Rosalind H. Williams

INTERVIEWER: So this is the 150th anniversary celebration with professor Rosalind Williams. And    I'm going to start back, can you tell me where you were born.

WILLIAMS: Schenectady, New York. I was born in Schenectady. Which I was very proud when I learned to spell. My father worked for GE there. That's why we were there.

INTERVIEWER: And    what was it like growing up in Schenectady?

WILLIAMS: Cold.    It's interesting that you ask me about growing up in Schenectady. Because I just went to my brother's 67th birthday party two days ago, three days ago. And I was going through a lot of slides from the family,    to take to him for that occasion. And so I now have especially revived, vivid memories of snow banks, and a lot of sledding, and small houses in a suburb of Schenectady, called Scotia. That was home to mainly GE engineers. And that's who my father was. And    so it was,    you know, it was a happy and an extremely normal childhood in the sense of the two-parent family, this older brother, and a small suburb, walking to school, walking to the park, skating in the winter.    We had a camp on Sacandaga Reservoir where we would go. We'd spend vacation in New Hampshire. So it was it was a very    kind of predictably pleasant childhood-- good schools.

INTERVIEWER: Was there anything about your    childhood, or any particular significant event, that happened that you think influenced your professional life later?

WILLIAMS: The significant events of my childhood weren't events, so much as the overall context. And that context is a life in the family of engineers.    So my father was an engineer at GE at the time. Late 40s, early 50s was kind of neat: the almost classic period of large industry in the US. But my uncles were also engineers. My grandfather, my mother's father, was an engineer.    My father's father    worked at MIT, as a janitor, actually. But still, it was at MIT. So that is the context in which I grew up. And that certainly had an influence-- an overwhelming influence-- in the sense of giving me an interest in, and respect for engineering.    I myself wasn't gaited that way. I was interested in reading and writing. But it therefore gave me a sort of topic to think about that might not have occurred to me otherwise.

The other event that is meaningful, is that at the age of 12, we all moved to southwest Virginia. Because GE at that point, and that point being 1956-- so you can do a little arithmetic and figure out I was born in 1944 towards the end of the war. But 1956, GE was    sending    units of the Schenectady plant to the South and Midwest. It was the first wave of what would later be overseas       geographical diversification. The South had cheaper labor and non-unionized labor. And GE had gone through some very serious labor problems in that post-war period. And for that reason was happy to get decentralized to get people out of Schenectady. So at the age of 12, I found myself in rural, southern Virginia. That's a big event too because it was just a very different place    being a Yankee in the South, and not what you'd call the progressive South at that time.

INTERVIEWER: How long did it take you to sort of adjust to that, or to feel like you were fitting in?

WILLIAMS: Oh I never fit in. But that was okay.    When we moved to Virginia,    and again, the place is Salem, Virginia. It's outside of Roanoke.    We were the Yankees in the South. And that never went away. We were always different. But that didn't keep me from making friends, from having a good time, from adapting to that milieu.    The downside is that the school system wasn't very good. I always felt my education was not what it should have been. But my parents did everything they could to make up for that fact. Which they certainly recognized. And, you know years later I went back to Roanoke in 2002 for my father's funeral.    Afterwards we were sitting around talking with friends from their church-- they had become Unitarians, migrating from the Methodist to the Unitarian Church. And the friends started telling us, my brother and me, about the influence of the GE people moving there in the 50s. But they said, you know, these people were a lot richer then we were. They made better incomes. The had better education. But you know, they didn't join the country club. They joined the Kiwanis Club, or the local clubs. They got involved. They got involved with the Boy Scouts, and the schools, and the churches. And really got engaged in the community. And really kind of helped us see some possibilities that we hadn't seen before. And they really got engaged with ordinary people. And I never thought of it that way. And I must say I felt very proud of my parents. Because that's exactly    the description of how they treated that move. And so they encouraged us to do likewise. My brother and I are still very, you know, we were on the high school honor hall of fame. We kept in touch. And       I will say that my brother, who completed the Appalachian Trail this past year, had the great pleasure of hiking on the trail overlooking the valley where we had gone to junior high and high school. And kind of seeing it from a new angle made him very happy. So we've kept connected. But it was an enormous change in our lives.

INTERVIEWER: So out of your family of engineers, you became interested in history.

WILLIAMS: No I was interested in history. And because of my family of engineers, I became interested in history of technology. And science, I should say, because the two are very hard to separate at points.

INTERVIEWER: And how did you decide to go first to Wellesley and then to Harvard for undergrad?

WILLIAMS: I    decided to go to Wellesley mainly because I wanted to get back to New England. Here I was in southwest Virginia. And I still had all the rest of my family at that point, grandparents were in New England, and specifically in the Boston area. So I'd always thought of the Boston area as the place to be, and the place to enjoy. So it was going to be somewhere in New England. Because I did want to get back in the Northeast. So Wellesley I think, seduced me with architecture. I can remember visiting there on a very wintry day with my uncle-- one of these engineer uncles who gave me a ride. And Wellesley has a wonderful Gothic architecture. And for anyone interested in history and literature, this was obviously a good place to go. And it was quite romantic.    Yes, so I applied there early admission, got in, and never looked back. I never thought about it.    I think after two years I was feeling somewhat stuck out in the burbs. And I wanted to be closer to where the action seemed to be, which was Boston itself.

So    there was another issue that I had. I couldn't decide whether to major in history or in English at Wellesley. Because I wanted both    literature and history. And Harvard had, and still has, a very good    joint program, or interdisciplinary program with history and literature. So those were the two attractions of Harvard: social and intellectual. But I will say, I got my best teaching at Wellesley as a small, focused, liberal arts college.    I really enjoyed it there. I still have friends from Wellesley. Including my freshman year roommate who's still one of, if not my best friend. So I had very good    feelings about Wellesley. Harvard was very different but also a good education in a very different way.

INTERVIEWER: I was particularly interested in your answer because my daughter went to Wellesley. So I was wondering now, why would you go for two years and then not stay?    Because I do think the education is very fine.

WILLIAMS: Oh it's    superb. Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: And then how did you choose to go to    Berkeley first, and then UMass for graduate study.

WILLIAMS: Well you're asking me why I went where I did to graduate school.    Graduating in 1966,    it was the '60s. That's the short answer. And somewhat as in the same way that I wanted to move from Wellesley, in part, because there seemed to be more action in Cambridge.    The action then seemed to be in Berkeley, or on the West Coast. And I wasn't sure what that meant exactly. But    it seemed a really interesting place to be. And by that time, I think I wanted to get out of the Northeast and try a different place. So I didn't quite know what I wanted to do. And I was not sure about an academic track at that point. But it seemed like not a waste of time to go to graduate school. So it was more a place holder decision. And as I said, Berkeley seemed an exciting place to be. So I headed out there intending to get a doctorate, or at least in a doctoral program. But it was not a very happy year in many ways. And so after that, or towards the end of the year, I made a decision to just get out of graduate school and do something else, come back to Boston. By that time,    the man I was eventually going to marry, you know, he was here. I wanted to be with him. That was part of the decision. So at that point, I came back to Boston. And then there's an interval of what, four years, five years between that time and when I went back to graduate school at UMass.

The reason I ended up at UMass Amherst is because my then husband was going to Amherst College on a postdoc. So that was entirely the fact that he was there. I was following him. It was the one place that offered a PhD program in history at that point. So that's the reason I ended up at UMass Amherst.

Two comments about all of this. First of all, those four or five years in a sense, like anybody later on in life, I look back and say boy if I had only known then what I know now. I could have used them in a more valuable way. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I didn't use them valuably.    I worked with migrant workers in southern Florida. I did other kinds of social science work. I worked for ABT Associates. I mean it's still a company here in    Cambridge. Which turns out to have been a real    cutting edge social science research firm.    I did a lot of writing on my own. So in some ways, those were very valuable years. But they were not on    the tenure track. And I feel extremely lucky that I was able to end up    in the academy. When I got off the track for that long, I'm not sure it would still be possible. But in my generation you could wander, and not have to pay a penalty. At least for what you might have to pay now for doing that.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah a lot of people were wandering in the '60s.

WILLIAMS: When I go to my Wellesley reunions, class of '66. I've    over and over again heard my classmates say, you know, I expected to marry the doctor. I never expected to be the doctor. And yet look at me. So there's a surprise of women in my generation. We weren't quite 50s. We're a little earlier than just, of course I'm going to have a career. And so we're in the middle. And most of us ended up having some sort of a career,    but not expecting to from childhood. And so the sense of surprise and delight is palpable.

INTERVIEWER: In your studies, in that period of your life, were there any particularly influential mentors that you had?

WILLIAMS: I would say, I was very lucky in my graduate studies eventually. But    it's an unusual track because    what we now call history of technology, was only in its very formative stages. So for example, when I went to Berkeley, I went there in part because of a scholar named Hunter Dupree, who's still alive and still actually living in Harvard Square. I saw him not that many years ago.    He was a historian of science. And for no particular reason I thought, well there weren't many people like him around. But he was close enough to what I wanted. And so, for example, he helped me write a Master's thesis about responses to chemical warfare in the interwar period,    particularly in England, and the fears of the combination of chemical warfare, gas warfare, an aerial warfare that were just    very powerful between the First and Second World War. I mean, that was    not his field. But he recognized my interest in it. He recognized that part of the interest is that I'm from a family of mainly chemical engineers. So he understood me as a person, encouraged me. And I owe a lot to him.   

Also in my graduate studies at UMass Amherst, there's no history of technology there. There's some history science now, but not when I was there. So I ended up working with an advisor named Will Johnston. He has just retired and is now living in Australia. And he did intellectual history-- European intellectual history. So this was not exactly his thing. But again, like Hunter Dupree, he trusted me. He encouraged me.    He basically let me go. And he said, you figure out what you want to do and I'm here to help. That's a wonderful gift. And that's a gift I had both for the Master's and the doctorate.

INTERVIEWER: So you have training in history, and    particularly history of technology. And then how did you come to wind up    as a writing teacher?

WILLIAMS: You just asked me, or commented on my training in history and history of technology. I've never had training in history of technology. I mean, that's    a label that I use for myself because it's convenient. But again, in my graduate studies, I never worked with anybody who was a card carrying member, for example, of the Society for the History of Technology. However,    what I did, I informally worked my senior year at Radcliffe-- I mean, I thought of it as Radcliffe, so I'm going to use that term-- for Thomas Hughes. He was a friend of my grandfather, who was then at MIT. And he was a card carrying historian of technology. So this was not    my own education. But it was a research job that I had with Tom Hughes. That, again, was absolutely formative in    connecting with somebody who knew what that field meant. And to say that he encouraged me is an understatement. He's still a big part of my life. And he has been for all these years.    So I owe him a lot.

And the other person who helped me figure out how to combine my humanistic interests, with the history of technology, is Leo Marx.    Now he's, you know, an MIT professor-- emeritus. And we are going to be teaching together this coming semester. I mentioned my husband    had a postdoc at Amherst College. Amherst College is where Marx was teaching in the early 70s. Well that's when I encountered him. He does history and literature. And he's the great example of a literary scholar who uses literature to understand not just history, but history of technology. So you see there are many parts of my brain I had to knit together. And Leo and Tom, who were never formal teachers,    helped me do that. Along with my formal teachers who basically had the great    wisdom, I feel, to say just whatever. You do it. So I just want to comment on that way that life happens to you even though you aren't planning it. Or you aren't actually enrolled in programs. The intellectual influences come from the angles... anyway.

INTERVIEWER: You had a lot of mentors.

WILLIAMS: Yes, yes.   

INTERVIEWER: And that's often unusual for women.

WILLIAMS: Well I was just going to say. And they're all male.    The ones I named are all male. My mother's an extremely strong influence. But in terms of mentoring in my academic interests, yeah.    I've been so fortunate.

You asked me about my mother and her influence on me. And    the first influences: she's a woman who studied math and majored in math    at Radcliffe, and taught math at community colleges    in southwest Virginia. And there are two things that are important. First that she was good at math. Well she had started majoring in chemistry, though she didn't stick with it. But her respect for science, engineering, and math, they were all part of a bundle. And the other thing is being a teacher in a community college. Where she said over and over again, that this for her, was just the right place to teach. I'm sure she was a terrific teacher. And she felt those were the students who were the first generation to go to college. That those community colleges are the great root of upward mobility for so many students, especially in southwest Virginia. So her democratic sentiments together with her    abilities in math-- those two things together-- made a deep impression on me.

INTERVIEWER: You were one of the early ones to take a kind of interdisciplinary approach to your particular study of history. You've got some history and some literature, and then the technology piece.    Was that unusual at the time?

WILLIAMS: An interdisciplinary approach is something where,    in retrospect, I realize I'm part of a generation. I'm always amazed how you can do something seemingly on your own. You think this is your great discovery. And then you discover a lot of other people are going the same way.    So you have to believe in zeitgeist and cultural background. I mean, I'll give you an example. When I came to work on my doctoral dissertation, I was then living in South Carolina with my husband. I wasn't anywhere near UMass at that point.    And I was just corresponding with my advisor. This is pre-email. So we were writing letters to each other. And I was looking through my notes that I had accumulated. And thought well, a lot of people have looked at technology from the producers point of view, the manufacturing point of view. What if we look at it from the consumers' point of view, the users, the buyer. And thought, aha, you know. I'm going to write my dissertation somewhat on I don't quite know what. But it'll be from this angle. And so low and behold, ten years later, it was clear that history of consumption was something that a lot of other people had that moment about that same time. Because books came out. I mean, mine was on the early edge. But it was certainly part of sort of ten year publication history of a lot of works on history of consumption and consumer history. So here I thought I was being an interdisciplinary pioneer, but not so. There were others. And I would say, in general, the interdisciplinary approach to history of technology that looks at    machines, and systems, and social context. That is    a large part of the history of technology. And so I'm by no means alone. It's still not so common to use literature, imaginative literature, as both a source of insight into history of technology and a source of commentary and evidence. That's less common. And I think unless I hadn't had the privilege of working with Leo Marx for so many years, on and off-- we weren't always in the same institution. But, he's been essential to me, in kind of reminding me, that you can do that kind of interdisciplinary work. That's a little more unusual.

INTERVIEWER: Was there anything besides your sort of background from your family of engineers and your own interest in history and writing? Was there anything else that sort of drew you to that intersection of society and technology?

WILLIAMS: Well, yes. I mean this is where my mother's father,    Doc Lewis of MIT, is essential. Because while he was a member of the academy of engineering and the academy of sciences, and in some peoples' view, the founder of chemical engineering in the US, all these high, you know terms of praise for him as a science-based engineer.    He loved literature, took it seriously. Those are two different things. And he both loved literature, took it seriously, knew literature very well, knew history deeply. And was always telling stories about the connections between science and engineering, and history and literature. So, for me this just wasn't an intellectual connection. I had a life experience.    Somebody whose life was shaped by    bringing those things together. And in some ways, shaping MIT,    in the sense of the Lewis Report.    The report of the committee that he chaired in the late 1940s established the School of Humanties, Arts, and Social Sciences as is now known    at MIT. So that serious appraisal of the significance of the humanities, arts, and social sciences is built into MIT. And Doc Lewis has a truly major leadership role in having that come about. So it's not just MIT, though. It's me personally. It's like we were sort of a fractal image, you know. And me as an individual, and MIT as an institution, the connections are the same ones that he really believed in.

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything more you want to say about his role in MIT?

WILLIAMS: Well I could tell stories forever as he did.       Since I wrote the book Retooling, starting with him-- it's not about him but I started with him-- as a way of getting into the history of MIT through this personal view. And my grandfather, himself, would say over and over that whatever the great ideas, great thoughts you have, individuals are what make them happen and what make them come alive. So, in a sense, I was using his own advice and framing the book that way.    I think maybe other people are better suited though, than I am, to write the history of his influence on MIT. Because I saw it as a little girl. You know, he was my grandfather. And for a long time, I couldn't understand why he didn't seem to be that important because he wasn't head of the department, or he wasn't provost. People seemed to think of him as important. But I couldn't quite understand why. They would say he's a great teacher-- just an off the charts teacher. Well you know, okay. But in other words, in worldly terms, it didn't quite seem to compute. And so it's taken me awhile, as growing up myself and being in the academy myself, to understand what makes a professor great as a professor, not as an administrator. So somebody else can write that story.   

My story is basically one of affection, and love, and respect, and    personal interactions. I'll give you one example.    In the fall of 1959-- so I'm 15 at that time--    my grandfather had a conference in Europe that he had to attend. But he wanted to go with my grandmother. And so he invited me along to take care of my grandmother, to be a companion for my grandmother on this trip.    So I set sail on, you know, Cunard Line, if you can imagine. This is 1959, first class.    A cousin went along too. That's another story. But anyway, so the four of us    went to Europe together. And I spent a couple of weeks in England with my grandmother. But en route, I was missing class. Because this was in September. And I was missing 9th grade    geometry, 10th grade geometry. And so my grandfather tutored me. And I had never thought of myself as being competent in math at all.    I mean for whatever reasons, it was not something I was very sure of myself about. So he sat down to open up the geometry book in the middle. And I said Grandpa, you know, I don't know geometry. We've got to start in chapter one. He said, oh no, no, not chapter one. And the tutoring sessions were just a revelation to me. First of all, I didn't feel stupid anymore. Because he was such a brilliant teacher. He got me to understand how to ask questions, how to know what I did know, and to work from there. And that really changed my math life, at that point. Not that I ever went on in math to any extent. But it just gave me a sense of the beauty of it.

And then when we were in England, he spent a few days there with my grandmother and myself,    before he went to his meeting. We rented a car and we went to Windsor Castle. And he knew more English history than I did. And we went up to Warwick Castle. And    why do I do European history and literature? You know, it's that visit. And I must say another visit that my wonderful engineer father arranged--    to go to Europe in the same year.    As I say, my formal education was sorely lacking. But for a 15- year- old, in 1959, to go to Europe twice in a year-- with my parents and then my grandparents--    that was a life-changing experience. I felt the world had opened up. And even now when I go to Europe    as a grownup, I still have this moment of excitement when I'm landing. Especially if we land in Zurich, which is where that first plane trip, you know, that's where we ended up. I relive that moment and just think how lucky I was to have that other world opened up to me.

INTERVIEWER: That's very unusual at that time.

WILLIAMS: Yes, yeah, Very much. Nobody else in southwest Virginia had close to that opportunity, or very few people, I should say. Yeah. But    yeah, so as I say, it opened a door. And again, I'm quoting my grandfather here who always said, when you do good research it's not like you answer all the questions. But you open the door for other people.

INTERVIEWER: So how did you wind up coming to MIT?

WILLIAMS: I came to MIT, because one night in 1980, when I had been two years rewriting my dissertation for publication on my own with a little kid. Another one, I guess, had just been born at that point.    I felt I was living in my garret, writing away. Nobody knew I was there. Which is fine in many ways. It's liberating.    So my husband and I were sitting in bed reading, just before we went to bed. And he was reading Science Magazine. He said, oh here's an ad for    a postdoc at MIT you might be interested in. So it turned out to be a research fellowship, that was supported by Exxon, in the program in science, technology and society at MIT. And I thought well, okay. That's great. I love MIT. I remember it from childhood. Leo Marx was part of the department then. I knew this person a little bit from Amherst College. And    so I applied. And got an interview. I had a very nice lunch at the faculty club.    And then got the    fellowship. But as I said, I had an infant and a four year old at that time. So I asked if I could make it half time fellowship and spread it out over two years, rather than full-time in one year. And they let me do that. And I have been grateful ever since to MIT and STS for that flexibility. Because I couldn't have done it otherwise.

So that's how I came to MIT. Towards the end of the two years,    there weren't any jobs in the STS program.    But it would be nice to stay at MIT somehow. So a colleague    mentioned to me, he said, well, you know the writing program is always looking for people to teach courses. So you might send in your resume there. Which I did. And after one semester of unemployment-- again I can remember it was a very cold January day, like today. I got a call from    Jim Purdy, head of the writing program, who is still head of the writing program. And    he said he had a course that needed teaching that spring. And could I do it? And for me, with these two little kids, it was perfect to teach only one class. I had no interest in a full-time job.    Who knows what I could've handled. But I didn't want to handle it at that point. So I taught the class. And then the next term I taught two classes. And then I taught three classes. And then the new head of the writing program, at that point Ken Manning    said one day, Rosalind, there is a tenure track position we're advertising. And why don't you apply for it?    Or think about applying for it. And I honestly hadn't known that it was being advertised. I was so out of it. I just taught my classes. So Ken mentioned this to me. And    I thought, well I better apply for it, at this point.    And so at that point, you know, the kids were little older. It seems maybe manageable to consider this. So I applied and    got the job.

The job however,    was not in my research area whatsoever. It wasn't technical writing. Now writing is writing. And I certainly learned quickly what I needed for the basics of technical writing, or technical communication. But it, you know, was hardly    a job in my field, quote unquote,    but a very good one.    And I kept that same basic position for about ten years, until I became dean. So most of my teaching at MIT has been    technical or essay writing.

INTERVIEWER: That whole period of time, were you sort of looking, you know, keeping your eye on STS and waiting for an opportunity? Or did you sort of commit yourself to writing?

WILLIAMS: I think it's fair to say that when I was teaching writing at MIT,    I also kept in contact with STS. Because if there is any department that does fit my own research profile, it's always been STS. But the beauty of MIT is precisely that the boundaries among units    are fairly low. In other words, your unit    commands your teaching responsibilities. But your research can take you anywhere. And nobody worries about it. And that's a great    strength of MIT. So, actually, I taught maybe one semester when my old mentor Tom Hughes was in town. I taught with him and with Bruce Mazlish, who was in history. But we taught a cultural history of technology type of class together. That I enjoy tremendously. And I'd go to STS events. And, you know, I had colleagues there. I had friends there. So yes, I did keep in touch    over all those years. But I never had an appointment until I stepped down    as dean.

INTERVIEWER: Let me ask about if you can tell me about    the role of Scott Krueger, and what that did while you were dean.

WILLIAMS: I said before that life is what happens to you when you're making other plans. When I became dean for undergraduate education, there were two things that changed that position radically from what it was when I took it in 1995. And the death of Scott Krueger is one of them. But I should also mention as context for all of this. the other was a re-engineering. Which was    the reorganization of MIT in the mid- to- late 1990s.    Combined with the deaths of two people at MIT-- Jim Colliton and Bill Dickson's retirement, followed much too soon by his death. Those people had had    units of what are normally, in most universities, thought of as the dean's office reporting to them for example: Admissions, for example: Housing. So when I became dean, it was a tiny office    with a lot of units that had responsibilities that deeply affected student life outside of it. But within a year,    due to illness, death, and re-engineering, the dean's office had gone from something like 40 odd people to over 500.    I wish I knew these numbers better. But it was an order of magnitude,    change. All of a sudden, the dean's office was this enormous    expanse. And so there were a lot of things going on already    at MIT in terms of the role of student life here, the management of student life here. So it was not a stable situation.    So while all these    events were still playing out,    the death of Scott Krueger came about    in the fall of '97 in the context of a fraternity event. And that was also a time when MIT was already    having a task force to look at the connection between student life and student learning. You know, I'm a little uncomfortable kind of thinking about Scott's death as sort of a catalyst for institutional changes. It was absolutely that. But it was a kid whose life was cut short. And I was thinking ten years later.    It's still to me, primarily just a tragedy. It's just awful, and should never have happened. So as I said, it's hard for me to talk about it as sort of    an institutional event. But it was that also.

INTERVIEWER: It made major changes in student life.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, and again, what I would like to emphasize though, is those changes were already going on. First through the reorganization of the dean's office. Which, for the first time, made that whole area of student life manageable as a coherent whole. And second of all, because the task force was meeting and trying to define the role of student life at MIT    in this day and age. So the questions were already out there. And so part of the reason that the changes happened as they did, is because Scott's death came at a time of a lot of questioning, and to some extent, upheaval anyway.

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk about the changes that happened in that period of time? And how from the report and from his death what did the administration decide to do to improve student life at MIT?

WILLIAMS: Well the effects of    Scott's death can be described narrowly, or more broadly. So to start narrowly,    anybody would sort of encapsulate it by saying, freshman now live on campus. And that's kind of the narrow policy change    that was made in response to    the pressures on MIT    after Scott Krueger's death. I mean, I feel that MIT had this choice at that point: either no independent living groups, no fraternities, or freshman on campus. There was not a choice to continue to house freshmen off campus.    There was a grand jury meeting    sitting that whole year after Scott's death.    I testified. A lot of people from MIT testified. And there was real concern that MIT and individuals, like myself, might be indicted for manslaughter. I mean this focuses your attention on the trade-offs. So    I think it was clear that MIT had to take at least the step of housing freshman    in dormitories, or we would say residences, directly run by MIT. And there was just no way around that change.    Whether or not that would've happened anyway, it's hard to say.    There's great inertia in the housing system here.    And I think we're still working out the consequences of this more narrowly defined change in housing policy. I mean, it always amazes me that MIT, that prides itself on being able to count and quantify, would beginning in the 70s, raise the percentage of women among the undergraduate student body dramatically from single digits. Actually I had a roommate at Radcliffe who fled MIT, because she was one of these single digit women undergraduates. And it was a very tough environment. So single digits up to 40 percent very quickly. And now well over 40 percent. If you count the numbers, that simply means you have to change your housing stock. And all these fraternities are not likely to survive when you're competing for a much smaller pool. I mean, that to me, is just common sense. But MIT never really has come to terms with that arithmetic. And is still working on it.

Okay, so that's the narrow answer. The bigger answer has to do with student life, both for graduates and undergraduates at MIT. And I stress the graduates because    the office of the dean of students takes responsibility for both dimensions. Not completely for graduates, but a large measure of that. And there, I think, it's a simple human truth that you're living conditions, your social conditions    influenced how you learn. And if those conditions are favorable, your learning is improved. So that seems a pretty simple    statement to make. But to implement it, and to ask yourself what do we mean by good conditions at MIT? What's favorable for learning? Again, I think we're still working on that. But what happened during the 1990s, was really putting that question on the agenda as a learning question, not just a care and feeding question.    Looking at residence life more carefully, for its social networks    in ways that MIT might influence for the better. Because residential life here has always been deeply connected to academic life. But in ways often defined by the students and sometimes in adversarial ways, adversarial to the goals of the institution. So I don't mean to present this as a story of neglect of student life versus, oh now we've discovered it. It's more that the discovery of the importance of student life or student learning made MIT want to have more influence. And the students' resistance is predictable. Because they're correctly seeing that the institution wanted to have more control over what was happening in residential life, feeling that it wasn't always healthy for students. Having freshman living in fraternities, for example, is arguably something that the students would fight to protect-- and alums would fight to protect. It's also something where the institution, understandably, has reservations about that arrangement. So, you know, there are just different ways of interpreting what's good for the students here. And there are tensions, because there are different points of view on this.

INTERVIEWER: After MIT made the decision that freshman needed to live in university housing, how did you respond to, or handle,    the reaction from other students that didn't like this, and alums?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. When the decision was made that freshman had to live on campus,    you know, most alums, students, even faculty had no clue, or very little clue, that it was in the sense    an absolutely necessary decision. That it was being forced through the potential legal consequences of the alternative. So they thought it was an option, that this is MIT's decision. I see it much more as MIT's bowing to the force of necessity, the force of things.    But that means there's a great deal of anger. Because    there are enormous financial consequences    to this decision. At a time when fraternities were already under financial pressures for a lot of reasons including the value of Back Bay property, MIT's policy of keeping housing    expenses low for the residences. Anyway for a lot of reasons, fraternities    were right to react in saying this really, you know financially, makes it hard if not impossible for a lot of us. And then there were a lot of alums who felt that these were the best years of their lives. Not all, by any means. There are many other alums who had a different view.

So there was a lot of push back.    And I just spent a lot of time going to    fraternities, to alumni meetings, to travelling around to alumni groups elsewhere trying to explain the decision. But it was hard to explain. Because I never felt I could say, you know, with the grand jury meeting, we had no choice. I mean, that was a legal background that really couldn't really be discussed.    And so it was not easy. And this is where being a woman really was a detriment at MIT. And, I must say you know, in most of my life here, I have not felt that way. But at this point,    certainly for a woman to be speaking for a fraternity system, just didn't work.   

It helps enormously when Larry Bacow became chancellor. Because he was a product. He was male, a product of the fraternity system, and a product of MIT.    And again, not being an MIT alum-- I am an honorary alum now-- but at that time, it wasn't the real thing. So I didn't have standing. I didn't have, sort of, moral authority. Larry had a lot more. But even he faced a lot of push back. So my situation was particularly vulnerable. But there was simply a lot of    unhappiness. And again, for reasons that I understand looking at the world from the fraternities' point of view.

INTERVIEWER: So, it's been more than ten-- a little more than ten years-- since that decision. How do you think the decision has sort of shaken out?

WILLIAMS: I'm not sure how the decision has shaken out. I believe that MIT still really hasn't    come to terms with the disproportion between the composition of the undergraduate student body and the housing system. I think the numbers still don't work that well.       It's disappointing that the project to convert Ashdown to undergraduate housing was put on hold. Because that would have been an enormous help in giving MIT more flexibility in its decisions. I mean, that is what it is. But anybody who cares about the housing system can't be happy about that. This is not news.    And within the fraternities, I'm not sure. I have had interactions with three-- this is not a big sample-- but three alumni members of house corporations, who feel    that the students are not really in any brave new world of fraternity living. That they have not    really    responded to the challenge as they might have. And that the quality a fraternity life is slowly diminishing. I think, in large part, because of the financial pressures.    And that the house corporations are not always in line with the students.    That the nationals are not always in line with the house corporations. So I have a few, kind of, data points that make me worry. But I really don't know.    I'm really not sure. All I know is that I think it's something that MIT is continuing to work on. And we'll have to. Because we are not there yet in terms of       a housing stock that supports the student body, and that    keeps the choice of residence that means so much to MIT students. And yet mixes in, you know, enough of the institutional goals with that choice. So I think it's a work in progress.   

INTERVIEWER: Going back as dean of students and undergraduate education, are there other areas where you feel    you made a big contribution, or where there were significant changes?

WILLIAMS: The biggest contribution I made as dean from 1995 to 2000, was very simply,    being there at a time when the office of the dean became organized in the way that it currently is. That is,    taking in the wide range of student life, and learning    management, activities, and units. Bringing them together, sorting out the office so that by the time I stepped down there was a fairly coherent definition of what the dean's office is, what it includes, what its    responsibilities are, and how it's managed. So that's the major accomplishment. Is simply leaving a framework    that has    lasted until almost ten years later. And the framework looks robust. What goes on within it keeps changing. But we're not trying to reorganize all the time. That I think, is great. Because then you can spend your energies on the work and not the reorganization. I'm also really flattered that the quality of the deans who succeeded me is so high. These are first class people. And it's an indication that MIT now has a dean's office that can attract absolutely first-rate people, like Bob Redwine and Dan Hastings. So just having an office that set up, organized, and is taken seriously in the discussions. None of that really was true when I came on board. So it's not very glamorous.    It's not    an event. But it's getting a structure there that, I think, is serving us well.

INTERVIEWER: You also, at that time, served on the Academic Council.    Do you have any thoughts to share about    what that was like,    about changes that came out of that counsel at the time you were on it?

WILLIAMS: The service on Academic Council in those five years-- 1995 to 2000-- just came with the job. But again, was a huge privilege to see more of MIT than the ordinary person gets to see.    These were the Chuck Vest years. And    those council meetings were    fascinating for the range of issues that was brought there. But mostly, I think, for the discussions of tenure and promotion cases-- because that's where it's really like lifting a lid off of MIT-- and seeing fine scale, what is going on. It's not just institutional offices. It's individuals, and how individuals thrive in this place. Or occasionally don't thrive, but much more often do. And to think of MIT as a place that maximizes the ability of individuals like that to find their way within the institution. Not to become what the institution wants them to become, but to enable and    facilitate these people. That was the real thrill of being on Academic Council.    It was also the time that women in science    became an institutional issue.    And while an issue like-- these were not things that were voted upon. That wasn't Vest's style. It was more a place where    these kinds of changes could be discussed and seen.    So it was a mix of the ordinary routine tenure and promotion cases, and these extraordinary changes that were happening at the same time. They were all there.    When I wrote my book Retooling, I just use my notes from Academic Council. It's basic information about,    for example, my chapter on engineering. What is engineering now? That's out of those    discussions in Academic Council largely.

By the way, when I was finished with that book manuscript, I sent it to Chuck Vest and to Bob Brown and the dean of science, the dean of engineering, other people on Academic Council. Because I wanted to make sure    I was    not intrudeing on anyone's privacy. And I also just wanted them to know, generally, what I was going to be saying. Because there aren't any rules really, in writing, for how you deal with using information from that kind of a meeting in the open press.    So I really appreciate their reading over the manuscript. Some people had suggestions, but nobody       felt that there was anything that had to be censored for the good of MIT. That also, is a very MIT-like attitude, isn't it?