William F. Pounds

INTERVIEWER: Today is October 27, 2009. I am Karen Arenson. We are talking with William Pounds, professor emeritus and former dean of MIT's Sloan School. During the turmoil over Vietnam in the late 1960s, he took on the unenviable task of leading a review of MIT's policies on two special research laboratories whose funding came from the Department of Defense in large part. Besides being at MIT for nearly 50 years, he also served for 10 years as senior adviser to the Rockefeller family and as the top executive of a number of their entities, all of this while remaining as a part-time professor on the MIT faculty and commuting between Boston and New York. Bill, thank you for talking to us. Let's start with the path that brought you to MIT way back. Where are you from? Where did you grow up?

POUNDS: Well, I grew up in Pennsylvania. And I have the distinction of having been born on a farm. I would think that would work well if I ever chose to run for political office, but that has not occurred to me. I grew up in Pittsburgh. My parents were school teachers, public school teachers, so I didn't fall very far from the tree. I went to Carnegie Tech in those days because it was the local school, and the expense of going away to college wasn't even on the agenda. And I commuted by streetcar in those days. And I got a degree in chemical engineering having little idea about what that was.

And when I graduated I went to work for Kodak, which in those days was a well-ordered monopoly, a very, I think, high-quality organization. And I was there, I don't know, maybe I'm going into too much detail here, but I was there for a year when the Korean War began. And I was first in line because I had just missed the Second World War. So in a fit of enthusiasm, I went off and signed up for Navy flight training. And I went into the Navy and I became a carrier-based fighter pilot during the Korean War, which was great fun. I recommend it to anyone.

INTERVIEWER: Flying.

POUNDS: Flying. Exactly. And I was in what now seems like flying ancient airplanes, but I was in during the transition from props to jets, so I ended up flying all kinds of airplanes including one that was supersonic, but in the latter days of my naval career.

INTERVIEWER: What made you choose chemical engineering?

POUNDS: Simple, I was going to high school and a chemistry teacher in high school was thought to be the hardest and most challenging, and I enjoyed his classes very much. And my father had been an engineer, and I was good at math and those things, so I thought well maybe I'll be engineering. And then you need an adjective, so "chemical" sounded good to me. I had no other attraction.

INTERVIEWER: And what did you do at Kodak? What kind of work were you doing?

POUNDS: Well, at Kodak I joined a pool. I didn't think of it that way at the time, but Kodak hired prospective, I suppose you would say managerial types, often engineers. But I'm sure they hired other kinds of people. And they put us in a large department that did projects all over the manufacturing facility, which in those days was called Kodak Park, which is an enormous enterprise. And the people there would be assigned to projects, fixing things in Kodak Park, making new organizational arrangements, establishing wage rates. They still paid on a piecework basis, designing workplaces and materials flows and all those kinds of things. I quite enjoyed it. And from there I enlisted in the Navy and away I went.

INTERVIEWER: But you were in the management core. You weren't doing engineering really.

POUNDS: Well, it was called industrial engineering. It was kind of general purpose. I don't know what you would call it. Work, I suppose, project work.

INTERVIEWER: And when you were in college or high school, were you a leader? Were there the early seeds of heading things?

POUNDS: Well, I'd been president of my fraternity in undergraduate school. I suppose my only leadership qualification. And so I went in the Navy, and I went through all that. And when I graduated, in those days you earned rights for education, GI Bill kind of rights. So I thought maybe I should go to graduate school, but I had no idea what I might want to study. And while I was in the Navy, I ended up getting married, which worked pretty well. I'm now up to year number 55 in my marriage. And I tell my wife it may work out, and it seems to be working very well. Anyway, I had a great time in the Navy and lived through it, which not everyone does. I didn't go to Korea but went to the Mediterranean.

INTERVIEWER: How did you end up in the Mediterranean?

POUNDS: Well, they had a fleet in the Mediterranean, and when I came out of flight training, they asked if I had any preference between the Atlantic or the Pacific. And I said, if it's all the same to you, I'll go to the Atlantic. Anyway, I flew --

INTERVIEWER: Did everybody get a choice, or were you at the top of the class?

POUNDS: They probably asked everyone. I don't know how everyone else turned out, but it turned out well for me. Anyway, when I got out of the, as I said, when I got out of the Navy, I didn't know quite what to do and so I decided to go back to Kodak. And I had been on leave for all those years, four years, not that that did me a lot of good, but they took me back happily and I went back to work.

And while there, I got exposed to some people who were doing what we now think of as operations research. They were using mathematics to build models of various things and with no more training then I'd had, which was simple engineering calculus. I discovered, and sort of fell into, several projects which seemed to have a very large payoff with relatively little effort. And I thought maybe if I understood this stuff, I could really save the world or become rich and famous or whatever.

And so I decided to think about going back to graduate school to study that. Since I had gone to Carnegie, and I made my decision late in my eligibility for the GI Bill, I inquired in several places. But only Carnegie came up with a quick answer, which was they would admit me, having applied I think in July for admission in September. So I decided to go back there. And where I went was into the graduate school, what they call the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, which was essentially their business school. As it turned out later, very similar to Sloan in some ways, in taste and style. I didn't know any of that at the time, of course.

I was a little squeamish about going to business school because as an engineer, everyone knows that people who are really smart are engineers or scientists, and the people who go to business school are not necessarily the intellectually elite. So I went there and discovered to my horror that I had to study things like accounting and marketing and finance and organizations and things like that. And I remember going to the dean and telling him that I had been around awhile and I knew pretty clearly what I wanted to study, which was math and economics. And I found myself in these classes and I didn't want to do that. And he nicely told me that I had come to the wrong place, because where I was those courses were required. So with possibly the world's most negative attitude, I entered all those classes. And over time I gradually learned something, which is a risk you run if you go to college, I guess.

At any rate I discovered that there were a lot of what seemed to me to be quite interesting problems in the world that were not obviously amenable to mathematical modeling or economic analysis. And when I was at Carnegie, there were two sort of leading faculty members there. They had really quite a remarkable faculty at that time. Franco Modigliani, who ultimately came here to MIT, was at Sloan, represented the sort of rational man end of the world. And Herbert Simon, who was also at Carnegie, had the idea that people were not as smart as economists thought they were. And therefore he invented a term, just sort of loose, called bounded rationality, which means that people do their best to be rational but they're not very good at it, and so they make lots of mistakes and do foolish things. And the longer I was at Carnegie, the more I drifted away from Franco toward Herb as a kind of patron and ended up being interested in what turns out to be the early days of kind of cognitive modeling. You know, how do people cope with a world that is hopelessly more complicated than we can understand?

So that was the evolution of my study at Carnegie. And because I considered myself elderly at that time, I thought maybe I should go to work. My wife was working and helping pay my way, and my GI Bill was paying my way. I thought it was perhaps time I earned my keep, and so I decided to leave and take what we might call a real job. And when I'd said that -- oh, and I had, along the way I discovered that if I claimed a possible interest in a PhD, I could take almost anything I wanted, whereas if I was a candidate for a Master's degree, I faced much more rigorous curriculum requirements. So I said maybe I'm interested in a PhD. And so I then took things that I liked, although they included all those requirements, I might say. And I was --

INTERVIEWER: Were some of the things that you were then taking, these were courses that Simon was giving?

POUNDS: Well, mostly in the early days it was mostly to take more math and economics. So rather than ending up with an MBA -- or I forget what they titled it at that time -- but it was effectively an MBA. I got a degree in math, a master's degree in mathematical economics. And when I announced I might leave to take a job, they said, well, why don't you just take the PhD, like, exams. I had only been there less than two years, and so I said I had nothing to lose, so I took the exams, and to my horror I passed them. And then I didn't know what to do, but I stayed a little while longer and met the language requirement and some other requirements for the PhD but made no progress at all on a thesis. And I took a job with Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in a paint factory in Cleveland. And we made automobile finishes for General Motors for the most part. And I went there thinking I would do my thesis on the job.

INTERVIEWER: What were you supposed to do for them? What kind of job?

POUNDS: Well, this little enterprise in Cleveland had been run by, or was run and owned by, a gentleman who I discovered was a little bit tyrannical in his management style, I discovered. Most of the people when I went there didn't speak to each other or much to him. It was a very, very, complicated social situation. And he had developed a business that had access to the General Motors paint business. And PPG, which was in the paint business, wanted access to General Motors, so they bought the business from him. And he was an irascible old duck, and he had made a lot of money out of the purchase, so he was pretty independent and was not happy with the folks at PPG particularly, or for that matter almost anybody else.

So I was sent up to cope with him, and he thought he hired me to cope with them, the people at the corporate headquarters. So I was working in effect as his assistant, whatever that meant. Nobody really knew. At any rate I was there for a couple of years, during which time I made absolutely no progress on any thesis. I decided that I would do that for two years and not pursue the PhD at all, and at the end of that time I would think about it, and if I liked what I was doing, I would declare victory and continue that. And if not then I would think about something else.

So 18 months into my service there, I was contacted by Howard Johnson, who was then dean of the Sloan School here at MIT. And he had discovered my existence through Carnegie. And he was looking for people who had the kind of academic training that I had had, the math and the economics. But I had something that was more valuable than I realized at the time. I had not only that training, but I had had actual manufacturing experience, both at Kodak and at PPG. And he wanted me to come, as it turned out, to teach about production management, which in those days was sort of an extension of OR.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think he was calling around to business schools to look for somebody with just that --

POUNDS: Yeah, exactly. And there weren't too many of those folks. And, you know, I don't know that we've ever hired another one.

INTERVIEWER: And it didn't bother him that you didn't have a thesis under your belt?

POUNDS: Well, he invited me to come up, and I talked with him. And he wanted me to come, and he made an offer that I could come as an assistant professor and with a light teaching load until I got my thesis finished. And that sounded like a pretty good idea to me. So I went back to Charlie, my boss in Cleveland, and with my hat in hand I went in and I said, Charlie, I'm going to leave. And he said, what the hell are you going to do? And I said, I'm going to go to MIT. And I didn't know what to expect. He said, Bill, that's the smartest thing you ever did. And it turned out he was a graduate of MIT. I never knew that. We didn't have a lot of small talk.

INTERVIEWER: This was Charlie --

POUNDS: Reed, the guy that owned this business. And it turned out he had been at MIT and spent a year after he graduated working with -- what was in effect then wasn't a separate school -- the head of the management department at MIT, whatever it was called. And he said it was the best year of his life. I never heard Charlie so enthusiastic about anything. And he was just ecstatic about the possibility of my going there. I couldn't get over it. Anyway, that was a happy ending for my work in Cleveland.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have to take a big pay cut to go from industry?

POUNDS: A little bit. Well, yeah, exactly. Might be 25 percent or so. And there wasn't much involved at either level, but --

INTERVIEWER: So why were you willing to do that? [INTERPOSING] An interesting move.

POUNDS: Yeah. I've been thinking about this interview a little bit and asking myself how to explain it all. And I've come up, and I'll repeat this reasoning, I think I was curious. I knew I could do what I was doing in Cleveland. And PPG had another and bigger job in line for me which sounded a little bit the same. And I knew I could do what I had done at Kodak because I'd been pretty good at that. And I had never had any contact with a university as a professor. Actually, I had done a little teaching when I was at Kodak because I began teaching a course in OR having only had these sort of casual visits with my friend. And with the proceeds of that I can still remember I bought a little sailboat, which served some useful purpose.

At any rate, I thought, well, it might be a nice idea, and who knows what. I could finish up my PhD and then we'll see. But I was not what you would call a driven academic. I was not seeking an academic career. I was thinking about the next step. So I came to MIT in 1961 and taught and made progress on my thesis and finished that up at Carnegie, of course. I got the degree at Carnegie under Herb Simon and some people there.

INTERVIEWER: And it was in some area of mathemtical economics or of operations research?

POUNDS: No, it was more aimed at cognitive things. I was interested in how people chose to do what they do. It was not a great thesis. I don't recommend it to anyone. But it served its purpose, I guess. So I came to MIT in '61 and taught and --

INTERVIEWER: What were you teaching?

POUNDS: I taught manufacture, what we called in those days production management. It was essentially factory operations, inventory control, scheduling optimization.

INTERVIEWER: Was that interesting to you?

POUNDS: Yeah, it was all mathematics. It wasn't management. It was essentially applied mathematics. You would have a mathematics problem, but you would say the foreman faces the following problem, and then it was a math problem. Anyway, I finished up my thesis in '64 and then I was promoted to associate professor. And I think I may have gotten tenure for reasons that I find hard to understand now. But in '66 I was invited to become dean. So I had been there something like five years, and looking back I think it was probably too soon. I didn't really have a very clear idea of what that meant, but I was curious. And as I lived around MIT I found it a little hard to understand from time to time, and I thought it would be nice if someone drew back the curtain and I could see the underlying scheme. So I thought, well maybe if I become a dean, they'll reveal the plan to me. Well, I did that and discovered there was neither a curtain nor anyone behind it.

INTERVIEWER: Was there an Academic Council then that met weekly or regularly?

POUNDS: Yes, there was. Howard Johnson had hired me at Sloan, and then I served, as I said, about five years. And he became president. And then it was he that invited me to become dean. A very nice thing that someone did for me was Charlie Townes had been provost at MIT. He was vastly above my pay grade. I didn't ever meet him, but we had similar names, Townes and Pounds. And in those days we had a human telephone operator at MIT. So you called MIT and say I want to speak with professor. And I sometimes got his calls and he sometimes got mine.

At any rate, after Howard invited me and I agreed to serve as dean, Charlie called me before he left for Berkeley, I think is where he went. And he had been provost then. And J. Stratton had stepped down as president, which gave Howard the opportunity to become president. And Charlie had been, as I said, provost, but they decided not to think about the dean question until they settled the president question.

Anyway, Charlie called me one day and took me to lunch and told me that if that transition hadn't happened, they had thought that they would invite me to be dean, too. So whether that -- I'm sure it was true, but it was a nice thing for him to tell me. So then I became dean and a member of the Academic Council, and I then served as dean for a long time. And during that time I did the work on that panel that you've mentioned about, the two big laboratories.

INTERVIEWER: What were your first impressions about MIT when you came?

POUNDS: Well, it was, I suppose you would say when I came I had very little impression of MIT other than that it was an honorable and admirable place full of self-admiration. That's true of every organization I've ever been in. And of course I was looking for clues as to what was going on in my immediate neighborhood, so I suppose I was more interested in my colleagues at Sloan and that enterprise, which was interestingly very comparable to what was going on at Carnegie.

Both schools, Carnegie and Sloan, were start-ups after World War II. The establishment business schools, Wharton and Harvard and others -- but those were the two big ones -- had existed for by that time 50 years starting around the turn of the century and were established and vast alumni groups and established teaching methods. The case method had been perfected at Harvard.

And it was in the middle '50s or late '40s that the Ford Foundation took an interest in business education as a general proposition. And they hired a couple of academics to write a report about it because business education was a vast enterprise in the United States. Not just at the graduate level -- in those days the MBA had not become as fashionable as it is now -- but at the undergraduate level, it was enormous. At the big state schools there were thousands and thousands of students in so-called business programs. And the reports were in many ways very similar to a report that had been written on medicine around the turn of the century, the Flexner Report, which had described medicine as a kind of backwater activity practiced by barbers and bleeders and those kinds of people and regretting the fact that it was not able to take advantage of insights that existed at the universities. And therefore it proposed that medicine somehow move as a profession closer to the university. Started at -- Johns Hopkins was the first and then at Harvard and the others.

Well, the reports in the mid-'50s or late forties on business education was virtually word for word what was said in the Flexner Report. It said business education was third-rate. It attracted the weakest students, the weakest faculty, the weakest programs, made no contribution to the profession, et cetera, went on and on at some length. Not commenting directly on the graduate schools. I think that Harvard and Wharton probably didn't deserve that kind of treatment, but it was sort of all of a piece. And at Carnegie the Mellons, and at MIT Sloan, decided to give a chunk of money to both places to establish a new program. And in light of these reports, both places decided to become academic, that is to not hire ex-businessmen and not hire experienced practitioners, but rather to hire academics, people out of economics, out of sociology, out of computer science, out of sociology, out of a lot of fields, hoping that ideas flowing out of those enterprises could somehow enlighten businessmen in the practice of the profession, business being a somewhat less well-defined profession than others.

And so both at Carnegie and at MIT, there was a kind of competitive lean away from the established methods. So the case method was seen as a kind of quaint anachronism at that time. And we talked, as I said, basically applied mathematics and the sciences to our students in economics and other disciplinary matters.

INTERVIEWER: Was Sloan pretty separate from the rest of the campus at that point? I mean, I know physically the building has always been at one end, but you talked about not really having a sense of the rest of MIT --

POUNDS: I think it was fairly distinct and I think it's, you know, we've made a lot of progress in that direction, but it's still sort of a little bit remote. There are close ties, sort of, by individual faculty who work closely with things. And I suspect it's an ongoing opportunity to kind of build it more closely into the MIT system. The same was true at Carnegie.

INTERVIEWER: Although, interestingly, if you look at Wharton or Harvard, those business schools are somewhat separated too.

POUNDS: Totally, yes. I have been in this business a long time, and I often say it's interesting if you look at where business schools are located. They are always on the edge. They're out on the edge somewhere and haven't yet, I guess, penetrated the soul of the university, which is unfortunate. I think an ongoing opportunity. But it's a complicated problem.

INTERVIEWER: So Howard brought you into MIT and Sloan. Did you become close to him in those years before he went off to become president?

POUNDS: Yeah, I was a young junior assistant professor, junior associate, not that I was so young, but I was junior. And I got to know Howard a little bit. But when he became president I didn't have any special access to him. He had a lot of other things on his plate and so did I. And I was unable to perceive any advantage I had from the fact that I knew him. And I remain a close friend. And his wife and my wife are very good friends.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a sense of why they picked you as dean? Was there a mandate, did they sit you down and say here's what we expect of you or would like of you?

POUNDS: Well, you might guess such a conversation took place, but I can report to you that in my 14 years as dean I never had a serious conversation with an MIT president about the school. INTERVIEWER: I understand that you did some traveling with him, maybe when he was still dean of the Sloan School and that you had a rather unusual trip to Colombia.

POUNDS: Right, that's true.

INTERVIEWER: And I wonder if you can tell us about that.

POUNDS: We the school -- there was a fellow named Charlie Myers who was a professor at Sloan. And Charlie somehow got in contact with folks in India. And the Ford Foundation in those days kind of ruled the world or at least thought they did. They had lots of money and they were very big in so-called economic development. And they had a vast enterprise in India and were putting a lot of money into India. And they had, I can't remember his name now, but a man who kind of was the raja of the Ford Foundation in India, an American.

But somehow it worked out that India should start up two business schools supported by not only the government of India. In those days the US was giving food to India, which India paid for in rupees, which had to stay in India. So the thought was we could use those rupees to start these business schools. Now they weren't our rupees. I suppose they were in some way the US government's rupees. But they decided to start these schools. And as it's turned out, they chose Harvard to start one near Bombay and MIT to start one in Calcutta. And so I used to travel with Howard -- I went to teach in that there, not actually in Calcutta, but in Kashmir, where we ran a special summer program, which Indian executives came I think more for the temperature than the intellectual excitement.

But anyway so we had done a lot in India, and one time we were contacted by an alumni group, which is very strong in Bogota. And Colombia is saying, what are you doing in India? Why don't you do something like that in Colombia? And so Howard gave me the task of going to Colombia. And we went together the first time, but then after that he kind of turned it over to me.

But the time we went, the first time we went down and we were in Bogota, and of course in the tropics it gets dark at 6:00 year-round. There's not much of a seasonal variation. So we were going to dinner somewhere, and it was at a time of wild radical activity in Colombia. Maybe that's not news, but it was certainly true at the time. Anyway, we're in our London Fog rain coats in this taxi, in the dark, going along looking all the world like CIA agents. A man stepped in front of the taxi with a machine gun, stopped the car and walked around to my side. I was sitting in the middle, and Howard, and Ed Kuh was sitting on the other. He went out, you know, and Howard said, don't get out. I said, Howard, I think I'm going to get out. Anyway, they searched the car, and we were okay and away we went. But it was a colorful time.

INTERVIEWER: Did that curtail your travels?

POUNDS: No, no no, no. Anyway, I did that with Howard, and then I was responsible for getting the school started in Calcutta. That didn't take a lot of my time, but it took some people.

INTERVIEWER: So you were tapped to become dean of Sloan. What kind of agenda did you fashion, or how did you know what to do? They weren't saying, here's what to do, and you hadn't been there doing it, so?

POUNDS: Those are very fair questions. The answer is I had the experience at Carnegie and the experience I had at Sloan. I had a great admiration and respect for my faculty colleagues. I basically sat down with them and said what shall we do, and I didn't have a clear vision of what to be done. At Kodak I had discovered that organizations are well-intended enterprises. They try to do whatever they're trying to do. If they're trying to make good film and they're trying to perhaps even make money doing that. But the way they do it is the way we do most things, is they do the best they can. And I discovered that at Kodak somewhat to my chagrin. I assumed that business was a smoothly functioning machine, and when I discovered there that it was not only not smoothly functioning but was susceptible to sort of elementary analysis that could improve it substantially. But then the longer I was exposed to it, I realized that it isn't all numbers, either. And therefore you could make some improvements that way, but there were other dimensions to it all.

And of course I discovered the same thing at Sloan. I began by building myself a little model of how our faculty were allocated and who was doing the most work, and I shared that with the faculty to their horror. And of course it was highly uneven. Some people were carrying enormous amounts of the load and others somewhat less. And over time, it was interesting, without any effort, just sharing that information, those loads evened out. And I kept track, least squares variations. And pretty soon people, sort of, were all pulling evenly. But of course you can't tell people what to do in a classroom, so what we were teaching was a mix of what we sort of said we were trying to do and what they decided to do. And that's how it works.

And on the research side, Sloan, for complicated reasons, doesn't acquire or doesn't seek much sponsored research. And therefore we don't have the benefit of clients telling us what to do, which MIT follows religiously. And therefore the Sloan faculty are quite free to do whatever research they want, and the dean is expected to find a way to pay them. So that was the nature of the job. And I was quite happy and proud of what the faculty were doing. The students seemed to find the program satisfactory. The students we attracted were first-rate, and the jobs they got when they graduated were first-rate, and the feedback we got was very positive. And I thought, well, that's not so bad. And that's what we did.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever try to analyze the school in light of the Ford Foundation report and say have we achieved what they were hoping for?

POUNDS: Well, we achieved it largely through the appointments we made. That is, we made people -- we had made appointments of people who would have been equally attracted to purely academic departments. We essentially used academic standards for our faculty. We filled in around the edges with people who were so-called lecturers and others, and every now and then we'd sweep them all out and say we're going back to the pure strain, and then gradually it would come back again. But we didn't slavishly follow that advice, but certainly we were on the academic side of business schools, as was Carnegie.

INTERVIEWER: At some point later there was a perception that there wasn't enough critical mass in the Sloan School, or not enough of its graduates out in the world to make a dent, and that it ought to grow larger. Was that something that weighed on you or was it --

POUNDS: That was later. That was later. I think maybe that occurred to Lester or maybe Glen. I leaned a little bit the other way coming from Carnegie, which was even smaller than we were. We had a kind of golden age. We had a very high faculty-student ratio, very relatively small, you know, MBA program, somewhat larger, not larger than the MBA but a fairly large proportionate PhD program. And so I thought that was, as long as we could afford it, a good way. And I was inspired in part by MIT's economics department, which we were very close to and benefited from enormously. And that was an accident of history. They happened to be in our building, and we shared our tastes and styles. And a lot of our faculty came to Sloan to be close to economics. And the boundaries were almost nonexistent. People drifted back and forth.

Franco Modigliani was actually on the Sloan School budget. I paid his salary, my old professor. But he was of course a leading figure also in the economics department. And I keep a kind of private book, which wouldn't pass any accounting measure, of some of Sloan's accomplishments. And I count -- now I've got my count up to five Nobel laureates out of Sloan. Now, they don't all count, and you wouldn't check it out at Oslo, but Franco, of course, was one. But he did -- I count him at Sloan since he was there, but he did it for work he did at Carnegie. In fact, I think my wife typed that paper when I was a graduate student there.

At any rate -- and then Scholes and Black, Scholes and Merton won it. But their partner, Fischer Black, who would clearly have won it if he had lived, was dead. So I count Fischer Black, so that's up to four. And just recently Oliver Williamson won it, who was an undergraduate at Sloan. But it's interesting, he studied a lot of things, but the thing he got his prize for was the kind of thing he started to study at Sloan about how organizations work. And of course, not only Franco, but Herb Simon also got a Nobel Prize. So it's almost an oxymoron for a business school to get Nobel prizes. It doesn't seem like the business we're supposed to be in. And I suspect there may be those who think it suggested that we weren't really a business school after all. But we had pretty good faculty, I think, and good students.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that one of the things that brought you to Howard Johnson's attention was the fact that you had this combination of academic training, but also the industrial experience. And you also mentioned that one of the things you did was something you had done in industry, which was just to sort of keep track and look at how resources were being allocated. Any other things you brought from the business world or perceptions or things that shape what you did at Sloan because you had spent some years in industry?

POUNDS: I guess I brought a kind of respect for what people do in industry. They do interesting work, not always fully appreciated either by themselves or by academics. And so I thought that working on their problems was a kind of honorable calling and encouraged, to the degree I had an influence, our faculty to work in that direction. And I worked as consultant to several organizations. But after I became dean, I began to be approached by companies not so much interested in me but in my title -- thought they could decorate their annual report by having a board member -- the dean of the Sloan School at MIT can't hurt.

And so I began to be invited to go on corporate boards. And once again, I went there not particularly out of any understanding of what they did, but out of curiosity. I can't imagine what a board does and what function it serves, and what role does it play, if any, in an organization. I had no idea. And it seemed how else am I going to find out since nobody knows. And so I went on a number of corporate boards, again to discover how it works. And I found that interesting, and as you would naturally, you become identified with the organizations you're working with and you do what you can to help them or urge them along. And I was intended to be instructive -- constructive. And I served on some of those boards for almost 30 years, a long time.

INTERVIEWER: What were some of them?

POUNDS: Well, I was on the board of the Sun Oil Company, which was a modest size, middle size oil company, not big by oil company standards. I was on the board of General Mills that made Wheaties and Cheerios and all those things. I was on the board of Stop & Shop, which was a kind of local family business run by the Rab family here in Boston. I was on the Putnam mutual funds, George Putnam. Now there's a case, another case. Howard had been on that board and decided that he would do something else, and George asked him who he would recommend, and he I think recommended me. And George came, I'd never met him, and he wondered if I would be willing to do that. And I had no idea what a mutual fund was other than sort of the general outline. And so I said sure. And then I was on some little companies, little ones around Boston, start-ups.

INTERVIEWER: So that was an education in itself?

POUNDS: It was all a bit selfish in a way. I was trying to learn how it works. And I shared that a little bit with my faculty colleagues. And it's interesting, academics really have a terrible disadvantage in that they can't observe a lot of the things that are really important in organizations without playing roles that are not easily available to them. You can't easily sit in a board room. And among other things, it's endlessly boring because you -- not much happens from day to day. And so we have theories of what goes on in corporations for that matter, management of the corporation, that we guess about as a result of the data that leaks out, you know, earnings reports, and annual reports and 10Ks and all that financial information. But if you ask many academics about how companies are managed, that's all they know. And I'm very sympathetic because it's not easy to get access to that. And that's what I gained by all that.

INTERVIEWER: So looking back, it seems to make a good deal of sense for a business school dean to have dipped into the real business world, not just at the level you were at as an employee, but from the board perspective as well across quite a variety of industries. I mean, you were in consumer retailing and oil and finance.

POUNDS: Finance, exactly. And I would say my academic colleagues were not exactly anxious to hear my tales from the field. But I hoped I was helpful in putting a little perspective in what they did.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it helped you relate to the students, and particularly the executive students as they came through?

POUNDS: I think so. Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: What about your undergraduate students, were they curious or interested? Did they have any clue? Or were you not even teaching undergraduates at that point?

POUNDS: I didn't teach undergraduates. I don't think there's any doubt that among all the students at Sloan, and I suspect at MIT, the most able students we have are undergraduates. We have outstanding students I suppose at every level, but I think the undergraduates are possibly the most promising sample we have. But I have to confess, I didn't directly interact with undergraduates very much. We had excellent faculty who were deeply devoted to undergraduates, and so I was not in doubt about what good we were doing for them. But I didn't play a big part of that.

Now, there was always the debate at Sloan whether we should discontinue our undergraduate program. Most of our competitors didn't have one. Stanford, Chicago. Wharton does. Harvard does not. And, you know, you could make an argument that people in their late teens and early 20s are not likely to enter into a management career when they graduate, so maybe it would be better to delay their exposure to those issues till a little bit later. And we debated formally whether to stop it and got testimonial from alumni saying don't do it, and this was the most important thing in my life and on and on. And I must confess, we were also impressed by the proportion of MIT's cash flow that flowed from graduates, of course. 15. It was somewhat disproportional. And it was hard to argue we were doing them any harm. So we did our best and they were some of our I suspect most able students.

INTERVIEWER: If you had a child who wanted to study business as an undergraduate, would you say that's a good thing, or would you say put it off?

POUNDS: I have learned that you counsel your children at your peril.

INTERVIEWER: How about your grandchildren?

POUNDS: No, no. Even more peril. They're not waiting for advice from their grandfather.

INTERVIEWER: Or a neighbor? I mean, do you think it's a --

POUNDS: Oh yeah. No, it's a first-rate program. You know, if that's what they think they're interested in. I would certainly encourage them to do that.

INTERVIEWER: You wouldn't say go learn a different discipline or broaden out --

POUNDS: If they said they wanted to study early Greek mythology, I would say maybe that's a good idea too. I think everyone should study what they find of interest.

INTERVIEWER: I'd love to touch on your experience in the midst of the anti-Vietnam protests on campus when the issues of war research at MIT and especially at two of its labs had become a flash point and Howard Johnson tapped you for another more, probably unexpected, assignment to chair this advisory panel to review the work of the instrumentation lab and Lincoln Lab and their relation to MIT.

POUNDS: Correct. And the defense department.

INTERVIEWER: When did you learn that president Johnson wanted you to do this? Do you recall?

POUNDS: Well, this was in 1969, and looking back it was easy to see from the kind of headlines and events that the protest movement was peaking then. It was about to decline. But it was at its most violent point. I think oftentimes those kinds of things peak with violence, and then the violence tends to drive away supporters and it gradually fades. Whether that will happen in Afghanistan and Iraq we will see.

At any rate, here during '69, there were many demonstrations of all kinds. And Howard decided to appoint this panel, so-called, to review these laboratories. Occurred sometime in April, I think, toward the end of the year. And I remember we were appointed late in April, I think. Spring was coming and it was good weather for demonstrations, so there were lots of demonstrations. And he 22 people to invite to join this panel. Somewhat large for an effective group, but two by two. It was like Noah's ark of, you know, conservative and radical students and faculty and staff members from the laboratory, members of the Corporation, alumni, faculty, on and on. Just every shade of constituency was represented. And the question was we had these two big laboratories. What, I suppose, what should we do, if anything, about that? And I think that it was greeted with a certain amount of cynicism by the community, who thought, you know, a soggy committee going off was just a way of kind of patting people on the head and saying there, there, you know, and pretty soon summer will be here and you'll forget all about it.

So he appointed us in a big standing room only faculty meeting at Kresge. In those days staff from the laboratories and students were allowed to sit in on those meetings, although presumably not to vote. Although I don't remember very many votes. At any rate, this was announced. And I had learned about it only earlier that week, and I had no instructions as far as I knew. And I got up and said that I would peek and we would meet, this committee would meet the following morning, which as it turned out was a Saturday morning. This faculty meeting took place on a Friday afternoon. And I said we'd meet in a certain room at 9:00 the following morning. And I hoped my colleagues on that committee would come.

And the next morning, to my surprise, almost everyone showed up. There were lots of statements about, you know, this was a kind of scam and this wasn't going to amount to anything and I'm not going to serve and one thing and another, but everybody came. And so I said that everyone thought this was a kind of idle exercise, but I didn't. And I thought we might be able to do some good and maybe shed some light on important questions. And so I said we would meet all day, every day, until we had a report. That started today, which was Saturday morning. So we would meet from 9:00 till 5:00 every day, that means Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. And we met for 36 days.

INTERVIEWER: Did you get any push back from the committee members over this?

POUNDS: Of course. You know, they were saying, oh God, it's impossible. And I said, well, I know it's hard. Noam Chomsky was one of the members of the committee, and he was giving a series of lectures at Oxford in Cambridge, or Oxford in England. And I said that I hoped he could attend our meetings and that I would see that if he wanted to fly back and forth between his lectures that we would pay for that. And it turned out he did. He came back and forth.

There was endless suspicion of what was going on in this committee, and we allowed people to sit in if they wanted to, but not speak. I hired a court stenographer to record every precious word by these people, which is in a file here at MIT somewhere.

INTERVIEWER: How many boxes of words?

POUNDS: Big, big file, I think. Many words, I'll tell you. And we had the transcript of what we said in every MIT library the day after our meetings. So it was a major effort. I didn't inquire about the budget. Somebody presumably paid for all that. But we met and concluded in the end that we ought to keep the laboratories, which came as a big surprise to a lot of people.

INTERVIEWER: Because this included Noam Chomsky and other radical --

POUNDS: Yes, some of them who kind of emerged out of this hermetically sealed activity, which they were busy all day every day in this committee, they were asked, how could you possibly do that? And the answer is I kept us on the track of saying what should MIT do? Don't tell me about the why. First we took a week or so to go around the table to find out what everybody's philosophical views about war and peace and the university and truth and research all the other kinds of profundities. And after we had all shared our deepest insights into that world, the question remained, well now in light of all that, what does MIT do about these two laboratories?