MacVicar Day 2000 - Celebrating Teachers at the Institute (2/4/2000)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PROFESSOR: Good afternoon. Dr. Vest, Professor and Mrs. Gray, distinguished guests who include today, Mrs. MacVicar and Margaret's two sisters, Anne and Victoria, it's my pleasure to be able to welcome you all today to the MacVicar lecture and subsequent discussions about teaching.

Today we celebrate great teachers, great teaching, and a woman who is passionate about both. We'll hear more about Margaret MacVicar later from our speaker, as well as from a wonderful video that Bob Randolph will show later on in the program. Let me say here, however, that Margaret was really one of a kind. In the 30 years that I've been affiliated with MIT, I don't think I have met anyone who had a shorter mean waiting time between interesting ideas about how to improve the quality of undergraduate education than Margaret MacVicar.

Margaret understood that teaching and learning were not the same thing. She appreciated the role that research plays in teaching of undergraduates. And indeed, UROP is one of her greatest legacies, not only to MIT, but to undergraduate education throughout the United States and the world. She recognized that teaching and learning are not segregated between teacher and student and that students learn from teachers, and teachers learn from students as well. She was truly a remarkable person, and MIT is a far better place because of her.

As research universities go, MIT is a little bit different than most of our competition. While the US is blessed with many great research institutions, the educational experience at MIT is a bit different than one encounters places like Harvard, and Princeton, and Stanford.

In thinking about who to invite today to give the MacVicar lecture, it was important to us that we find somebody who really understood and appreciated what it was to be an MIT student. We also wanted somebody who was a terrific teacher and educator in their own right. And we also wanted somebody who knew and appreciated and could convey the essence and spirit of Margaret. And once we had articulated those criteria, there was really only one person who leapt to mind, and that was Edie Goldenberg, professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Now Edie attended MIT as an undergraduate, majored in political science, and she and Margaret were roommates and lifelong friends. And indeed, Edie and I were talking on the way over here. Edie had the pleasure, as did Margaret, of being the first group of women to occupy McCormick Hall. That meant, also, that Edie and Margaret had the privilege of being the first residents of McCormick Hall to violate the policy on having pets in the dorm, an issue which lives to this day, I should tell you.

After graduating from MIT in 1967, Edie went west in search of warmer weather and found herself at Stanford, where she received her PhD in political science, and then returned to the colder climes of the north, where she joined the political science faculty at the University of Michigan. She's held numerous positions of leadership at U of M, Including being the Director of the Institute of Public Policy studies, as well as the Dean of the College of Literature Sciences and the Arts.

Now, again, just to give you a sense of the scale of that operation, to repeat a comment that the Chuck made earlier, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, known by us Michiganders as LS&A it has a larger student body than MIT does, it has a larger faculty than MIT does, and it has a larger instructional budget that MIT does. So being dean of LS&A is, indeed, an extraordinarily challenging position, and Edie managed that job with a typical aplomb for the 10 years that she held that position.

Now, what's not widely known about Edie is that she is also directly responsible, personally, I believe, for Chuck Vest being our president. Now, it's not something that everybody knows around here, but it's true because if you read his bio carefully and check the dates, you will see that in 1988, Edie served on a search committee that found a new provost for the University of Michigan, located him amongst the ranks of engineers-- you could tell that she helped engineers in high esteem-- and it was from that position that Chuck joins us. So we thank you for your good work.

Since stepping down as dean, Edie has returned to the ranks of the professoriate. It's nice to know that there is life after deanship. She is a distinguished educator, a distinguished scholar, Edie has written widely and extensively about civil service, she's also written about the role of media in American political campaigns. She's an extraordinarily good friend of MIT and continues to serve this fine institution as a member of the MIT Corporation and Chairman of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Political Science.

I can think of no better person to give the first MacVicar lecture of the millennium, which follows on the heels of the 30th anniversary of UROP, than Professor Edie Goldenberg. Edie, welcome. Thank you.

GOLDENBERG: Well, thanks, Larry. And thanks, all of you. it's a real honor for me to be here to add my congratulations to the new MacVicar Fellows-- we were just together for lunch, and what an impressive group that is-- to honor my undergraduate alma mater; and, of course, to remember my late friend and college roommate, Margaret MacVicar. And it's especially exciting to be here on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of UROP, a program that Margaret launched, that has had enormous impact here at MIT and around the country, but more on that later.

When I think about Margaret, and I think about lecturing in 6120, I can't help but remember a call I had from her one day. She lectured in this room. And Margaret wasn't very tall, as you can see from her family. And she needed to use all of the Blackboard, so she had a student bring in a bench.

And she would write on the Blackboard standing on the bench, and then the student would come and move the bench, and she'd write on the Blackboard standing on the bench. And one day, she got so interested in writing on the Blackboard that she fell off under the bench. She was, of course, very embarrassed, but I've got to say that that was a memorable lecture for her and for her students. And I'm sure that all of us could come up with one story like that, some embarrassment that we suffered while we were teaching.

I want to say a word about the title of the talk. Posters have to be printed. And so the provost asked for a title time ago. And it was late at night, and I was feeling a little silly, kind of the way I used to feel when I was up all night studying for a physics exam.

And I remember one night, Margaret and I were writing slightly bawdy verses about BCS theory or something like that. I suggested this title as a joke. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

For one thing the letters for "rat" are embedded-- in slightly interrupted order, granted-- in "undergraduate." For another, Margaret and I were both deans at the same time. We were both deeply involved in undergraduate education. And as you all know, a dean is a mouse in training to be a rat. For a third, when a lot of people think about rats, they think about lab rats, a widely recognized symbol of science, and research, and one that's fitting for a talk at MIT.

But when I think about rat and MIT, I think about the Brass Rat, nature's engineer, a real symbol of MIT. More on the rat later.

So I was asked to say something visionary about the place of undergraduate education in the research university, to do this in the special context of MIT, to remember Margaret, and please, to wrap it all up without going on too long. That's a tall order.

As I reflected on my assignment, I decided to let Margaret be the visionary, to use four of Margaret's visionary ideas to organize my comments today. These four ideas are these-- first, undergraduate education is a core responsibility of MIT and of all research universities; second, undergraduate education means breadth and depth; third, research experiences powerfully enhance the undergraduate experience; and forth, every individual student matters.

So let's take up each of these in turn. In 1986, Margaret made remarks at an MIT Corporation meeting, in which she said that MIT must have, at its heart, commitment to a world-class undergraduate educational program. One of her favorite sayings from antiquity was, "To prepare for one year, you plant rice. To prepare for 10, you set trees. To prepare for 100 years, you educate people."

Margaret was an MIT undergraduate and also an MIT doctoral student. She spent three years at each, and therefore never knew what class she was in, by the way. And while she believed in the fundamental importance of research and graduate education at MIT, she never wavered from the view that undergraduate education is the fundamental purpose of MIT, that undergraduates should be at the center of the Institute's complex mission.

And in this as in so many other things, Margaret was a good decade ahead of her peers. Sometime around 1990, the rest of us woke up. Other research universities caught on to the reality that if undergraduates continued to be neglected relative to other aspects of their mission, then universities would suffer, and suffer badly, at the hands of intrusive legislatures, unhappy alums, donors, value conscious parents, and students.

In 1989, I began my years as dean of Arts and Sciences at Michigan with an agenda that included re-centering undergraduate education in our institutional mission. Four years after that in 1993, Donald Kennedy was pondering and writing, "Is it possible to engage a research-oriented faculty such as that at Stanford more deeply with our students?"

The criticisms that galvanize the rest of us weren't exactly new. Back in 1828, the trustees and faculty at Yale concluded that, "not one of our colleges is a place of thorough learning, and not one of the better class of them does half of what it might do by bringing the minds of its instructors to act directly on the minds of its pupils." And in 1893, the president of Vassar commented this way on the Vassar faculty-- "One is obliged to suspect at times that the student comes to be regarded by the faculty as a mere disturbance of ideal schemes and as a disquieting element in what, without students, might be a fairly pleasant life."

[LAUGHTER]

What is new about the criticisms of the '80s and '90s is that they came, and still come, from outside of academe. And they were and are frequent, pointed, and relentless. What is also new for our universities today is that our educational challenges are greater than they were in the 19th century. We admit a more diverse student body. We pursue a more varied and complicated institutional mission. Our students face a present and a future of rapid change and demographic diversity in a society that stresses knowledge and information.

The complex societal problems we face have led to more and more specialization. Understanding basic social questions requires more knowledge than any one person has. Our students need broader and more interdisciplinary understandings of the world. They also need to develop the ability to cooperate with others who bring complementary specialized information to address problems as a whole, which leads me to the second point.

A good education requires both depth and breadth. In 1985, Margaret shared her ideas with Paul Gray, then president, as he prepared a speech to welcome new students to MIT. Margaret wrote, quote, "Uncommon excellence in a scientific or engineering field is not enough. It must be accompanied by an understanding of the social and human context, by an ability to comprehend your work in its broadest humanistic terms."

A year later, Margaret herself welcomed the '86 entering class with thoughts about the reforms to be proposed for General Institute Requirements, in particular, the HASS or Humanities and Social Science requirements. And she said, "You are likely aware of the major movement in the liberal arts colleges to reformulate their core curriculum to include strong science, to include mathematics, and to include exposure to technology to complement the humanities, arts, and social sciences core. MIT has long such had a program of the sort of equal weighting of humanities, arts, and social sciences with the sciences and mathematics."

Now, having been an MIT undergraduate myself, if Margaret were here today, I would certainly quibble with the idea of equal weighting, or at least that that's what was happening in the '60s when I was a student here. But the general idea of balance and breadth is valid and goes back a long way. I was interested to read a copy of the fourth Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture at MIT in 1949 by Detlev W. Bronk, then president of Johns Hopkins and, by the way, a PhD in physics from Michigan.

His lecture was entitled "The Unity of Sciences and the Humanities." President Bronk described MIT then as a place where the course of technology is guided by considerations of human motives and human values. And he argued in that lecture that historical perspective is essential to creative imagination of all sorts, including creative imagination in science and engineering.

And yet we've seen a shift in student interests around the country away from the humanities and toward pre-professional training at the undergraduate level. I think it's captured quite well on a cartoon some of you may have seen in the Chronicle for Higher Education a couple of weeks ago. A student is talking with a friend of his, and he says, "My dad says I shouldn't waste my time with that general education stuff. But hey, it's my life, and I want to broaden myself. So I'm taking business accounting, international accounting, ecological accounting, and accounting and literature."

[LAUGHTER]

In my view, this trend toward the pre-professional and away from the humanities is unhealthy and an unwelcome development that undermines needed balance in undergraduate education. A liberal arts education depends on grounding in the humanities as well as in science and social science. It has staying power beyond the short life of technical training. A good education in the liberal arts introduces students to fundamental issues as they have been explored by others through the ages, including exposure to ideas, feelings, problems, and situations that are common to the human experience and to the ways that respected minds and revered hearts have dealt with them.

My goals for undergraduate education are these. To provide students with a solid foundation for problem solving. To help students understand others from different backgrounds and to interact effectively with them. To help students examine their own assumptions and avoid being taken in by specious argument. To help students feel connected with others who have dealt with similar feelings or situations or problems in the past.

To open students' eyes and minds to other cultures, thereby coming to understand their own better. To provide a deeper sense of self and citizenship. To develop valued employees, responsible citizens, and effective leaders. In sum, to teach students how to learn and to inspire a zest for learning that will last a lifetime. Now, these sound to me very like the goals of an MIT education, or at least what I think of as the goals of an MIT education-- helping students develop a balance between openness to new ideas and a healthy skepticism of those same ideas, a balance that permits knowledge to advance. This requires breadth as well as depth.

Research experiences enhance undergraduate education. The 1957 Arthur D. Little Lecture was-- copies are sitting out there. That was, of course, the famous "Generation of Greatness" by Edwin H Land. He called in that lecture for faculty ushers who would introduce students to the research environment. Others tried to make Land's idea a reality at MIT but failed.

Then, some 30 years ago, Paul Gray turned to Margaret MacVicar. And Margaret built on Land's idea, molding it brilliantly to MIT's culture. That was the beginning of UROP. To succeed at MIT, UROP had to be non-bureaucratic on the one hand, and yet academically credible on the other, and it's been both. Margaret made it work. She stayed with it and personally made those many critical individual decisions to support or not to support, to give credit or not to give credit, to place students off campus or not to place students off campus.

The decisions, these individual decisions that gave UROP its culture, its reputation, its solid grounding. UROP has transformed the undergraduate experience at MIT and at colleges and universities all around the country. In 1973, MIT students presented the Irwin Sizer Award for the most significant contribution to education at MIT to Margaret and to UROP.

In 1986, Margaret was honored with a national award, the Charles A. Dana Foundation Commendation in Higher Education, for her design and implementation of UROP at MIT. Now, university teaching may be the only profession where practitioners feel qualified to practice without any formal training and without reading any of the literature that relates to what they do.

Evidence on student learning dates back to the 19th century. But it has not been well understood or well regarded by faculty outside of the schools of education, which aren't held in all that high repute, and outside of departments of cognitive and developmental psychology. Some of this literature doesn't deserve a lot of attention because it isn't especially convincing. But it is compelling to me on three points.

First, students learn more when they are engaged and involved. Second, students learn more when they cooperate with others on problem solving. And third, the quality of teaching affects what students learn. UROP engages students with real problems in cooperative settings with teacher collaborators who are deeply engaged in the problems themselves. This is a prize-winning recipe for successful learning.

One of Margaret's favorite sayings she attributed to Confucius-- I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. UROP students do. UROP has been emulated all over the country. Many argue that MIT is unique, that a program like UROP can work in MIT but not elsewhere because of the special talents of MIT undergraduates and because of the special place that this is.

I heard this very argument two weeks ago in New York at a meeting of the Carnegie Corporation. It's a meeting devoted to a discussion of undergraduate education. And it's true that many of the early efforts to clone UROP at other institutions . Failed but today, there are hundreds of undergraduate research programs and institutions all around the country. They even have their own national organization of undergraduate research. That's when you know that something has really become mature.

It really got its start right here. I inherited a fledgling UROP program at Michigan in 1989 that at that time enrolled 14 students in an undergraduate student body of 24,000. Over the next period of my deanship, we built UROP to 1,000 first and second year students and probably twice as many juniors and seniors. And it's still growing. There are three distinctive features of UROP at Michigan worth mentioning. First, from the beginning, our program has focused on students at risk.

Underrepresented minority students who we know drop out at higher rates than majority students, regardless of their preparation coming in. And women in science and engineering, who we know often don't complete the majors that they set out to do. We decided to concentrate not on our honors students but rather on students who were more challenged academically.

Second, we needed to reach these students early, so our program has focused on UROP experiences in the first and second years. Many of the juniors and seniors already had research experiences through their majors or through honors, but there were virtually none for first and second year students. Third, and this is unusual for a higher education setting, we decided to evaluate our program seriously, and designed it with that in mind, including random assignment of students to participate or not to participate in UROP.

Our research results show that undergraduate research works. It improves the learning experience for all students, but especially for underrepresented minority students, including those who aren't performing well in class, and for women in science and engineering. The greatest payoff comes in the second term of a full year experience. It takes the students that long to figure out what it is that they're doing.

And there's some kind of aha that happens around the Christmas holiday break when they start getting it, or sometimes it's in January. So our UROP is always a year along because we want them to have that experience. Some of them have it earlier, but we want to be sure they have that experience. Undergraduate research promotes greater involvement by students with the academic life of the university.

A positive side benefit is that working with students in research reminds our faculty of the joys of discovery as seen through the eyes of novices. I've heard from more than one faculty member, especially in professional schools, they say I haven't taught an undergraduate ever because we don't have any, and this is just wonderful. This is just such an eye opener. Over 90% of the faculty at Michigan who volunteer to work with UROP students volunteer a second time.

About 40% of our first and second year UROP placements are in the Medical School. UROP is one of the few effective ways we've found for undergraduates at Michigan to work with Medical School faculty in ways that are valued by the Medical School faculty. And it's not just at Michigan. A 1995 publication reports that UROP experiences at the University of Washington and at Radcliffe College enhanced women's aspirations in science and engineering.

Preliminary findings of yet another study suggest that, I'm quoting, "The most powerful undergraduate learning environments may occur in research universities that also attend to the undergraduate program." So as research universities around the country have struggled to recenter undergraduate education in their missions, their leaders have struggled to articulate what it is that their institutions have to offer to undergraduates.

In fact, research universities have a lot to offer to undergraduates. They enjoy a comparative advantage in providing a wide variety of research experiences with faculty who learn for a living, faculty who are the leading scholars across a wide range of opportunities in arts and sciences and in the professional schools. And undergraduate research is an approach that treats each student as an individual learner, which brings me to the fourth point.

Each individual student matters. Nobody I know believed that more than Margaret. Love and appreciation poured in from her students in notes and cards to Margaret when she became ill. Margaret took a personal interest in every student who came her way, the brilliant ones as well as the merely talented ones. She loved commencements. She actually lost her voice on numerous occasions, you'll remember, because she spent so much time practicing in order to pronounce every single name correctly.

She felt that that moment when the students walked across that stage was a moment that deserved special care and recognition. When one of Margaret's students father died, he had to leave MIT and return to Michigan. Margaret arranged for mentors for him at work and at school. When I was preparing a charge to our own committee on the undergraduate experience at Michigan, Margaret helped me with the language that says, in part, "Every student is an irreplaceable asset of talent, promise, and aspiration." I could never have said it better.

Margaret taught important lessons about the value of every individual student, perhaps especially important lessons for those of us at large public institutions. Our student-faculty ratio is an even greater challenge than yours, and sometimes we feel overwhelmed by sheer numbers of students. One benefit of UROP placements with faculty and professional schools and with research scientists is the pool of mentors for undergraduates is vastly expanded beyond the size of the arts and sciences faculty alone. This makes individual attention to undergraduates in places like Michigan possible.

Margaret's legacy is very much with us. She would be pleased with our progress. Today, undergraduate education is recognized as a core responsibility at MIT and at most research universities around the country. A high-quality undergraduate experience requires depth in one or two areas and breadth across many. Liberal arts colleges are worrying and fussing about how to strengthen their sciences and math. MIT, of course, has an outstanding science and math and engineering capability. But today, there is also much more-- boasts a much stronger humanities and arts environment than when I was here as a student.

Research experiences, whether in class or in the lab, are much more available for undergraduates, even in their first and second years, and even for students who aren't academic stars. And every individual student matters. So where's the rat in undergraduate education? Well, not just embedded in the phrase, it's in the belief that excellence in research and teaching go together, an unwillingness to accept the view that one can be excellent only in research or teaching but not in both.

I've been struck at Michigan that the departments and programs that devoted real energy and imagination to their undergraduate programs are either already rated in the top 10 in terms of research excellence or they're making moves in that direction. Research and teaching, RAT, can and do go together. The rat is also, of course, the brass rat. Where's MIT in undergraduate education? Well, in a leadership position, as it should be.

There's a strong tradition of national impact by MIT in undergraduate education, in physics and in some areas of engineering. What is special over the last 30 years is MIT's leadership in undergraduate research, which has transformed colleges and universities, affecting areas of inquiry in science and engineering, of course, but also in social science, the arts, and the humanities.

Undergraduate research works, and the full set of possibilities for advances in undergraduate research are not yet realized. We're clearly on the right track. Now, Will Rogers once said that even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. Margaret would never have wanted us to rest on our laurels and become complacent with our achievements. She would insist on a constant stir in undergraduate education, in using our imagination to continue to improve the learning environment for our students.

I don't know what the next nationally notable educational innovation will be to emerge from MIT. Maybe it'll grow out of the partnership with Microsoft and other corporations, or maybe from the partnership with Cambridge University and other universities around the world. Or given the role that MIT's on of late, maybe it'll be an interplanetary partnership. I imagine n squared IT, a collaboration with some university on Mars.

But more likely, it'll emerge from the imagination in a single lab or classroom. John Gardner wrote that an institution's true supporter is a loving critic who must never be indifferent. Margaret was always a loving critic of MIT. I'm delighted that Margaret's name is associated with the MacVicar Fellows, since they so appropriately capture her devotion to students and to the educational experience of undergraduates.

And as an alum and another loving critic of MIT, I'm delighted that the McVicar Awards publicly acknowledge the outstanding contributions individual faculty make to the MIT experience. This has been a special honor for me today. I'm glad we're all here together to remember Margaret and her signal contributions and to celebrate faculty, students, and a very special place, MIT.

[APPLAUSE]

PRESENTER: Institutions are 90% people and 10% image. The people create and sustain the image, and then they move on. This is another way of saying that we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. We all nurture the image that is MIT. Now, we know that to be true, but sometimes we fall off the track in one of two ways. We may worship those who've gone before, or we may forget those who have preceded us.

It seems to me that these last two days, we have avoided both extremes while remembering Margaret MacVicar. Shortly after the announcement of last year's McVicar Fellows, President Vest wisely asked if there was some way those who were new Fellows could be introduced to Margaret, her spirit, and her values. He had been prodded, I suspect, by others.

But this film that you're about to see is the result of his request, his interest, and let it be said, his budget. We are in his debt as well as we are in the debt to the talents of J. Collier and Larry Gallagher. And I think debt is the right word and not too strong a word, for this film, while brief, really does approach the profound. Margaret MacVicar, you see, personifies what is best about this place, and in remembering her, we are reminded of the values that are at the heart of MIT.

And these values are each year personified afresh in the new McVicar Fellows. May the film not only remind us of the strong and influential colleague, but call us all to reaffirm what we each do to MIT the flagship institution that it is. Enjoy the film.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GOLDENBERG: She was an educator, a catalyst, an innovator.

GRAY: She had the ability to step up to almost any challenge or opportunity.

BELLINGHAM: She was a person who could hold 30 different projects together and still have time to go up to her farm in Maine for the weekend.

GRAY: She was not a person who was easily discouraged.

GOLDENBERG: She fought for her students.

BELLINGHAM: She held us to high standards.

GRAY: And she had a certain inner strength and inner confidence.

GOLDENBERG: She was also a wonderful human being.

GRAY: A great colleague and a great friend. Well, let's start with Margaret's undergraduate years here. She came in the middle '60s, at a time when MIT was endeavoring to admit more young women.

GOLDENBERG: Margaret and I met as roommates in McCormick Hall at MIT.

GRAY: She served while she was a student as president of the Association of Women students.

GOLDENBERG: And we explored all of the states in New England together. We drove all over the place. But the place that really caught her attention was Maine.

GRAY: After her undergraduate education here, she pursued a doctorate, and she spent some time in England. And she returned here in the late 1960s with an appointment as an instructor in physics. And so beginning in the summer of 1969, she began preparing the way for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, as it came to be called.

BELLINGHAM: I started in Margaret's laboratory as a UROP student, and when I left her laboratory, I had my PhD.

GRAY: As I recall, that first fall, there were just 20 or 30 students who participated. There was a UROP office. She was it.

GOLDENBERG: She prided herself on putting that program forward with relatively little money.

BELLINGHAM: Margaret really valued the people in the laboratory, and that was how she focused her energies. The advances were going to be made by the people, not by the equipment.

GRAY: The only condition associated with involving a student in UROP is that a faculty member had to say, this work, if performed, is worthy of academic credit. That was it.

BELLINGHAM: There was this point where you realize, this person is in their element. There's these big plumes of frost and cryogenic smoke billowing through the laboratory. And I don't remember exactly what it was she said, but it was something like, isn't this cool?

GRAY: She worked on her own research activities. She had a number of graduate students who worked with her on those programs.

GOLDENBERG: She saw that they had not just the research skills that they needed, but the life skills that they needed.

BELLINGHAM: I remember going and parking and the vice president's spot at the Carnegie Institution and proudly marching up to her office. There was just a whole level of exposure that you got if you worked for that you just couldn't get any other way.

GOLDENBERG: It was Margaret who once told me that every student is an irreplaceable asset.

BELLINGHAM: In a very real sense, we were sort of an extended family.

GRAY: Within a decade, the program had grown to about 3,000 students.

GOLDENBERG: The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program is such a great innovation in higher education, and it's one that we've emulated at Michigan. And of course, it has been emulated all over the country.

GRAY: I've had a number of students tell me that UROP was the reason they decided to come here. By the middle '80s, she was interested in having a role which gave her a broader sweep with respect to the undergraduate educational program.

GOLDENBERG: She had very deep thoughts about what a good education means.

GRAY: She made her imprint there by helping the faculty rethink the role of the humanities, arts, and social sciences at MIT.

GOLDENBERG: She loved commencements. The fact that MIT has every student recognized individually was something that was very important to her.

GRAY: She was engaged in those activities and was looking forward to activities that would have gone beyond those kinds of efforts when she was taken ill in the fall of 1990.

BELLINGHAM: I'm extremely proud of the preparation that Margaret gave us.

GRAY: She was a teacher in every respect. She was a teacher of her students. She was a teacher of her colleagues, of institutions in a very important way.

GOLDENBERG: She packed a lot of life into 47 years, and I think she would have liked to have gone on for about 100, which I always thought was about right.

BELLINGHAM: There's a piece of her in every one of us, and it makes us stronger, more capable people.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[APPLAUSE]

PRESENTER: I think for any of us who ever knew Margaret, this is-- I'm sort of choked up. It was very moving. And I really appreciate everybody who participated in making that film. I think it's a real treasure, and especially for the McVicar Fellows. As time goes by, those of us who knew Margaret individually are going to be less and less common around here, and I'm really glad that we have this connection.

But I think the point was best set at the end, that there's a piece of her and everybody who loves to teach. And that's what we're going to turn to now. You know, at MIT, the demo is part of the culture. And I don't know, though, if you've ever had a teaching demo, but we're going to try that today. And we have a couple-- I'm going to introduce a couple spectacular teachers who are going to try to do this. And we'll see what happens.

Yeah, Arthur. You both-- where's Alex? Is Alex here? Alex is here. You guys are among the most unpredictable people at MIT. So I'm just going to let it roll. Arthur, professor of anthropology, show us how you do it in ISP. And then, next, Alex, just come on after Arthur's done. I have to be ruthless. This is all about time pieces, and I'm going to be ruthless about the time.

STEINBERG: Right. You've all been able to sit here peacefully being talked at by people. That's going to end in a couple minutes. Some interesting words were said about learning and that learning is done by getting involved in what you're doing and-- for recording purposes? Okay. And using your hands and solving problems. So in 15 minutes, we're going to try to do all those things.

Now, we're not going to solve these problems, but we're going to at least take a slug at them. And you're going to take a slug at them. Okay? So I do this in the context of a freshman course on technologies and cultures. This gentleman spent 40 years solving this problem. He's a English scientist by the name of John Harrison, born in 1693, died in 1776. Anybody know what he's famous for?

AUDIENCE: Longitude.

STEINBERG: Longitude, exactly. He's the guy that developed the first accurate timekeeping instrument that could keep-- that could measure the longitude. One of the reasons he was after it-- he did it, I suspect, is that the prize that the British government put out in 1714 said they'd give 20,000 pounds, which was an enormous amount of money in that period, to a person who could measure the longitude within half a degree on a trip from Portsmouth, England, to the Caribbean.

And he set out to do this. It took him 40 years because no one knew anything about accurate timekeeping. There were other conflicting methods at the time. If a clock could keep time to within a couple of minutes a day, that was pretty good. He began with this absolutely remarkable gadget that didn't go all the way to the West Indies. I want to point out to you that it has wooden-- it's made of brass and wood. It has wooden gears in it. It has an extraordinary temperature compensation device in there that's made of steel and brass.

And because this is on a ship that's rocking back and forth, you can't use a pendulum clock, obviously, but he has opposed pendulums connected together with springs. Very ingenious gadget. Pretty accurate. But he decided it wasn't accurate enough, so he didn't have it tested. He built two more. This machine is this size that you're just looking at there. He built another machine suddenly, very suddenly, in the late 1750s. 1759 it was finished.

It's a watch that's five inches in diameter. Why he changed to this size, where he got the idea to change to this size, no one knows. A lot of his papers are extant, but no one has ever really figured that out. This is the heart of that watch. This is the balance wheel with a very small spring. Now, with all that said, you're going to have to figure out the problems that he had to deal with. And I'm going to show you in a minute how you do it.

First of all, he had to sail, or the clock had to sail-- the time keeper, let's say, had to sail from Portsmouth down to the West Indies. It was also supposed to go back, obviously, but the prize was supposed to be given for that one-way trip. As a matter of fact, he had a hell of a time winning the prize. At the risk of making a snide observation, he was a very geeky kind of guy. This word's going to come up again in Alex's presentation I realize.

He probably was a hyper geek, in fact. Anybody that can obsess so over a time keeper for 40 years-- it's probably almost all he did. He was supported by various and sundry grants, by the way. And then build a machine-- this is-- H4 is that silver thing that I showed you that essentially lost a minute-- just under two minutes, but going and coming. This was on the first trip. This is unheard of.

And the Board of Longitude, which was made up of professors and admiralty people and nobility-- professors of mathematics largely, incidentally, from Cambridge and Oxford-- didn't have a clue that a machine could work like this. Their pocket watches didn't work very well. This one works a lot better, but it's a modern one. So if a rate was applied, which means how much it gains and loses every day, it in fact only lost 5.1 seconds, which is absolutely extraordinary given it was traveling on a ship, et cetera, et cetera.

So they made him go through a second trial, and again it gained only 39.2 seconds over the one-way voyage. Again, if a rate was-- with a rate applied. If you applied temperature rates as well, it gained only 15 seconds, which is really unheard of, was totally unheard of, which is part of the reason why he had so much trouble getting the prize. People simply thought there was something wrong with the experiments.

There wasn't anything wrong with the experiments. They're amazing pieces of machinery. Now, here's what we're going to do. I have a lot of clocks here. Can someone help me hand these out? I'd like you to form into groups of about five. So talk to people in front of you. Talk to people behind you. You're going to stop be--

[CHATTER]

Okay. Here, let me let me get your attention for just a second. Hang on. These are alarm clocks. These are very, very cheap mechanical alarm clocks. Here's what-- you've got to wind them up slightly. You wind them with the left knob. The right one is the other-- the right knob, sorry. And then shake it so that it starts running. Here's another one.

Now, here's what I'd like you to do. Hey. My classes are just this disorderly, by the way. It's exactly this disorderly. Here's what I'd like you to do. Oh, you stopped good. You're quiet for a second. I expected this would be. I'd like you to look at the clocks pretty carefully. I'm not going to ask you to really figure out exactly how they work because that takes too much time.

But I'll tell you what I would like you to try to figure out, and I want you to do this jointly as a group. What do you think are the impediments to making this thing accurate? These are very, very inaccurate clocks. They're analogs to the kind of stuff that Harrison's contemporaries were using. I've had students try to calibrate these, and it's really difficult. Really, really difficult. They're off by as much as 20 minutes a day in some cases.

Another question. How might you correct these problems? Now, I want you to spend about five minutes worrying about this. Talk about it. Discuss it. Come up with some solutions. Then, I think you probably-- someone in your group ought to write down on a piece of paper what you think. I'm going to call on someone from various groups to come up and write on the board what their conclusions are. This is the way I run classes. That's what you're getting, guys. That's what you're getting. Here's some paper. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Give me paper. I'll hand it out up here.

STEINBERG: About five minutes.

AUDIENCE: Arthur, our clock doesn't work.

STEINBERG: Yeah, that happens sometimes. Sorry. Have you wound it?

AUDIENCE: It keeps banging into the--

STEINBERG: Okay. So he's doing the right thing. He's bending it. Have you wound it enough to get it running? Oh yeah, okay. You probably ought to worry about the inside of it. Yeah, right. I think it winds the other way. You took-- yeah, the winder comes off if you wind it the wrong way. You want to get in a group with these guys?

AUDIENCE: I'm not mechanically inclined, actually.

STEINBERG: I've given you-- I've given you a couple hints. You might think about materials. Think about the regularity of the oscillator. Now, someone in your group I hope can figure out what the oscillator is and what its importance is. And then, figure out about how you can regularize the output of the power. Come on, write something up here.

Hey, can I get your attention back for a minute? I've got to really-- I obviously have a very recalcitrant class. Oh no, here they come. Here they come. Someone from over here is supposed to come help me out. We want him to write up-- we want you to write up your solutions, or some solutions. Write something. Yeah, go ahead. You do it. Here. Here. Here, here. Oh, you're going to use that piece of board. Okay, good. Good. I need some more board space for you.

AUDIENCE: Slip one in here?

STEINBERG: Slip one in there. No, it's okay. It's okay. Leave it. Leave it. Leave it. That's good. That's a good list. That's a good list. Wow. Super. That's good. That's good. That's good. That's excellent.

AUDIENCE: Do you want us--

STEINBERG: Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: What's wrong on the left side, or what?

STEINBERG: Huh?

AUDIENCE: What's wrong on the left side?

STEINBERG: However you want it. However you want it. Whatever you want to put.

AUDIENCE: They share the board.

STEINBERG: They all want to do it. I can't stop them, right? I can't. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: A-ha. They're having fun.

STEINBERG: Of course they are. That's the object. I'm going to stop this minute. How--

AUDIENCE: We're ahead of time--

STEINBERG: How much--

AUDIENCE: --so you could go to 5 to.

STEINBERG: Oh, I could? Yeah? I will. I'll stop. Hey, can I get your attention back? Good. Thanks. This is sort of-- hey, class. Yoo-hoo. Thank you. This is sort of the way I like the classes to work. There's a lot of commotion. There's a lot of discussion about what's going on. People-- what I would do is get the people who were writing on the board to talk about it themselves, but we don't have time to do that.

And then we'd get-- we'd start you arguing about, no, that's not the way to do it. Yes, that is the way to do it. You've got really an awful lot of the stuff, which is nice. There are material problems. There are bearing problems. Whoops.

[LAUGHTER]

We could use a-- here it is. There is this problem. There a quip that any MIT faculty member worth his salt can walk into any classroom and lecture about what's on the board. I'd have a nice time with this one. I have a lot of acid rain in my pool. Anyway. So constant temperature. Constant pressure. The springs. The springs are just impossibly-- very difficult.