do is, mechanical vibration. So anything that makes noise in the world has vibration, and so there's lots of things around us-- and it was a subject I really liked to teach. To this day, I try not to walk into even a regular lecture without carrying something with me that is a demonstration of what it is that I want to talk about. I'd try to craft lectures so that in the course of the lecture I appealed to at least three different styles of learning. And so in fact, I'll tell another story.

So I'd been teaching a number of years-- I should have brought another little prop, but we all know what a guitar string or a piano string does. You pluck it, it vibrates, and it makes sound. So in my second year at Harvey Mudd, a physics professor named Stoddard gave a lecture on the vibrating string. And I attended the lecture and took good notes, but I walked out of that lecture saying, wow, that was a great lecture. And 15 years had passed, and I had given the lecture before on the vibrating string, but I wasn't satisfied with it. And I said, you know, I'm going to go back and look at those notes and try to figure out why I thought that was such a great lecture. So I went back and did it, and I then crafted my own lecture, brought a demo, did many of the same things he did, and did the lecture and had a student come up to me afterwards saying, you know, that was the most amazing lecture I have ever seen.

INTERVIEWER: Just what you wanted to hear.

VANDIVER: Right. And it wasn't mine. You know, I borrowed it from Professor Stoddard.

INTERVIEWER: So I'd like to talk a little bit about each of your areas of interest. So why don't we start with dynamics of offshore structures? You've said a little bit about the vibrations, is there anything to add to that or talk about why you're interested in it or why you've stayed interested in it?

VANDIVER: So I got involved in dynamics of offshore structures in my PhD thesis. And so that first professional ocean engineering paper was about using measurements of vibration to tell you whether or not there was structural damage. Turned out actually not to work, but showing that why it wouldn't work was as important as that it could work.

I was interested in vibration. I'd had a wonderful teacher who taught me about basic vibration when I was an undergraduate and that's why I went looking for a PhD thesis involving dynamics. The PhD thesis led to that wonderful gift from Professor Carmichael who said, you know, I have this project on flow induced vibration, maybe you'd like to take a look at that. And that turns out to be a problem that just never goes away. So we have this failure in the Gulf of Mexico right now and the pipe that connects that floating drilling ship with the blowout preventer on the bottom is 5,000 feet long and 21 inches in diameter. If the current flows by it, it'll vibrate. And I've been studying that problem for 35 years. And instead of like many engineering problems, you study them for two or three years, you solve it, and you go on to the next one. This one, the frontier in the industry justs kept getting into deeper water, bigger things, and you had to get better and better and better with your solutions. So we had crude solutions in 1980, better ones by 1990, and about 1990, one of my doctoral students and I wrote a computer program that predicts the fatigue life of pipes like the one connecting the ship to the BOP as a function of the expected ocean currents. And that program, which is called SHEAR7 has been around now for 17 years. We keep improving it, but it's basically the industry standard program for that purpose. So the continuing advancing of the frontiers kept me interested in the dynamics problems in the ocean.

INTERVIEWER: OK. You're still doing the photography?

VANDIVER: I don't do the color schlieren photography that I did when I was Doc's T.A. I occasionally do it when-- well, every year I give talks to the students who are taking high-speed photography at the Edgerton Center. And so I brush off the equipment and then students think of applications and things they would like to try. So I act as a consultant, and I've consulted on a few other doctoral student projects around MIT using those techniques. But I don't often go in and take pictures of my own anymore; there's too many other interesting things going on.

INTERVIEWER: Energy and oil and gas exploration.

VANDIVER: And? What do you want to know about them?

INTERVIEWER: I want to know what is it you're interested in, why you're interested in it?

VANDIVER: Well, I'm interested in ocean engineering problems in deep water, and there are two major sources of support and problems in the world. The US Navy in the United States and doing things in the ocean with cables and so forth and the offshore oil industry. And beyond that, there's not much money out there to support activities. And I've worked with both over the years doing dynamics problems. So that's primarily the motivation there.

INTERVIEWER: Ocean Engineering?

VANDIVER: Ocean engineering in general? Well, I like the oceans and you develop a-- once you get started in a field, you develop a group of peers and colleagues who you get to know pretty well. And I like my relationships with my colleagues. And then they pick up the phone and call you and say, hey Kim, we've got a problem. Can you help us on this? You then have a sequence of graduate students over many years that are now off working at the major laboratories and companies in these industries, so it just sort of becomes your life work. Kind of just becomes part of you and all these people you know, so you wouldn't walk away from it, you'd be walking away from your friends.

INTERVIEWER: Over the years you've done some consulting work with a number of companies, what does that kind of work add to your own research and understanding? And what does it bring to MIT?

VANDIVER: Doing consulting is really valuable. And I remember as a junior professor I was sort of amazed by this policy that MIT would allow its faculty to consult the equivalent of one day a week. But it didn't take me very long to realize that that was frequently the source of the next research project. You'd do a consulting problem, you would solve the problem to the extent answers were known, but you'd explain to the client that we don't know this and this and this, and if you really want to know the answers you're going to have to do some research. And so that lead to lots of research projects over the years for me, and I think somebody was very wise when they set that consulting policy for MIT, understood that.

So when I first started on the faculty I think we were probably less than 20 percent -- substantially less than 20 percent industry sponsored research. But today, I think we're much closer to 30 percent industry sponsored research. So that sponsored research from industry, I think, comes an awful lot of it from the consulting connections.

INTERVIEWER: As we talked about, I have a bunch of administrative things that you've been involved in-- undergraduate research in the Edgerton Center. Do you want to sort of walk me through chronologically?

VANDIVER: Sure. That's the best way to do it. The way in which I got involved in faculty governance and then the administration side of MIT started pretty early. I was asked-- I can't remember the first Institute committee that I was asked to serve on. Well, actually, it might have been about the time-- I didn't quite have tenure, so I'd been five or six years on the faculty. And I was asked to report to 3-207. I didn't have any idea what 3-207 was and so I walked down to 3-207 and it says president. I said, uh-oh. Walked in and the president and provost were there and I had a meeting with the provost, and it was Francis Low. I walked in and I said, well, I'm Kim Vandiver and he said, sit down. He says, I have a job for you. He says, I want you to serve on a committee, the search committee for the dean of engineering. And this was a committee that eventually produced Gerry Wilson as the dean of engineering. And I said, OK, but why me? You know, just a nobody, young professor. And he looked me in the eye and he said, quite frankly, you're the token non-tenured faculty member. I said, OK. But it would turn out to be a wonderful experience. When you're doing a search for somebody in a position that high, you interview a lot of people. And you get to see all the good, clean laundry and dirty laundry and everything else. It was a real eye-opener. That was fun. And I began then serving on regular committees at the Institute. And one of them I think was a committee on educational policy, which was later on divided into what we call today the Committee on the Undergraduate Program, CUP, and the Faculty Policy Committee. But that committee then dealt with the big questions around MIT's curricular requirements and other things. And I met other people around the table who cared about these things. And I must have already been showing that I cared about these things because somehow I got nominated to do it.

And one of the people that I watched at those committee meetings was professor Art Smith. Now Art Smith died just a couple weeks ago, and he was another one of these mentors. He's a quiet, long-time friend. We go to the same Unitarian Church with his family and then my sphere as a professor began to interact with him about the same time. But he was a person who could-- these meetings were lunch meetings and they would last two hours. And he could sit there for an hour and 58 minutes and not say a word. And he would let everybody else flame and talk and express their opinions and then with two minutes to go he would say, well, you know, we thought about this in 1964. It was a bad idea then, it's a bad idea now. And that would be the end. We'd vote and it was over and we'd do whatever it was that Art thought was the right thing to do. So I just learned a lot by just watching him. He was a wonderful character.

So then I just started getting involved in other committees and in the mid 80s I became the associate chair of the Faculty. The associate chair, it's not an ascendacy thing. You don't then become the chair of the Faculty. It's a junior faculty officer position. And that involved me in many more things. I got to know Margaret MacVicar very well. She was the dean for undergraduate education and the creator of the UROP program. And she and I worked together a lot over a number of years. So these stories branch in a couple different directions. So this is right in the mid 80s, about 1985 to 1987. And at the same time something else really important in my career happened.

And that was I was asked to become the director of the Experimental Study Group. MIT has three freshmen alternative programs: Experimental Study Group, Concourse, and today, Terrascope. In those days it was just the two. And I said, OK, I'll do this. And in those days it was a self-paced independent study, a way that freshman could do the required courses of the freshman year. And the hallmark of that program in those days is that the students had tutors. And the tutors were upperclassmen who had gone through this program as freshmen. And I learned a really important lesson in the five years that I was the director of the Experimental Study Group, and that is that students make great teachers. And when you have a student walk in your office and say they want to teach or they have an idea for a subject that they would like to do a little seminar that they could do for the students, get out of their way and give them all the resources you can, and stand back and watch what happens. And I learned lessons from those students that to this day change the way I approach education.

INTERVIEWER: Can you give an example?

VANDIVER: Well, lots of faculty don't naturally believe that you should allow students to be in charge of a class. There's all sorts of reasons you might believe that, but the students in ESG showed me why, if you pick well-- if you choose students well-- they can be marvelous teachers. In one example, there were two students, three students, who were sophomores and ESG at that time was not allowed to teach chemistry. We were teaching math, we were teaching physics, but the Chemistry Department had not allowed us to independently teach chemistry. Our students then would have to go to the regular lectures. We gave our own exams. So the department was ceding some authority to allow you to do this.

So I had these students, two students at the time come to me. I think it was Marya Lieberman and Seth Brown. And they said, we'd like to teach our own independent subject on chemistry called "Chemistry Demystified." And it would be hands-on, they would do kitchen chemistry labs, and they would do some analysis. And it did count with credit, but it didn't count for our required chemistry. But what it did was it demonstrated that they could teach. And they got the attention of-- the head of the Chemistry Department liked it and I brought it to the attention of the dean of science and said, these kids are so good. Give them a chance to teach the regular chemistry subject at ESG, and they did. Actually, they wrote a proposal. They wrote their own curriculum, Showed it to the dean and the department head and only then did they actually say, OK, you can do it. So I need to tell you a story about Marya Lieberman.

Back in the late, well, it was in the late 80s. Remember cold fusion? So there's huge uproar around cold fusion. It's announced and everybody is talking about it. Well, within 24 hours of the announcement of cold fusion, I walk into this little study room that had become more of a little lab project room at ESG, and Marya's sitting on the floor surrounded by about five freshmen. And right on the floor in front of her is a Styrofoam cup with wires going to it, batteries hooked up to it. I walk in and say, Marya, what are you doing? She says, we're checking out cold fusion. So I looked at her and I say is that deuterium? And she says, yeah. And I said, well, where did you get it? And she just looked me in the eye and she said, you don't want to know. By that time they already had it on, the batteries are already hooked up, if anything was going to go wrong it would have gone wrong, so I just said, right. You know, and I'm gone out the door. She and Seth Brown, this other student are married, have had children, are both professors at Notre Dame.

INTERVIEWER: OK, so pick up the chronology of your administrative duties.

VANDIVER: I chaired a number of different committees: Committee on Curricula. I was associate chair of the Faculty. That was a really terrific experience. The mid 80s were times of quite a lot of unrest on campus around Nicaragua and the Sandinistas and all that stuff. We had students all in uproar over that. Then a little later on was apartheid in South Africa and we had students arrested and big faculty meetings where there was lots of turmoil. As associate chair of the Faculty, the then chair of the Faculty asked me to sort of be the faculty governance SWAT team to deal with students in these confrontations. And her name was Molly Potter, she was the chair of the Faculty at the time. And so I went to my first student event and brought out some faculty who the students respected, and it was really a free speech kind of issue. They were going to run a student up a speaker to run them out on a rail. I said, look, you really need to let the person have a chance to talk. And if they're really as bad as you say they are, you'll actually come out the winners at the end of the day. So this first one happened and it actually worked out really well. And from then on I started getting called in to help deal with these confrontations with the students on campus. I was lucky most of the time.

A year or so later, along about 1980-- would have been about 1989 I was the chair of the Faculty Nominating Committee. And that's the committee that picks the faculty and nominates them for all the major committees at the Institute. And nominates the associate chair of the Faculty and the secretary of the Faculty and the chair of the Faculty. Well, we had gone through about six or eight candidates for becoming chair of the faculty and I'd gone and asked people if they'd serve and I got turned down again and again and again. And I would check in with the provost and at the time, Constantine Simonides, the vice president and I was getting a little frustrated. And one day Joel Moses, who was the provost said, Kim, I'd like you to step down as chair of the nominating committee. I said, OK. And 24 hours later I was the nominee to be the chair of the Faculty. And that's how I became chair of the Faculty. So what you do is you serve a year as the chair elect. And then you serve two years as the chair. So my chair elect year was the year that Chuck Vest started at MIT. And in May of 1991 was his inauguration. He'd started in the fall of '90, so May of '91 was his inauguration. You become chair of the faculty on the 15 of June, so I wasn't quite the chair yet. So I had no official duties. The chair of the Faculty had to be at the inauguration. The night before Chuck Vest's inauguration, 19 students occupied his office. And this was over apartheid and divestment of companies doing business in South Africa.

So Constantine called me in and he said, Kim, I need you. I want you to go in and negotiate with those students and have them out of Chuck's office by noon on Saturday. And the inauguration is going on at that time and it's scheduled to finish at noon. So three other faculty and I start meeting with these 19 students and about 10 o'clock in the morning on Saturday morning we're all sitting in Chuck's office. Right outside the window he's giving his speech. And the other three faculty with me were Jean Jackson, Phil Clay, and Rosalind Williams. And we worked with the students and what happened is the television news people showed up outside in the hallway, and the students desperately wanted to get their cause on TV and so they turned to us and they said, if we go out and talk to the reporters will you let us back in? I said, no. And so we had a moment and I said, but I'll tell you what, if every one of you, one at a time promises that if you go out in that hallway and talk, I will let you back in, but you must promise that you will walk out of here at noon. And we went around the room and every one of them agreed to it. They all marched out, got their pictures on the camera, came back in, and walked out at 11:59 and everybody was happy. But that began my two years as chair of the Faculty with Chuck Vest. So he and I started off on pretty good footing. And I had a wonderful time being chair of the Faculty. I think it was my probably favorite job at MIT, it was really fun.