William J. Hecht '61, SM '76

INTERVIEWER: Today is May 14, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. We are talking today with William J. Hecht, a 1961 MIT graduate, who served for eight years as director of MIT's Educational Council and as associate director of admissions, and for 25 years as executive vice president and chief executive of its Alumni Association. Few people know MIT's alumni as well as he does.

Bill, thank you for talking with us. As a student, one tends to think that MIT is about students, and that alumni are outsiders who've had their turn, and somehow can't leave. As an alum, the picture looks somewhat different. What do you think is the role of alumni at MIT?

HECHT: Well, let me start with a story. Peter St. Germaine, an alumnus, used to say that at MIT, people think that the institution is a three-legged stool. And then he parenthetically would say, for milking the alumni. And he said, really, it's a four-legged lab table. And the fourth leg paid for the lab table, called the alumni.

I think the alumni are an integral part of the place. They are the real stakeholders. Yes, if you've been a faculty member for a long time, you get a stake. But if you're an alumnus, you're stuck with the place forever. And its reputation, and your reputation, are integrally tied together.

And I think alumni feel a very intense closeness and a really kind of shepherding appeal to the place. They'd like to make sure it stays great, and they also understand that that means change. And that's always difficult as an alumnus. There are some things that ought not to change. But you understand that it could be better. And particularly, MIT people always want it to be better.

And one of the delights of having been around the place more than 50 years now-- because, after all, I came here as a freshman in 1957-- is that I've seen the place change, for the most part, for the better. It's a more diverse place. It's a more interesting place. The alumni are more engaged than they used to be, although they always were engaged.

One of the differences about the place is alumni engagement is not just something that the administration likes to have happen. It's something that the alumni insist on. And they do. There are visiting committees. There're all kinds of ways alumni are involved.

But even if you're not formally involved, alumni are engaged. The faculty think of them as my former students, and often consult with them, and talk to them. And frequently, their former students turn out to be faculty mentors. Not just the other way around.

Younger alumni do great things. And the next thing you know, they become John Reeds and they come back and tell the faculty what to do in economics and banking, and these kinds of things.

INTERVIEWER: How similar is the role that alumni play at MIT to the role at colleges, say, in the Ivy League, or Stanford or Chicago?

HECHT: Well, I would say it's a little bit different. It's a bit more intense, for two or three reasons. One of them is there is this visiting committee structure that the trustees have, which have about a third of their members specifically selected by the Alumni Association to be representative of people out in the real world.

Whether that real world is another academy or whether the real world is running a company in Japan or Detroit. There is this engagement. And I think that's one really key thing.

The second thing is the trustees themselves are dominated by alumni membership. And it's not that all trustees are alumni, but many are. And, interestingly enough, in my years of service in the Alumni Association, one of things I discovered is it is much harder for this institution to have a non-alumnus serve as a trustee than it is for many other institutions. We don't give honorary degrees.

If you were a trustee at MIT, we do expect you to do some work. You're not just a person who comes and has dinner with the president once a year and then goes away. You're actually engaged. You do visiting committee work. You do subcommittee work for the Corporation. So I think that's different. A lot of other schools like to kind of manage their alumni.

I think that MIT and its alumni body have a kind of symbiosis. A healthy symbiosis. It's not parasitic either way. It looks that way sometimes, but I think it's symbiotic. The alumni really bring something unique, in the sense that often-- historically-- there've been times when the alumni body is actually further out on the cutting edge of what's going on in the world than the faculty.

This was particularly true back in the early days of microelectronics when the real world was doing things that the faculty didn't have the capacity to do. It's often true in terms of interdisciplinary kinds of things.

Young alumni go out and say, I don't want to do a little of this. I want to do a little of that and a little of this. And the next thing you know, they come back and say to the faculty, you know, we really should have a subject that teaches this. And they come back and teach. And they come back and work in the labs.

So I think there's a deeper engagement. I also think that part of it is the rigor of the experience. This is a vigorous, rigorous, challenging experience as a student. Whether you're a graduate student or an undergraduate student, it's difficult. That's a good thing. I really don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's a great thing because we get smart people here.

On the other hand, most of them have never been seriously challenged about, how good are you? How competent can you be? How hard can you work? How much can you learn? How diverse can you be? How can you change your mind about things you know are true?

All of those things happen to MIT students when they're here. And I think that makes a different kind of alumnus and a different kind of relationship. I once described it as the Parris Island of the mind. And I think it is. It's a challenging, difficult, but important, place to come learn.

INTERVIEWER: In what ways has the role of the alumni changed since you first arrived at MIT?

HECHT: Well, it's interesting. I think what's happened is a deeper engagement, more like its early days. If you go back to the early historical days, the alumni actually were very deeply engaged, because the institution was poor, small, not well known. Extraordinarily good, but not well known.

If you look at the founding of the Alumni Association, which was seven, eight years after the first- class graduated, it wasn't founded by the Institution saying, we need alumni. It was founded by the alumni who thought they could benefit the institution and each other.

So, in a sense, in the period when I came, it was a little bit more distant. People weren't as engaged. The Alumni Association was seen as sort of off there-- looked a little more like all of the other institutions, all the other great places. Basically, alumni are off in a corner. It may be a happy corner. It may be a good corner. It may do good things. But they don't see that as a critical kind of engagement.

But you look at some of the things that have happened. For example, the real thrust in entrepreneurship. That got reborn here. It wasn't never here. After all, the early alumni, the early faculty, were very entrepreneurial.

In fact, that's what made this place so different, is it engaged people in an entrepreneurial setting, albeit an entrepreneurial setting in the 1870s and '80s and '90s. But the rebirth of that really was because alumni said, there are a lot of us who are entrepreneurs. We need service. You're not doing anything.

And a number of them approached the Alumni Association shortly after I came back. And I'd been in a start-up-- well, that's not true. I had a grow-up. I used to say I keep-- I know nothing about starting a company. I know a little bit about keeping a grow-up from becoming a throw-up.

And when I came back here, one of the things that surprised me was how little MIT was doing. And the next thing you know, we got the Enterprise Forum going, and that bred all kinds of other things. As you, as alumni know, there are huge activities around entrepreneurship, the 50K competition, all kinds of prizes for energy, for entrepreneurial companies, all kinds of engagement with alumni.

And that's really a function of alumni saying, let's get engaged. Let's do those things. And I think that's true in a number of other areas. Alumni don't like to be passive. They're activists.

In part, because MIT demands that of you when you're here as a student, and when you leave, you tend to want to continue that relationship, albeit in a very different way, in a very different context. So I see a much greater engagement in the last quarter century, 30 years, really. Much more like it had been, at least from what I can glean from the historical record.

And I think that's healthy. I really do believe, as I said earlier, that there is a symbiosis between the Institute and it's alumni body. Which affects both the alumni and really has a bearing on the institution. It charts its path in a different way.

INTERVIEWER: Some colleges have cultures where a very high proportion of graduates remain attached and active-- for instance, one example that comes to mind. What does it take to have a culture like that?

HECHT: Well, it's interesting. I don't pretend to be a student at Princeton. But I've seen Princeton for a while. And I think that culture is different than MIT's. MIT's takes some getting over. MIT is so challenging for most people.

There are a handful of people who it isn't challenging for. They end up as faculty members. But the rest of us find it a challenging place, and we need a little distance. Some would say healing. But I think it's distance. And I think Princeton doesn't do that. Princeton makes you feel loved. It may challenge you, but I don't think it makes you feel threatened.

I don't think it makes you look at yourself and say, in this well of me, just how good am I? At least, the Princetonians I've met have never asked that question. MIT does that to most people who are here. It really says, Karen, Bill, just how good can you be? And what are you good at? And find out what that is, because if you're going to spend your life working, you might as well do something you love, because then it's more fun.

And the trouble is, I think most young people don't have a clue what they're good at. Particularly smart young people. Being smart, and graduating from high school in the United States-- even a very good high school-- is not very challenging.

I went to a very challenging New York City high school, Stuyvesant. It's a test school. When I went back to my 50th reunion, they told me there were more applicants to Stuyvesant that year to get in as a test public school, than there were to Harvard. So it's a challenging place. But in comparison to MIT, it was kind of trivial.

INTERVIEWER: But even among the other non-MIT elite universities, Princeton-- which seems to have this very high participation rate among alumni-- seems to have more of, almost, a party feel when the alumni come back. And I don't know if that comes out of their whole eating club culture. But the notion of business executives dressing up in cute orange and black outfits and parading, and they look forward to it, but it gets them involved.

HECHT: It's true. And it used to be true of Dartmouth. Dartmouth has historically been-- Dartmouth and Princeton were the two schools that were more like that than any of the rest of the Ivy Leagues. And I think some of that is that they're smaller, isolated. They're really-- they look much more like a small liberal arts college in a Midwestern society.

Now they both happened, one in New Jersey, one in New Hampshire. But they are isolated liberal arts colleges. They are entities unto themselves. If you go to Cornell, it's a huge place. It is an entity unto itself, but it's huge.

If you go to Columbia, you're in New York City. You can't avoid New York City. If you're at Harvard, or MIT, or Yale, you can't avoid the city influences. So I think that changes things, number one.

Number two, I think both Dartmouth and Princeton-- and this is an over-characterization-- but they started out heavily oriented towards athletics. And there was an element of party school to both of them. They weren't the most-- if you go back to the 1900s-- they weren't the most demanding places in the world. They are now. They're first- rate places.

But they weren't then. And I think there's a little bit of that that carries over. It's very much like, you know, there's an old banner from the 50s. Tech is hell. And people were proud of that. There's a little bit of that still here.

MIT is challenging. Nobody comes to MIT to simply have a great time. You just would be an idiot to do that. Okay? You may have a great time, and many students do have a great time, but that's not the purpose. The purpose is you come here to study.

And I think that's true of athletes, it's true of musicians, it's true of anybody who says, this is the place I want to be. I want to challenge myself. And it's different. I don't think you can create a Princeton or Dartmouth culture in a place with people who are that committed to doing work. Not that we don't party.

INTERVIEWER: How does MIT stack up in terms of alumni participation compared to some of these others? And how much has that changed over the years? Or is it pretty steady?

HECHT: Well, it's an interesting thing. You can measure participation lots of different ways. It turns out that if you look at the number of volunteers we have, MIT probably has more volunteers running more things than many other institutions. We have lots of volunteers running classes, lots of volunteers running clubs.

The Educational Council, which does interviews for the admissions office, is huge. And we have a very highly motivated and energetic group of volunteers. I happened to be on everybody's mailing list for all those years that I was in running the Alumni Association.

I still get mail from a young woman named Elaine, whose last name I don't know, who organizes events in Beijing for MIT alumni, and monthly events in Beijing for MIT alumni. So there's a great deal of that kind of engagement.

There is a lower-- but not dramatically low-- a lower participation in annual giving at MIT than there is at, say, Princeton or Dartmouth. It's about competitive, usually, with Yale. Part of that, I think, has to do with the sociodemographics of the kids who come here. This is a school that if you look at its body of applicants, there are people who would apply to the University of Massachusetts, to Michigan, to Berkeley.

They're not people who get to MIT because their grandfather was an MIT alum, their father was an MIT alum, and their great-grandfather has a building named after him. There are a handful of people like that. But those generations that are here are here because of their very basic competence. There's no legacy policy. There's none of that.

That cuts both ways. It means, if you think you've got a smart kid and they don't get into MIT, you're a very disappointed alumnus. And I've talked to many of those people. On the other hand, I used to say to them, you don't want your son the trout, or your daughter the trout, to swim in a salmon stream. Salmon eat trout. You don't want that to happen. So MIT is different.

INTERVIEWER: Although, they say, she's really a trout. Or she's really a salmon.

HECHT: Yeah, that's what they say. And I think that the participation rates have come up. There have been some very good things, the last 10 or 15 years. Senior classes have gone back to giving gifts. Young alumni participation has moved up. There's been a lot of outreach.

The Alumni Association during my tenure did some interesting things, email forwarding for life, which is a really remarkable thing. It allows alumni to have a forward box and when you get sick of your ISP to kick them out and still have your mail forwarded. That was done with two purposes in mind. One, it enabled you to have a link to the institution. Not just a link to the Alumni Association.

Most other Alumni Associations that run such a thing don't allow-- they have a firewall between the alumni body and the institution. Not us. We wouldn't put up with that. It means that alumni can access all of the online learning that exists at MIT, directly. Now the public can do that, too. But alumni have a direct channel.

And I think that engagement is really critical. It's critical because we have to build a sense of philanthropic behavior in people. If you're a middle or lower-middle class kid, you don't see a lot of philanthropic behavior in your family. If your family's been wealthy for years, you know about philanthropy. It's part of the genes. You're supposed to be philanthropic.

It's one of the responsibilities of a wealthy family. It's not necessarily the responsibility-- except perhaps to a church or a synagogue or a mosque-- to do that as a middle class person, or certainly as a lower class person. And MIT's distribution, if you will, is much more-- much less-- representative of the upper quartile in American society, than it is of the bottom 3/4.

And I think that's a good thing. It's like our international students. We don't just have wealthy international students. We actually provide financial aid for international undergraduates. Almost unheard of at most other places. And we do it because we believe that the best people ought to be given a chance to be here.

Now, there's a problem with that. You have to teach them that philanthropy is part of their responsibility. And I think the Institute and the Association have done a lot of work in that area in the last several decades. And are better at it than we used to be. And we're beginning to see the kind of giving from alumni, who do not only achieve success in an intellectual sense, or in a personal sense, but in a financial sense.

We're seeing the kind of huge gifts. Whether it's from the Kochs, or from other people who have made it, if you will. And say, you know, I really owe the institution something. And, frankly, if you don't have that in your genes, or in your family's genes, you've got to build it.

You've got to teach people that that $50.00, or $100.00, or $200.00, or $250.00, or $500.00 gift, when you're 15 years out, is a meaningful gift for you. And it also builds you into the future as a way to stage giving. But it's engagement that's really important. You don't give to institutions you don't care about.

And I don't care how Princeton you are, or Harvard you are. If you don't stay engaged, you'll lose contact and other people will engage you. And I think part of the, if you will, magic of a Princeton, is that they've got a kind of funny, hokey mechanism for continual engagement. Which is you wear orange spandex. Now, that is a horrible thought to a man of my size. That would be so much orange and black spandex that it would be disgusting.

But our mechanism is different. Our mechanism is built around intellectual engagement. MIT alumni will not come to see each other-- unless they're classmates-- to just drink beer and martinis. MIT alumni want to be engaged intellectually.

So when an MIT activity goes on, there ought to be an intellectual hook. As I used to say to the staff, who were not MIT alumni, mostly at the Alumni Association, you've got to scratch the inner nerd. And if you can't find the inner nerd to scratch, you just-- you're going to miss it.

INTERVIEWER: It does seem like there are many different types or categories of alumni. You've got the ones who are very involved, in terms of both volunteering and giving. And graduates who are somewhat involved, and they maybe attend one or two big reunions, or an event in their hometown, or a reception, and give a gift every so often.

And alumni who're really not involved at all, but you've got their contact information, whether it's because of email forwarding for life. And then you've got even a small set, I think, who you have no contact information.

Can you talk about these gradations and what determines them? And can you predict who's going to fall into what category? And have the proportions changed very much? Or is there sort of a predictable curve, and somehow, no matter what you do, you get this bunch and this bunch and this bunch?

HECHT: Well, I'm not sure it's predictable. I think there may be one small subset that's predictable. And that's the people who are really kind of alienated. For whatever reason, their MIT experience was not satisfying, too demanding, turned them off, failed to turn them on. They thought it was trivial. There are one or two of those I've met, actually.

They thought it was overly hard, they thought it was-- there weren't enough this, there wasn't enough that. You can't absolutely say that if you had a bad experience as a student, that you'll become one of those. But there's a much higher probability that if you had a bad experience as a student, you will become one of those.

Many people who had what they think was a bad experience get out into the real world and suddenly decide, holy cow. I really understand stuff that my peers don't even-- they've never heard of. I went to Sloan, as an undergrad, and I was-- you know, it was 25 years before I was using anything in business that I'd learned as an undergraduate. Because, after all, we were on the cutting- edge. And most business was on the trailing edge.

So it takes a while. It's very hard to predict who will become very engaged. We did, from time to time, look at things like, does engagement as an undergraduate predict your engagement as an alumnus? There's a little, mild correlation between people who are very engaged as undergraduates remaining engaged.

There's a little, mild prediction that certainly, by the time you get to the 50th reunion, and looking back 50 years ago, the Institute housing system was not as complete and comprehensive. The guys in my class-- and they were mostly guys, except the seven or nine women-- who were in fraternities are a little more engaged. There's no question about that. But doesn't mean that dormitory characters aren't more engaged.

The biggest donor in my class did not live in a fraternity. One of the worst donors in my class did. So, it's very difficult to predict. I think some of it is the degree to which you want to stay engaged and some of it is cyclic. We're all organic. Although we are generally subject to the laws of physics, we are much more subject to the laws of psychology. Whatever the heck they are.

And there're going to be times in your life when you don't want to be engaged, or you're too busy. You know, raising children, having a family, getting your career started. What's interesting is overtime many people ebb and flow. So there are people who are engaged for a while, cease to be engaged, and get reengaged.

And that's one of the reasons, I think, that we try-- historically, in the Association-- to continue to have engagement. One of the reasons, I predict, that the more engagement you have with someone, even if it isn't repaid immediately, eventually it's an important kind of connective tissue. One of the interesting things about this body of people who are alumni and alumnae, is that-- because most of them don't start out wealthy-- those that become wealthy did it on their own. And that's a very unpredictable thing. Some of it is skill, some of it is smarts.

But as one of my directors of a grow-up company once said to me, and you guys have got to believe in luck. Because luck sometimes determines whether you win or you lose. And, you know, that's certainly been my experience in my work life, that there were times when we did all the right things and we lost. There were times when we screwed up a whole bunch of things and we won. And you sort of say to yourself, that doesn't look fair. And the answer is, it's not physics. It's life. And life is a little more complicated.

INTERVIEWER: We hear about life cycles of people. Are there life cycles in the life of an alum? In other words, that you're different when you're 25 or 50? You're different when you're at your 10th reunion or your 25th or your 40th? That you sort of need or want different things, and how does that relate to--

HECHT: Absolutely. And it's really complicated. In part, because one of the things that drives your life cycle as an alumnus is when you decide to have a family, if you decide to have a family. That has a huge impact on you. You know, there's no question that whether you're a two working couple family, or a one working person family, having children is a huge, positive indent, negative impact on your life. I mean, it's impactful.

And alumni who have families tend to need very different kinds of support and things. For example, if you live in the greater Boston area, there are lots of ways for families to connect, partly because the MIT campus is here. The MIT Museum is here. If you live in Chicago or Tokyo, it's a lot harder. So the challenge is, how do you engage people at that point in time?

There's another factor that's really critical, and that is your work cycle. Are you building something? Are you, God forbid, starting a company, in which case you have no life? You have the company. You probably are eating, sleeping, breathing, and married to the company. And you're lucky if you hold your family together while that happens.

Another thing that happens is all of the kinds of realities that impinge on you. You know, you lose a good friend at 40. All of a sudden you realize, my God. There's more to life than just working and trying to keep a happy family. I need friends. They're important to me. This man or woman, who was in my life, is important. So you start looking for other ways to find it.

It's also, to some degree, happenstance. Does MIT happen to have a way in which you can get engaged? I mean, if you're in-- we always talk about the Sage of Omaha-- if you're in Omaha, there doesn't happen to be an Omaha MIT Alum Club. And, therefore, how do you stay engaged?

It is said-- though I'm not sure about this-- that one of Buffet's advisors is an MIT alum. We've never been able to find out who he or she is, but wouldn't it be lovely? But there's almost no way to be engaged. So email forwarding, all of those kinds of distance engagement, all the distance learning that MIT's engaged in. All that stuff is, again, a way to reach out and connect with people in a different kind of format.

INTERVIEWER: In planning for my 40th reunion, I got the sense that as people were entering their 60s, they were beginning to think about leaving careers. Their children were grown up and out of the house, for the most part. And there seemed to be a little more interest in reconnecting in a different way, because of that. And it--

HECHT: Absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: --it surprised me a little bit. It seemed logical.

HECHT: It is true. The largest reunion turnout is for the 50th. Because, by the time you get to the 50th-- and I'm a year away from that-- you begin to understand that there's an awful lot about life that you might not have looked at too carefully, and you need to look at fairly carefully.

There are men and women that I've known for a long time and have become more important to me over time. Even though I have less personal contact with them. They become more important because they've gone through what I've gone through. They've lived a cycle of life that I've lived.

Not just being married and missing the Vietnam War, or not missing the Vietnam War. But having children, having grandchildren, having tragedies, having awful things happen. All of those things make you a richer, stronger, better person. Although there are a bunch of them you'd like to avoid, and you don't want to be a better person about, but they happen.

Those things, I think, deepen your understanding of how important-- first of all-- MIT was in your life. Most of us-- not all of us, but most of us-- would be very different human beings had that four, or six, or however many year, interlude of intimate connection with the rigorous part of MIT not been in our lives. And as you age, I think that means more to you. You really do understand how meaningful that's been.

I think the other thing that happens is you have a little bit more time. And you also inevitably have to reflect more. Even if you don't have the time, you can't avoid reflecting. Your peers start to die, or they come down with horrible things. And you say to yourself, oh my God. I'm a little luckier than I thought. No matter how bad things are today. I'm maybe a lot luckier than I thought.

Aging inevitably means you have to reflect. Because you are a smart person if you came to MIT. And inevitability catches up with you, even smart people. And, therefore, you have to reflect. And I think that reflectivity, reflection on yourself, really makes you think more about what this place meant, what people mean to you.

You know, there's nothing more challenging than losing your parents. It happens to all of us, mostly. And yet, you don't really miss them until they're gone. Because they're always there. They're kind of like the furniture. No matter how much you love them, no matter how much you express your affection for them, no matter how close you are, there isn't that longing until there's the loss. And I think, in a sense, that aging factor has a lot to do with older alumni becoming closer in a different way to the institution.

INTERVIEWER: How do MIT's presidents relate to the alumni? And have they differed very much from president to president, in their style and what they did?

HECHT: Well, I think every MIT alumnus would have an opinion on this, and probably six or eight opinions per alumnus. I think the president's I've seen-- and I've seen Killian, Stratton, Johnson, Wiesner, Gray-- and Vest. I really haven't seen Susan, except as a cranky old alumnus. Because just about the time I retired, she came on. Although I've done a few things with Susan.

I think each one of those presidents had a different engagement with the alumni. Jim Killian had wonderful times wearing a beanie, believe it or not, at the Senior House Steer Roast. If you can imagine someone as distinguished as James R. Killian, Jr. wearing a beanie, but he did. And it was a propeller beanie, at that.

J. Stratton was a revered and respected teacher and most people remember him that way. Howard was unusual. In that, when I was first back here on staff, Howard had just become president. That was during the time I was in admissions work. Howard was, quote, a young guy. He looked young, he was young.

Now, granted he was a World War II vet, so he wasn't as young as I was. But he sure looked like a young Turk in comparison to Stratton and Killian. And, in many ways, many of the things that happened during his time were emblematic of a young Turk.

Jerry. Jerry was a rare guy. He was an unusual, and unbelievable, singular human being. Pugnacious, demanding, opinionated. But probably one of the most generous spirits I've ever met. The fact that he was working with Howard during the times of great difficulty, I think, was an important asset. Because there were things that Jerry could say that Howard, as president, couldn't say. And Jerry not only said them, Jerry balled up his fists and said, this is the way it's supposed to be. So he was different.

Paul, following Jerry. Paul had worked with Jerry. Paul was again a younger alumnus president, who I think reinstated a number of kind of historical traditions, that connection with the presidency. That had gotten broken when Howard was president. And not because Howard wanted to break it, but because the students believed that anybody over 22 was not very trustworthy. And having been 27 or 28 when the students were thinking anybody over 22, and on staff-- I remember those times. Not always fondly.

But Paul, I think, reestablished a kind of sense that the president was here on the campus. He moved back into the house. And he was accessible to students. And it was important to have that access. I think there was a belief, in the late '60s and early '70s, that you didn't need access. Everybody had access to everyone.

Well, it's a wonderful myth. It's not true. You need access. And you need accessible people. And you need points of access. And having the president back on campus is a wonderful thing.

Chuck. Chuck had two kinds of magic that were really interesting. One of them was-- those of us who spent a long time at MIT are very much like a man who is married to the most beautiful woman in the world for a long time. And you suddenly notice that all you ever talk about is the fact that she has this small mole behind her left ear. You really don't remember that she's stunning and attractive and funny and vivacious. It's that damn mole that bothers you.

Chuck didn't know about the mole! Chuck came from outside. He thought, my God. I'm at MIT. I remember my first conversation with him before he became president. He said, well, what are people going to think of me? I'm not an MIT faculty member. I'm not an MIT alumnus. I looked at him and said, well, we had one of those once. His name was Karl Taylor Compton. He looked at me and said, holy God, I guess I am at MIT. I said, you certainly are.

And Chuck, I think, brought that. The other thing Chuck brought, which was really critically important, was a great deal of comfort with the political sphere. Toward the end of Paul's presidency, Washington was mad at MIT, and mad at everybody. Certainly everybody in the university sector. No reason for it to be mad at MIT, but we were just one of those grubby universities that wanted more money.

Chuck knew how to work Washington and worked it really well. And that's a remarkable skill. That's a remarkable skill because Washington is not an easy place. The little lobbying I've done in my life with Washington, or more with the State House for libraries in Massachusetts, it's a tough bunch. They have very demanding jobs.

I happened to be a town meeting member in a Yankee town. And that's pretty easy work. I mean, it's challenging and it's difficult, and you have to make hard decisions. But since nobody gets paid anything, and everybody's a volunteer. And town meeting is this historic, old, there are rules and you behave a certain way and you do your deliberation and you meet for many more nights than should, but you discuss everything and finally reach some conclusion-- that's not quite how Washington works.

Washington is a lot more pressure, a lot more money, a lot more challenging issues. Fortunately, the town of Reading doesn't have to have a foreign policy. We may want a foreign policy like Cambridge has, but we don't spend any time on it.

INTERVIEWER: How much time did the president spend with alumni and at alumni functions?

HECHT: Lots.

INTERVIEWER: And has that grown? Or has it always been heavy?

HECHT: It's always been heavy because-- I think it was Paul who said to me, that a president of a university is the leader of a group called the faculty who doesn't want to be led. The paterfamilias of a group of students who hate their mother and father. The head of a small corporation, but no stock options and lousy bonuses. And last but not least, the mayor of a small city with no political patronage, who lives in a big house and begs for the alumni for a living.

And I think the engagement, really, with alumni, has to be a part of the president's job. Nobody else can represent the institution like the president can. Nobody else should represent the institution like the president can. Although a number of us got teased about being more Mr. MIT than the presidents whom we served with.

It's also varied, depending upon the demand. If the demand on campus, as it were, for Jerry Wiesner was huge, or for Howard was huge, there wasn't a lot of time left over to go visit alumni. Alumni had to almost come here to be engaged. And those were challenging kinds of times.

The typical president I served with-- and the two I served most directly with, both Paul and Chuck-- were out on the road anywhere between six and 12 weeks a year. Seeing alumni. Now they were doing other things, too. They were visiting companies. They were doing ILP work. They were certainly buttering up big donors, whether they were alumni or not.

But fundamentally, that amount of time a year had to be engaged with alumni. Otherwise, you lose touch. And there has to be an infrastructure. There were a lot of people here, a lot of unsung folks. Faculty members who, some of whom, maintain very strong relationships with their alumni groups. Some of whom, because they define the disciplines in professions they're in, are kind of almost minor deities.

There are people who I know in Hong Kong, when I used to visit Hong Kong, who would say, oh, remind me to go to old Harl. And they were talking about Harl Aldrich, who was no longer a faculty member but is kind of a towering figure in his discipline. Or, you know, say hello to Andy Lo. I did my thesis with him.

That connection is really important with faculty. There are a lot of staffers who spend time. Certainly the job of the Alumni Association is spend a lot of time engaging people, trying to keep them reconnected. Or reconnecting them if they're disconnected. Or attempting to take even that small sliver who are disenfranchised and trying to at least understand the disenfranchisement.

INTERVIEWER: It strikes me that there's an interesting mix between a sense of duty. You need to go do this, the staff. But a lot of them are really interesting people. And it probably varies from night to night, how many of the interesting people. And to what extent you can really engage with them, as opposed to being perfunctory, and moving on to the next--

HECHT: And it depends, again, to the degree-- the degree to which presidents of the institution, or for that matter any institutional representative, really wants to spend time and energy getting to know people. I think one of the real challenges for the president of the institution-- or for any senior person, whether it's a dean or a provost or whatever-- is to know enough to actually engage.

Staff does a reasonable job of trying to prepare you, but nothing really can prepare you for the cheek by jowl kind of conversations. Not so much at the presentation, but during the questions and answers. Over a beer or a glass of wine, over a meal. And those are really where presidents who make a huge impact make a substantial difference.

The fact that they have an intimate understanding of the institution is great, but they also have to have at least an ability to sort of flexibly understand this person, who may be coming out of what looks like left field to someone who lives and works and sleeps in Cambridge.

Cambridge-- there is a phrase I used to use, which is that you can't be Cambridge-o-centric, even though MIT is. When you're out in the field, things look different. Alumni in-- whether you're in the West Coast, or in Tokyo, or in Seoul-- they're different. The world is a different place out there. Bringing some of that difference to MIT is as important as anything.

And that difference-- I think that's why I go back to the earlier conversation we had about engagement. If alumni are really engaged, if you have a trustee who lives in one of these places, and makes his or her living in one of these places, and sees the world from Beijing or Tokyo or Brussels-- it's a different view.

INTERVIEWER: So MIT has changed over the years, in terms of the diversity and the representation of the student body. To what extent did alumni participation sort of follow from that? And to what extent did you have to manage it? To say, we don't want to wait 20 or 30 years for the rabbit to go through the pipeline. And to bring those people in and try to get them more active so that there was more representation among the active alums?

HECHT: I was privileged-- and I use that word absolutely seriously-- to be present, if you will, at some of the early days of the diversification of this place. I was an admissions officer in '67 when I first came back, and ran the Educational Council. It was great fun. I worked with Paul Gray when he was a young Turk. And Shirley Jackson, another president of RPI, when she was a young graduate student.

Jaw to jaw with Shirley. Shirley's a tough person to go jaw to jaw with. About the fact that MIT wasn't a very diverse place. It was white and it was male. I went to a white male institution. There were seven or nine women in my class. I think there might have been three black kids. We had a reasonable number of Asians. We had a reasonable number of international students. But we weren't a very diverse place. We looked like every other damn college and university.

When I came back, it turns out that the Faculty Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid had posed to the admissions office, we need to do something about this. What can we do? And one of my first jobs, literally, in the admissions office, was to go out and recruit the first six kids who were minority kids.

Five African Americans and a Native American who were in a special program. We thought they could do it academically. But their SATs, relative to everybody else's SATs, were terrible. And you made one assumption. And the assumption was, the SAT has a glitch in it. Because these kids aren't stupid. There's got to be something wrong with the test, or there's something wrong with society and the test.

But we went out and reached out. And it did a bunch of things. It brought more minority students here. God bless Mrs. McCormick. She gave Killian some money when she passed. It enabled more women to come.

After all, it used to be five or six times harder to be a woman here, simply because there were lots more women applicants than there were men applicants, percentage wise, who didn't get admitted. And you really had to be brilliant to be a woman. One of my alumnae friends said, yes, it's too bad that the women standards had to reduce themselves down to the men standards, over time. But I think that's a good thing.

I came back. I left in 1976. I came back four and a half years later. And I looked around, and the Alumni Association looked like the student body I went to school with. It didn't look diverse. It had never had a woman president. It had never had a president further west than Texas. It certainly never had thought about having an international president.

And I worked pretty hard at that. Simply because my view was look, we've changed the student body. We've got to change the alumni body to be reflective of the student body. And that was, I think, one of the several things I did that I'm perhaps proudest of.

There was huge contention about whether we should enable the black alumni of MIT to exist. And I remember saying to one of my directors in the Alumni Association, the black alumni do exist. Whether we recognize them or not is our problem. It's not their problem. So we ended up with the alphabet soup of BAMIT and LAMITA and a whole group of things.

At one point, the women's organization, AMITA, was so alienated from the Alumni Association that they literally would not speak to staff members. And I thought that was pretty asinine. And it wasn't because the women didn't want to do the right thing. It was because there were some curmudgeonly older men who weren't too sure about women.

And I worked on that problem, too. And I was very pleased to have a wonderful first woman president, Mary Frances Wagley. And that, I won't say opened the flood- gates, but there have been many women presidents since then.

Working with those volunteers, as presidents, was a remarkable experience for me. It probably made my job singularly wonderful, because I was able to deal with people who were very different, had very different ideas. People who I could trust. People who-- you know, when you're the CEO, you need somebody to hold confession to. And as a volunteer, those people heard me out, and I heard them out.

You yourself, Karen, were the first really young, full-time working president I had. The couple of working people I had before were running their own companies, could count their own time, and in a sense, it was a great experiment. Because I really believed we needed to have younger people who were in full career as presidents. So that it didn't look as if you were near retirement, or already retired, in order to be president of the Alumni Association.

I remember when I knew the Association was going to undergo-- I wanted it to undergo-- a huge set of changes. And I consciously went out and recruited Ray Stata, who had not been particularly active with the Alumni Association-- and, in fact, was a little alienated from MIT at the time-- to become president.