Transcript

And again, it's interesting, because when I was a second year Assistant Professor I was really excited both about MIS, and this computer business game.  And as Assistant Professors do, you know, my colleagues, we'd sit around, we'd talk at the luncheon tables.  And it was widely felt amongst the group that what I was doing was suicidal.  I needed to be in the main areas of the school doing normal, respectable kind of worK. And it just didn't actually feel like so much fun to do what they were doing.

And the school's strength is that as the years went by, all those that I was having lunch with went elsewhere, and I was kept behind.  And we've looked — and this, of course, is a part of the school is we look for unusual, restless minds, and see how we can twist them into our process.  That our great teacher of business policy, Ken Andrews, came out of his a PhD in English.  Our tremendous managerial economist, Bob Schlaifer, was brought here because of his great understanding of Greek.

And so it's been the school's ability over the years to tolerate unusual thought processes. And then some of them adapt, and it's terrific, and some of them don't, and they leave. But there has been a climate of experimentation, and willingness that has gone on, you know, certainly since 1960.