Suzanne Berger

INTERVIEWER: This is the 150th anniversary interview with professor Suzanne Berger. And the first question I have is where were you born and where did you grow up? And the one thing I forgot to mention is if you just keep looking, keep your eye contact with me, and ignore the camera.

BERGER: Okay. Well I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, where my parents were graduate students. It was at the very end of the Depression. And actually, my father was getting a PhD. Not because he ever intended to get one, but because there were just no jobs. And since he was a good student, he stayed in school. And so he was a microbiologist. But I grew up in New Jersey. And then left only to go to college.

INTERVIEWER: Were there any particular experiences or influences when you were a child that you think pointed you in the direction that you took in your career?

BERGER: I think my -- it was a household that truly -- that truly respected and honored, above almost all other things, learning and curiosity. And even above any kind of practical success in the -- success in the world. I remember my grandmother telling me a story about having gone out on a date, I guess, with a young man. And the young man telling her that he had been in the paint crew that had painted the inside of Rockefeller Center. And her telling her father about this. And her father said, so what's so great about being a painter? Why doesn't he spend more time studying? Well studying in those days would have been studying Torah, being a religious scholar. But that idea that what was most worthwhile in the world was somehow understanding, learning. And that material success was not highly valued in our family.

INTERVIEWER: Where did you decide to go for your undergraduate studies?

BERGER: So I first went to Antioch College. And then I transferred to the University of Chicago. And I still think that the University of Chicago was just about the perfect undergraduate education. At least for someone who is going to be a social scientist or humanist. At this point, I can't help but believe that MIT for someone in engineering and science would probably be the best. But the University of Chicago was an intensely serious place. Where in the class philosophy, we would read ten pages of Plato. And all of the discussion would focus on is he right, is he wrong? What is his idea? What exactly does he mean? And 10 pages of Plato is about all you can really absorb, if you're truly trying to understand. So that when later I went to graduate school at Harvard. At Harvard, where you know whole books would be assigned. And then maybe three or four critiques. And the question wasn't was Plato right or wrong, but what did professor A or what did scholar B have to say about Plato? And what's the controversy over Plato? Somehow it seemed to me to lack the intensity, the seriousness, of my University of Chicago education. And I found graduate school kind of a depressing experience, after sort of the illuminating, kind of mind opening experience of Chicago.

INTERVIEWER: So what made you decide to go on to Harvard for graduate study?

BERGER: I just loved what I was doing at Chicago. I can't say that I really knew exactly what I wanted to do as a profession. I just wanted to do more of what I was doing. And as I look around at a lot of colleagues, they're not people who ever consciously decided that they were going to be professors or researchers. They're people who got captivated by an activity. And just tried to do whatever they could to continue doing this thing that seemed to them to open up big -- the opportunity of looking at the big questions about the world. The things that really mattered. And so I would say I just kept doing what I was doing. I'm not aware of ever having made a real decision.

INTERVIEWER: What was it about political science that interested you so deeply?

BERGER: I think political science has some of the biggest puzzles in life in it. How could it be, for example -- no one really -- or very, very few people -- want to fight in war or be in wars. Either kill people or be killed. If you ask people, everyone would say, you know, we ought to get rid of war. And yet somehow, it's proved over thousands of years absolutely impossible to solve this problem even a little bit. How is it that something, where if you asked each individual what their preference is, you would have an overwhelming majority of -- an overwhelming consensus on the answer, but collectively we're unable to achieve this objective?

Political science is filled with puzzles where you cannot understand how, given what individuals individually would seek, how we come out with the kind of collective social solutions we have. And I think the best in social science is about trying to understand the gap. And trying, if you're a more policy minded person, to figure out how you might bridge that gap between things that most of us could recognize as desirable. But have somehow proved to be almost unattainable for us as a society.

INTERVIEWER: While you were in school, did you have any particular mentors or influential professors?

BERGER: Yeah, I think at each stage there was somebody who played a role that was really quite decisive. As an undergraduate, when I was at Antioch, briefly for one year, my freshman year, there was a political scientist whose name was Heinz Eulau. And Eulau was very, very interested in what would call behavioral social science. Sort of questioning individuals and trying to build out of individual, traits about legislators, in his case. Trying to understand the political process, building up from individual properties of the legislators.

And Eulau was really a first class researcher, but who happened to be, I think as he saw it, stuck in a midwestern little college, without the kind of graduate students who could have helped him on his research. So he chose what he had at hand, and that was a group of four of us, one a freshman, that was me. And he sent us out interviewing Ohio state legislators. And we had to track them down in their farms and their factories. And we had these long questionnaires to administer. And to have that opportunity as a freshman, of really being involved in a research team, and being able to do field research, and being able to interact with a professor, over a concrete research project. It's what MIT tries to do now with UROP.

But for me, that experience was fantastic. It was kind of funny that years later -- I mean he left and went to Stanford, and I left and went to the University of Chicago.

And I met him years later when I already had tenure at MIT. But within political science, I had taken a direction very different than the one that he had been pushing. And he looked at me and he shook his head and he said, Suzanne, what ever happened to you? I got you in on the forefront of the behavioral revolution. What happened to you? It was such disappointment. Here, by my lights, I had been a great success. I had a tenured job at a major [INAUDIBLE]. What ever happened to you? You were on the forefront of the behavioral revolution. But still that experience -- it's kind of funny. At that point I could look at it as funny. I don't think I would've thought it was very fun as a graduate student.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. People do have their own prisms. Let me ask about each of the particular areas of interest that you have. Let's start with European politics and economy. What is it that's so intriguing to you? Why have you been drawn to that area of research?

BERGER: There, also, there was a mentor who was very important. When I went to Harvard as a graduate student, I thought I was going to work on Soviet politics. And I guess my reasons for getting into that were kind of weak. I had taken a lot of literature courses at the University of Chicago. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and I'd been intrigued and somehow I'd been pulled into an interest in Russia.

But when I arrived at Harvard, I discovered that the faculty working in the Soviet Union believed that they had totally figured out the society. And each graduate student -- it was like one of those color in the dot pictures. They had the picture. They had the big design. And each student was going to be assigned a little piece that you got to color in. So one would be assigned to work on state farms. And another would be working on the Soviet youth movements, or something like that. And so it just lacked all intellectual challenge and interest. And so even though I'd learned Russian in order to be able to pursue this, I quickly felt that this -- I felt very, very uninspired to continue this way.

And I had, more or less by accident, started taking classes from a faculty member called Stanley Hoffmann, who's still alive and doing very well today. And he was teaching about French politics. And what Hoffmann was able to do was to show you that history and political history is a storehouse of experience about how human beings have tried to deal with some of the most difficult questions of organizing people in society. And I was absolutely fascinated by the way in which he was -- he could pull out of these old quarrels in France, issues that were just fundamentally important, even for us today. And above all, the way in which he could use French experience as a kind of mirror that we could look in, as Americans. It was a society in many ways like us. And yet, people who had come up with altogether different kinds of solutions to the kinds of issues that were important in the United States. And so it was kind of almost by accident that this truly inspiring teacher -- kind of that I met this person, at a point when it I, myself, was searching for an intellectual direction.

And so my very first project was on French peasants. And I thought that -- this was 1960s. And at that time, the dominant paradigm in political science was that as economic and social life became more modern, as people got better educations, as their incomes rose, as they used more modern technologies -- that their political behavior, their attitudes, their voting patterns would also change. They'd be dragged along, basically, by economic and social change. And so politics seemed to be just a kind of derivative of changes in the economy and society.

And that was in fact one of the things that I'd found most interesting in Professor Hoffmann's approach. That he did not see politics as just a kind of residue. Something that was just determined by economic and social change. But he understood politics as a sphere of autonomous relations. In fact, he saw politics as something that could shape the economy and shape society, rather than just determined by -- just determined by economy and society.

And so I thought, here I go find a group of peasants. Of backward peasants in France. People who were -- who at some point A in time had had lousy farming techniques, little equipment, low levels of education. And try to study how they would change as that community got more modern farming techniques, became more connected to the center, et cetera. And so I did, in fact, identify a set of farming organizations in western France, in Brittany.

And it turned out that there was an organization that had been created right after World War I that had a newspaper. And this organization put out a newspaper first every month, and then it started being every week. And I could read the newspaper. When I actually went to Brittany, it turned out that they had rooms full of archives of the organization. And I was able to -- the organization was still going. And I was able to interview 90 of the leaders of this organization, in order to study over time the changes, and try to see was it really true that as the economy changed, that the politics of this area changed.

Well, to make a long story short, in fact it turned out that far from changing, their politics had been consolidated and strengthened. And that the whole puzzle became to understand how is it that people voted in this area, really the way they had 50 years earlier? And in fact if you took a map of which were the parishes that had been for or against the French Revolution in 1793. And we had a pretty good measure of that. And overlap that over a map of left right voting in the 1960s in this French department. It was pretty much the same. So the puzzle became not to explain change, but to explain this remarkable continuity. How had it happened? And so this was really my first big project. And the first big puzzle.

INTERVIEWER: Let me ask about government business relations in industrial societies.

BERGER: Well, I guess out of that first peasant project, I got to be quite interested in traditional classes, social groups, and businesses, that you would think should have disappeared with modernization, but don't. Should we just look at them as a kind of lag phenomenon? Or is something else going on here? And that was -- that puzzle was at origin of work that I did with three other MIT faculty. Michael Piore in the economics department, Lisa Peattie who was an anthropologist in DUSP, and Martin Rein who was a sociologist, was also in DUSP.

And we all became interested in a phenomenon we called dualism. That is, how is it that in modern society, you can have the coexistence of very modern structures and businesses, and still the survival of what seemed to be kind of small scale, very traditional enterprises. Is it just a lag that will be eliminated with time? Or, as we came to think, are these traditional businesses, more small scale things, being deliberately preserved and protected by government because they serve important social and political functions? Political functions, for example, by keeping social unrest, they employ a lot of people, so they prevent unemployment from going up. So small shops can absorb a lot of family members who otherwise might be unemployed factory workers.

So we started -- and that was the second big project. And it was done with these three other MIT faculty. And I think that I was beginning to appreciate all the pleasures of MIT and the opportunities it makes available for working across your discipline and across your department with people elsewhere in the Institute.

INTERVIEWER: And how did you get interested in national and international security?

BERGER: Well that was another accident. Just to say that out of that project on dualism, Michael Piore, who's an economist, and I, we started realizing that the basic theories in our fields, economics and political science, did not account very well for some of the phenomenon that we were seeing. And so we started trying to look at those theories to understand what in these theories -- What do they (theories) allow you to see clearly? What are the lenses you put on with each theory? What do you see clearly? What is it you don't see so clearly? And as we had those discussions, we realized this would be a good course to organize for students.

So this must be 25, 30 years ago. We started teaching a course that we called Political Economy I. And that course we're still teaching. And it's a graduate seminar. But we get 30 students in that seminar. And they come equally from Sloan, from political science, economics. Now we have a contingent of Kennedy School students who come up from Harvard for that course. That course continues to intrigue people in the same way that those puzzles intrigued us.

So we called each of these different family of theories paradigms. So we looked at the liberal paradigm, Marxist paradigm, cultural paradigm. And I tried to explain -- a friend of mine who was in Washington, who was then assistant secretary -- had been assistant secretary of the Navy in the Carter administration. I tried to explain to her what it was we were doing. And I used the example of how each paradigm -- if you were looking, let's say, at the Soviet Union, would show you a different part, or come up with a different idea of the Soviet Union. Which would suggest a different kind of policy response in a part of the United States.

And she said, "Suzanne, you ought to be teaching -- you know, our people, our smartest people in the military can only ever understand one best solution. They think that given the facts, there's always one best idea, one best way of following things. So it would really just be eye opening for them to realize that from the same facts, depending on what glasses you put on, you might see different things." And so together -- her name was Mitzi Wertheim. Together with Mitzi, and actually someone who was a very senior member of the defense establishment, Jake Stewart, we created a seminar. Seminar 21, we called it, Looking Towards the 21st Century.

And we -- Mitzi and Jake asked the joint chiefs of staff if they would suggest the absolute best and brightest in their various services to participate in this seminar. And not the intelligence officers, but people who really were heading for the top. And if they would do that, we at MIT would provide the best of our faculty to come once a month for nine months to try to show how these different paradigms could shape [INAUDIBLE] understandings of central problems and areas and parts of the world and themes for these people.

And up till now, this seminar continues. I did that for seven years. And it continues with other faculty -- have taken it over. And we've now had more than 1,200 very senior people from each of the military services. NSA, CIA, state department. We've now added NGOs as well, because they play a central role in areas of concern for security. So that was a different adventure.

But I can see how that grew out of our dualism project. How that grew out of my peasant. So even though, apparently if you looked at these activities on paper you don't see the connection, in my mind they're connected. And in fact, connected to, well, the research support we had for that dualism project came from the Ford Foundation. And if Ford said, what good was our support to you? I guess answer number one would be, well we published a book. But I think if you look at the long term impact of that research funding, first of all it created that class that still goes on. And I can look -- I can see the impact of that class in the research of my students over the years. It created this seminar. Though Ford would probably never even be able to see that. But I know that that's how it worked.

INTERVIEWER: And is there a link between all of this and globalization?

BERGER: Ah. Globalization. I guess that was another accident made possible by MIT. At the end of the 1980s, it was a very bad time for the US economy. And President Gray, Paul Gray, looked at what seemed to be the losing battle of US industry to compete at that time with the Japanese. It looked like the Japanese were just eating our lunch in fields like electronics, automobiles, in which Americans had been leaders for a long period of time. And he said there's a huge problem for the American -- for the United States. And MIT ought to be able to analyze this and to come up with some solutions.

And so he asked 16 faculty from completely different fields to participate in this project. And the leader of the project was Michael Dertouzos who was the head of the lab for computer science, which is now CSAIL. And Robert Solow, who later won a Nobel Prize. So that was the Commission on Industrial Productivity.

And I just have to tell you a little about the commission because -- Well first of all, Michael Dertouzos was a fantastic leader. And he really was able to get these 16 prima donnas to actually work together. And I say prima donnas -- we started the commission by everybody offering their favorite explanation of what the problem was. And there must have been 80 different explanations from the Americans have lost the Protestant work ethic. We're too litigious All our energy goes into suing people in courts. And on and on and on.

And at one point, Paul Krugman was a member of this group. And at one point, Krugman shouted, I don't want to hear the word competitiveness once again. It's a nonsense word. It means nothing. Depending on the level we set the dollar, the United States could be selling cotton T-shirts in Sri Lanka. And the dean of engineering, who was in the room, stood up and shouted, I always knew there was something deeply wrong with economics. And now I see it. So you had these fundamentally different world views here.

And Michael Dertouzos brilliantly realized that there had to be a different way of going about this. So he broke us into teams, and said you've got to go study particular industries, and then we'll build our analyses from the bottom up instead of this top down approach. And that's really how I started doing the kind of research on industries from the bottom up -- that really, I would say, from the end of the 1980s has become the basis of all the subsequent work that I've done on globalization. So there too it was a kind of MIT product.

INTERVIEWER: And then I have one more -- comparative politics. Which sounds like it would be closely related as well.

BERGER: Well comparative politics. I think in a way I've answered that by talking about Hoffman and the kind of insight that how much you can -- how much -- it seems inevitable to us, once you look at how other societies organize things, you realize that what seems to you inevitable in life, is not inevitable at all. There is another way of tackling this problem. Or another way of organizing.

Take something like training and education for workers. In the United States it seems absolutely self evident that companies have little to gain from investing in their workers. Because the workers then can move on to another company, and the company loses its investment in education and training the workers. And when you ask US company managers why they do so little for developing the skills, they say, well because we'll lose those people. They'll go off -- they'll go off somewhere else. And that just seemed to be a fact of life.

Until you go to Germany and Japan, work companies invest -- and very very heavily -- in worker training and skills. And they have a way of trying, in fact, by creating a common reservoir of skilled workers to make sure that no one company does all the investing, while others are able to free ride on those who invest. So what seemed to be a kind of a immovable fact of life suddenly takes on a whole different sense of possibility and opportunity, if you look at German and Japanese patterns. That's just one example.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. So let's back up a little bit. And why don't you tell me how you wound up at MIT.

BERGER: Well the true story is I was -- I -- After I got my PhD at Harvard, Harvard then, in those days, hired only its own junior faculty, faculty from its own graduates.

And the experience of being a graduate student at Harvard was hard. You felt no one ever really noticed what you were doing. And so when you were appointed as a faculty member, it felt like holy oil had been poured on you. Suddenly you felt incredibly special. So I hadn't really thought very much. I was offered other jobs at that time. But it just felt so special to have been chosen by Harvard, that without really thinking much about it, I signed up and agreed to start there.

And as I, though, became a junior faculty member, I realized that -- I realized that at Harvard, there are 12 junior faculty for every one tenured faculty member. And that's a kind of fixed ratio. It began to appear to me that this, perhaps, was not going to be for the long term a very good solution. And it might be best to leave at a point of my choosing, rather than wait, eventually, to be kicked out.

And so about two years into my assistant professorship, opportunities presented themselves at MIT and at Yale. And I really didn't know much about MIT for a social scientist. I'd sort of thought of it as others did as an engineering and science school. Except that I had one very good mentor who I'd had as a professor at Chicago. Professor Myron Weiner, who was here. And as I started to talk with him and his colleagues, I realized what an exciting place MIT was. And so I moved, after two years as an assistant professor at Harvard, I moved to MIT.

And I've never regretted it. And any time that I've had other opportunities to go other places, MIT has always seemed a very compelling place to remain. The one truly tempting opportunity had been I once had an offer to go to join on a permanent basis the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. And at that point, I'd gotten to know provost Walter Rosenblith pretty well. So I went to discuss this with him. And he ended this conversation in about three minutes, or this particular line of inquiry by saying, Suzanne, you know you love teaching. You can't be seriously thinking about this. And that was true. I really did love teaching. And you know, as I think back about that conversation, many other administrators would've tried to offer a higher salary or a faster promotion, or something like that. But Walter just zeroed in on the thing that he understood was my real attachment to the Institute. And I stayed.

INTERVIEWER: Can you talk a little bit more about what it is about the environment here that keeps you here?

BERGER: Well, I really like the fact that MIT, hierarchically, is a very flat place. And that in a number of ways. First of all exactly because departments have a fixed number of faculty, but we're not required to have any fixed ratio between tenured and junior faculty. It means that any junior faculty we hire, we hire with the anticipation, expectation, that if they continue to do work as good as we've seen, that they will remain.

So that enormous hierarchy that exists between tenured and junior people at places like Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. That doesn't exist at MIT. There is a difference between more senior and more junior people. But it's not -- it just isn't that steep. And so we treat junior colleagues as if they are really colleagues, and hopefully people who will be there for the long stay. So that's flatter.

I think the MIT administration is just much more approachable than -- I would never dream as a junior faculty member of having tried to even have a conversation. The thought of going and talking to the provost about a job offer, when you were a young faculty member at Harvard? It would've been absolutely out of the question. It was hard enough to talk to the chairman of my department about having a job offer at MIT and Yale, and what would be the right solution -- the right solution there.

In fact when I did, just rolling back to that experience, and someone said, well why would you want to leave Harvard? So I said, oh, well you know, it seems to me many junior people really don't get tenure here. So perhaps it would be best. The person looked at me and said, well, if you lack confidence in yourself, I guess it would be the best solution for you. So it was very -- the MIT administration, the senior members of the administration, have a kind of approachability. The system is flat enough.

And then the third aspect of this flatness is that you can move across departments so easily. My collaboration with the economist at the very -- my very early years here with people in DUSP. The fact that all my globalization research projects have been carried out with engineers and with colleagues from Sloan. At Harvard, people in the Harvard Business School, they're across the river. Those people -- you don't ever even see those people, let alone interact with them. And there are many ways in which MIT pushes you into this kind of -- I'm deeply aware of how the shape of the Institute its values and priorities has shaped my own career. And the kind of accidents -- what seem to me as accidents -- have had a very deep impact on shaping what I've done.

INTERVIEWER: Can you remember what your first impressions were when you first got here? The students and the culture, and colleagues.

BERGER: Well, first of all, it's really ugly. If you look at MIT buildings where we are, it's extremely ugly. Physically it was not a pleasant environment. And that's -- it's been slightly changed over the years. But not a lot.

INTERVIEWER: Especially if you come from the University of Chicago.

BERGER: Yeah. Oh even Harvard. Harvard's rather attractive. And the buildings had numbers. Initially I was very taken aback. My undergraduates in my classes seemed to want to know what the right answer was. And I was struggling desperately to tell them that the issue is how you think about a problem and how you pull it apart. And how, depending on how you look at it. And the students felt very unsatisfied with that answer.

Many of these points about MIT have changed over time. I think we've really changed. There's a much stronger presence in the undergraduate, in the undergraduate student body of students who might well have gone to a place like Harvard or Princeton or Yale. And who are more curious about looking at why would we define the problem this way rather than that way. And not just kind of solving problem sets. But initially I found the problem set mentality was a real problem for me in trying to teach undergraduates. And I could recognize they were brilliant students. And I found myself struggling to push them beyond this way of kind of understanding the world.

I also found it a little difficult in my first years. At MIT it's undoubtedly true that in the science departments, there are people asking the question of just understanding things, just because understanding the world is important in and of itself. But there really is an old and deep engineering tradition at MIT that says -- that's always asking the question, why does this matter? What's it good for? Why does it matter? And so at MIT, I was kind of taken aback by -- if I would explain what I was doing on French peasants. And someone would say, well why does it matter? Or, what's it good for? Or, you know, why should I care? That was disconcerting to me.

I think over time, MIT has probably changed me more on this front than I've changed MIT. And so my own interests have become more policy focused. I constantly ask myself, why does it matter? How could it matter? Why is this -- studying this thing in and of -- But I've never lost my love for just understanding things, in and of itself. Its intrinsic fascination for why it's possible for this thing to exist and carry on.

INTERVIEWER: So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about certain, multiple aspects of being here. One is teaching. One is researching. One is publishing. And how you feel about those various components to what you do.

BERGER: Okay I guess I would say, first of all, that I think that there is absolutely no conflict between teaching and being an excellent teacher, and research and being an excellent researcher. It's true that there are only 24 hours in the day. And that's the ultimate constraint. And hopefully you get some sleep along the way.

But I have felt that the interaction between my teaching and particularly teaching of graduate students, and my research. That these two activities have truly nurtured each other in ways that make it -- they seem to me a seamless activity. So the happiest times, I would say for me, have been when I've been involved in a big research project. And when graduate students have also been involved in it.

And I think about the globalization project. When together with another faculty member, often an engineer, and one or two graduate students, we'd be riding in a minivan, going out to these industrial parks in the middle of China. And we'd argue all the way to the factory about what it was that we'd want to be asking about. And then for the next two hours of the ride, what did we see? What did it mean? What did the man really say? What did it mean that they were -- that the machines were set up as -- so I was learning both from the engineer who saw entirely different things in that factory than I saw. And from the graduate student, who had different questions. And I think also for the graduate students it was a fantastic opportunity. And so those -- that possibility of doing these activities with students.

And what I feel proud of there, too, is that the students didn't just work on the common project. Each of them developed wholly autonomous projects and books out of this that are very very, different. And projects that have gone on to win them terrific jobs and honors for their books and dissertations, et cetera And so this possibility for having both an individual project and a group project. For being a teacher and a researcher. This is, I think, the height of pleasure that's available. And it's a deep feeling of satisfaction on all fronts here at MIT. So teaching, research.

Publishing. There's myths about publishing and what's needed to do in order -- what you need to do in order to have tenure. In reality, what MIT wants to see for tenure is that you've done a few, maybe two in my field, truly important and relatively distinct pieces of outstanding work. The length of the list is really pretty much irrelevant. What you have to have done is for at least two major pieces of work, or they can be expressed in articles or expressed in books. You have to have changed the agenda. The questions that others who look at this question, at this issue, are going to be asking. You have to have made a difference in some part of the field on at least two significant fronts. And it's hard sometimes to convince junior colleagues that this is really it. It's hard sometimes to convince people that this is only it. And it's hard to convince, above all, when people have done a lot of work, but none of it really adds up to a big difference. Then people feel somehow deceived, as if you told them to do a lot, they've done a lot. And it's very hard to articulate to them why what they've done is still not enough.

INTERVIEWER: Among the dozen or so books that you've done, are there a couple that you're most proud of? Or you think have made the biggest difference?

BERGER: Well I guess the one that's made the biggest difference, at least in the United States, is How We Compete. And I feel very pleased about that. Because it was so hard to write. Because I felt I was trying, not only to express my own point of view, but there had been -- there had been eight of us who worked on this project. And the graduate students of course had to write their own dissertations and their own books. So they weren't going to do writing. And the other colleagues in the project were mainly engineers. And they'd said from the beginning that if there was a book, they weren't going to write it. That that isn't their job.

And yet I felt I truly wanted to respect -- we had met for five years every other week for two hours, and discussed these issues. We'd been discussing in those minivans. And so writing it was extremely difficult, to have both my voice and their voice. And I've, afterwards, I think I've given at least 50 lectures in the United States to industry groups, trade groups, academic groups, about that. And it's -- that that book did come at a moment when people were asking very searching questions about how can we actually keep good jobs? How can we keep activities that are important in the United States? Is low labor -- is low labor cost, is there going to be some sort of race to the bottom, where the only way we can protect economic activities in the United States is by kind of competing in their, on lower wages, lower working conditions? And I think that book spoke to those questions in ways that people -- that people would like.

It was also the first book where I tried really to write in a way so that a normal human being could read it. As opposed to a political scientist. And that was a struggle, but I enjoyed it.

But I have to say there's one other thing I wrote that gave me enormous pleasure. And I wrote it during a year when I decided I was taking a vacation from the How We Compete project. And this is a little book about globalization in the period 1870-- 1914. When borders were as open as they are today. Capital moved as much across borders. Goods and services and even people moved around a lot. Because they didn't really have passports in those days.

And I started thinking, why is that people didn't worry then about the questions we worry about now? About jobs, and can we have -- can we maintain standards of environmental standards? Can we maintain various welfare provisions if we have open borders? So I started looking at the debates over globalization. Though that word wasn't used then. In that earlier period, which was just like, in many ways, just like our own. And also at the question of -- people then also thought that this state of the world was irreversible. Though this world came to an end in one day, when World War I broke out, borders went back up, and they didn't come back down for 75 years.

And as I started to work on this project, I started looking at this in France. Because after all I'd done a lot of research in France. Someone convinced me to publish the part of what I was writing on France in French.

And so that little book came out. I thought nobody but nobody would be interested. Instead, that book was picked up by French politicians and political parties. And used as a way of kind of battling out their current conflicts about border openness, capital mobility. Should there be a Tobin tax on financial -- And it was fascinating to see that people could use that older set of issues as a way of rethinking their current dilemmas.

So I had enormous satisfaction from that. And what I'm doing now is I'm doing the rest of that project. And I'm looking at how those debates played out in the United States, England, and Germany. And so what I'm trying to do is write the larger project, in which the French piece will be put back in again. But that will come out in English

INTERVIEWER: You've been involved in a lot of the programs to expand MIT into the wider world. And I wonder if you could talk about those efforts. And why MIT thinks that's so important.

BERGER: Okay. I think here we have to go back to what MIT was like 40 years ago. Even 20 years ago. Which was a place that was strongly, how can I say, infected with the "not invented here" syndrome. That is, faculty did not believe, in most areas, that significant research, creation of knowledge, took place anywhere outside the United States. And quite possibly nothing that was really important was happening anywhere except MIT. And in fact if anything important was happening somewhere else, probably the people involved will turn up at MIT sooner rather than later.

And so it was in that environment at the end of the 1980s, as the Japanese across one field after another began to demonstrate their mastery, that a faculty member, professor Richard Samuels who is now the director of the Center for International Studies, realized that while we had, I don't know, more than 100 Japanese postdocs and assistant professors and graduate students at MIT, that we did not have one person at MIT who was capable of going to a Japanese laboratory, participating in a research group, and truly understanding what was going on. We were incapable of learning from the Japanese. While they had made themselves very capable of learning from us.

And so he started the first effort to -- It was the MIT- Japan program. To try to give MIT students the opportunity to go to participate in research groups and laboratories in Japan on condition that they first study two years of Japanese here. His idea was you can't just wander in with your Berlitz book and hope to be able to really understand what's going on. And I realized, looking at Samuels' program, that this was the way -- I had not really found for myself some way of connecting my own belief that comparative politics -- that is, comparing what one nation does to another -- which seemed to me such an important way -- important lever for trying to change our own society. I realized that what Samuels had come up with was a way to translate that into a program that would work at MIT to get students and faculty to be able to appreciate how important it is to understand how another society does things.

And it's that angle of approach -- that is, trying to understand how knowledge is created elsewhere. To try to convince people that our students and faculty are not going to remain at the cutting edge unless they're able to participate in knowledge creation in other big centers in the world. And it's that idea which slowly, and now very rapidly, has convinced people across MIT of how important it is for faculty to be involved in collaborative research. And for students to have that kind of hands on experience of research and participation in a company or a lab as part of their basic education. It's not a frill. It's not a junior year abroad in France. It's a significant opportunity, if you're a biologist, to go be at the Pasteur Institute for six months, and working on your project.

And I think that's what's really changed MIT. So who's the biggest -- which department is now the biggest supporter of our international education initiative? It's EECS. Electrical engineering and computer science. And I think -- So they've become a tremendous supporter. They've you know -- Bringing their students to China. We have the largest proportion of the students who participate in the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative, what we call MISTI. The largest number of students do come from EECS. In fact, we have of proportion of engineering students, science students, and students from the other schools, that's about like -- it's pretty much the reflection of the Institute itself.

INTERVIEWER: And there's some -- Can you talk a little bit about the MIT- France program?

BERGER: Yeah. Well the MIT -- Of course I was very -- Once we got the MIT- Japan program, which Dick Samuels had started. And then the MIT- China program, which provost Mark Wrighton had allowed us to start. I just kept wanting, thinking somehow, we've got to do something on France.

And we had visited the minister, French minister of education and research, Claude Allegre. Who was a friend of John Deutch, who had been MIT provost. And we explained, this is what we're doing on China and Japan. Isn't it a pity we can't do it on France? He was very agitated.

And so France gave us a million dollar endowment. And then MIT raised a similar endowment with the help, particularly of the d'Arbeloffs, who helped us. And then we were off.

And so at this point, we have an MIT- France program where we're sending close to 80 students a year. Undergraduates and graduate students. For internships in French companies and laboratories. And we also have a seed research competition, where MIT faculty apply to get funding, to collaborate with some French colleague or research lab. And we have, every year, something like 40 or 50 applications for MIT faculty and research. The funds are shared equally with the French lab.

So I think this dream of being able to somehow give opportunities to MIT students and faculty, to share and to participate in and learn how to participate in cutting edge research elsewhere. We can see this moving ahead. From a handful of four or five students that Samuels sent to Japan at the end of the 1980s. Last year we had 420 students. This year in the -- who went. This year we had something like 140 faculty who participated -- who competed in this seed research fund competition for all the countries. And happily, we just had our tenth country program, the Brazil program. We've just added Brazil as one of the countries. And foreign languages and literatures is adding Portuguese as a language you can study at MIT. So the same pattern. Students who study Portuguese will be given opportunities to go to Brazil.

I do want to say that there are two things very different about what MIT is doing here than other schools. First of all the emphasis is on having a hands on experience in a company or a lab. It's not going off to study somewhere else mainly. Although if someone wants to do that, that's fun.

Secondly, we see this as a basic part of your education. So parents don't pay more. These overseas programs at most schools are for rich kids. Because it's their families who can come up with the extra money. We recognize at MIT that if we really think it's part of education, there shouldn't be additional expense here. So we're raising all the money that's needed to support this additional opportunity for the students. And I think that's a very different feel about it on both counts than what we have in most places.

INTERVIEWER: It seems to me that you're in a unique position to be able to answer this. Since you've been here as the change has taken place from a sort of insular MIT to a more global MIT. How do you see students being changed by the experience of participating in these programs?

BERGER: I think for many students, it's a kind of humbling experience. These are students who always were the best. Or else they probably wouldn't have -- They wouldn't have gotten to MIT. And it's very hard psychologically to be in the situation where doing things the way you've always done them, that have always been very successful for you, is challenged by a different kind of approach. Let me give you an example. One of our students went to work in an investment financial services company in Mexico. So she was a Sloan school student. And we placed her -- she was interested in Mexico. And so she went to work in a financial services company. And the day that she arrived, a group went out for a very nice lunch. And the lunch went on for two hours. And she said she thought, gee, this is -- they've done this for me. How really nice. What a lovely welcome. But then the next, day everybody went out, and lunch was two hours again. And the next day lunch two hours again. And she became very uneasy. She felt people are not working here. Look at all this time off, and all this schmoozing and -- And so she called the MIT Mexico coordinator and said, you know, I just -- I just don't know if I did the right thing coming here. It seems to me nobody's really working. And so the coordinator said, I want you to listen at lunch. Listen to what people are talking about. Observe that they are going ahead with -- That things are happening there." And gradually, the student started to realize that this was a part of the work day. In which people were sharing information, helping each other. We had very much the same experience with a biology student, who went to the Pasteur Institute. And she said, when I asked her, so what was different about being there than staying in your lab at MIT? She was a graduate student. She said, well for one month, I thought I was just completely wasting my time. It seemed like nobody was working. People were going out. They were drinking coffee. They were smoking. It seemed like nothing was happening. And then, she said, after a month, the project took this leap forward. There was this real advance. I could see that there'd been an advance. But I hadn't seen where it had come from. She said, and then I remembered that, during our training things, they said watch how people are talking to each other. Look how the group tries to figure out what to do. How to define the problem. Look at how the group tries to recover from a failure. And regroup it. And she said, then I started watching. And I realized, these people were just working in a different way. And they were coming at problems from different angles. That's really hard for somebody to see. And it's an experience in which people often first feel, well they'll often feel people aren't really working here. That things are not -- they could be doing this in a better, easier way. Or something like that. And then this gradual recognition that people are looking at different parts -- doing problem solving in another way. That to me is -- that mindset, that meant -- when your mind turns around to think about problems -- about what's going on here in a different way. You've become a person who's become capable of participating with others somewhere else than in your own comfortable lab setting.