In the summer of 1964 during a consulting trip to the West Coast, Don Putt spoke to me about the presidency of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Don was an alumnus of Carnegie Tech, studied engineering there, had been a member of its ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps), going on after graduation to flying school and a long career in the Air Force. The presidency was open and Don wanted to know if I was interested. It wasn’t the first presidency I was asked about. I had already turned down offers from Yale and Cornell to become the dean of their engineering schools, and now my alma mater, Colgate University, had offered its presidency to me. I loved Colgate, and turning down that offer was wrenching. It was a fine liberal arts college but not an institute of technology where I had spent much of my professional life, first at Cal Tech and now at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT). Colgate’s community and its undergraduate mission were far removed from mine, and I could see the strong professional bonds I had built and treasured weakening if I went to Colgate. Carnegie was different. It was an institute of technology, and while it had no program in my fields of aeronautics and astronautics, the technological milieu was a familiar one.

The first toe-dipping trip was in September 1964. I was met by Jim Bovard, president of the Carnegie Tech Board, and John “Jake” C. Warner,¹ president of Carnegie Tech² since 1950 and retiring in 1965,

and Don Putt, an alumni trustee and later a life trustee. We talked a bit and then went to the top floor of the Gulf Oil Building to meet Richard K. Mellon,³ Roy Hunt, a past CEO of Alcoa, and other Carnegie Tech trustees. Then a quick visit to the campus to meet and dine with Carnegie Tech vice presidents.

Carnegie Tech⁴ had impressive strengths, not least Pittsburgh itself, with its industries in iron and steel, aluminum, heavy electrical machinery, and the like—and the corresponding wealth. Tech had created very strong engineering departments mirroring Pittsburgh’s industry—in metallurgy and materials science, mechanical, electrical, and chemical. And because big business was beginning to see the value in business schools, it now had the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, funded by the Mellons. But the picture wasn’t monochromatic. There was a very fine college of fine arts with an exceptionally strong drama department. I was introduced to the Margaret Morrison College for women, a favorite of tech founder Andrew Carnegie, named for his mother, and specializing in the “practical arts for women” such as nutrition, clothing design, and the like.⁵ No law school. No medical school. No college (then) of humanities and social sciences, but there were strong departments in those fields, justifying Jake Warner’s claim that it was a “liberal professional” institution.

I returned to MIT leaning toward taking the job. But first I had to talk to my mentor, Jay Stratton, president of MIT. Jay, as always, was helpful, telling me in some detail about the infighting among the various Pittsburgh institutions, especially with the University of Pittsburgh and its strong leader, Edward Litchfield, about whom later. But at the end of the conversation, Jay said with a grin, “You’ve got one priceless asset at Carnegie Tech.” I immediately thought of some great endowment, but he said, “That asset is Herb Simon.” Herb Simon,⁶ he pointed out, was among the broadest and deepest thinkers in the social sciences, and that he, with Allan Newell and Alan J. Perlis, gave Carnegie Tech enormous strength in the emergent field of computer science.⁷

I decided to accept in September. That simple declarative hides a lot of agony: leaving MIT and the strong community of friends and colleagues we had in Boston, Cambridge, and Belmont. But there were things I wouldn’t give up, especially Randolph, our spiritual home, with

my family, with friends, and the camaraderie and solitude that came with my love of fly-fishing.

Carnegie Tech announced my appointment in October 1964, on Columbus Day, and with that I became for the first time in my life a public figure in contrast to being well known in professional circles and in Washington. I was inundated by publicity. The first go-rounds in the press were flattering, but after the first wave was a second, in the form of thoughtful pieces, especially from the two Pittsburgh papers, the Post-Gazette and the Press, that hinted at a strong desire to become a distinguished national university. The Press editorial, in particular, set some markers for me:

I had to continue the drive begun by Jake Warner to strengthen the position of Carnegie Tech in the total university galaxy. And I certainly had no argument with introducing Pittsburgh to the modern Space Age. The city had a ways to go. At one of my early meetings with Pittsburgh-based trustees of Carnegie Tech, they reported on a visit by a Pittsburgh delegation to meet with the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to find out how Pittsburgh could help. They heard what space rocketry was all about, but a member of the delegation, bred in producing steel and aluminum, asked, “Where’s the tonnage?” There would have to be a little bit of an adjustment in the center of gravity if they really wanted to get into space-age industry.

That little anecdote and the editorials put in front of me the gap between my technical experience and connections and what was facing me at Carnegie Tech. I decided that it was important to continue the work I had been doing with the government, especially the Air Force, and my technical consulting for the United Aircraft Company. But I also decided that I’d better look into new areas where Carnegie Tech could gain a national reputation. I went back to Jay Stratton’s statement that Carnegie Tech had one tremendous asset in Herb Simon and his pioneering use of computers to probe human behavior in organizations. That thinking about computers proved extremely apt in what was billed as “just a pleasant dinner” with leaders of major Pittsburgh foundations: the A. W. Mellon, Scaife, and the Richard K. Mellon foundations. As we talked, it became obvious that they wanted to know what really good ideas I had for Carnegie Tech. I said it’s very clear that the computer is still in its infancy and will have a tremendous effect on our future.⁸ All relaxed when I said that because they were hoping that is what I would say. That session led to a $10 million gift to endow an R. K. Mellon chair in computer science (to which, unsurprisingly, Herb Simon was appointed) to help us buy a new computer—they cost a lot in those days, and of course the very large supercomputers still do—and to set up new research programs. This money enabled us to establish a computer science department with Alan Perlis as chairman.

Bunny and I made two important decisions before I actually started my Carnegie job. One was not to live in the house intended for the new president. Bunny felt, rightly so, that the traffic in front of the house on Morewood Avenue was too heavy for our children, especially the two youngest just moving into their teens. Carnegie sold the house within six months and bought a new home for us on Devon Road, a quiet residential street a block away from campus. The second decision was that I would go alone on February 1 to Carnegie Tech and the new job. Bunny would stay in Belmont with the four children, so that Guy and Sarah wouldn’t have to split their junior year in high school. The wisdom of that decision was amplified when two very close friends, Helen and Gordon Scannell, asked us if we would like to leave Guy and Sarah with them for their senior year in school. That was enormously helpful for I had discovered, whenever I tried to hire someone who had children in

high school, they did not want to move at the critical last year when the children have to face the trauma of college entry.

On February 1, 1965, my pay started at Carnegie Tech. I was 48. I left my family, my home in Belmont, and the faculty and students of MIT to fly to Pittsburgh, carrying a couple of suitcases. I moved into the president’s house on Morewood Avenue, complete with maid, cook, and driver. I didn’t need much attention at home, but the driver I used all the time. I reported in at my office and met Miss Priscilla Brown, who had worked for my predecessor and would be my secretary throughout my tenure; Edward R. Schatz, a talented, typically tough-minded western Pennsylvanian, vice president for academic affairs; and Robert Kibbee, who became my vice president for planning. Another ally in my office was Professor Raymond Parshall, who helped me with correspondence, especially the tough kind. He could cut through the chaos that at times besets a campus and its president. One time when we were having a little set-to between faculty and administration, Ray calmed me down by pointing out that “a professor is someone who thinks otherwise.”

And I met the deans, including Norman Rice, dean of the College of Fine Arts. As we stood in front of the fine arts building, he waved his hand toward the science and engineering buildings and then at the fine arts building and said: “Now, President Stever, I want you to know that this is the principal axis of the institution.” He was most convincing. Dean Rice was not the only salesperson for fine arts. There was the outstanding success record of the graduates of the college.⁹ And even more pleasant for the campus life, there were the regularly scheduled student plays, frequent symphony and chamber concerts, individual musical performances, and art exhibits. These were enjoyed not only by the campus community but also by the surrounding city community.

The Graduate School of Industrial Administration began in the late 1940s as the School of Industrial Administration with $6 million from William Larimer Mellon, who wasn’t happy with the “caliber of managers he had been able to hire at Gulf Oil, where he was chairman.”¹⁰ It became the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, coming into

its own as a strong institution during Jake Warner’s tenure as president, and when I arrived ranked with the top business schools in the country. We had just lost its first dean, Gordon Leland Bach, to Stanford. He had laid out a unique approach to management education and assembled a powerful faculty. The new dean of the school was Richard Cyert, and his first point to me was that I should understand that a portion of Carnegie Tech’s endowment was given for the Graduate School of Industrial Administration and that therefore it had more say on its budget than other schools. True, but the school also needed general funds from the university. We always had an interesting session with Cyert and his colleagues at budget time. He also gave me two other messages. One was that I should understand that the president’s salary didn’t have to be biggest in the institution because we had some very important and first-rate professors. His final message was that I shouldn’t waste a lot of our ability on raising money for new buildings. The money should go instead to support our fine and growing faculty.

I ignored his first point even though I knew we had “some very important and first-rate professors.” I partly agreed with him on the second point. I didn’t see any great building needs. And I knew from the comparative salary data I had looked at from the American Association of University Professors that Carnegie Tech needed to boost faculty salaries if it was going to be competitive.

We had a gem as leader of our social sciences in John Coleman. Later as president of Haverford College,¹¹ he did a weekly tour with garbage collectors in the area surrounding Haverford saying that brought him down to some very earthy matters and served as a reality check on the application of the social sciences to worldly problems. Some students indeed did follow his example, not simply in collecting garbage but in trying to link their work and studies closely to real problems. You practiced what you preached.

I had one serious problem: Margaret Morrison College. Jake Warner urged me to close it and told me why: competition from state-supported public schools, such as Penn State, offering the same courses at lower cost; a low research effort; many tenured faculty nearing retirement and difficulties in attracting quality replacements; and programs that were no longer sustainable—for example, the degree program in social work had

to be phased out.¹² After one year on the job, I learned that the “Maggie Murphs” also had many distinguished alumnae, were leading campus citizens, and added quality and pizzazz to the campus atmosphere, making that recommendation hard to take.

In my inaugural talks with students and faculty, I emphasized what I saw as the great strengths of Carnegie. It balanced strong programs in science and engineering with the fine arts. It was gaining national leadership, notably in the cognitive sciences, the first real efforts in artificial intelligence, efforts to model human behavior in computers through symbolic manipulation, and the study of organizational behavior from different perspectives—all driven by people who became giants in these fields, including Herb Simon, Alan Perlis, and Allan Newell.

One of Jake Warner’s points in a farewell speech to the faculty was that they should not let their professional activities cut out close contact with the undergraduates’ social life and extracurricular life. I worked to get close to the undergraduates, athletes, housing units, fraternities and sororities and social clubs, and Bunny and I dined with them often.

Soon after I arrived, I learned a great deal about Carnegie’s relationship with the University of Pittsburgh, in particular its chancellor, Edward Litchfield. He had come into office in 1955, when Pitt was a “middling American university, perhaps somewhat above the median but not by much.”¹³ Chancellor Litchfield pushed hard, and spent hard, to change that. By 1965 when I arrived, he had increased graduate and professional school enrollments, increased SAT scores of entering freshmen, increased faculty salaries, increased the proportion of full-time students, and increased the university’s physical facilities—even acquiring the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball stadium.¹⁴

While pleasant and smooth in his personal relationships, Ed was hard driving with strong ideas on what the university needed and how to do it—his academic specialty was, after all, administration, somewhat ironic given what was to happen to him. He was very aggressive toward his academic neighbors. Litchfield, in trying to recruit a colleague of mine to be Pitt’s dean of engineering, which he earlier had tried on me, took him to the top of the Tower of Learning, a skyscraper on the campus, waved his arms toward the Carnegie Tech campus and declared: “This is your college of engineering of the future.” Jake Warner told me

that when Lichtfield complained to him that “you don’t like me,” Jake said: “Ed, I like you very much. I just don’t trust you.” When Bishop, later Cardinal, Wright was invited to receive an award as the “Man of the Year in Religion,” he said that he’d “like to think about it.” He then checked that Litchfield was going to be there, too. He came and joked that he was delighted that Chancellor Litchfield was also there because he was a little afraid to leave his cathedral lest it be taken over by Pitt.

The Pittsburgh research and higher education institutions did try to work together, primarily through the Oakland Corporation. Ed Litchfield had one big idea for the corporation: putting a big building in Panther Hollow, the deep cut with a railroad running through it between the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Tech, and the Mellon Institute. It was to be the equivalent of Route 128 around Boston and Stanford Park in Palo Alto, both entrepreneurial hot beds. It was an expansive view of what the Oakland Corporation could do over and above what the Mellon Institute did with industry. I had my suspicions about that because I knew that large industries—for example, TRW, for which I had consulted—were discovering that they would rather have their own research parks with campus-like settings. Big companies were simply not willing to get into Panther Hollow-type operations. Nevertheless, I was a good citizen, attended meetings, and tried to be constructive in Oakland Corporation activities. But I had a feeling that Ed’s plan was grandiose and would fail. It did.

Ed Litchfield’s end at Pittsburgh was a sad caution for his fellow presidents. By 1965, Pitt had a deficit of almost $5 million with current accounts $25 million in the red. Litchfield had a mild heart attack and resigned two months later. Private funding dried up, and the state had to rescue it with a $5 million dollar bailout. In 1966, Pitt became a public university, and its quest to become a leading private university ended.¹⁵ It had become a very good public university. Tragically, Ed Litchfield, then a corporate leader, his wife and two children were later killed in a plane crash.

While Pitt was going through its agony, I was trying to learn the ropes of being a president and spent spring 1965 in an unrelenting round of meetings with faculty, students, community leaders of Pittsburgh, especially contributors—in fact and potential. And by prearrangement

with Carnegie Tech, I continued to consult with United Aircraft, to finish up my chairmanship of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and to take on other governmental tasks, notably President Johnson’s Commission on the Patent System. Among the pleasanter additions to my portfolio was serving on the board of the Pittsburgh Symphony. For that board I served on a committee that analyzed, at Jack Heinz’s request, a large grand old movie house in downtown Pittsburgh for possible conversion to a symphony and drama facility. We supported that after looking at a similar conversion in St. Louis. It became Heinz Hall. Not least, I joined the committees of several local development groups, such as the Allegheny County Development Corporation.

The high point of the spring came at Easter time when the Carnegie Tech Community Orchestra presented Pablo Casals’s “Easter Oratorio,” and we held a special convocation to award Casals an honorary degree— my first. Sidney Harth, head of our music department, who played with Casals in some of his European events, arranged this event, which took some doing because Casals had for some time refused to visit the United States because of a contretemps with our government.¹⁴ He spent several days with us giving master lessons to students. Bunny had brought our four children to Pittsburgh. They were in awe with front row seats at the concert and convocation. In turn Bunny and I were awed the next day at a lunch for Casals with members of the music faculty. At our small table were the Casals, famed musicologist Fritz Dorian and his wife, Sadie, and we listened to Pablo Casals and Dorian reminisce about the Salzburg festivals before World War II.

June graduation—my first as president—went very well, followed by my family moving full-time to Pittsburgh, followed almost immediately by an about-face for summering at Randolph. In October came my inauguration. It was lovely, a gathering of many college and university presidents, other dignitaries and personal friends from around the country, including two people who greatly influenced my career—Lee Dubridge, president of the California Institute of Technology, and Jay Stratton, president of MIT. John Coleman, who was still with us, had assembled a two-day symposium on higher education with Vince Barnett, then president of my undergraduate college, Colgate, giving a keynote speech on undergraduate education. Lee Dubridge gave the key-

note address on graduate education, and Jay talked about the broader side of professional education.

But these wonderful reunions aside, my real object in the inaugural was to assert my views of how Carnegie Tech could go in the future. I felt strongly that the liberal arts and professional education the institution was providing was very good, but I wanted to set new standards and new goals. Other institutes of technology, notably MIT and Cal Tech, had quite deliberately broadened and strengthened their programs so that they could justly call themselves universities. Carnegie Tech wasn’t there yet, but I was determined to take it there. So I entitled my talk “A Great University” and said in part:

Following up on my inaugural talk, I managed in my first year to get two new and major things going, with a lot of help on and off campus, the

latter including substantial funding. We first established the Transportation Research Institute, focusing academic work on an area of keen interest to Pittsburgh because of the role of local industries in many transportation modes—aluminum in aircraft and steel in railroads and automobiles. The institute was proposed as an interdisciplinary program by the heads of civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering—Tom Stelson, Milt Shaw, and Everard Williams, respectively. Jim Romaldi became professor in charge. It was successful for a while but ran into problems after I left Carnegie for various reasons, one being that the automobile was going to dominate transportation no matter what, and hence there was little incentive for private funders to pay to look at other systems. The second was that people in the institute had supported Pittsburgh building a metropolitan rail system. That came a cropper, denting its reputation.

A more lasting addition was the School for Urban and Public Affairs. There was tremendous postwar interest in Pittsburgh in urban renewal, and the R. K. Mellon Foundation supported fellowships in urban affairs at several universities. However, they didn’t go very far in attacking the real problems of cities, and they lacked a rigorous quantitative method to examining the problems and interdisciplinary approaches that knitted together engineering, management, and other perspectives on problems that didn’t fall neatly into this or that disciplinary box. At a meeting of university presidents to look at urban issues, I gave my thoughts on an educational institution that might not have these weaknesses. Nathan Pusey, president of Harvard, didn’t think much of the idea. But the R. K. Mellon Foundation did. It asked Carnegie to establish the School for Urban and Public Affairs and gave us $10 million to get it started. The foundation’s reasons were well put in a letter written to me in December 1968 by a Mellon Foundation trustee: “We see a great opportunity for this School to provide assistance to the city, the state and the nation in the massive effort which is needed to educate, train and motivate managers in the field of urban affairs.”¹⁷ The school got a good start with Dean William Cooper and Associate Dean Otto Davis leading, and after some early difficulties went on to do extremely well, emphasizing quantitative and problem-solving approaches to urban issues. In the 1990s it was renamed the H. John Heinz III School of Public

Policy and Management¹⁸ for Senator John Heinz, who was killed in a plane crash in 1991. The John Heinz III Foundation liberally endowed the college.

Those were the additions. The subtraction was Margaret Morrison College. In 1968 the faculty senate seconded the recommendation of a visiting committee to the college that four programs within the college be shut down. In November 1969 the board of trustees approved my recommendation to close the college. Many of the students at Margaret Morrison transferred to the new school, later to become the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Morrison’s dean, Edwin Steinberg, became the dean of the new college. All that sounds a bit glib, but it wasn’t easy, and it was emotionally taxing on all involved. But the reality was we had no choice. The college was no longer sustainable.

What happened to the University of Pittsburgh and Edward Litchfield, as unfortunate as it was, proved to be one factor in the biggest event during my seven years at Carnegie: the merger with the Mellon Institute. Jake Warner had told me that R. K. Mellon wanted the institute and Carnegie Tech to come together somehow, but it didn’t happen in part because Jake had other priorities at the time.

Like most successful marriages, the merger made more sense after it happened and even more so as the years passed. At the time it wasn’t a sure thing. Carnegie Tech and the Mellon Institute were quite different. Carnegie Tech was a place to teach students, while the principal raison d’être of the Mellon Institute was contract research for industry, with particular strengths in chemistry. Not surprising, since the idea for the institute came from a chemistry professor at the University of Kansas, Robert Kennedy Duncan, who in the early 1900s wrote books and articles lobbying for closer ties between academia and industry. The Mellons were entranced and built Duncan a research institute on the University of Pittsburgh campus. It thrived and moved in 1937 from the Pitt campus as the Mellon Institute for Industrial Research to its own quite magnificent building. However, it ran into trouble after World War II. It didn’t build connections with federal funding. It didn’t add

strength in fields becoming important to industry, such as microelectronics. And while it built up strength in fundamental research, it didn’t build up the funding, including industrial interest, to maintain it.¹⁹

My first serious thinking on the subject came in May 1966 when I was invited to lunch with the Mellon trustees, who asked me point blank what we would do if the Mellon Institute offered to join with us. I was well aware of what the institute brought to the table: a quite magnificent building next to our campus, a sizeable endowment with a book value of $40 million but more than that at market value, a field laboratory outside of Pittsburgh with excellent facilities and equipment, basic researchers who were good, at least some of them, and those applied researchers still earning some money. After I recovered from their surprising question, I asked a lot of questions, told them that I favored the idea and that “I would like to put together a strong working group with some of our vice presidents, deans, and best professors to do a proposal.” They drew back in horror. “No! We don’t want any of them knowing about this. It has to be kept close and confidential.”

They did agree that I could discuss it with a small group of colleagues—Aiken Fisher,²⁰ chairman of the Carnegie Tech Board; Edward Schatz and Robert Kibbee, my vice presidents; and Paul Cross, president of the Mellon Institute. That was the working group. We totted up the minuses and pluses. In the minus column went an oversized chemistry department and long-term commitments to the current employees of the Mellon Institute. Our first proposal was more or less shoehorning Mellon Institute scientists and applied researchers into Tech’s organizations with a residue of people to be decided later. When I tried it on trustees of the A. W. Mellon Foundation in New York, I got little enthusiasm and, when I went on to our Randolph summer home, I got even worse from Jim Killian, the leader of the Mellon trustees working on this merger. Liz and Jim had driven over from their vacation spot in Sugar Hill for lunch with Bunny and me. After lunch Jim and I sat on our front porch looking up at the peaks of Mount Madison and Mount Adams, relaxing I thought until he opened the conversation with “It isn’t bold enough.” He pointed out that the new entity wouldn’t be that different.

I flew back to Pittsburgh the next day, determined to come up with

something “bold,” starting with the principle that we would also include a number of moves that I wanted to do anyway. I called Schatz, Kibbee, and Cross to a confidential meeting in the President’s House. I pointed out that this opened the door for us to become a university in name as well as in fact—the Carnegie Mellon University. And I pointed out that while, yes, Andrew Carnegie was the founder, in fact the Mellons had made major contributions to transforming Carnegie Tech, including the new School of Urban and Public Affairs, the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Scaife Hall for Engineering, Warner Hall for Administration, and several endowments.

It went well. But there was one problem: we didn’t involve the faculty. And I knew when the faculty was told, there would be trouble. I often wonder what would have happened if we had done that. We’d probably still be arguing today about the merger. And late that evening in the President’s House, after some beers and after Kibbee had stretched himself flat on his back on the floor, I said to Schatz and Kibbee: “I’m going to have an awful lot of headaches when this is announced.” “Guy,” Kibbee said, “you can afford a lot of headaches for a $25 million plant and a $40 million endowment.” After another sip of beer I asked: “What will the colors be for the new university?” Bob immediately said: “Green and gold.” When I asked about a motto, Bob, son of humorist and actor Guy Kibbee, said: “Lux and Bux.” Thus was born Carnegie Mellon University. Because one of the Mellons objected to their name being included in the new university, we first called it Carnegie University. And we replaced the timid transformation of the Mellon Institute into a graduate department of Carnegie University with a bolder arrangement, a Mellon Institute of Science as the umbrella for our science departments. And that meant splitting into two our College of Engineering and Science—a combination that didn’t make sense to me anyway. And most important for me, we proposed to establish the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The executive committee of the Carnegie Board enthusiastically backed the merger, especially when I gave them the numbers to back my point that the merger translated into one of the largest increases in the resources of a university in the history of higher education.

I told the faculty at the start of the fall semester in 1966 that we had agreed to discuss a merger (although it was a fait accompli). About a half

dozen committees, including both Carnegie Tech faculty and deans and Mellon Institute staff, were created to look at various details of the merger. Each of the different proposed changes had to be treated rather differently, and there were different time scales. The College of Humanities and Social Sciences took the longest, and we worked hard to get the remnants of Margaret Morrison transferred to the college. I felt badly about that for Morrison had contributed to Carnegie Tech’s character. On April 19, 1967, the full Carnegie Tech board approved the merger.

I became briefly president of Carnegie University, which became Carnegie Mellon University when, in a splendid talk Paul Mellon gave at our June 1967 commencement, he added “Mellon” to the name of the university. He said: “I’m very happy to express the pride and pleasure of all of us in the realization that the [Mellon] Institute will add its dedicated scientists, its physical and financial resources . . . toward the formation of what we all hope, and what we all know, will be an outstanding American university.” Paul Mellon’s blessing was seconded by Andrew Carnegie’s daughter, who wrote to me: “Your founder would share our pleasure today. . . . I can hear my father say as he did so often, ‘All is well since all grows better.’”^21,22

Yes, the 1967 merger was a big deal for me. But the year was also a big deal for me as a fly fisherman. From the beginning of our marriage two decades ago, Bunny, who had fished for trout since she was a little girl, had whipped me into shape as a fly fisherman. And fly-fishing had become an important part of my life at Randolph. And now it became important in Pittsburgh, through my membership in the Rolling Rock Club and a wonderful trout stream the club managed in the hills east of Pittsburgh. The Rolling Rock Club stocked Loch Leven Brown Trout,²³ a wonderful breed of brown trout, that is justly regarded by “many anglers as the perfect trout, both for its graceful form and its sporting qualities.” My first day on the Rolling Rock stream was perfect. I caught a goodly number of trout and took some back home to cook, both for dinner and for breakfast, trout being a breakfast delicacy, with Bunny being an absolute expert preparer of trout.

Roy and Margo were the two of our four children staying with us in Pittsburgh, and Roy would fish with me in the Rolling Rock stream. Margo joined in eventually, so with Bunny we had four enthusiastic fly fishermen in the house. Sarah wasn’t as interested, focusing rather on academics and going to Europe for her humanities studies, particularly history. Guy had a terrible fish allergy and just touching a fish led to swollen eyes and difficult breathing.

In the year and a quarter between first being asked by the Mellon trustees about a merger and its realization, Bunny and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary and I turned 50. I began to do some very careful thinking. Was I going in the right direction in my life? How was our family doing? The happiest time in my life was at MIT when I finally got to teach and do research. And I had added variety to that life that fit very well, in my government and industrial relationships, mainly the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and the United Aircraft Corporation. Now at Carnegie, I had given up teaching, research, and the day-to-day intellectual charge that came with being on the MIT faculty. But I slowly came to accept that change, emotionally and intellectually. I evolved into full engagement in making the brand new university work.

Making the university work meant money. In the press conference that Paul Mellon, Aiken Fisher, and I had announcing the merger, Paul Mellon denied that including “Mellon” in the university’s title would guarantee the continuance of gifts from the Mellon family, foundations, or corporations. That surprised neither Jake Warner nor me. We’d gotten the same message from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the main conduit of Carnegie money. We were told gently but firmly that just because “Carnegie” was in our name didn’t guarantee money from the corporation. That proved true with Carnegie—and with Mellon. However, when we had a good proposal, both were willing to consider it.

But we needed more money! How could that be when the new university had through the merger gained enormous assets and endowment money? A substantial part of the answer was the commitments we made as part of the merger: to keep the Mellon Institute programs, including the people who weren’t moving to teaching and research. No mass firings.

Just a few weeks before the merger became official, on July 1, 1967, we closed a money-raising campaign started 10 years earlier by Jake Warner. We had collected $30 million, we had more income coming in through federal research grants, and our budget was in the black. But we had closed down our capability to do fund drives, and anyone familiar with universities knows they always need more money. As soon as one fund drive starts, the wheels for the next one must start turning.

But, still, why should Carnegie Mellon University and other universities run into financial trouble when student enrollments and research support were booming? After all, the 1960s marked for public and private universities and colleges “the largest enrollment increment for any decade in enumerated history.”²⁴ Two hundred thousand more students enrolled in private undergraduate colleges and universities between 1965 and 1970; the numbers were more dramatic in the public colleges and universities, with enrollments increasing by almost 2.5 million.²⁵ Those students needed more housing, classrooms, and faculty to teach them, all of which cost money that the private universities had to raise, with little of that coming from government, federal or state.

The research boom of the 1960s lured many universities and colleges into a financial swamp in at least two ways. The first was that more research capacity, meaning buildings and laboratories and graduate education and students, was needed on campus to attract federal funds and quality faculty. “A direct correspondence existed between average faculty salaries and overall institutional ratings.”²⁶ Private institutions had to find the money to do this for themselves. That meant unrelenting hunts for money and that a university president was judged by how much he found—a reality still true today. The second way that universities became mired in a financial swamp after the boom deflated was when they used “soft money”—federal research funds—to pay faculty salaries. And faculty salaries were rising sharply, far ahead of inflation. Soft money worked as long as the federal funds flowed more or less unabated. But in the goodness of time it became a very costly shell game as research funding declined in the late 1960s, and the universities suddenly found themselves with a large cadre of tenured faculty having lost research support but still harboring the quaint notion that they should be paid their full salary—if not by federal research funds, then by the university directly. By the end of the 1960s, it was obvious that “the insatiable appetites of

research universities had outstripped their financial resources.”²⁷ A Carnegie Commission study done in the late 1960s projected that by 1975 private research universities would fall short of needed income by 30 to 40 percent.²⁸ Not only Carnegie Mellon, but other major private research universities—Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Cornell—all ran into severe financial problems. The intensifying competition for research dollars and hence prestige encouraged by the postwar boom in federal research translated into major construction and staffing commitments— commitments responsive, for one, to the rise in information technologies as a major need of a campus and new programs to support minority and low-income populations. These were all good causes but none were cheap, especially when anticipated income didn’t arrive. As Roger Geiger aptly put it:

Carnegie Mellon didn’t escape that “decidedly less congenial environment”during my time as president. By the 1970–1971 academic year we faced a substantial and climbing deficit. Even though I knew in my mind that “in large part the accumulated deficit had been caused by factors beyond the university’s control,”³⁰ it was for me personally, and certainly for the university, very painful. Desperately needed renovations and repairs were put off. We didn’t launch a department of biological sciences, delaying the university’s establishment of a standing in an exploding field. We didn’t turn into reality our dream of building a center for the dramatic arts. We started losing good faculty. We urgently had to reinvigorate our fund-raising effort, and we did, although by the time I left for Washington we were considerably short of what we needed, much to my disappointment. Could I have done more? Even from the vantage of several decades looking back, I doubt that I could have escaped the tidal wave of red ink that beginning in the late 1960s ripped through the major research universities. At the same time, I inherited what was in retrospect a budgeting mistake that bit us hard: operating and capital funds were commingled in the same budget, so that money intended for,

say, maintaining our physical plant went instead to covering rising construction costs. Doing that means that “financial oversight can be muddied. Accurate forecasting of total annual expenditures becomes difficult, and money slated to balance general operating expenses can be more facilely transferred to cover the costs of a project whose funding is based on restricted sources.”³¹ When income fell off, these “convenient” arrangements turned first into cash flow problems and then real deficits. Capital and operating budgets need firm separation; that wasn’t true for Carnegie Mellon at the time but is now.

The fall in research income, a falling stock market, and sharply higher faculty and related costs all contributed to the financial problems of research universities. More deeply and more harmful was the most dramatic event for American higher education in the 1960s—the student unrest if not downright rebellion on many campuses, fueled by the convergence of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, vague dissatisfaction with a “consumerist” culture, and growing use of illicit drugs.

Drugs—or rather the fear of what they could do—hit us in January 1968, just when we were about to launch a major new funding push, the Fund for Distinction. An official of the Pennsylvania commonwealth told reporters that at a university campus in western Pennsylvania students on LSD were blinded when they propped their eyes open and stared at the sun. It was a stunner. I immediately called together my senior administrators, and they were adamant that Carnegie Mellon was not the campus where this happened. Moreover, whatever the campus, they didn’t believe the story. George Brown, our highly respected dean of students, insisted that simple logic dictated that the story was false; that you couldn’t have five or six blinded students in hospitals without nurses or doctors talking about it, never mind screams of rage from the families.

The national media thought otherwise. Not just western Pennsylvania but the entire country was treated to this horrible result of drugs on campus. We were flooded with reporters, but that was nothing compared to what hit us when one of the leading TV news shows reported that the culprit campus was Carnegie Mellon University. We were in for it. Media

flooded us. One TV crew set up on campus to stay and tried to get students on camera to talk about it. Most refused. But one of our acting students, a young and very attractive woman, did go on camera—after all free TV time is gold to an aspiring actress—to tell the viewers that “It couldn’t happen on our campus. We’re all too bright for that.”

The end of the story came when reporters finally went back to the official who made the original announcement. He turned out to be blind himself and was understandably horrified by stories that people could blind themselves with LSD and drugs. So as a warning I suppose, he had concocted the story. TV cameras and reporters and the headlines melted away. We looked in vain for some sort of apology from the media or even a correction. I respect the media, but they could have done better on this one.

Even for those who lived through the 1960s—and more especially those like me who were hit by the 1960s—the pace and drama of what happened seem in hindsight almost unimaginable. Coming home on April 4, 1968, after a day with visiting committees and dinner with some students, I learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered. The next day we closed down operations for a memorial service. The terrible sadness that enveloped all of us was soon joined by shock as riots and fires occurred in the major cities, including Pittsburgh. We made sure that students were protected. Many of the students living off campus moved in with dormitory friends.

Even before King’s murder, we had tried to attack at least one of the root problems in American race relations: the participation of African Americans in higher education. Some 10 years earlier, Carnegie Tech had started the School College Orientation Program, which held summer institutes to help minority students prepare for college.³² Dean Norman Johnson, an African American, urged us to go beyond that, to help minority students not only prepare for college but stay there. We created in 1968 the Carnegie Mellon Action Program, CMAP, to do that, with Norman Johnson as director. The program started well, but Johnson pointed out that none of the CMAP students were going into engineering and the sciences, and he and others worked on changing that. “By 1976,” long after I had left, “Carnegie Mellon was the third largest producer of minority engineers in the country.”³³ It wasn’t easy to get there.

We tried to no avail to get individual and institutional support for the program. And it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the university was able to provide operating funds out of its resources. At no time when I was at Carnegie Mellon do I remember an African American participating in activism. They were too interested in their educational opportunities. Our activists were white students who had seized on the construction union’s refusal to accept African Americans.

These efforts—to prepare minority students for higher education and to keep them there—were the university using its special strengths effectively and pointedly to confront problems forced on it by the “outside world.” But more was to come, a time of what Herb Simon called “The Troubles.”³⁴ Perhaps the worst, for the university and for me, came in 1969. Two realities collided violently: (1) United States Steel and Carnegie Mellon University both had major construction under way that year and (2) the local building craft unions had either none or only a few black members. Minority workers were effectively shut out of construction jobs.

In September 1969 I came back from a fund-raising trip to New York to be met at the airport not only by my driver but also by two of my vice presidents. That was trouble. They briefed me on the emerging crisis—a direct confrontation between protesters and the construction workers and union officials at the construction site for our new science building. We spent the weekend planning what to do. We had already laid the groundwork in my letter on student protests on campus published earlier in September in The Tartan, the student newspaper. I emphasized that campus protests were entirely apt but that:

1. The protest or demonstration must be of an orderly nature so that no acts of violence shall occur and the normal orderly operation of the University shall not be impeded.

2. The protest or demonstration shall not infringe upon the rights or privileges of students not in sympathy with it . . . .

3. Finally, the freedom to demonstrate on the campus shall be limited to members of the campus community only.³⁵

We had already earlier shut down construction for three days, at the request of Mayor Joseph Barr. But the week that letter was published it was also clear that next week some students were going to demonstrate on campus, demanding that construction be shut down again. We shut down construction again on Monday, September 22, and cancelled classes in favor of an all-campus convocation where I would be the sole speaker. We put in a lot of work over the weekend getting ready for that, but I was skeptical that we would change any minds. We held to our basic positions: that the university community, students and faculty, should be free to voice their opinions but peaceably and that while individuals could certainly do as they wished, we were not going to put the university between the black coalition in Pittsburgh and the construction unions.

I was nervous when I entered the gymnasium for the convocation. I was the only act, and there were to be questions afterwards. I started reading my speech but felt that I was coming off as rather cold. In trying to ad lib to soften the tone and to underline my sympathy with the black students, I made a terrible, terrible mistake by saying “why I had lunch with some of them yesterday and found that they’re real people.” I was so shocked by expressing myself so badly that I lost my usual aplomb and couldn’t figure out how to correct the unfortunate remark. I went on with my written talk and then took questions. I recognized a long-haired young person, very slight and short: “Here’s a young woman in the front row.” He rose and said: “Young man, sir.” The place cracked up, but it didn’t save the day.

I was so upset that I went home to lunch. Bunny, bless her, suggested we go to the zoo, one of our favorite places to go with our kids. It was a weekday and would be uncrowded and quiet. We went to our two favorite exhibits. One was the lion—old, shuffling, with sore feet and aching limbs. I had at that moment a lot of sympathy for him and spoke to him a lot. The otters were our second favorite. The young otters played wonderful games, plunging down the water slides and chasing each other. They always refreshed us when we went to the zoo, and they did that day.

We laid out a communications center in my conference room that night and assigned deans and other academic officials equipped with walkie-talkies to key points around the campus. We were very glad we did, for the next day was a near disaster for the university. Police helicop-

ters flew over our campus. Police massed in Schenley Park just over the hill from Carnegie Mellon. I had a front-row view from my office of the crowd gathering for a demonstration at 10 a.m. at the construction site for our new science hall. Three hundred workers at the construction site were about to pour concrete for the basement. One of the large cement mixer trucks, instead of dumping its load at the site and leaving, circled the site just off campus, a way I suppose for the construction unions to taunt the demonstrators.

It heated up. The Pittsburgh chief of police called to tell me that he had police stationed nearby, that we were on the verge of a serious riot, and that the police should move onto the campus. I told him that we knew police units were nearby but asked him not to send them on campus unless we requested it. I thanked him for being so well prepared. The police chief appealed my request to Mayor Barr, a member of our board. I again pleaded that police not be sent in. “If we have a confrontation of our students, faculty, and police, we won’t get this campus settled down for years. Please hold this police chief back unless we call.” He reluctantly agreed.

The demonstrators divided into three groups with each marching from a different direction to the construction site. They faced off with union officials, calling them names and understandably angering them even more. An explosion was near. We had one report that a young faculty member was encouraging students to lie down in front of a truck. One student just managed to crawl to safety as a truck went by. I was terrified. And angry with the faculty member who did this. Then our network reported that the construction workers were getting ready to charge with two-by-fours. I still refused to call the police but told my staff that if it worsened I’d have no choice. My heart sank.

Then I got a better call: the students were backing away. The prospect of being charged by construction workers using two-by-fours was too much. We arranged for discussions of what had happened and what to do next by students in their own colleges led by deans. The next day was to start with a meeting of our policy advisory board, which included students. But that morning I got a call at home quite early and was told: “Your office is occupied by some students. Why don’t you stay away?” The sit-in, thanks in good part to some thoughtful faculty, turned out to

be a minor one. I eventually got to my office. Everything was neat as a pin, and the only thing missing was a telephone charge card for my Defense Department business. Somebody did eventually use it for a while, but I have no idea if they were caught.

The close call with the construction union was for me the scariest event of the student activism of the 1960s. We had more events, with of course the Vietnam War a major provocation. Young people cared about the war for many reasons, not least that young people did the fighting. The war had a long history, and U.S. involvement began innocently enough when, first, President Eisenhower and then President Kennedy sent “military advisors” to help South Vietnam in fighting North Vietnam. That changed quickly: From 17,000 military advisors at the end of 1963 to rapidly climbing draft calls in 1964 to 500,000 and 80,000 U.S. casualties by 1968.³⁶ Vietnam became the “longest and ultimately the most unpopular war in American history.”³⁷

In my first year at Carnegie Tech, students and faculties at campuses across the country had begun organizing “teach-ins” on the war. That also came to the Carnegie Mellon campus but a bit later than other places and I’m glad to say without the disruption of academic life or the violence (and deaths at Kent State and Jackson State) that marked some of the protests. “Compared to Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard or Wisconsin, Carnegie Mellon was distinctly peaceful. No students were killed, no faculty members injured, no buildings destroyed, no police called in.”³⁸ Part of the reason is that what was in some ways a motley group called the Pittsburgh Council of Higher Education³⁹ agreed on the principle of maintaining the rights of free speech on campus and issued a strong statement affirming that right and setting out guidelines. While there were rough moments, that action turned out to be very effective. There was one visit to our campus by a noncampus group on its way to a large rally in Washington. They settled on our campus for a rally. While many students had polar views, they behaved well. No violence. No damage. We didn’t appreciate the invasion by the media with TV trucks ripping up our lawns and getting a lot of attention in the press. We all breathed a sigh of relief when the protesters continued on to Washington.

The government tried to disengage from the war even before Richard Nixon took office in 1969. The Paris peace talks had begun, and on

November 1, 1968, President Johnson suspended bombing of North Vietnam to pressure the North Vietnamese to settle. Nixon came into office in 1969 with what proved to be contradictory goals: reduce American involvement and win the war with the South Vietnamese army. The failure was almost absolute. The policy of withdrawing destroyed the morale of American troops wondering why they should die when the United States was pulling out. The South Vietnamese army was simply never up to the task. And Nixon in other ways escalated the war. Cambodia was bombed in March 1969 in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese sanctuaries. A year later, American and South Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, a campaign that failed in its purpose but left the country badly destabilized and prey to the coming horrors of its “killing fields.”⁴⁰

Of direct concern to me was that in May 1969 Nixon changed the selective service system so that now the youngest were called up first rather than the oldest. While, in fact, the actual numbers being called up declined, there was suspicion that the change was aimed at the campus activists. That wasn’t proven, but the activism became enormous and then superheated with the killing of 4 Kent State University students by national guardsmen on May 4, 1970, followed by the killing of 2 and wounding of 11 students at Jackson State College. The terrible news from Kent State and then Jackson State reverberated at Carnegie Mellon as it did on campuses across the country. On the evening of May 4, students had a bonfire on campus. I met with students and agreed to shut down the campus for a day to allow attendance at a memorial service to be held at the Heinz Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh.

I joined 79 college and university presidents in October 1970 in petitioning President Nixon to step up the Vietnam pullout. We emphasized our common concern for the young people whose education was being seriously and perhaps irreparably damaged by the war. Our petition got good coverage in the press but no detectable action. Some alumni supported my signing; others didn’t, saying Carnegie Mellon shouldn’t take a position, even though the petition said that we were signing as individuals and not for our institutions. I did not ask the university’s board for approval, not wanting to get the board members involved in the issue. I would take the heat.

Like many other campuses, the protests damaged our efforts to raise funds for what was still a new university. I think it wasn’t so much the causes— civil rights, Vietnam, environmental damage, the murders of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and students at Kent State and Jackson State—but more the tone and the targets of some of the protests. A bad moment came in a fund-raising session with the Sun Coast Clan of alumni in St. Petersburg, Florida. One older alumnus sitting in the front row asked some hostile questions about the students. He made it clear he didn’t like anything about them—long hair, beards, their activism, and so on. I tried to answer gently, but he broke in with a snarl and an expletive. That set off other alumni on an antistudent tirade. Fortunately, a forceful graduate of Margaret Morrison College told them to shut up and listen, which they did. Still I was insulted and upset and wrote in my appointment book “the last time.” It was a low point.

The activists had also in effect taken over the student newspaper, The Tartan, and the senior yearbook, The Thistle. They used these and other platforms to launch mean-spirited attacks on the Mellon enterprises and other businesses, such as the Gulf Oil Company, that had so strongly supported us.⁴¹ Then there were the marshmallows thrown on the stage when Senator Strom Thurmond was speaking, a break-in of ROTC offices, and other incidents, all of which got us publicity and angry alumni around the country. Other campuses also had their problems, some much worse, but this was happening on my watch and absolutely crippled my efforts to raise the funds the university badly needed. Both Richard Scaife and Richard Mellon, major supporters of the university directly or through their families and foundations, resigned from the Carnegie board, pleading other commitments but leaving us wondering whether the turbulence on campus and the attacks on them were the real reasons.

The year 1971 brightened with a palpable wearying by students of the turmoil of the past two years; stronger support by the trustees, especially Aiken Fisher, who was a stalwart throughout the combative years; and more active engagement by the faculty. We organized sessions for students, administration, and faculties to discuss issues, including an all-night vigil, and maintained academics in the face of traumatic events outside the campus that could have overwhelmed us. I especially wel-

comed the new mood of the faculty evident in the start of the new academic year in September 1970. Prior to that, with some notable exceptions, the faculty had been rather passive. One reason may have been that a “great many university faculty members . . . were dependent on the love of their students”⁴² and were unwilling to anger them. And certainly some faculty members shared at least some of the students’ views or at least believed that while their “values were nearly all correct, their ideas for reforming the world [were] nearly all wrong.”⁴³ It was about this time when I realized that we had a positive effect from keeping the merger discussions from the faculty because that prompted them to organize a faculty senate with Sergio di Benedetti as chair. Jim Langer, who proved to be an outstanding helper in handling the encounters with activists, followed him.

Still, it wasn’t all tea and crumpets. As I mentioned, student activists—Maoists citing the “poverty of student life,” a slogan used in 1968 by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French revolutionary student leader—took over The Tartan and used it to push their views and to attack the administration, trustees, and others. “Being annoyed especially by the growing incivility of our students,” Herb Simon “decided to get into the act.” Herb wrote a letter to The Tartan noting that the nonvoluntary student contributions to support the newspaper “subsidizes the propaganda of a little band of self-appointed ‘radicals’ who use it to preach a muddle of tea-party anarchism.” There ensued some to-and-fro between Herb and the editors, ending with Herb writing eight columns for the newspaper, under the title (of course) of “Simon Says.” His penultimate column, a New Year’s message written from a mountain town in Peru, where he and his wife, Dorothea, were retracing Inca history, wonderfully expressed how Herb saw the world:

I didn’t know it at the time, but in 1968 in the midst of all the turmoil a call from Lee Dubridge signaled another phase change in my

life. Nixon was elected, transition teams were forming, and on Thanksgiving Day while I was watching a football game Lee called. He had just been announced as the president’s science advisor, an appointment that delighted the scientific community and of course me. I had known Lee since 1941 as the wartime director of MIT’s Rad Lab. Nixon was putting together several task forces to aid in the transition, and Lee wanted me to chair the one on science. I accepted and quickly began to put together the rest of the task force.⁴⁵ It was quickly formed, met the following Saturday, and then weekly through December. I reported to the president-elect and his major advisors on January 11, 1969, at the Hotel Pierre in New York. It was an intense and long session, something a little different from what I had done before.

One of our recommendations for appointments included several for directorship of the National Science Foundation. Lee Dubridge looked at the recommendations and then asked me if I would take the NSF directorship. “Wow!” I was excited and certainly interested. But I thought it over and said to myself and then to Lee: “Gee, I’ve been at Carnegie Mellon almost four years, but we’re in the middle of a fund drive and I ought to continue that.” And I felt that four years was too short a stay, even though I had balked inwardly when my predecessor, Jake Warner, in introducing me to faculty and students, said that I was young enough that I could serve a full 20 years before retiring, which would make me the longest-serving Carnegie president. I wasn’t going to stay 20 years, but four was too short.

With some reluctance, I said “no” to Lee, who immediately asked me to join the National Science Board, the governing body for NSF. I said “yes” to that. But that turned out to be the proverbial camel’s nose. My work on the National Science Board, particularly in strengthening the foundation’s programs in engineering research and applied science, brought me in much closer contact with broader and also higher aspects of national policy for science and technology. Heretofore, my governmental involvement had focused on military research and development, especially radar, guided missiles and defenses against them, and civilian

space. Now my view was much more cosmopolitan. For example, after I joined the National Science Board, I had extensive contacts with the White House Office of Science and Technology, led by Lee Dubridge, who was succeeded in 1970 by Edward E. David, Jr., from Bell Telephone Laboratories.

In June 1971 Ed David asked me to come see him in Washington, which I did. He then asked if I would consider succeeding William McElroy as NSF director. Bill had since 1969 directed the foundation effectively and ably but had now accepted an offer to become chancellor of the University of California at San Diego. Ed gave me the summer to think about it. He kept asking. I finally said “yes.” I saw a chance to tackle on a national stage many of the science and technology issues I had experienced firsthand at MIT and then at Carnegie Mellon, dominantly maintaining and strengthening the “compact” between universities and government that had led the United States to excellence in fundamental research.

President Nixon announced my nomination on November 15, 1971. I was immediately flooded with publicity and congratulations, this time on a national scale for every research university in the country had and sought more grants from NSF. I regretted leaving Carnegie Mellon while there was still unfinished business, especially our fund-raising drive. Fund-raising in the aftermath of the 1960s was then a severe problem for us as it was for most private campuses. We raised enough funds to build a research-computer building but fell short of funds for a fine arts building, an expansion of the student center, Skibo Hall, and other projects.⁴⁶ I took comfort, however, in what had been accomplished in my seven years at Carnegie. There was the merger, which could have been disastrous but in fact came off very well. We were now a university. New colleges were in place and starting to do well, including the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Mellon College of Science, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the Transportation Research Institute, and the School of Urban and Public Affairs. Our endowment had gone from $55 million to $112 million.⁴⁷ We now had a very strong position in computer science and technology and the facilities to back that up. We became “one of the first universities in the country—in the world—to train students in computer science at the doctoral level.”⁴⁸

And we did more than survive the 1960s; we prevailed. We had our problems, but nothing like the experiences of our brethren campuses, not only at Kent State, Columbia, and the University of California at Berkeley but even some of our immediate neighbors such as the University of Pittsburgh. We didn’t censure publications even when they were really beastly to the administration. Rather, faculty, notably Herb Simon, took them on directly. We never called in police, even under intense pressure to do so. We set out what I believed to be fair guidelines for on-campus protests and made them stick. We spent a lot of time on campus dialogues, vigils, meetings—anything to enable students and faculty to express their opinions, however disagreeable. I’m very proud of what we did.

In the two and a half months I had left at Carnegie Mellon, I was torn between making all the connections in Washington to get confirmed, which I was unanimously, and saying goodbye to all our Pittsburgh friends.⁴⁹ For example, we had a dinner for Acting President Ed and Virginia Schatz, Vice President Jack and Jane Johnson, and Dean Erle Swank. At the end, the Cameron Choir appeared in front of the house and sang Christmas carols, came in for cider and doughnuts, and sat on the floor to sing some more. Especially after all the tumultuous events all of us had lived through, I was moved when the leaders of the student government gave me a plaque that read:

On the evening of February 17, 1972, Bunny and I crossed the Potomac River in our packed station wagon to enter Washington and a new life.