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Re-engineering MIT

All of us were strong personalities with fixed agendas. But the faculty wanted someone who could listen. Chuck went around and interviewed hundreds of people about what needed to be done.

By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

In the summer of 1994, three senior women professors in the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were unhappy - very unhappy. Full of energy and optimism when their MIT careers had started, they had come to believe as the years went by that they were being discriminated against in salary, office space, research support, and recognition.

They talked, compared notes, polled other women faculty, and discovered their feelings were widely shared. They decided to act. Sixteen of the 17 tenured women in the School of Science signed a statement alleging discrimination and asking the dean, Robert Birgeneau, to set up a committee to investigate.

Biology professor Nancy Hopkins, one of the three original activists, says the women doubted anything would change, and they were worried that they would be dismissed as whiners and troublemakers. "It's the easiest thing in the world for administrators to bury these sorts of initiatives," she says. "Most universities have done so. The women were scared of ruining their careers."

Birgeneau strongly supported the request, but most of the powerful department heads in the School of Science balked. The opposition view was: Why be so public? We can deal with this internally. The battle heated up, and the women were worried that Birgeneau might back down (though he says there was no chance of that). At last, Birgenau went to cpxxMITcpxx president Charles M. Vest for advice. Vest listened, then said, "Just do it."

With Vest's support, Birgeneau appointed the committee, and it reported to him in 1996 that there was discrimination in the School of Science. Birgeneau quickly took steps to redress the glaring inequities. But some women faculty, convinced the problem was not limited to the School of Science, proposed to publicize the report by putting it in the faculty newsletter and on the cpxxMITcpxx Web site. Because of the report's critical content, they needed Vest's approval.

Again, the women were pessimistic. Hopkins says, "I didn't believe it possible that the president of any major university would admit the unpopular truth about gender discrimination during my lifetime."

But Vest not only approved - the report was published in March of last year and is still on the MIT site - he wrote a supportive preface to the report: "I have always believed that gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception. I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance. . . . I commend this study to all of my faculty colleagues. Please read it, contemplate its messages and information, and act upon it personally and collectively. "

"Just do it" pretty well sums up the forceful, go-right-at-it style of Chuck Vest, 58, who will complete 10 years as president of MIT this fall. At a college known for its hands-on approach to everything, Vest appears to have the quintessential engineering attitude: There's a solution to every problem; find it and do it.

With that attitude, Vest has changed the university in major respects. From increasing diversity among the student body (now 42 percent female and 18 percent minority) to building up private research funding to revamping MIT's archaic housing policies, Vest has overseen changes that represent seismic shifts in the 139-year-old university's character. The differences may not seem dramatic to the outside world, but within MIT, the view is widespread that Vest has had a profound impact.

"Universities change slowly," says MIT provost Robert Brown, "and to change a university dramatically in a decade, as Chuck has done, is really an astounding thing."

It's not what anyone expected when Vest arrived 10 years ago. After all, he was an outsider. Most recent presidents have come from within, already immersed in MIT's quirky, inbred culture.

When president Paul Gray announced his retirement in 1989, the MIT search committee promptly nominated an insider to be president: molecular biologist Phillip A. Sharp. Sharp accepted the job, was publicly introduced, then flabbergasted the institute by changing his mind and deciding he'd rather stay in teaching and research. (In 1993, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for discoveries in genetics and this year was named head of the newly created McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.)

A new committee went on a new president hunt and came back with the man who likes to be called Chuck: a genial, self-effacing, donnish mechanical engineer from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who tends to look away shyly when he talks or listens.

Some members of the MIT community were skeptical. Vest had spent his entire career at Michigan and had been provost there for only two months when he was tapped for the MIT presidency. "He wasn't a professor here," says Philip Khoury, dean of humanities and social science at MIT, "and no one had any idea whether he could have been. He was not a prize-winning scholar or perceived to be a major intellectual figure. Michigan is a very good school, but it's not in MIT's league. I didn't think he would be successful. I assumed the highfalutin attitude: `Who is this guy from Ann Arbor, coming in here and thinking he can run things?' "

Vest himself had had no plans to leave Michigan. Though previous provosts had been lured away by other universities, he says, "I do not believe in job-hopping, and I intended to stay in that job for at least five years. I had not been willing even to talk to other colleges." But then - "to my utter amazement" - he got a call from the MIT search committee, which had heard good things about him as dean of engineering. He reconsidered his resolve to stay.

Recalling that time, in an interview in his wood-paneled office overlooking the Charles River, Vest shows a mix of down-home humility and self-confidence. "I remember receiving a note from an economist at Michigan that said, `Dear Chuck, Boy from West Virginia becomes president of MIT. The American dream.' A lot of people would find that corny, but my entire life was devoted to engineering education, and MIT is the absolute pinnacle. So when the opportunity came, there really was no choice. I felt this position would offer a bully pulpit for science and technology; it was a call to national service."

After his appointment in June 1990, Vest asked Gray and provost John Deutch to stay until October. "This bought me a couple of months," he says. "I would come in here five days a week and just meet from morning to dinner, for an hour each, with faculty and administrators, asking them what they thought the big issues were."

That impressed the doubters. "I was a candidate for president," says Michael Dertouzos, director of the Laboratory for Computer Science. "John Deutch was another, and Phil Sharp. All of us were strong personalities with fixed agendas. But the faculty wanted someone who could listen. Chuck came and went around campus with a fat notebook and interviewed hundreds of people about what needed to be done. I've never seen anything like it."

Vest soon learned that the biggest issue was not in Cambridge but in Washington. "Public understanding and federal support for science and engineering were, at best, stable," Vest says, "and much more likely headed downhill, and I felt it was an important part of my role to try to articulate the importance of investment in research and advanced education."

Not that MIT was in danger. Its position in the top rank of scientific and technological institutions was unchallenged. Its endowment (now about $4 billion, a quarter of Harvard's) was healthy. Its 900 faculty and 10,000 students (half of them graduate students) were arguably the best in the world. Still, there were real worries about the future. For decades, MIT's vast research activities, the underpinning of its teaching culture, were funded primarily by the US government, largely through the Department of Defense, but also through NASA, the Department of Energy, and other agencies. In 1965, 92.3 percent of campus research was funded by the government, an all-time high.

The Cold War ended in 1989, and there were calls for big cutbacks in government spending in research, especially defense-related research. Then in 1991, Stanford University was found to be charging government research accounts for a yacht and for flowers and parties at the president's house. The hue and cry led to tighter control of the way research funds could be used for overhead. In that atmosphere, Vest decided a strong case needed to be made that federal funding for university research was a good public investment. Says Khoury: "It was important that we show that we were not taking this money, rolling it up, and lighting cigars with it."

Vest first set up an MIT office in Washington, with a full-time staff - essentially, a lobbying office. Then, he says, "Starting in June 1990, I would spend one day a month in Washington, talking to people in Congress and the executive branch about the importance of scientific and engineering research and advanced higher education to this nation, its economy and quality of life. The message has been simple, and I have tried to do a lot of it personally."

He was determined to speak not only for MIT but for research universities generally. "Over time," he says, "and I don't claim credit for this, we began to work with other institutions, and other presidents have become more active in this role."

The result, to be sure, has not been big increases in federal research funding in the last 10 years, but there has been no big collapse, either. In 1995, MIT got $245 million in federal funds for research; in 1999, the figure was $243 million. (This does not include $365 million for the Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, a nonacademic electronics research center that MIT operates for the federal government.)

Vest's low-key but relentless lobbying, some observers say, gets part of the credit. "He is highly respected on the Hill," says Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), vice chairman of the House science subcommittee. "He doesn't march in and say, `This is the greatest project in the world, and any responsible legislator must support it,' which is what a lot of people do. He says, `Let me explain this program. These are the funding needs; I hope you will support it.' "

While federal support has held up in dollar terms, it declined as a percentage of the university's total research budget - down from 1980's 83 percent to 69 percent of the campus total. Vest believed it would never be as high as it once was and that MIT had probably been overdependent on the federal trough, anyway. "What started as a problem also opened our sights to other views of the future and other ways of interacting with the world," he says. "We were nimble in finding new ways of serving society and at the same time creating new revenue streams from the private sector."

Individual faculty had always been free to seek private support for their research (the MIT Media Lab, which has for years aggressively courted corporate support for its research, may be the best example). But Vest sought to create higher-level connections. Since 1994, MIT has set up eight long-term research partnerships with US companies, including Ford, Du Pont, Microsoft, Merck, and Merrill Lynch, that will generate $248 million over the next 12 years. Corporate sources provided 8.6 percent of the university's research funding in 1980; in 1998, it was 20 percent.

Vest strongly pushed these deals, and several come out of his personal contacts. The pact with Ford Motor Co., says chancellor Lawrence Bacow, is "a direct product of Chuck's personal relationship with [former Ford chairman] Alex Trotman. They served together on the IBM board. Alex one day said to Chuck, `Is there something else that we could be doing together?' And Chuck said he had been thinking of how to develop close relationships with industrial companies."

Such relationships between universities and corporations have their critics. A government agency that gives money for research, according to Sheldon Krimsky, professor of public policy at Tufts University and a specialist in conflict-of-interest law, has no profit motive and therefore no financial interest in a particular finding. "You can't find out what they want," Krimsky says of government decision makers. "They want good research. But there have been cases where if private funders don't get what they want to hear, the funding stops."

If you get money to carry out research into a technological area because of its commercial potential, says Nicholas Ashford, professor of engineering and director of the Law and Technology Program at MIT, "you can't call that research balanced if it does not deal with the human side of it. The university is doing a great deal of research in biotechnology, as many universities are. Is anyone paying attention to the risk side of these assessments?"

Ashford doesn't believe any MIT faculty member would suppress or drop research under pressure from or fear of a sponsor, but, he says, "If the data is equivocal, concerned eyes might be cast in the direction of the funding source."

But Bacow, who oversees MIT's corporate partnerships, insists that the research agreements won't compromise academic or university integrity. For one thing, they center on basic research. The Merrill Lynch deal, worth $15 million, includes research in financial engineering and technology and a $5 million gift to establish a graduate minor in financial technology. The Ford agreement involves engineering and the environment, and the Microsoft agreement is in computer technology and education.

MIT retains the rights to all discoveries, Bacow says, though it may license their uses to the sponsor. Even then, all research is published. "We review each research agreement to ensure that publication rights are not limited," Bacow says. "Our conflict-of-interest rules prevent faculty from receiving research support from companies in which they have a financial interest. We require faculty to disclose such relationships."

President Vest insists that it's about more than money for MIT. The partnerships, he says, "have been driven as much if not more by educational objectives as by financial objectives. Manufacturing design, process, and production were not high on the academic agenda or prestige ladder. But a subset of our faculty has discovered there are some incredibly interesting challenges in the way industry works today: globalization, the speed with which scientific innovation moves into the marketplace."

In some ways, Chuck Vest resembles Dwight Eisenhower as a rising military officer: not a glamorous MacArthur or Patton, just a hard-working achiever with such manifest intelligence and ability to get things done that others seek him out.

He grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, a small city with three main employers: coal mines, a glassware factory, and West Virginia University. He remembers his hometown with nostalgia: "It was a wonderful place to grow up. Pure Americana - good public education, and for the most part, kids mixed together with no one caring whether you were from a faculty, farm, or factory family. The schools were integrated when I was in junior high school, and race relations were rather good among the young people."

He describes his mother, Winifred, as a homemaker and gifted amateur genealogist. His father, Marvin, was a math professor at the university.

At an early age, Vest says, he was attracted to math and science. "I built radios, read about space as long as I can remember," he says. "I gave serious thought to studying history, but my strongest passion was science and technology." He went to West Virginia University, graduating in 1963 with a degree in mechanical engineering. While he was there, he took two advanced math courses with his father, who was, Vest recalls, "an absolutely superb teacher, delivering precise, well-organized lectures and expecting a lot from his students. I didn't ask a question once, and I earned an A in each. He was such a demanding teacher that my fellow students didn't even blink over the fact that I was in the class."

Vest and Rebecca McCue were married in June 1963, right after he graduated from college. He was 21; she was 20. They moved to Ann Arbor that same month, where he entered graduate school at the University of Michigan and she completed her last year of undergraduate study and went on to receive a master's degree in remedial reading. (They have two children, now grown, and one grandchild.)

He became immersed in the then-new field of holography and earned his PhD in 1967. (His field is holographic interferometry - the uses of holograms to visualize or measure thermal or mechanical phenomena - and some of his research was instrumental in the development of CT scanning.) He stayed at Michigan to teach and eventually became a full professor of engineering.

"I loved teaching," he says. "I always enjoyed explaining things and had some ability to do so. The thrill of guiding others to suddenly understand or discover something is wonderful. I had no aspirations to move into administration; I was never a department head and had a tendency to avoid committee assignments."

In 1981, he took a part-time job as associate dean of the College of Engineering as a favor to a colleague who had become dean. He intended to stay only for two years, but, he says, "One day I realized I was accomplishing more as an administrator than as a researcher and teacher. I enjoyed fostering the careers of younger faculty." He became dean of the College of Engineering in 1986, and three years later was named university provost and vice president for academic affairs.

If the MIT insiders raised eyebrows at the arrival of the West Virginia boy, Vest earned his chevrons early, as one dean put it, over the so-called overlap suit in 1991.

MIT and eight Ivy League colleges, plus several others, had a policy of admitting the best applicants without regard to affluence, then awarding financial aid to the neediest students. Often, the brightest needy students would apply to several of the top colleges and be accepted by all. To avoid bidding wars in the form of richer financial aid offers, the colleges shared information on admitted students and agreed to offer comparable financial aid packages.

But the US Justice Department, under the Bush administration, called the sharing collusion and price-fixing and filed an antitrust suit against the colleges. The Ivies agreed to drop the practice, essentially saying, "We did nothing wrong, and we'll never do it again." But despite advice that he would never win in court, Vest refused to sign. He believed that if colleges did not cooperate, they would start using financial aid to bid for the most desirable students; there would be less aid for everyone else, which would hurt the neediest students.

MIT alone fought back in court. After losing an early decision, MIT won on appeal. Then, in 1993, President Clinton's Justice Department made a separate peace with MIT, dropping the suit and allowing MIT to do some information-sharing. ,p>The suit was filed "just as Chuck joined MIT," says Lawrence Bacow, "and the stakes were enormous. It was an antitrust suit with treble damages; there would have been huge fines levied. If we had lost that suit, it would have had profound consequences. MIT is traditionally not a place where the sons and daughters of privilege attend, and the concern was that if we did not protect our ability to allocate financial aid, needy students would not be able to come to MIT. And Chuck stood tall, did the principled thing, and earned tremendous respect."

Vest's interest in what is best for students came up most directly, perhaps, in 1997, when an 18-year-old freshman, Scott Krueger, died of alcohol poisoning during an initiation rite at Phi Gamma Delta, one of MIT's 30 fraternities. The chapter was disbanded. Two years later, another fraternity chapter, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, was disbanded for alcohol violations and two others were cited, one of them also for alcohol violations.

Vest was intensely disturbed by Krueger's death and appointed a task force to study the residential system. In the end, he ruled that all freshmen would live on campus, starting in 2001, after a new $40 million dormitory is finished.

It wasn't just the drinking that concerned Vest and others. It was the dearth of MIT student life, in general. Though there are dormitories, there never was much campus-based social or cultural life at MIT - nothing comparable to the Harvard residential houses, for example, which have concerts, art exhibitions, and lectures.

"Generations of students remember their MIT years in terms of where they lived and whom they lived with, and activities were based on that dispersed culture," says former president Gray.

About 30 percent of MIT's undergraduates, almost 1,200 students, live in the 28 fraternity houses or in "independent living groups" - off-campus group residences run by students and sanctioned officially by MIT. Instead of being assigned to housing before they come to school, incoming MIT freshmen attend Rush Week in August, where they are wooed by fraternities. If they decide to pledge rather than live in a dormitory or group house, the fraternity is where they live, usually for their whole MIT careers.

The system put a roof over students' heads, to be sure, but Vest and others believed that, combined with the intense workload of MIT students, it also separated them from their classmates and from the university.

"I have never been in an institution where people push harder, work longer hours, exhaust themselves," says Khoury, the dean of humanities. "Out there in the fraternities, they are isolated. We work them to death, and they hide out there - it's like a relief agency. Some fraternities are elegant, some are pretty bad. Vest has taken a courageous position on this and taken a lot of flak." ,p>There were student demonstrations against Vest's decision and angry complaints from certain alumni who fondly remembered their fraternity days. For the fraternities, there was a real money issue: Their financial viability depends on getting enough pledges to support the houses, and here was the university's president placing the freshmen class off-limits - in other words, eliminating one-quarter of the pool of potential pledges.

But Vest was firm. He maintains that MIT desperately needs a greater integration of residential and academic life and that faculty have to be more involved with students outside the classrooms and labs. The plan is eventually to have arts and intellectual programs in the dorms involving faculty members, as the Harvard houses do.

"If you look at the institute in the 1950s, '60s, '70s," Vest says, "students were virtually all white male engineers with fixed and similar career objectives. In 2000, it is nothing like this. It no longer serves a good purpose if students come here from these varied backgrounds and immediately move off into small, separated living groups. We are trying to build a broader sense of community and collegiality."

One thing almost everyone says about Charles Vest is that he works extremely hard - several who have worked closely with him say too hard. He answers all of his own e-mail, and administrators and faculty are accustomed to getting detailed messages from him posted at 2 or 3 a.m. He is said at times to show signs of sleep deprivation.

"He works amazingly hard," says provost Robert Brown. "It's very tough on people who have offices near him, because you know the volume and variety of things he's doing. You can't at the same time be talking to faculty about their individual problems and wondering about national issues without handling an enormous amount of work."

Meantime, Vest's interest in individual students is legendary. "The degree to which he gets involved in personal concerns that come to his attention is extraordinary," says Rosalind Williams, dean of students. "If someone is upset, he really wants to see if something can be done, and he will follow up with me: What happened with so and so? In most cases, it is someone who has run into bureaucracy, and he wants to be sure we act in a humane way."

Even so, he is not always working. He runs along the Charles River every morning ("to maintain my stability") and kayaks in the summer on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee. He no longer has time for the 100- and 200-mile bike rides he used to take, "but maybe someday I'll get back to it," Vest says. At home, he listens to music, mostly jazz and classical, and he says he and his wife "use movies as our primary diversion."

Vest's warm, low-key temperament and self-effacing humor are evident in conversation. When MIT offered him the top job, he recalls, "I thought one of the great benefits of going from public to private higher education would be that I wouldn't have to be going to Lansing to meet with the state Legislature." And although he is cutting-edge in terms of science, public policy, and society, Vest has a decidedly old-fashioned cast about him. He uses words like "service," "duty," and "community" with great seriousness, a kind of fiery mildness. Successful CEOs are often called hot-tempered, but Vest says, "Generally, I don't get very angry. I defuse angry situations with humor, when possible."

As for the challenges of running MIT, to say Chuck Vest has a positive attitude understates the case. "I honestly have never felt truly discouraged," he says, "but I certainly get frustrated when I do not believe I am rapidly accomplishing what I have a duty to do." As provost Robert Brown puts it, "It's hard to go to Chuck with an issue and paint it as an insurmountable problem. There just is no insurmountable problem."

Nevertheless, some problems have resisted even Vest's determination. When asked to name his greatest frustration, he says, "The toughest hill to climb is building diversity in the faculty. That's the area in which I feel least satisfied." Of MIT's 931 faculty, 144 are women; 15 of the women and 106 of the men are minorities. ,p>The positive attitude is also evident in Vest's handling of a personal crisis. On February 26, Rebecca Vest suffered cardiac arrest at home. Because of fast response by campus police and the Mount Auburn Hospital emergency room, she survived. She recently returned home after more than 40 days at Mount Auburn, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Of her condition, Vest says, "Her recovery has been excellent, and we anticipate that she will continue to progress well."

Ten years is a long time to be president of MIT; only one president in this century has served significantly longer than that. Some have wondered whether his wife's health problems might break Vest's concentration. The answer is, evidently not. Though he spends a lot of time by her side, nobody reports any diminution of his energy or zest for his job.

And big things are brewing at MIT: a $300 million campus face lift, new ties with foreign universities, ambitious research initiatives in neuroscience and health, a $1.5 billion capital campaign (of which half is already pledged). Asked if he ever gets tired enough to consider stepping down, Vest replies in a characteristically emphatic way, "I am focused on doing my best during a period of change and excitement at MIT. I have not yet given a microsecond of thought to doing anything else."