Models of my life 2

Chapter 6 Managing Research:
Berkeley
Dorothea and I set out for Berkeley at the end of the summer of 1939, intending to make the trip a bit of a holiday. The Burlington Railroad from Chicago to Denver connected with the Denver and Rio Grande Western. From Denver the train, nosing south to Pueblo, Colorado, pierced the Front Range through the Royal Gorge, then plodded steadily northward again up the valley of the Arkansas, with the Front Range red in reflected sunlight to the east and the shadowed, snow-capped Sawatch Range to the west. For five hours the locomotives throbbed rhythmically, lifting their heavy load 1,000 feet upward each hour, just the vertical pace of a mountain hiker on a steep trail. One by one, Mounts Princeton, Yale, and Harvard passed in review (three almost identical pyramids, but the latter a few hundred feet higher than its rivals). Gradually the valley narrowed.
Around sunset, the altered click-clack of the wheels told you that you had crossed Tennessee Pass and the Continental Divide, and were now descending the valley of the Eagle River, a tributary of the Colorado. In another hour, the train would halt at Glenwood Springs, where you could disembark and spend a couple of days at the old resort hotel, enjoying the mountains and the sulfurous hot springs.
From Glenwood Springs, the D&RGW brought you next to Salt Lake City, where the Western Pacific picked up the Pullman cars for the rest of the trip. If you chose the right train, you would sleep through most of the Nevada desert and enter California through the Feather River Canyon the next morning. It was a wonderful trip, full of gorgeous mountain scenery, the long half-day pull up the Arkansas valley being especially dramatic, and the transcontinental Pullman providing much of the ambiance of a sea voyage, but without storms or seasickness. Perhaps you can still do something like that on Amtrak; I haven’t checked the schedules recently.

Dorothea was returning to her native California soil, I was making my second visit there. We reached Glenwood Springs on the evening of August 30, and spent the next day on a mountain trail above the hotel. That night we turned in early. Our room was on the first floor, facing a large interior courtyard of the hotel. At 2:00 A.M. I was awakened by a radio blasting from the court. I recognized the loud rasping voice instantly, and felt the hair bristle on my neck. Adolf Hitler was announcing that German armies had entered Poland.
The war had little immediate effect on our professional lives, almost no effect at all for two years. But except for the lull of the Phony War,* those years were full of terrifying news.
The Bureau of Public Administration
When my mind was not turned to the events in Europe, my three years at Berkeley as director of Administrative Measurement Studies were as exciting and illuminating as the previous three years had been. I learned to manage an organization of considerable size (not only my own staff of five, but the fifty WPA workers who were attached to our project and, while we were studying the State Relief Administration, several hundred people in that organization as well). Somehow, my social self was ablemost of the timeto overcome the introverted self. I learned how to delegate. I even learned how to fire an unsatisfactory employee.
I was able to delegate much of the direct management task. The WPA group had a supervisor, a cheerful and able young Mormon graduate student, whose name I have not been able to recover. Bill Divine, who had just finished his studies in public administration at Pomona, took chief responsibility for the large project in the State Relief Administration in Los Angeles; he lived there and I visited every couple of weeks. Fred Sharp supervised most of the extensive field work for our studies of land use in the San Francisco Bay area. Ronald Shephard saw to it that we used appropriate statistical techniques and theories in all our work. Hence, my administrative duties were largely limited to supervising these immediate assistants and a secretary, planning and budgeting for the project, and hiring staff replacements. I learned early that (in principle, at least) it gets easier, not harder, to administer as you move upward in an organization.

• After the destruction of Poland in September 1939, there was little Nazi military action in Europe until the assault on Denmark and Norway in April 1940. Hence, “Phony War” for the interlude.

Nominally, Sam May, director of the Bureau of Public Administration, was my boss and in charge of the project. But he paid little attention to it, being busy learning to ice skate at the new rink in Berkeley and courting a young woman who soon became his second wife (he had been a widower). Often forgetting that he was there, I made the hiring and firing decisions that properly were his, and had complete responsibility for the plans and budget. Once or twice he expressed irritation at my failure to consult him, but he never reversed my decisions.
He paid more attention to some other Bureau functions, especially the advisory service it provided to the state legislature. I pitched in a couple of times on legislative studies, writing a report on water problems in the Central Valley, then as now a major set of issues in California politics, and on reapportionment of the state legislature. Once I helped draft the annual report to the legislature of UC Berkeley President Robert Gordon Sproul. He told us to be sure to devote plenty of space to medicine, agriculture, and engineering; the rest didn’t matter much.
My colleague of the previous summer, Milton Chernin, a senior member of the Bureau staff and fully twenty-nine years of age, with his Ph.D. behind him, was the older brother who instructed me on the novel problems of managing a large project, and who served as front man when the demands of extroversion were too much for me. He participated actively in our study with the State Welfare Administration and advised on the others.
Chernin also served as a surrogate director for most of the other programs of the Bureau. At this time he had no tenure track position at Berkeley, and no strong prospects for one, but friends on the faculty who were aware of his talents were working on it. Before we left, he had become a faculty member in the School of Social Welfare, and subsequently dean, a position he held until his retirement from the faculty many years later. He also became a major force in Berkeley academic politics, and after his retirement served as president of the Faculty Club for a number of years. He died in 1989. When I visited the Berkeley campus early in 1990 to give the Hitchcock Lectures, I was delighted and moved to find his portrait beaming down on me, hanging over the fireplace of the Club. He had been a mainstay of the campus for fifty years.
Chernin was a small, rather homely man (Dorothea dissents, but that was my perception), graying and balding prematurely, with a big nose on an invariably cheerful face. He was full of jokes and stories, all of them with a point and many of them self-deprecating. He was extremely bright, oriented to social policy more than to science. He was a staunch liberal, and, as we shall see, was sometimes accused, without basis, of Communist tendencies and associations. Modest to a fault, more than generous in sharing

credit, he was loved deeply by his associates, hence always able to claim their loyalty. It was a joy to have him around, together with his attractive, bright, skeptical, streetwise wife, Gertrude, a social worker.
Victor Jones and his wife, Annie Mae, had come to Berkeley the previous year from Chicago, where they had been our good friends in the Political Science Department. Victor and I and several others shared an office for several years in the Bureau, very amicably, although we sometimes had to draw a chalk line on the floor to prevent territorial encroachments. Victor was a professional Southerner, with a great fondness for black-eyed peas. (They always looked to me like beans instead of peas.)
There were too many others at the Bureau to mention here. It was our social as well as our professional homean exuberant young group of political scientists who both worked together and partied together. At a party celebrating my success in the final oral Ph.D. exam at Chicago, they presented me with a copy of Bertrand Russell’s An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, in which I find all of their names inscribed to remind me of those times.
For the first two years, we lived in a tiny cottage on Virginia Street, north of the campus and high above it, with a gorgeous view of the Golden Gate. The living room floor sloped noticeably westward to a large French door, ten feet above the walk, making things a little precarious for people who drank too much during a party, but we never lost a guest in this way. After Dorothea became pregnant, we moved down the hill, bitterly regretting our loss of the view, but glad to be relieved of the steep climb home each evening.
The landlord of our aerie, the ancient Mr. Greeley, didn’t maintain the premises very well. Between the bottom of the front door panel and the sill was a one-inch gap, allowing free entry to the rainwater that flowed across our porch during the winter rains, and free entry also to a friendly little garter snake. When we asked Mr. Greeley to replace the door, he replied, “I’d like to, but it fits so well.” This statement was so outrageously contrafactual, and uttered so matter-of-factly, that we were silenced, despairing of communicating.
The Research Project
As the research project got under way, we did not take too seriously the details of the Rockefeller proposal, and especially the rather flaky data we had inherited from the local government study, but asked ourselves what kind of measurement studies would both be feasible and make substantial contributions to the field. We wanted to show how quantitative empirical

research could contribute to the understanding and solution of municipal problems. In the course of the three years, we completed three major studies, producing a monograph from each (Simon et al. 1941; Simon, Shephard, and Sharp 1943; Simon 1943), as well as a number of papers.
Here I had a different experience of collegiality than in my previous work with Ridley. Now I was the “boss,” but my colleagues were my contemporaries, and we worked as equals, formal authority seldom showing itself. Bill Divine, Ronald Shephard, and Fred Sharp each had a rather distinct sphere of work, so that I tended to work with them one-on-one, rather than as a group. We found each other congenial, and our relations were warm.
The first study, a field experiment we carried out in the State Relief Administration, was something I would never have dared had I been experienced enough to understand what it entailed. It was, I think, the largest experiment that had ever been carried out in an organization up to that time, comparable in scope to the Hawthorne studies of worker attitudes and productivity, carried out in the Western Electric Company during the 1930s, and more systematically designed. Its purpose was to determine how large the case loads of social workers should be for the most effective operation of the agency. Bill Divine and I have told much of the story of the research elsewhere (Simon and Divine 1941), and in chapter 8 I will describe how it became embroiled in a heated California state political battle.
The SRA study generated a great mass of data. To process them, we made arrangements to use the equipment in the Los Angeles Service Bureau of IBM. There we encountered new machines with wired plugboards that were far more flexible and powerful than the old tabulator I had used in Chicago. This was my second experience with prehistoric computers, further whetting my appetite and curiosity.
The second study, an analysis of fire risks and losses, was a natural successor to the measurement research that Ridley and I had done. It involved a detailed analysis of land use maps for the Bay area, and a correlation of building construction and use with fire losses, so that fire loss experience could be compared among cities after appropriate allowance for the amounts and kinds of property at risk.
Only a few insurance companies had at that time enough statistical sophistication to appreciate the study, and to the best of my knowledge, it went largely unnoticed and unused. Nearly forty years later, I received an admiring letter from a fire insurance actuary, who assured me that the study had been a generation ahead of its time. That was comforting, but did not make the work seem less futile.
The third study, Fiscal Aspects of Metropolitan Consolidation (Simon 1943a), was a theoretical analysis of the incidence of urban property taxes

together with an examination of the actual pattern of municipal revenues and services in the San Francisco Metropolitan Area, the two analyses leading to conclusions about what economic effects the consolidation of local governments in the metropolitan area would have.
A paper drawn from the study was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (1943b), my first technical publication in that discipline, and later reprinted by the American Economic Association. It was a standard reference on property tax incidence for many years. The important lesson I learned from this analysis was that my conclusions depended at least as much on certain assumptions about boundary conditions as on the central assumptions of economic rationality that lie at the core of neoclassical theory.
By boundary conditions I mean the assumptions that have to be made about which indirect effects of a change in taxes the human actors would take into account in making their decisions and which they would ignore. Would they respond to the prospect that increasing the tax would lower the return on capital generally, or would that be neglected in their calculations? The answer to that question turned out to make all the difference with regard to who would ultimately pay the tax. The “action” lay in the boundary conditions, not in the assumption that people were trying to behave optimally. Recognizing this fact later provided me with an important clue for building the bridge between theories of human bounded rationality and economic theory.
Completing the Doctorate
Apart from what I learned in carrying out the research project, the period at Berkeley contributed in several other ways to my education. Through exposure to Ronald Shephard and Kenneth May, who were doctoral students of the mathematician and economist Griffith Evans and the mathematical statistician Jerzy Neyman, I received an education in economics and statistics that took me well beyond what I had learned at Chicago. Acknowledgments in my publications during the 1950s record what I learned from them about the method of comparative statics in economics and about the theory of statistical tests.
While we were at Berkeley, I also completed my University of Chicago Ph.D. in political science. By arrangement, I took a three-month leave of absence in 1940 to prepare for preliminary examinations in constitutional law, political theory, political parties and propaganda, and statistics, which I was permitted to write in Berkeley under the supervision of the Political

Science Department there. I was permitted to take a statistics exam in place of that in international relations usually required; the statistics exam was constructed by Oskar Lange of the Economics Department at Chicago.
Before mailing the exams back to Chicago, I had them copied as insurance against possible loss, and I still have those copies. On casual rereading they now look most impressiveI was able to cite hundreds of Supreme Court cases by title and date and to drop the names of numerous obscure political philosophers. On the other hand, while my answers on the political parties and propaganda exam had seemed brilliant and even original to me at the time, they seem less so now. Occasionally the questions I answered were rather different from the ones that were asked, still a common failing on students’ examinations.
In answering one question on statistics, I ostentatiously provided two separate derivations of the chi- square distribution. (While taking my shower on the morning of that exam, it came to me with blinding and unaccountable certainty that there would be a question on chi-square, and I boned up on it before setting out for the exam room. On no other occasion have I had such loving attention from my guardian angel.)
Apparently I displayed enough erudition on the examinations to satisfy the department. Leonard White was kind enough to write me before Christmas that, while the committee had not yet met to make a decision, having seen the grades on the examinations, he had no doubts about what its decision would be. Shortly after the beginning of the new year, 1941, I was notified that I had passed. With the exams out of the way, I began to devote evenings and those weekends I could spare to drafting my thesis.
The document gradually expanded from an outline to a few paragraphs for each chapter, then to a full draft. My committee (Professors White, Pritchett, Ridley, and Perry from the Philosophy Department) responded with minimal criticisms, mainly because the first two were unwilling to claim that they knew what I was doing. The most searching critique I got was from Charner Marquis Perry, a specialist in ethics. The second draft was approved, and I was allowed to return to Chicago in May 1942 for my examination.
The exam was scheduled for early afternoon. I stopped to watch a match on the tennis courts at 58th Street, was caught in a heavy Chicago spring shower, and arrived at the examination room drenched. The committee (Herman Finer was present, but Lasswell, Gosnell, and Schuman were not) had been looking at my graduate transcript, and had discovered to their astonishment and even consternation that the only graduate course for which I had credit was in boxing (I had earned a B). I explained that I had relied on the Chicago policy that demanded successful performance only

on comprehensive exams; and besides, credit for a number of my graduate courses had been recorded on my undergraduate transcript (which they did not have before them). The explanation was accepted, how grudgingly I don’t know.
My only other difficulty on the exam derived from my stubborn positivism. The examiners, especially devout Catholic Jerry Kerwin and British Labourite Herman Finer, found it difficult to believe that one could not prove, from self-evident premises, that Hitler was a bad man. And if one couldn’t prove it, what right had one to believe it? I doubt whether they bought my positivist explanation that choice begins with faith in value premises, not with proof of their correctness. But at the end of the exam they conferred for only about fifteen minutes before calling me in to congratulate me.
What was the extent of my formal education when I had earned the Ph.D.? In addition to the broad general education that my high school and the University of Chicago had given me, I had excellent training in political science and a solid foundation in economics. I had made a modest beginning in mathematics, a basis for subsequent self-instruction. I had studied bits and dabs of science.
Clearly I had strong preparation for the teaching and research in administration, economics, and even operations research, that would largely occupy me for nearly fifteen years after I received my degree. Unless practice in self-education is such preparation, however, I had almost no background for the work in computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology that would occupy me for most of the rest of my life. Of course these were new or radically changing fields when I entered them. Since my colleagues and I were active in creating these new disciplines, we had plenty of time for learning and no problem of catching up with our predecessors. Young researchers who moved into molecular biology in the 1940s can tell a similar story. Interdisciplinary adventure is easiest in new fields.
Writing Administrative Behavior
As I have mentioned, my dissertation later became Administrative Behavior, and it contains almost all the essential content of the book. I have also offered an explanation (or rationalization) of how it was possible for me to write such a document without extensive experience of administration, and I should like to expand on it.
The dissertation examined administration as a decision-making process, introducing that framework with the help of a maze metaphor: ''A simplified

model of human decision making is provided by the behavior of a white rat when he is confronted, in the psychological laboratory, with a maze, one path of which leads to food." As several readers of the manuscript who provided me with comments prior to publication of the revised thesis objected strongly to the human/rat analogy, it disappeared, along with the maze metaphor, from the published version. But it is clear from this brief quotation and the pages that followed it in the dissertation that I viewed decision making very much in terms of making successive choices along a branching path.
Whether I had been preoccupied with mazes prior to this time, I cannot recall. They were prominent in the writings of the principal author upon whom I relied for my psychological facts, Edward Tolman of the University of California at Berkeley. As was true of most other behaviorist psychologists of that time, the subjects of his experiments on choice were usually rats, not people.
The dissertation contains the foundation and much of the superstructure of the theory of bounded rationality that has been my lodestar for nearly fifty years. The idea had its origins in the Milwaukee recreation study, was reinforced by what I had discovered about the boundary conditions of rationality in the California tax incidence study, and was not contradicted by any of the management or other human experiences I had had in my six working years, or in the years that preceded them.
In a previous chapter, I explained how, without any management experience, I wrote, at twenty-two, a textbook on municipal administration, to be used in a training course for city managers. I was thoroughly familiar with the literature of public administration and management, and simply culled and organized this information, with some sharpening of the logic and some translation into the specific terms and situations of municipal administration. Only intelligence and literary skill were required, not experience.
But how could I, at age twenty-five and with minimal management experience, have written Administrative Behavior, a book that challenged (more or less successfully and correctly, as it turned out) much of the received administrative theory of its day, and provided a new conceptual framework (decision making) for the analysis and description of organizational phenomena?
Part of the answer is that I had read Chester I. Barnard’s Functions of the Executive with painstaking care shortly after its publication in 1938, and had led a discussion group with my colleagues in Berkeley in which we examined it closely. In Administrative Behavior, I acknowledged Barnard as the source of many of my central ideas regarding authority, the "zone

of indifference" or “acceptance,” the equilibrium of inducements and contributions, and other basic topics. Although Barnard did not construct a systematic theory of decision making, much of his discussion was directed at the executive’s decision-making processes. All of these intellectual debts can be traced through the footnotes of my book.
Barnard’s contribution to my notion of organizational identification is more equivocal. The idea is certainly present in his book (see, for example, the distinction between organizational and personal decisions, pages 187 89, from which I quote at length on pages 203 4 of Administrative Behavior), but I had come to it much earlier, while working on the Milwaukee recreation study in 1935 (see Administrative Behavior, pages 211 12).
The other central idea in my book that appears in only muted form in Barnard’s is bounded rationality. The closest parallel is Barnard’s notion of opportunism and strategic factors, ideas that he derives from John
R. Commons. Since I had also read Commons, the latter’s Institutional Economics may have been a common source for these various conceptions of rationality that deviate from the economists’ maximization of subjective expected utility.
Administrative Behavior also contained a provocative discussion of the “proverbs of administration.” This attack on traditional principles of administration was derived almost purely from the logical structure and internal inconsistency of the principles themselves. No experience of organization was required to detect it, just a taste for rigor in reasoning.
Now the idea of bounded rationality, which appears to be the most novel and original component of the work, is not specifically an organizational concept. It applies as fully to individual decision making as to organizational decision making. By the age of twenty-five, I had already had ample experiences in life to understand the limits of the economists’ framework of maximizing subjective expected utility as applied to actual human behavior. The scantiness of my experiences with organizations posed no particular limit to my development of an alternative approach to decision making.
Applying the ideas of bounded rationality to organizations could then be easily achieved with only a bookish knowledge of organizations. It was simply necessary to ask what the implications of bounded rationality were for the division of labor, for authority, for organizational identification, for coordination, and so on. Inference rather than empirical observation could, and did, guide this analysis.
That this kind of inference led to a realistic account of many organizational phenomena is the surprising outcome of the writing of Administrative Behavior; within the work I explain the underlying insight that led me to it:

Rationality, then, does not determine behavior. Within the area of rationality behavior is perfectly flexible and adaptable to abilities, goals, and knowledge. Instead, behavior is determined by the irrational and nonrational elements that bound the area of rationality. The area of rationality is the area of adaptability to these nonrational elements. Two persons, given the same possible alternatives, the same values, the same knowlege, can rationally reach only the same decision. Hence, administrative theory must be concerned with the limits of rationality, and the manner in which organization affects these limits for the person making a decision. The theory must determine . . . how institutionalized decisions can be made to conform to values developed within a broader organization structure. The theory must be a critique of the effect (judged from the point of view of the whole organization) of the organizational structure upon the decisions of its component parts and its individual members. [P. 241]
Around 1945, while I was teaching at Illinois Institute of Technology, I revised my thesis, circulated it for comment, revised it again, found an editor willing to risk it (Donald Porter Geddes at Macmillan), and published it in 1947. It was built around two interrelated ideas that have been at the core of my whole intellectual activity: (1) human beings are able to achieve only a very bounded rationality, and (2) as one consequence of their cognitive limitations, they are prone to identify with subgoals. I would not object to having my whole scientific output described as largely a glossa rather elaborate gloss, to be sureon the pages of Administrative Behavior where these ideas are first set forth (especially pages 39 41, 204 12, and 240 44).
One of the people to whom I circulated the manuscript was Chester Barnard, whom I had admired since his book appeared a decade earlier, but whom I had never met or even communicated with. He replied by sending me about fifteen pages of insightful comments. This emboldened me to ask him if he would write a foreword to the book, which he did.
The book created no sensation when it appeared, but it was widely and quite favorably reviewed in journals of public administration and business management. Chester Barnard’s foreword undoubtedly contributed to its good reception. At the time, I was disappointed that none of the reviewers recognized it as the revolutionary document I firmly believed it to be, but in retrospect, I think I was treated generously. It sold a couple of thousand copies within a year or two after publication, gradually declined to about four hundred a year, and then, after the fifth year, began a steady increase in sales. It has remained in print since, never selling less than a few thousand copies each year.

America Enters the War
The years in Chicago and Berkeley were lived against the grim background of the Götterdämmerung being prepared and enacted in Europe. The Spanish Civil War, the rape of Austria and Czechoslovakia, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the invasion of Poland, the fall of France, the bombing of Britainall evoke in me vivid memories of anger and frustration.
In the spring of 1940, at a movie theater in Los Angeles, I watched with tears of rage the newsreels of divebombers destroying buildings and strafing farmers in the unprotected Norwegian countryside. I took comfort from the apparent invincibility of the French army and fortresses, until I reread the forecasts of Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller in the Encyclopedia Britannica and knew that the Blitzkrieg would not be halted.
In the terrible summer of that year, I often studied on the Berkeley hillside overlooking the Bay and the Golden Gate, frequently interrupted by gloomy thoughts of the destruction of Europe, and perhaps the Free World. Hitler had touched my life directly, too, if only slightly: My father’s sister, niece, and niece’s husband escaped from Germany; Uncle Julius died either during a flight on foot over the Pyrenees or in a concentration camp.
We heard Winston Churchill’s brave words of defiance, and hung on the news of the bombing of Britain. We were relieved when Ambassador Kennedy stated (perhaps with fingers crossed) his confidence in the survival of Great Britain, and thereby gave support to President Roosevelt’s re-election campaign. I never doubted that Great Britain would repel the assault, but all the reasons for my confidence were (by historical hindsight) specious, the products of wishful thinking. I learned from this and later experiences during World War II that I am an incorrigible optimist, perhaps sustained by the even stauncher optimism of my wife.
At the beginning of July 1941, the Russian armies were reeling under the Nazi attack. In my office, I kept track of their movements with pins on a map. I could not believe that Stalin had been so stupid as to allow his main armies to be trapped in Poland and White Russia; I was much more optimistic than those around me, thinking the Germans had greatly exaggerated their claims of prisoners. I pointed to the huge distances in eastern, as compared with western, Europe and to the logistic difficulties the Germans would soon encounter.
A group of us drove up to the Russian River for the Fourth of July weekend holiday. I sat in the sun, weeding a strawberry patch (I could weed the plants even if I couldn’t spot the berries because of my color blindness). From a nearby house, a radio was booming out the sententious words of

H. V. Kaltenborn, the oracle of the airways in those days, as he pronounced a death sentence on the Russian armies. Although I didn’t believe himdespised him, in factit was depressing. I clung to my faith in logistics and in Stalin’s rationality. (I turned out to be right, again mostly for the wrong reasons.)
Later in the summer of 1941, we joined our neighbors Dan and Lucille Arnon for a pack trip on the Muir Trail in the high Sierra. As we followed the San Joaquin River higher and higher toward its sources, then branched off to Evolution Valley, the mountains became our world. There was no Berkeley, no war; just the great peaks around us, and the stream rushing through the green valley, and the daily tasks of pitching camp, fishing, cooking, rounding up and packing the mules, Daisy and Ruby. We climbed the steep trail to Evolution Basin, huddled at the timberline under the sheer 1,000-foot cliff of the Darwin Range.
Just short of Muir Pass, we turned back and began to retrace our steps. The spell was broken only when we came to the gap overlooking Evolution Valley and could again see the foothills above the Central Valley. Then we remembered Berkeley and Europe. After being away for two weeks, we had no knowledge of whether our country was at war or at peace.
A little further down the trail we met a family just coming in: a husband and wife with two little girls. The younger girl proudly told us that, although two years earlier she had ridden a horse, this time she was walking all the way. We asked for the news. America was still at peace, they said. But the war came, of course, soon after.
On the morning of Sunday, December 7, I was lying on the floor of our small living room, reading the New York Times (I had not yet kicked the newspaper habit) and listening to a radio symphony program.
Dorothea was in the next room. The music was interrupted for an announcement. As with millions of other Americans, that is how the news of Pearl Harbor broke in on our quiet Sunday. My first reaction was one of relief, a release from the tension of the long and anxious waiting. Now Hitler was doomed. My second reaction was, “The poor Japanese, they don’t stand a chance.”
As I had been an ardent interventionist, I felt I should enlist promptly for combat service. But because of my education and experience, I thought it not unreasonable to seek a commission. Easier said than done, because of my color blindness. But Professor Joseph Harris in Berkeley’s Political Science Department was a good friend, and his brother was commanding general of the Ninth Service Command. With Joe’s encouragement and letter of introduction to his brother, I sought a waiver for my color blindness for

service in the Coast Artillery (which had mostly become anti-aircraft artillery). In a letter to Joe Harris on March 24, 1942, I wrote:
My own plans for the coming year are more indefinite than ever. I have made preliminary inquiries at the Presidio where I was informed that it is unlikely that my color blindness would be waived for any of the combat Arms. The Navy rejected me on the same grounds last week. I have written to your brother, but there has not been time yet for a reply. I have not yet given up hope, but I have given some thought to what I should do if I can’t get into the Services.
I have decided, first of all, that I will not take a commission to do any purely paper-work in the Army or Navy, even if my defect is waived. I think I can be more useful as a civilian. If I do stay in civilian life, I believe that I can accomplish more as a teacher than as a minor functionary in some “war agency.” Hence, I am keeping my eyes open for a teaching post. If any inquiries come your way, I hope you will keep me in mind.
After a bit of correspondence, the waiver was forthcoming from the Ninth Service Command. Soon I was asked to report for my medical exam, at Fort Baker, just north of the Golden Gate. I appeared, carrying the sheaf of correspondence relating to the waiver, which had become an inch thick with the endorsements of successive layers of the military bureaucracy. I was declared hale, a recent high-tech repair to one of my teeth was admired by the dental examiners, my color blindness, caught by the Ishahara test, was duly noted, and I was sent, still stark naked, to the commanding colonel. He went slowly through my file, page by page, from bottom to top. At last he raised his head and said, “Oh, that waiver is for limited service in the combat arms, and the damned Democrats have changed the rules again so that we cannot grant waivers for limited service.”
My choice was between training for a commission in a noncombat branch with a desk job for the duration, or eventual conscription as a private. On those terms, I preferred to stay out until called. My “greetings,” postponed because of my family responsibilities, by a temporary loss of papers between Chicago and Berkeley, and by a siege of mononucleosis that delayed a medical exam, finally arrived the week before Hiroshima, but were canceled when Japan surrendered and the rules about dependents were changed (by this time we had two children). I would be lying if I said I was sorry to have missed that war; perhaps just a little guilty.

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The three Berkeley years were a contrast in black and whitethe grim shadow of the war falling on the bright sunlight of my professional and social life. But it is the sunlight that dominates my memories of it: the exhilaration of directing the project research, the comradeship of Chernie, Victor, Bill, Fred, and Shep, and the others in the Bureau and the Political Science Department, the gradual emergence of the thesis out of my moonlighting labors, the economics and statistics I learned by association with Shep and Kenny May and, through them, with Griffith Evans and Jerzy Neyman. When I visit California now, it is easy to work up nostalgia for it. I merely have to walk up the steep hill of Virginia Street to our little cottage, which still stands there overlooking the Golden Gate, but has experienced upward mobility with the addition of a second story.

Chapter 7
Teaching at Illinois Tech
When it became increasingly probable, in the spring of 1942, that I was not immediately going to become a soldier, and when my degree was in hand, I began to think about how I would support myself and my family when the Berkeley project ended. Once again, I had no real decision to make. Victor Jones, whom I had known first as a graduate student at Chicago, then as a colleague at Berkeley, and who was now returning to Berkeley after a year at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, recommended me for the position he vacated there.
There were two hurdles: When it still appeared that I was going into military service, Dean John Larkin at IIT had offered the job to another person. Fortunately, he turned it down. Second, Dean Larkin was a little skeptical of my qualificationsa long list of publications but no teaching experience. Would I be able and willing to teach large numbers of under-graduates? His doubts overcome, he offered me the job and I accepted. I was pleased at the prospect, for an engineering school seemed more likely to provide a congenial environment for a mathematical political scientist than most other universities. I was right, and have subsequently spent my entire teaching career in institutes of technology (at least until Carnegie Tech decided to change its name and become a university).
The move by train back to Chicago was not difficult. Kathie, three months old, fit snugly into a basket. Our household furnishings came by truck. There was a serious housing shortage at this time (which became even more severe when the war ended), but we moved into the apartment the Joneses had vacated, a second-floor Pullman with three bedrooms on 57th Street near Kenwood, in the University of Chicago neighborhood. (Milton Friedman and his family occupied an apartment in the same building for many

years.) The government-controlled wartime rent was about $900 per year, not bad on a $2,800 salary. Life at IIT
Teaching loads at Illinois Tech during World War II ranged from fifteen to eighteen hours a week,
summers included, but were reduced to more reasonable levels thereafter (twelve hours). The long teaching hours left little opportunity or energy for empirical research. To supplement a modest academic salary, I took up part-time work again with the International City Managers’ Association, editing, writing, and participating in training activities. A good deal of time went, also, into becoming a skillful academic politicianeven to playing bridge or billiards nearly every noon to widen my acquaintance among the faculty. As a result, I was elected to a postwar planning committee, whose activities greatly increased my understanding of university administration and finance.
My initial preoccupations in my new job are reflected in part of a letter I wrote on January 3, 1943, to Grace Knoedler, who was helping put our measurement studies through the University Press in Berkeley:
The school situation here is as uncertain as I imagine it to be at California. The consensus seems to be that, since we are a technical school, our enrollment may not suffer badly. Whether I will teach political science next semester, mathematics, or chemistry, I don’t yet know.
I have had a good deal of fun this semester, especially with a course in American Political Institutions and Ideas. We spent the first part of the semester reviewing American gov’t, and the rest studying the formation of the Constitution. Not particularly scientific, but I’ve had a chance to read some of the writings of the founding fathers.
Teaching constitutional law to engineers is, as you might surmise, not the most exhilarating pursuit that can be imagined, but they seem to absorb at least a modicum of it. My other course, Administrative Aspects of Planning, hasn’t worked out quite as satisfactorily as I had hoped, largely because there is a problem of working out a raison d’être with the faculty of the architecture department. They teach these people a very Utopian variety of city planning, and I have a choice between telling the students that, legally and administratively, such planning is not possible in this country at this time, or telling them how to do a less Utopian kind of planning. You can see that this might breed both confusion and discouragement in their minds, and I have yet to find the proper approach.
With respect to teaching methods, I am neither a wiser nor a happier man. First, 3 hours a week of lectures is too much talking time for a course

if the students do any independent work outside. Yet, if the class is large, it is hard to use that time for anything but lecturing; and if the students don’t do any reading, it is impossible to conduct a discussion. Thus far, I have largely refused to cover the material of the readings in my lectures. The students who dislike to read, and they seem to be numerous enough, are pretty completely thrown off the track by this, and never get back on again.
How does one instill curiosity into people? Without it, this ''educational" process is a continual struggle between a student who is trying to get by, and a teacher who is trying to catch him at it, and neither of them particularly profiting by it.
Well, I don’t know the answer to all this, and for occupational reasons I am going to proceed cautiously, conservatively, and traditionally for the next year or twobut not indefinitely. Maybe the New Deal in subsidized higher education will bring to us students who have some real drive and interest.
I undoubtedly wrote this letter at a moment of end-of-term despondency or cynicism after one semester of teaching, for from the beginning, I have in fact enjoyed teaching, and have been successful at it, or at least popular with my students. Except for one occasion, which I will explain in chapter 18, evaluations from my students have always been near the top of the range. The problems I mentioned in the letter, with constitutional law and planning administration, were real enough, however, as I shall explain.
At IIT in 1942 the students I enjoyed most were the co-op engineering students, who normally alternated semesters in school and in a factory. They were a couple of years older than typical undergraduates (nearly as old as I when I started teaching there) and serious about their studies, especially when they thought them relevant to their future careers.
My biggest assignment, often two or three sections each semester, was to teach these engineers “Constitutional Law,” a required course. John Larkin had found it difficult to get the engineers to take an American government course seriously, and hit on lawtaught by the case method, with its discipline of logic and writing briefsas an alternative route to the goal. Surprisingly, it worked, for the students found in it something solid to chew on and digest.
In 1942, however, because of the war, the students were required to carry overloads in order to graduate as quickly as possible; and since my course was marginal to their professional goals, they began to complain about the workload. In fact, some of their engineering professors had suggested that perhaps they could persuade me to ease up in this “inessential” course. I responded by sending a memorandum to the dean of engineering and the

engineering professors stating that, if each of them were willing to reduce his assignments by 25 percent, I would follow suit. I heard no more about the matter, and had the respect from then on of both students and faculty.
In fact, we got on so well that they invited me to give a talk at their senior banquet, an affair attended by the dean of engineering and the president. Randomly thumbing through the encyclopedia, I became fascinated by the article on lemmings, and decided that those obsessed creatures provided me with an excellent topicallowing me to deliver a sermon on leadership while exercising my skills as a ham and stand-up comedian. I outdid myself that evening. Perhaps the presence of the president alarmed me enough to get my adrenaline flowing. From then on I was on President Heald’s list of stars, and my academic career at IIT went smoothly.
Those mature and demanding co-op students, and the even more mature and demanding GIs who appeared after the war, taught me a great deal about teaching. I learned that there is no use lecturing to a class unless the class is listening. And they will only listen if you are saying something that they think they can understand and that seems relevant. They will listen better if you talk LOUDLY. If you pace up and down, you can tell from their moving heads whether they are following you (like the crowd at a tennis match).
You can also get feedback by keeping your eye on the prettiest girl in the class to see whether she is attentive. (Unfortunately, at that time engineering classes did not have female students.)
If the students are engineers, they will better understand the logic of a Supreme Court case if you can represent it on the blackboard as a wiring diagram for an electric circuit, the switches representing the yes-or-no choices of the court. (The maze again!) The wiring diagram for the case of Marbury v.
Madison, in which the Supreme Court for the first time declared an act of Congress unconstitutional, being rather baroque, pleased the students no end. Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is entertaining (the more respectable word would be interesting).
Coverage of subject matter is a snare and a delusion. You begin where the students are prepared to begin; and you carry them as far as you can without losing them. Whether that takes you to the end of the specified curriculum, half as far, or twice as far, is irrelevant. You talk from notes, and certainly do not read lecturesin fact, it is better if you do not write them out. Anything you cannot communicate without reading will be forgotten instantly, and probably is not suitable for a lecture anyway.
You prepare notes for more material than you can possibly cover so that you don’t suffer from the beginning teacher’s nightmare: What happens if I run out of material before the class ends? (If you do, which almost never happens, you dismiss the class. They will thank you for it.) There is zero

correlation between the number of hours you put in preparing formally for your classes and their success, provided that you have a coherent general outline of the curriculum and a thorough knowledge of the subject.
You start every class by giving students the opportunity (or better, the obligation) to ask questions about their reading, about previous sessions, or about anything. You take each question seriously, and answer it without making a jackass of the student who asked it (no matter how foolish the question). After a year of teaching constitutional law, I found I was able to write a twenty-page document to distribute to students that provided answers to 90 percent of the questions they asked. I was never sure whether that was a good thing, though, for it cut down the questioning.
Of course, students don’t learn by being lectured at, anyway; they learn by thinking hard, solving problems, dissecting proofs. Requiring them to write briefs was the most important component of our teaching at IIT. After students have thought hard about a topic, a lecture can help them sort out and organize their thoughts. Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds. If students have thought about something, you can discuss it profitably in class; without the preparation, it is just a bull session.
You keep lectures on the high ground. The details of proofs are better gleaned from books. Above all, you feel no obligation to repeat the contents of the textbook, for that would simply confirm students in the habit of not reading it.
During subsequent years when I was a department head, I was occasionally visited by a delegation of students complaining about a faculty member. Without exception, I believe, the real core of the complaint was that the instructor showed disdain for students, or a punitive attitude toward them, or cynicism about teaching. Students are prepared to tolerate any other form of incompetence in an instructor, but not hostility. From my teaching at Illinois Tech, I learned these and other principles for being an effective and popular teacher, and I doubt that my teaching style has changed very much since those days.
Constitutional law was not my only challenging teaching assignment at Illinois Tech. The Institute had a distinguished architecture department, which at that time held its classes at the Chicago Art Institute. The chairman of the department was Mies von der Rohe, of Bauhaus fame; and Ludwig Hilbersheimer, also from the Bauhaus, was the professor of urban planning. The students were, almost to a person, staunch disciples of Mies and “Hilbs.”
One of my tasks was to teach the senior architects a course in urban land economics, followed by one in city planning administration, for both of which my textbook writing at ICMA (one of the textbooks was on planning

administration) and my research on urban property taxes in Berkeley had prepared me well. However, economics was a dirty word to most of the architecture students, who desired above all to preserve their profession for the expression of noble artistic impulses and to protect it from the baneful influence of money-grubbing speculators.
The architecture being taught at IIT, adhering to the International style, was usually labeled “functionalist,” but I soon learned that functionalism was quite different from a concern that a building serve its intended functions. What it meant to Mies was that a building should be “structurally honest,” making evident to the eye of the beholder just what function each component was performing, what load each girder was bearing. If a mullion was decorative, carrying no load, it should end several feet above the ground so that it would not appear to support anything. Whether Mies’s buildings “worked,” other than visually, was to a great extent a matter of accident. He did not always remember, for example, that the windows of bathrooms should be frosted or that chemistry labs might need a gravitational flow of distilled water. Functionalism for Hilbersheimer had a different meaning. All his city plans started with the prevailing winds. The city was to be designed so that, on average, factory smoke would not blow into the residential areas. I am sure there were additional considerations, but a prominent feature of all his plans was the wind rose, a diagram showing the frequency and strength of winds.
In this setting, I felt less like a teacher than a missionaryone preaching not to tolerant pagans but to true believers of another faith: I was preaching the message of Islam to devout Christians. It was challenging and exciting.
I started out with Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities, which apotheosizes the medieval city. Now, according to Mumford, the medieval city was not planned (although individual buildings often were), but grew in an “organic” way, following some laws of nature he never quite elucidates. Its beauty is not a formal, man-made beauty, but a natural one. Following Mumford’s argument, some of the brighter students came to see that not all order and design come from the mind of a planner. A city can grow, and so can beauty, out of the interaction of many natural and social forces. The students could not and would not deny that the medieval city, which had developed in this way, was a thing of beauty and a joy.
With the possibility established that a plan (or pattern) did not imply a planner, the students were ready to learn that markets and prices could be organizers, pattern formers. Of course I did not try to convince them (nor did I myself believe) that natural market forces could do the whole job of structuring the functional and beautiful city. When they had learned the lesson of markets, I took them on to the concept of externalities (for ex-

ample, noxious odors wafted from the stockyards to surrounding neighborhoods), those features of real economic situations that escape the market mechanism. This provided a framework for discussing the functions and administration of local planning agencies.
I don’t know whether Mies and Hilbersheimer ever learned what heresy I was preaching, for I never confronted them directly, nor, I expect, did the students. (They were much too awed.) But, however much Mies might have been dismayed had he read my Gospel, I was wholly shocked to learn the content of histhat the architect was an artist, whose task is to build beautiful buildings (or cities) either in collaboration with or in spite of the client.
Any rights of the client to determine the amount of resources to be applied to the task, or the functionality of the final structure, were not included in Mies’s view. On the contrary, the client was to be educated, persuadedI won’t say dupedto contribute the resources necessary to produce a great work of art, as defined by the architect. The client was an instrument, a means.
Mies used to love to tell the story of how he came to build his first modern structure, the Tugendat House. As a young man, he had designed some quite conventional, late Victorian, houses near Maastricht in the eastern part of the Netherlands. The wealthy Tugendat had seen them, and wanted one like them. Here Mies would pause in his story to draw on his cigar, and you were supposed to ask how Tugendat reacted when the architect arrived with his plans for an avant-garde glass and chrome structure. “Well,” Mies would say, “at first he didn’t like it at all. (Pause.) But then we smoked a couple of good cigars. (Pause.) And then we drank a couple of glasses of good Riesling. (Long pause.) And then he began to like it very much.”
If a certain passion creeps into my voice as I recount this, it is because my subsequent encounters with architects have taught me that this attitude was not peculiar to Mies, but is widely shared through the profession. Architects are notoriously prone to design buidings that are bid in at 40 percent over the agreed budget. And they are notoriously inept with such prosaic details as air-conditioning, energy efficiency, waterproof roofs, and all manner of other things their clients and the inhabitants of their buildings consider important.
A society as affluent as ours can afford to provide painters with just about all the canvas and paint they can use, and let them paint what they want. But no society is affluent enough to provide its architects with all the steel and glass and concrete they need to save their artistic souls. Nor should the members of a democratic society be obliged to delegate to the architectural profession the decisions that determine the comfort and pleasantness of

their daily surroundings. Architects have every right to try to educate public taste, but not to dictate it, or to intimidate their lay clients, diffident and embarrassed by their ignorance of the arts.
Perhaps that is enough of a sermon on the moral shortcomings of the architectural profession. This is an autobiography, not a tract. But how can it be complete if the author/subject has not revealed his strongest moral feelings, even his prejudices?
Teaching the architects at Illinois Tech gave me an intensive education in architecture, but also one in painting. I usually arrived an hour or two early for classes at the Chicago Art Institute, acquiring a thorough familiarity with the marvelous collection of paintings in the galleries. I counted that as a major perk of my professorship at Illinois Tech.
I experienced special pleasure, too, when a couple of the students in my class entered a citywide city planning contest sponsored by one of the newspapers and, in competition with professionals and their own faculty, won first prize for their proposals for the organization and administration of planning in Chicago.
My teaching duties at Illinois Tech during the war went well beyond constitutional law and city planning. Much of the time we were teaching students in a naval officer training program, which required them to learn about geopolitics (sophistication in which was supposed to account for the German strategic success) and contract law. So I taught those subjects as well, learning more than my students and generally enjoying it. I also had stints of teaching elementary statistics, labor economics, engineering economics (we’d call it “operations research” today), American history, and I do not recall how many other miscellaneous subjects. As a product of the University of Chicago, I had (and still have) the opinion that I should be able to teach almost any undergraduate course. I was never called upon to make good in chemistry or mechanical engineering.
During these years I was mindful of my goal of bringing quantitative methods to the social sciences. I continued my mathematics and science education by studying textbooks and working the exercises.
Occasionally, I sat in on courses taught by colleaguesEli Sternberg in theoretical mechanics and Karl Menger in topology. Both were excellent teachers, and Menger’s course was especially dramatic because he built it around the history of the concept of dimension, a history in which he had played a significant role. After the war, I also audited one or two graduate courses on mathematical methods in physics at the University of Chicago.
Menger, Sternberg, and I, with the aim of providing IIT students with some additional intellectual stimulation (the atmosphere was a little too vocational for our tastes), initiated a seminar in philosophy of science, which

continued for about a year. The combination of that seminar and Eli’s mechanics course stimulated my first writing in that subject, a paper on the axioms of Newtonian mechanics (Simon 1947b).
Specifically, I was bothered by the sloppy way in which the concept of mass was introduced in the standard textbooks in physics and mechanics, and set out to clean things up. When I arrived at what seemed to me a more rigorous definition, somewhat related to the ideas of the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, I wrote it down, and with Eli’s encouragement submitted it to The Philosophical Magazine, which, in spite of its name, is a highly respected physics journal that had published some papers on the subject.
My paper was accepted with almost no revision.
Although the possibility of such a connection was not at all in my mind at the time, that paper later connected up with work I was doing at the Cowles Commission (see next section) on causality and identifiability, and the junction of these topics led, in turn, to some of my most significant work in the philosophy of sciencespecifically, work on the axiomatization of scientific theories and the status within them of theoretical (not directly observable) concepts. But these ideas emerged gradually over a long period of years, and forty years later I am still refining them.
Toward the end of my stay at IIT, I had a luncheon conversation with Karl Menger that I cannot forget. He had started his career, he said, with a deep interest in logic and the foundations of mathematics. The publication of Kurt Gödel’s famous Impossibility Theorem (1931) struck him a blow from which he never recovered. If it was impossible, as Gödel had shown, to provide wholly rigorous foundations for mathematics, what was the meaning of mathematical certainty? Menger never again worked on the foundations of mathematics. Even thinking about the subject depressed him, and as he recounted this story, he gradually subsided into a gloomy silence that continued through the lunch.
The Cowles Commission
During my years at Illinois Tech, my family and I lived close to the campus of the University of Chicago and had many friends there. Toward the end of the war, at the suggestion of Bill Cooper, who had come back to teach in the undergraduate college at Chicago, I began to participate in the weekly seminars of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. The staff then included Jacob Marschak, Tjalling Koopmans, Oskar Lange, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Klein, Leo Hurwicz, Don Patinkin, Gerard Debreu, and a number of others. Franco Modigliani, then at the University of Illinois, often

came up from Urbana for the meetings, as did Andy Papandreou from Evanston, where he taught at Northwestern. George Stigler and Milton Friedman, associated with the university but not with Cowles, sometimes participated. There were also frequent visitors from abroad, including Ragnar Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo from Norway. The list, you will note, includes no less than nine future Nobelists.
A visitor’s first impression of a Cowles seminar was that everyone was talking at once, each in a different language. The impression was not wholly incorrect. Maintaining order in this group of lively minds was no mean task, and when Franco (or another) got hold of the chalk, it was not easily wrested from him. But the accents may have been more a help than a hindrance to understanding. When several speakers tried to proceed simultaneously, by holding tight to the fact that you were trying to listen to, say, the Austrian accent, you could sometimes single it out from the Polish, Italian, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Greek, Dutch, or middle American. As impressive as the cacophony was the intellectual level of the discussion, and most impressive of all was the fact that everyone, in the midst of the sharpest disagreements, remained warm friends.
At the Cowles Commission I received my fourth education in economics. The first had been my high school reading and preparation for debates; the second, my Chicago training with Henry Simons and Henry Schultz; the third, my education at Berkeley from the statistician Jerzy Neyman and from the students of Neyman and Griffith Evansespecially Kenneth May and Ronald Shephard.
One of the Cowles discussion topics closely related to what I had learned from May and Shephard was Paul Samuelson’s famous essay (1941) on comparative statics and dynamics, which proposed a promising new systematic approach to the prediction of shifts in the equilibria of economic systems. Another topic, which came to be known as the “identification problem,” had been introduced to me by Henry Schultz and concerned the statistical ambiguities that arise when one tries to estimate both supply and demand relations from the same statistical data. Definitive work was done on the identification problem, under the leadership of Marschak and Koopmans, at the time I was active with the Cowles Commission. My only contribution to that project, and that only after I had moved to Pittsburgh, was to show that a formal concept of causal ordering among variables in a system could be constructed, and that the causal ordering was uniquely defined precisely when the system was fully identified.
The Cowles work on identifiability was closely tied to another venture in which I had no part at all: the construction of large econometric models of the national economy, models that grew rapidly in size as computers

became available for estimating their parameters. This was the project to which Larry Klein devoted his efforts.
A fourth topic, an outgrowth of Koopmans’ wartime work on scheduling oil tankers, was “activity analysis” or, as it is better known today, linear programming. The first national conference on this subject was held in Chicago in 1949. Koopmans played the principal role in developing the economic implications of the subject, while George Dantzig originated the key computational technique, the simplex method. Again, I was only peripherally involved, using linear programming techniques to investigate the economic effects of technological change.
While I was participating in the Cowles seminars, I also came to understand something about macroeconomics. John Maynard Keynes’s famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,y wholly verbal and equationless, had mostly baffled me, but now John Hicks, and especially Franco Modigliani, published mathematical models of the Keynesian system that I could understand. I came to understand just enough of monetary theory (a specialty of Modigliani and of Don Patinkin) to know that I did not understand it at all, and to suspect that other economists didn’t either. That suspicion lingers with me today.
My active participation in Cowles research, as distinct from simple attendance at the seminars, was the product of another accident. To clarify questions that arose in my mind while teaching an American history course at IIT, and making use of analytic techniques I had learned from May and Shephard, I wrote a theoretical paper on the economics of urban migration, which was published in the journal Econometrica (1947c). At just that time, Marschak and Sam Schurr were planning a major study of the economic aspects of atomic power, to determine whether the “free energy” that everyone was proclaiming was a reality, and what the consequences of atomic energy for productivity would be. On the basis of my migration paper, Marschak coopted me to write the chapters of the study on macroeconomic implications.
If you examine the Schurr-Marschak volume, you will see that we forecast only a modest economic role for atomic power, a conclusion that was neither very popular at the time nor given much credence. We received the usual Cassandra treatment. We had looked hard for the possibility that the new source of energy might have a major “trigger effect,” but our economic data and reasoning told us it simply was not there. With forty years’ hindsight, our predictions still look good.
My participation in the atomic energy study had an amusing by-product a few years later. When the General Atomics Corporation was formed in La Jolla, California, in the early 1950s, some top-flight physicists on the

staff decided they should bring in a consultant to educate them on the economics of the industry. The physicist Ed Creutz, a former Carnegie Tech colleague who had joined General Atomics, recommended me for the job, and I agreed to spend a week there. It was decided that I should give a seminar on the first day and then hold court in an office where people could come to me for consultation.
In the seminar, I said essentially that there would very likely be an industry here in thirty or forty years, but that the pioneers who built it up would probably lose a lot of money in the meantime. That message (although it turned out to be an awfully acccurate one) was not cheerfully received. I spent two days in my office, but no visitors came. I waited through Monday and through Tuesday. At noon on Wednesday, I went to the harbor, rented a small sailboat, and spent the rest of the week sailing on San Diego Bay. My advice could have saved them hundreds of millions of dollars, and I did not even ask for a cut of the savings.
Friends from the Cowles Years
Among the gifts I value most from my association with the Cowles Commission are the lifelong friends it brought. Among these good friends, both those who are now gone and those who are still alive, the two of whom I think most often are Jascha Marschak and Tjalling Koopmans. By any accounting of time spent together, my relations with them were not much closer than with a number of the others. Perhaps there is another reason for my feelings about these two: They were of ages to be to me a father (almost) and an older brother, respectively.
But I prefer to think that my feelings about Jascha and Tjalling have something to do with their remarkable qualities. They were Europeans. Like my father, they pursued their professions with intense seriousness, but without neglecting other parts of life. They were intellectually curious about all things. The health of the body politic was important to them. Their quiet humor floated above a deep pool of serious concern for the human condition. There was a great gentleness in both of them.
In the early 1950s, when I was on a faculty recruiting trip from Pittsburgh, I had dinner with Marschak one evening in the Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago. The conversation turned to the selection of faculty. As he had assembled a spectacular group of stars in the Cowles Commission, I asked him what qualities he looked for in selecting staff. “Oh,” said he, “I pick people with good eyes.” I stared at him.
Good eyeswhat could he mean? I told him he was joking, but he insisted: He looked at their eyes.

And then I began thinking of the clear dark Armenian eyes of Arrow, the cool blue Frisian eyes of Koopmans, and the sharp black Roman eyes of Modigliani. It was certainly true that they all had remarkable eyes. Ever since, I think I have included that among my own selection criteria; intelligence shines through the eyes.
Much later, just a year or two before his death, I visited Jascha in his Los Angeles home, in the hills on Tiger Tail Lane. We took a long walk together, slowly because he was already frail. We engaged in our usual debate, he expressing his permanent faith in human optimizing rationality and I defending a bounded rationality point of view. We were revisiting old territory, yet he expressed no impatience at my intransigence and listened thoughtfully to my arguments. Debate with him was always like that: thoughtful, neither wavering nor stubborn, considerate. In fact our views were very close, for he was regarded by the profession as almost as much a renegade as I, but he never lost his belief that the limits of rationality must find their place in a broader frame of optimization. Best of all, his intelligence was as keen and flexible as it had been when we first met, thirty years earlier.
On a third occasion, midway between these two others, I behaved badly. On a visit to New Haven, Connecticut, where the Cowles Commission had moved, I was invited to dinner at the Marschaks. During the cocktail hour, to stir up the conversation a bit, I proposed the following hypothetical situation.
Suppose that computers have developed to the point where they can be raised just like children and can acquire human culture, the only difference between computer children and flesh-and-blood children being that the former are less susceptible than the latter to physical and mental disease. A referendum is to be held to decide whether future generations are to be computer children or flesh-and-blood children. How would you vote?
The room became very quiet and very cold. Jascha’s wife, Marianne, the warmest and most cordial of human beings, was obviously angry. I thought I was going to be turned away without dinner. Jokes that challenge the basic values of humanity are not funny, especially if they skirt too close to the human values rejected by Nazism, with its medical experiments and gross disrespect for human life. I did not intend my question as a challenge to values but as an opportunity to explicate them. But I had obviously touched a deep and serious nerve. I hastened to back-pedal, and I did get my dinner.
Moral concerns were also an important part of my relations with the Koopmans. My last conversation with Tjalling was heartbreaking. He had just had a serious stroke, and had only partially recovered his memory and speech. We sat in his home in New Haven through an afternoon and con-

versed about many matters. He never lost his patience or his calm while groping for thoughts and words. I could vividly imagine myself in the same position, lashing out at the world around me, blaming it for my disability. But calm fortitude was of his essence. It would not have been a conversation with Tjalling if he had behaved in any other way.
Several years before that last conversation, we had decided that he and I with our wives would go off somewhere for a few days to talk about the conditions for peace in the world. It was Tjalling’s suggestion, not because he was unrealistically sanguine that he or we could change the world, but because he thought it was everyone’s responsiblity to have carefully thought out views on such problems and to contribute toward their solution, even if that contribution could be only an epsilonor perhaps just an expression of good faith. So we went to the Poconos, and spent a couple of days enjoying each other’s friendship, walking in the mountains, and looking for conceptual paths that led away from the Cold War.
I am afraid that I have made the Marschaks and the Koopmans sound like solemn peoplethey were not. They were warm human beings with a talent for friendship, and my memories of afternoons and evenings with them and our mutual friends are memories of funthe serious kind of fun that only committed intellectuals who take the world seriously can have, but also the unself-conscious kind of fun of a congenial company.
My professional meeting ground with Tjalling was economics and econometrics. And on that ground we found the most profound difference between us. While we were both committed to ''hardening" the social sciences with the help of mathematics, mathematics meant something entirely different to Tjalling than it did to me. I discovered thismuch to my amazementat a dinner at our house when the Social Science Research Council (see page 172) held a conference in Pittsburgh, on Expectations and Uncertainty. The year was 1953. The encounter so startled me that I remember exactly where I was standing during the conversation: facing the living room fireplace, while Tjalling had his back to it.
For me, mathematics has always been a language of thought. I don’t know precisely what I mean by that (and explicating the meaning is today one of my important research goals), but I can try to explain. When I am working on a problem, I am sure that I do not usually think in words, but in terms of a more abstract representation that is perhaps partially pictorial or diagrammatic and partially symbolic. Mathematicsthis sort of nonverbal thinkingis my language of discovery. It is the tool I use to arrive at new ideas. This kind of mathematics is relatively unrigorous, loose, heuristic. Solutions reached with its heir have to be checked for correctness. It

is physicists’ mathematics or engineers’ mathematics rather than mathematicians’ mathematics.
For Tjalling Koopmans, it appeared, mathematics was a language of proof. It was a safeguard to guarantee that conclusions were correct, that they could be derived rigorously. Rigor was essential. (I have heard the same views, in even more extreme form, expressed by Gerard Debreu; and Kenneth Arrow seems mainly to share them.) I could never persuade Tjalling that ideas have to be arrived at before their correctness can be guaranteed, and that the logic of discovery is quite different from the logic of verification. I am sorry that he did not live to read and comment upon my recent work on the logic of scientific discovery. Perhaps we could have built a bridge across what seemed a great gulf that separated our attitudes toward mathematics. It is his view, of course, that prevails in economics today, and to my mind it is a great pity for economics and the world that it does.
Beginnings of Decision-making Research
The association with the Cowles Commission did not diminish my preoccupation with decision making, but turned part of my activity on that topic to new directions and brought me into the thick of the dramatic intellectual developments that took place in the social sciences just after World War II. The excitement of the time can be conveyedor re-evoked for those of us who lived through itby listing the labels for constellations of ideas that were born then: operations research and management science, the theory of games, information theory, feedback theory, servomechanisms, control theory (these and others collected under the banner of cybernetics), statistical decision theory, and the stored-program digital computer.
The ideas were all closely intertwined, with decision making at their core, and they quickly generated a scientific culturean interlocking network of scientists with a real sense of community, which was almost independent of the special area in which each worked, and which ignored the diversity of their backgrounds and training. They came from physics, statistics, economics, biology, mathematics, engineering, philosophy, and even a few from psychology and political science. (In chapter 12 I will give a fuller account of the zeitgeist of this period, in discussing the historical origins of artificial intelligence and cognitive simulation.)
My dual participation in the engineering culture of Illinois Tech and in the econometric culture of the Cowles Commission gave me early access to this world. I learned of the theory of games before John von Neumann and

Oskar Morgenstern’s book, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), was published, then spent most of my 1944 Christmas vacation (days and some nights) reading it. I wrote what I think was the very first review it received.
When the wartime security wraps were removed from computers, my earlier experiences at ICMA and in California with IBM plugboards made it easy to see their immense potential. Statistical decision theory had already formed part of my graduate training, and I had published a paper on the topic during the Berkeley period. The operations research techniques formed a natural continuity with my administrative measurement research. Through the neuroscientist Gerhard von Bonin, who lived in our apartment building, I met the legendary psychophysiologist and systems theorist Warren McCulloch and, through the Cowles Commission, the great mathematician John von Neumann.
Return to Engineering
After Dorothea and I returned to Chicago in 1942, we saw my parents fairly frequently. Milwaukee was only two hours away, and there were first one (1942), then two (1944), then three (1946) grandchildren. During these years my relation with my father grew closer than ever, as we were able to share many of our professional interests. I was very pleased when he invited me to his beloved Professional Men’s Club, a weekly luncheon club representing the whole range of professions, to talk about the atomic energy study, and on another occasion to talk to the Milwaukee Engineers’ Society.
Shortly before my father died, in November 1948, I made a discovery that moved me deeply. It had never occurred to either my brother or me to follow his profession of engineering. The reasons are obscure. Had we been immunized against this inheritance by his own abandonment of the Rhineland vineyard? I don’t know. It gradually dawned on me that the path I was following in my professional maze was returning me to the paternal calling, and not only because I had chosen to teach at an engineering school. As a designer of control gear, my father had been a significant contributor to the development of feedback devices. Now I was beginning to think of feedback theory as a tool for modeling the dynamic behavior of economic systems and organizations.
In one of the last letters he wrote to me, my father sent me some references I had requested on servomechanisms. Soon, I was using servo theory (now usually called control theory) in papers on inventory control and production planning, and was able to make contributions to the theory. Twenty years

later, I took great pleasure in printing in The Sciences of the Artificial (Simon 1981) a drawing of a servomechanism my father had patented in 1919, just three years after my birth.
And in the 1980s, when I was elected an honorary member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and subsequently received the Harold Pender Award from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, I decided that I had been a closet engineer since the beginning of my career.
Administration Again
After four years without administrative chores, in 1946 I accepted the chairmanship of the department of political and social science at Illinois Tech, the beginning of about twenty-five years of departmental and deanly administrative duties. But accepted is not strictly accurate. I told John Larkin that I wanted the job, and he finally overcame his reluctance to appoint someone so young and unknown. Don Smithburg and Victor Thompson joined the department, and together we laid plans for our textbook, Public Administration, which appeared in 1950, and for a professional Master’s program in public administration at IIT. Since we did not have time to get off the ground a program of empirical research in organizations, I was able to return to empirical and theoretical studies of administration only after I moved to Carnegie Tech in 1949.
Fair and Unfair Competition
If we are to account for my path through the maze during my professional years, we have to descend from a level of high principle to some more worldly concerns. However important my liberal values have been to me as a human being, we have seen that they had only a tangential impact, and a minor one, on my professional career.
When I arrived at Illinois Tech in 1942, I was still quite uncertain about my long-range career plans. As the war began to wind to a close, I had to think about whether I would remain at IIT or look for other opportunities. I did not look very actively, because I enjoyed my job and my associates and believed that Illinois Tech, under the leadership of President Henry Heald, had good prospects for the future. My salary was adequateby 1946 I was earning $4,600 as an associate professorand we lived com-

fortably in our apartment near the University of Chicago, with our three children.
When the University of Chicago approached me, I was happy to discuss possibilities with them, but I was not tempted by the offer of an assistant professorship, involving a reduction in rank. With the publication of Administrative Behavior the next year, IIT promoted me to a full professorship at a salary of $6,000.
We felt almost wealthy. Then the University of Illinois, which was expanding its graduate school, offered me a professorship in public administration at a still higher salary.
I was tempted until I visited the campus at Urbana and learned that the Department of Political Science was wholly uninformed about these new plans of the graduate school. I was not looking for that kind of academic political fight, and it was well that I was not, because the whole graduate school initiative collapsed a year later under a major attack from the Illinois legislature. During my negotiations about the position, however, President Heald again agreed to a substantial salary raise.
This was the last time in my career that I sought out a job opportunity, even semi-actively. If people approached me, as they did on a number of occasions after I moved to Carnegie Tech, I listened and deliberated, but my answer was always in the negative. After I had made and communicated my decision, I let the university know I had had an offer, but I never bargained about my salary.
This did not amount to either naïveté or charity on my part. I knew that my talents were highly marketable and that my university would have to keep my salary at the market level if it did not want to see me wooed away. Perhaps sharp bargaining could have inched my salary a little higher, but the time spent in bargaining would not have yielded much of a return. So at a very small price in dollars, I have earned brownie points for not haggling, and avoided lots of stress.
Two other considerations have been of much greater importance than money for the path my career took: my attitudes toward competition, and the criteria that, at choice points, directed me down one path rather than another. This is perhaps a good place to review the rules of play, as I conceived them. The record makes clear that I have been, and am, a competitive person, and in addition to the intrinsic satisfactions of academic work, I have never been insensitive to the implicit competition with others that pursuit of a career entails.
A highly competitive person has a hard row to hoe. There is no satisfaction in winning a competition unless it is a stiff and fair one. Stiff is easy to define; it is stiff if one’s own realistic assessment of one’s abilities make the odds longthe longer the odds, the greater satisfaction on winning. Fair

is harder to define, for if one wins a contest against long odds, there must be a reason. The odds weren’t really long; they only appeared to be so. Isn’t it unfair to appear to be an underdog when one really isn’t? Let’s start with some obvious distinctions: A professional gambler needs to win in order to earn his living. Fairness is not his concern. He tries to be unfair in various ways: Keeping cards up his sleeve is one way that the rest of us universally deplore; the morality of concealing his skill to attract dupes is hardly less questionable. Fairness means at least an honest deal (no hidden cards) and no intentional concealment of one’s abilities.
How do these criteria apply to the life of science? I advise my graduate students to pick a research problem that is important (so that it will matter if it is solved), but one for which they have a secret weapon that gives some prospect of success. Why a secret weapon? Because if the problem is important, other researchers as intelligent as my students will be trying to solve it; my students are likely to come in first only by having access to some knowledge or research methods the others do not have.
For example, in tackling the problem of understanding human thinking, which will be the topic of chapters 13 and 14, the secret weapon that my research partners, Al Newell, Cliff Shaw, and I had was access to a digital computer, and an ideaderived from contact with computersthat it could be used as a general processor of symbols. The computer and the idea were not available to Gestalt psychologists who otherwise might have written the first programs for heuristic search. We were very pleased in the spring of 1956 when we realized that we had won this competition, that we were the first to explicate the symbolic processes that enable people to think and solve problems. But hadn’t we been unfair to take advantage of our private knowledge and our private access to computers? What merit was there in winning such a one-sided contest?
One can see from this example that “fairness” in science is a rather strange, even arbitrary, concept. It isn’t unfair to be smarter than other people (but be sure you aren’t deceiving yourself!). It isn’t unfair to work harder than they do. It isn’t unfair to happen to know relevant things that they don’t know. It isn’t even unfair to happen to have the most powerful piece of equipment in the world.
Nevertheless, in the contests we design for ourselves, we always have in mind some implicit criteria of fairness, and our victory is spoiled if the criteria are violated. As a boy, I used my intelligence to win in academic competition, but somehow felt superior to those who reached the same scores with less intelligence but by dint of more effort. Hence, when I was not valedictorian in my high school class, but graduated third (and shortly thereafter was also third in the University of Chicago Freshman Week ex-

aminations), I was not bothered by my ranking, for I knew that I had worked much less hard than my victorious competitors. They were overachievers!
In my subsequent career, I have certainly had no aversion to being a workaholic, and have not enjoyed my successes less for having worked for them.
In the high school environment, where bookworms were not suffered gladly, it was not “fair” to win by studying harder. In the world of science, with no holds barred, overachievement was the normal route to success. Nonetheless, I have probably never quite gotten over the “Look, Ma, no hands” syndrome.
Success is especially pleasant when it is effortlessbut it seldom is. To save appearances, one simply redefines work as fun (which, unaccountably, it usually becomes).
But then, how about the long oddsthe special pleasures of an underdog victory? In reviewing the record, I observe that I have always been pretty careful in setting the odds, and have usually behaved like an honest professional gambler, if that is not a contradiction in terms, taking my advantages where I could find them, never eschewing a (legitimate) secret weapon that I found at hand. In giving up thoughts of a possible political career, I felt that being a nonveteran and a Jew was too much of a good thing as far as underdogging was concerned.
In one respect, however, I have quite consciously played the underdog. I have never believed that I had to be at Harvard or Stanford or M.I.T. to win the academic game. While I was a student at the University of Chicago, the university still played Big Ten football, although it rarely won a game. When one member of the team, Jay Berwanger, nevertheless made All-American during a season in which every game was lost, there was no doubt that his achievement had special luster. It was a personal achievement that owed nothing to the organization he belonged to.
Although I don’t believe I consciously thought of it in this way, that was my ideal: to win without conspicuous social support, whether from family or university. Then it would be certain that I had won “fairly,” and not just by using the hidden, or not so hidden, weapon of a superior environment.
I was exceedingly reluctant to leave Illinois Tech even when tempted by schools of greater reputation, and when I finally did leave in 1949, I felt a little disloyal in abandoning the challenge of helping raise IIT in the ranks of academe.
Fairness is a tricky concept. Evidently it is not unfair to win the raffle of the geneswith respect to either intelligence or industriousness. It is not unfair to have the experiences or to be at the places that provide one with a secret weapon. It is unfair to inherit merit from the prestige of one’s family

or organization. Put this way, the distinctions seem highly arbitrary, and I am not prepared to defend them. I simply report the rules of the game that guided my career and conditioned my feelings of success in competition. As it turned out, they provided me with an enjoyable and winnable game.
Gravitating toward the Sun
Speaking of competition puts one in a Darwinian frame of mind. How does a career, and especially the choices made along its course, look from a Darwinian point of view? What is a Darwinian maze?
Fitness is the central concept in modern Darwinian genetics. It is measured simply by the rate at which an organism reproduces itself. If two organisms compete for occupancy of the same ecological niche, relative fitness determines which will survive. Even small differences in fitness can lead to enormous differences in reproductive success over only a few generations.
Replace competition between two populations by choice between two alternatives, and replace fitness by any measure associated with the outcomes of the choices. Then if one is confronted repeatedly with choices of some kind (for example, whether to take a second helping), slight differences in the probability of selecting one alternative or another can soon produce substantial differences in outcome (body weight). All of us are familiar with this particular example.
The win or loss of a chess game may be decided in the same incremental way. Especially when good players are nearly equal in skill, the game is seldom lost by a single bad move. Rather, the winning player secures a cumulative advantage by exploiting successive small weaknesses that are observed in the opponent’s choices of moves. We can express the better player’s advantage by a probability, slightly greater than 0.5, that in each pair of moves that player’s will be the stronger.
For most of usthose of us who have not won million-dollar lotteries, or suffered sudden crippling accidentslife is much like the chess game. We make hundreds of choices among the alternative paths that lie before us and, as the result of those choices, find ourselves pursuing particular, perhaps highly specialized, careers, married to particular spouses, and living in particular towns. Even if we point to a single event as the “cause” of one of these outcomes, closer scrutiny of the path we have trod would reveal prefatory or preparatory events and choices that made the occurrence of the critical event possible.
This kind of biased random walk describes very well my own choice of occupation. The bias, though perhaps slight, gave it direction. I expect that

I was always ambitious to contribute to the solution of central problems in science, but I started out my career with little knowledge of the geography of science or my location in it. During my period of study at the University of Chicago, I did tend to home in on the Big Questions: I read the Great Books assiduously, I found Whitehead and Russell, I dug into the work of Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch (1943) on the application of Boolean logic to nerve networks and Claude Shannon on switching circuits (1938) as soon as I learned of it.
Mechanical calculators and IBM punched-card machines fascinated me, and I became knowledgeable about them and used them. I tried to understand special relativity theory, and studied differential geometry as a preliminary to tackling the General Theory. I read von Neumann and Morgenstern’s The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) within weeks of its publication, and stayed up all night to finish
W. Ross Ashby’s Design for a Brain (1952). My nose was clearly sensitive to where the action was, and all my choices were slightly biased toward the Main Chance. The University of Chicago had done an excellent job of developing my scientific tastes.
But my actual research career started in an academic backwater: public administration. However important that field was and is to public affairs, it attracted few scholars with a real understanding of what research is all about, or of how to construct theoretical foundations for an applied field. Viewed by the norms of science, many of the books published in public administration (and management generally) are positively embarrassing. For these and other reasons, this field was nearly invisible to mainstream social scientists. Even if a researcher made a contribution with potential beyond administration, it was unlikely that it would be noticed by anyone outside the field.
My case was even worse. I spent my first three working years (1936 39) largely on very practical tasks at the International City Managers’ Association. Mary, my first college sweetheart who once visited me in Chicago long after our affair had ended, expressed amazement that I should be devoting my life to such trivia. I replied that it was a job, and a pretty interesting one at thatand that sooner or later I would probably finish my degree and go into academic life. But I certainly had no plan for the transition.
How, then, did I find myself within a few years placed strategically in the social sciences, to be noticed by and to influence virtually all of them? The nose helped a lot (as it did Tolman’s rats in their mazes). When I did sense something exciting and fundamental, I sniffed my way toward it and became involved in it almost without plan or forethought. Earlier, I men-

tioned the weekly salon that Dorothea and I had established before we left Chicago in 1939, and which gave us strong connections with the early protocyberneticists whose work exuded excitement and significance.
Similarly, at Berkeley I gained contact with the renowned statistician Jerzy Neyman and with students of the economist Griffith Evans. (I never met Evans personally. Many years later, I addressed an inquiry to him, and received a postcard reply: “I am over eighty years of age and trying to complete some of my own research, so I am afraid I do not have time to answer your question.” A good sense of priorities.)
I was neither a name-dropper nor a celebrity seeker. I generally had little contact with the Great Men, but absorbed their influence indirectly through my contemporaries who were their students. I was much too timid, usually, to approach the Great Men themselves. I have recounted already the one real out-of-class contact I had with Carnap, and I met Rashevsky outside class only many years later, at the party at the Marschaks I have mentioned. I do recall that, with some other students, I once accompanied Bertrand Russell to his apartment while he was visiting Chicago, and I later had contact on a number of occasions with von Neumann. But my list of celebrities collected while I was a young man is not long.
This reticence has persisted. I have seldom been able to cultivate an acquaintance with someone, however important and useful it might be, unless we were brought together by some working or social relation without initiative on my part. Even today, when I have numerous routes of access to power, I exploit them very littleat least by comparison with others whom I observe around me. I do not know whether to classify this as a virtue or a vice. It certainly is not a considered policy, but a necessity for comfortable living.
No doubt it has something to do with vanity, too. I prefer being asked to asking, whether it be a matter of jobs, research grants, professional talks, or anything else. A strong distaste for the prospect of being rebuffed has probably made me considerably more platonic in my relations with women than I might otherwise have been. So perhaps mine is a rather useful vanity masquerading as decency.
But to return to the subject of gravitation, my first important movement from the recesses of outer space toward the sun was my association with the Cowles Commission, which was at the very center of the new postwar developments in mathematical economics and econometrics. Moreover, Cowles had close ties with the RAND Corporation (an acronym for Research and National Development), the original Think Tank, located in Santa Monica, and largely funded by the Air Force. RAND was well keyed into the early developments in cybernetics and computing.

There is a Russian folktale about the peasant from a distant village who encounters a friend on Red Square, just outside the Kremlin in Moscow, and asks, ''Why, Ivan Ivanovich, what are you doing here?" “Oh,” he replies, “I came to see and to be seen.” For centrality to the postwar quantitative social sciences, the Cowles Commission and the RAND Corporation were definitely the places to see and to be seen. My presence in these places made Administrative Behavior visible not merely to scholars in the discipline of public administration but to others, as well, who could sense how crucial decision processes are to explaining human rationality. Thus Administrative Behavior did not languish in its provincial homeland, but was noticed by economists and decision theorists.
It was also noticed by sociologists and the new community of behavioral scientists christened and nourished by the Ford Foundation’s program. My visibility to that community was probably due to the salience of the Chicago Political Science Department. Administrative Behavior became one of the type specimens of Chicago political behavioralism, for both its friends and its enemies. Among the first to take note of it were the Chicago sociologist Edward Shils, who mentioned it in his pamphlet The Present State of American Sociology in 1948, and Bernard Berelson, the Ford Foundation’s behavioral science honcho, who sought my advice (along with that of many others) on the Foundation’s program plans.
When I moved to Pittsburgh in 1949, I retained my close ties with the Cowles Commission and with RAND, and by 1952 had become a RAND consultant, spending several summers at its offices in Santa Monica. As I will discuss, I also became an adviser to Berelson on the proposed Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
The Ford connection soon led to participation in the affairs of the Social Science Research Council, and later the National Research Council. So, however peripheral research on public management and on organizations was to the central themes of the social and behavioral sciences, from about age thirty I was as visible as a young man could wish. From then on there was no question that my work, if worth noticing, would be noticed. Wandering in the forums of the Cowles Commission, RAND, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Research Council, I would see and be seen.

Chapter 8
A Matter of Loyalty
On April 3, 1948, the U.S. Congress approved the Economic Cooperation Act (ECA), implementing the Marshall Plan for bringing about the economic recovery of Europe, then in a desperate condition and threatened with the prospect of Communist revolutions. Some four months later, the Economic Cooperation Administration was a going concern with a viable program. I had the good fortune to have a grandstand seat at these events.
Don Stone, whom I had known and briefly worked for at the Public Administration Clearing House, had since 1941 been director of the Administrative Management Division of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget. He had several times offered me positions in his division, but I had declined, preferring an academic career. I did, however, frequently serve as a consultant to the Bureau.
Don was selected by Paul Hoffman, a former automobile manufacturer who had been appointed by President Truman as administrator of the ECA, as his staff man for organization. Don invited me and a few others to come to Washington for some months to help organize the agency. I took several extended trips to Washington in the spring of 1948 and spent the entire summer there, first holding a position as consultant, then as director of the Management Engineering Branch of ECA.
As I have told the story of how ECA came into being in an article that is reprinted as chapter 16 of the third edition of Administrative Behavior, here I will limit myself to some of its personal aspects.
When we began, there was no agency, just a few desks and telephones, and a telephone directory that grew rapidlyfrom 15 names on April 13 to 741 names on July 26. Classical organization theory would have called

for us to draw up an organization chart, with divisions and sections and branches, and a manual describing the functions of each. There was no time for that. Instead, we focused on drawing up a mimeographed document, Basic Principles of ECA Organization, that described the mission of ECA, selecting and emphasizing one particular point of view of the many that were competing for hegemony. There were at least six important alternative approaches to conceptualizing ECA, and we blended those that seemed best to us while playing down the others.
Our policy document never received any official approvalthat would have taken months and much compromisebut it was widely circulated, giving each new person who entered the organization a specific picture of what it was about. That picture emphasized negotiating with a unified Europe through the Paris office (rather than bilaterally, with the individual European countries), and placed the balance of payments in the center of agency planning and budgeting. This conception of the program served as both a weapon and a motive for the competitors in the power struggle that went on in this, as in every, burgeoning organization. Units that fit the conception could use it to claim a larger place in the program, and the administrators of those units were led to see the broadening of their functions as essential means for implementing the ECA program.
The Management Engineering Branch had one other arrow in its quiver. Before the Personnel Division could fill a position with a permanent employee, we had to provide a formal job description. By setting our priorities properly, we made it easy for units that fit our conception of how the ECA should operate to hire employees, and very difficult for the others. We used that power discreetly but vigorously.
I do not want to exaggerate my influence, or the influence of the Organization and Management Division in general, over the shape that ECA and its programs took. In the long run, in this as in many other situations, it was mainly the nature of the task to be accomplished and the pressure of the task requirements on the organization that shaped the agency. But perhaps we helped to start it in a good direction and to speed it on its way. Whether or not we were influential, it was a most educational experience for me.
By 1948, Communists and supposed Communists were being discovered under every rugbeginning with William Remington and followed soon after by Alger Hiss. Any graduate of the University of Chicago, with its reputation of tolerance for campus radicals, was guaranteed a full field investigation before he could obtain a security clearance. The ECA Security Office found me a highly questionable character, and gave me my clearance with great reluctance. To explain how this came about, I must give a fuller

account of my history as a liberal activist, and my history as an investigatee of security agencies. The story begins before the period we are now considering, and continues long after, but it will be more easily understood if it is told in one piece.
Liberalism, Depression Style
At what age I became a civil libertarian is not recorded. While yet in grammar school, I had a letter published in the Milwaukee Journal in defense of atheism. I was indignant that my father forbade my doing such a thing again. After all, I had signed my own name, and the fact that some people, misled by the common address, had confused “Herbert” with “Arthur” was no fault of mine. Nonetheless, I did abstain from writing further letters of this kind.
At school and church, I was a nonconformist in certain minor ways, and learned to bear the embarrassment that nonconformity brings with it. By the time I reached college, I was more or less a Socialist, and became aware that socialism and communism were often considered indistinguishable, and that communism (and supposed communism) was very little tolerated by society, especially as represented by the Chicago police. One of my dormitory fellows spent a night in jail because he attended a meeting that was raided. Whether it was literally a party meeting or just some sort of fellow-traveling protest I don’t remember. I conversed with Communists on the campus, and argued with them, but never had an impulse to join them. I was (and am) a New Deal Democrat, probably imprinted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address.
When Bill Cooper and I and some others (including Dorothea) formed a Progressive Club on campus in the autumn of 1937, we were noticed by the monthly campus magazine, Pulse, which reported our activity in such an atrocious imitation of TIMESTYLE that I cannot resist quoting from the article:
Testimony to the progressives’ characters and purposes can be found in no better source than their potent faculty members, all active, who exuberated in delight at discovery of students who thought by themselves, for themselves. Faculty men were pleased to allot time from already crowded hours to furtherance of cherished ideals which had at long last found untinged company in a campus organization. Understandably proud therefore was President William J. Cooper in announcing traditionally hard-to-get faculty mentors Charles

Merriam, Paul Douglas, Jerome Kerwin, Malcolm Sharp, Edward Levi, as charter members, smilingly adding that there were more to come.

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Nearest approach to pinko viewpoint is found in advocation “(5) Such legislation as will protect the consumer, aid the underprivileged, promote economic stability, provide more adequate support for education, operate for a more equitable distribution of wealth, and reduce the dominance of vested interests over the economic life of the nation.”
More significant than their pros are the Progressives’ consopposition to: any form of fascism or communism; undermining of the democratic process; use of coercion and violence; sabotage; instigation of class warfare; fomentation of animosity with view to revolutionary upheaval.
While they haven’t yet been pestered by Communists, whose platform calls for active participation in all “progressive parties,” an ejection provision in their constitution will care for such as these. Meanwhile they concentrated on action.
The Progressive Club focused most of its attention on local government (Bill Cooper, Dorothea, and I were all working in that domain), which in Chicago at that time was maximally corrupt. Dorothea and I also joined a newly formed organization, the Hyde Park Independent Voters, to support a reform, antimachine candidate for alderman of the 5th Ward. We canvassed our precinct from door to door, were generally received genially and even warmlyand earned a total of fifteen votes for our candidate in the election. We had to conclude that we were not very effective canvassers, but we look back on the experience with fondness, for the Hyde Park Independent Voters later became the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI), which ultimately merged into Americans for Democratic Action, of which we are therefore prenatal members.
Like most student organizations, the Progressive Club never grew to any size, and most items on its agenda never progressed beyond the grandiose statements in its constitution. But the club did not represent my total activity as a liberal at that time. While I was working for Clarence Ridley at the City Managers’ Association, some of the employees in the Public Administration Clearing House (PACH), of which this was one unit, decided to form a union. I was generally sympathetic to unions, but had never thought of myself, an intellectual and white-collar worker, as a prospective union member. But when I learned that Louis Brownlow, director of PACH, was greatly alarmed by the notion of a union and was actively campaigning against it, I immediately decided that if a union were formed I would surely join it. The union never materialized, so it was a tempest in a teapot. I mention it to illustrate my touchiness on matters of civil liberties.

During these last two years in Chicago, Dorothea and I dined very economically in an eating cooperative, the Ellis Co-op, organized on the principles developed by the Rochdale cooperatives in nineteenth- century England, hence explicitly nonpolitical. The diet was adequate, and Mrs. Polacheck cooked expertly, but by reason of budget constraints rutabagas were ubiquitous on the menu. Once every semester, she splurged by preparing a dinner of delicious blintzes.
If the Co-op was nonpolitical, most of its members were not. In particular, there was a large contingent of Troskyites, who propounded most extraordinary theories about how the war in Spain should be conducted by the Republicans (“cooperation at the front, but no cooperation at the rear” was the basic Troskyite axiom). These same Troskyites constantly tried to persuade the Co-op to adopt political resolutions about Spain and other matters. In general, we outvoted them, but it was nip and tuck.
Meanwhile, as already recorded, my close friends Leo Shields and Winston Ashley and their Trotskyite- Aristotelian-Catholic associates had taken over the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. And to flesh out our popular front alliances with radicals, Dorothea and I attended one or more discussion meetings that were obviously organized by members of a Communist cell.
Dorothea was for a time a member of the American Student Union (ASU), and I also attended some ASU meetings. The ASU was never a Communist organization but was heavily infiltrated by Communist students, sometimes controlled by them, and definitely regarded by the FBI as a Communist-front organization. In loyalty investigations you get black marks for talking with Communists, but no brownie points for arguing with them or contesting their control of an organization.
During this period, the only morning newspaper in Chicago was the Chicago Tribune, which was incapable of distinguishing news from opinion. When a new left-wing newspaper, the Midwest Daily Record, appeared, we subscribed immediately. It was soon obvious that it was essentially a Midwestern edition of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. We retained our subscription, however, relying on our political sophistication to interpret and discount its news stories, and much preferring it to the thick stream of bile poured out by the Tribune. It was not until many years later that I learned one uses one’s time best by reading no newspaper at all.
Dorothea and I were intensely political animals at this time, deeply concerned about events in Europe (first the Spanish War, then the aggressions of Hitler in central Europe). By many definitions of “fellow traveler,” but not ours, we were fellow travelers, not accepting either Stalinism or Trotskyism, significantly more concerned about the dangers from the Right than the dangers from the Left, but quite aware of both dangers.

We believed that a French-Russian-English military alliance was essential to the safety of democracy in Europe, and migrated from our natural pacifism to a strong interventionist position for America. When in doubt, we could determine our policy by looking at the Chicago Tribune and opting for the opposite position.
The situation in Europe was becoming steadily more grim as Hitler stepped up his demands for the incorporation into the Reich of Memel, Danzig, Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia. In April 1938 there was a great blizzard in Chicago. Dorothea and I struggled through the drifts to our respective offices, she to the Political Science Department and I to ICMA. At noon, a caterer was persuaded to bring some food into our building so that we would not have to brave the elements, and a group of us gathered together in the commons room at the Public Administration Clearing House, where ICMA was located. When someone turned on the radio, we were assaulted by the high-pitched tones of an enraged Hitler denouncing the president of Czechoslovakia. “Benes, der Lüger!” (“Benes, the liar!”) I remember the phrase, and the hate in Hitler’s voice as he uttered it.
It was too much for me. I put on my overcoat and trudged the half-mile through the snowdrifts to the lake shore at the foot of 57th Street. It had stopped snowing, but the strong northeast wind was driving blasts of spray from the half-frozen lake against the great blocks of ice that had piled up along the beach. The battle of wind with ice seemed to echo the battle of wills that was going on in Europe. I stood watching the struggle for a quarter of an hour, my face to the wind, then turned and walked back through the snow feeling somewhat calmer.
Even though it was entirely clear that fascism was the enemy, defining one’s political position was not easy during this period. The Stalin-Hitler pact in the summer of 1939 completed our disenchantment with the Stalinists. The political trials in the Soviet Union during the 1930s had already caused us great concern, but we were unsure what they meant.
As late as our stay in Berkeley, from 1939 to 1942, I spent hours in the library stacks reading transcripts of the trials, unable to comprehend them. Why did the victims confess so abjectly? What were they really guilty of? The answer came to me only with the publication of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941). I picked his book up one afternoon and did not put it down until I reached the last page at dawn. Then I understood.

“Subversion” in California
Our associates at Berkeley, primarily the staff of the Bureau of Public Administration and the Political Science Department, were nearer the middle of the road than were most of our Chicago friends. Milton Chernin, my closest associate, was active in liberal politics in California and suspected by the authorities of Communist connections if not party membership. In fact, he was a liberal Democrat, and if he had ever been further to the left, I never had evidence of it.* “Liberal Democrat” was the label that fit most of us.
During the three years at Berkeley, my little research group carried out three major projects that have already been described, one of them a large-scale field experiment in the California State Relief Administration. The study was authorized by the state office of SRA, where Chernin had earlier been director of research. In the two field offices in Los Angeles that were turned over to us, we set up a careful experimental design, which was to govern the operations for three months.
At the same time, a great political donnybrook was going on at the state level, so that we more than once arrived at one of our district offices on a Monday morning to find that the director had been fired. We would then proceed down to the state headquarters, also in Los Angeles, pound on the desk, and demand (and get) the director’s reinstatement.
The political situation was so confused that no one knew what authority we had, and those momentarily in charge assumed we would not be so peremptory if we had none. Hence, they always backed down, and our experiment ran through its rocky course to completion. One of our allies in the state office, a former assistant to Chernin, also subsequently turned up on the FBI lists as a suspected Communist. Meanwhile, on more than one occasion, I had written reference letters for him and for Chernin, as I certainly ought to have done.
After a time, we discovered in one of our two experimental districts a very active Communist cell, complete with a mimeograph machine. The members were good case workers and nice people, who later got into deep trouble and ultimately into prison as a result of perjury or contempt con-

• Chernin did like to tell the story of the Battle of El Cerrito Hill, in which General David Prescott Barrows, sometime chairman of the Berkeley Political Science Department, and later president of the university, surrounded the hill of that name, near the Bay, with police and National Guardsmen, and led a charge up it at dawn, having been advised that strikers were gathered there to launch some kind of revolutionary action. At the top they found two hoboes, lighting a fire to cook their meager breakfast. I don’t know whether this event actually occured,but Chernin’s delighted telling of it on many occasions could not have endeared him to the authorities.

victions (I don’t remember which) for their testimony before a Red-hunting committee of the California legislature. Our only political entanglement with them was to attend a lively party they gave just when the agency was going into final collapse toward the end of our study. They all expected shortly to be unemployed.
So much for radicalism in the Los Angeles offices of the SRA. Back in Berkeley, the statistician on my project was leaving for another job, and I had to hire a replacement. (Actually, my boss, Sam May, was supposed to hire the replacement, but it never occurred to me to bring him into the act until I had made the decision and needed a signature.)
The mathematician Griffith Evans recommended two of his doctoral students for the job: Kenneth May, who was Sam May’s son, an excellent mathematical economist; and Ronald Shephard, who was more of a statistician, and worked closely with Jerzy Neyman. After conversations with both, I chose Shephard, mainly because I thought it slightly awkward to hire the boss’s son. Both were probably overqualified for the job.
Shephard was hardly on the payroll when Kenneth May burst into the newspaper headlines by publicly announcing that he was a member of the Communist party. The special piquancy of this development was that his father had recently become head of California’s civilian defense agency. Sam essentially disowned his son, although they were reconciled some years later. When war broke out, Kenny volunteered and served in the ski troops in Italy, where he was commissioned a captain in the field.
This did not prevent the radicalism issue from shadowing his academic career after the war, and I always felt that his scientific productivity was greatly diminished by the energy he had to spend to defend himself politically. I had learned a great deal of economics from him and Shephard, and that personal contact added to my distress at his political difficulties.
Ronald Shephard turned out to be a fine member of my staff and, like Kenny, a lifelong friend. He was what one would call an original, always having an unusual way of looking at thingsparticularly at the irrationality of social conventions. After the war, when housing was difficult to find, he went around to university campuses, stating that he would accept any job that brought a house with it. Purdue University provided the house and he went there.
I never learned much about Shep’s politics (he was what one would call a “personal anarchist,” a label not predictive of political allegiances), but when we left Berkeley, he presented me with his personal copy of Karl Marx’s Capital, all three volumes, which he said he was discarding. I put them conspicuously on my living room shelf, first in Chicago and then in

Pittsburgh, with the mental resolve that if it ever became politically necessary for me to remove them, I would at once migrate to Australia or New Zealand.
My Security File
That ends the recital of my contacts with radicalism in Chicago and Berkeley. Many years later, when, pricked by curiosity, I used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the papers relating to my security clearancesall 550 pagesI was able to learn how much of my private life during this period was known, and how much unknown, to the FBI and Air Force Intelligence. Any of you who belong to the Depression or postwar generations will have recognized that there are at least a dozen items in this autobiography that could have been used to deny security clearance under the standard (and dangerous) rules of the game.
The actual intelligence harvest, as recorded in my dossier, was quite random and very incomplete.
The items that later got me in trouble (I will tell the story shortly) were my subscription to the Midwest Daily Record and my friendships with Milton Chernin and his SRA associate, both of whom had used me as a reference. The newspaper had been noted by our Chicago landlady, who evidently inspected our trash barrels and reported it to the FBI when interviewed a decade later, in 1948.
My wife’s ASU involvement was dimly suspected (it had been reported to the FBI by a dean of students at the University of Chicago) but never nailed down. The FBI certainly had no conception that we spent our main effort in that organization struggling against a Communist takeover; that was far too sophisticated for their world picture.
Among the things that never found their way into the FBI record were the Ellis Co-op; our attendance at one or two Communist cell meetings; my numerous Catholic-Trotskyite friends; the Communist cell in the SRA district office of our California experiment; Kenny May; and my volumes of Capital. Not a very good batting average for the FBI agents. Since, in the political climate of the 1940s and 1950s, any one of those items would likely have sunk me, I don’t regret the inefficiency of the investigators. What I do regret, and resent, was the existence of an inquisitorial system that could build subversion and crime out of wholly legitimate activities and associations.
What also did not get into the record was the Progressive Club at the University of Chicago, with its active policy of excluding Communists from

membership. Once one understands the inquisitorial mentality, this is not at all surprising. Positive evidence of loyalty has no important place in the FBI record. Thirty interviews with friends, acquaintances, and associates who state with certainty that one is not a Communist do not weigh in the balance against a single interview that suggests that one may be. The negative item is recorded on the summary sheet, the positive items are not. One could have an interesting intellectual discussion of the Bayesian probability model that lies implicit in this inference process. Its practical effects are wholly corrosive of democratic freedoms.
Liberalism, the Postwar Period
By 1946, I had advanced to the chairmanship of the Department of Political and Social Science at Illinois Tech. The number of members of the department was not much more than the number of words in its title.
I continued to be sensitive to civil liberties issues. Much to my surprise, for I have absolutely no recollection of it, I recently recovered from my files a long memorandum I mailed in 1946 to Arthur Macmahon, then president of the American Political Science Association, recommending that the association set up a committee to address academic freedom in the universities. I reproduce here the first paragraphs of my memorandum to illustrate my concerns, and my views on academic liberties at that time.
PROPOSAL FOR A COMMITTEE ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION
There are a number of indications that the current anti-Communist enthusiasm is leading to a full-fledged attack on ''leftist" tendencies among college textbooks and teachers in the social sciences. As in the past, this attack will not confine itself to individuals or books that are demonstrably communistic, but will broaden itself to include any person or thing that can be labeled “liberal.” The members of the American Political Science Association, by virtue of their profession, should possess expert judgments as to the proper limits of academic freedom in the political realm, and as to the proper definition of “subversive.” For this reason it is both suitable and highly necessary that the Association be in a position to take prompt action in defense of academic freedom should the anti-red campaign develop to dangerous proportions. It is proposed that a committee of the

Association be created with power to investigate instances of alleged subversive speech or writing, and to publicize its findings in each case.
MacMahon took my proposal quite seriously, and presented iton more than one occasionto the board of the association. He also consulted with the director of the American Association of University Professors, who after long silence made a bumbling and ambiguous reply that suggested that these issues were on AAUP turf and intrusions were not welcome. In the end, after more than a year of correspondence and deliberation, calm heads prevailed and nothing was done. The William Remington and Alger Hiss affairs, early events in the postwar Red hunts, were still a year or two in the future, and evidently did not cast a sufficiently dark shadow before them. I accepted the decision (I had to) as undoubtedly the product of more wisdom and experience than a young man possessed.
During the period of this correspondence, a small cloud crossed over my own sky. A letter was sent to Henry Heald, president of IIT, complaining that one of the members of my department had used a speech of the president of the National Association of Manufacturers in a deprecatory way (perhaps as an illustration of interest group propaganda). When Henry Heald interposed a courageous and appropriate protective shield, nothing came of the matter.
The 1948 U.S. presidential election also gave me some moments of anxiety. Among the members of my department, two were precinct captains for Henry Wallace’s candidacy (supported by the Communists, among others), two for the ADA (backing Harry Truman), one for the “regular” Democratic machine, also backing Truman, and none for Dewey. If that had come to the attention of the Chicago Tribune, there would have been trouble for IIt and for me.
Perhaps I am craven in jittering about such matters, but perhaps jitters don’t compromise your principles as long as they don’t make you prudent. I certainly did nothing to deter my colleagues from performing their civic duties as they saw them, nor did I hint my concern to them. And of course nothing happenedexcept for Harry Truman’s marvelous victory.
At IIT, I taught an evening public administration class for public managers in federal (and a few state and local) positions. One of my students was a supervisor in the Chicago post office, Henry McGee, some years later to become the first black postmaster of Chicago. We became good friends, as did our families, and he convinced me that I should join the NAACP. On the FBI copy of my security application, there is a neat penciled check

opposite this item on my list of affiliations. Why would a white man join the NAACP in 1946? In the security interviews I have had, only in 1948 was that question actually asked.
Although IIt was located nearly in the center of Chicago’s South Side “Black Belt,” nearly all its black employees in the 1940s were janitors. The library had courageously, and over much opposition, hired one black clerical employee. When our department got money for a full-time secretary, my colleagues and I decided that the appointee would be black. Dean Larkin, although he was a cautious man, agreed to the action, and we took some steps to prepare other IIt employees to accept a black associate.
The next step was to find suitable candidates, which proved very hard. Since there were almost no secretarial jobs for blacks in Chicago, the Chicago high schools did not train them in secretarial skills, and black high school graduates did not find it profitable to pay tuition to private secretarial schools.
After much search, we located Julia Jones, whose spelling was intuitive, whose grammar was not standard, whose vocabulary was limited, but who was obviously a bright young woman with good social skills, and willing both to learn what she needed to learn and to deal with whatever problems might arise in her lily-white surroundings.
Julia was a fine secretary during my remaining years at IIT, and my successor’s secretary thereafter. Later she wrote me to express her gratitude for my patience while she was learning her trade. Her letter warmed but also embarrassed me, for I had done only what I ought to have done. Today it is hard to recall the atmosphere of those times (fortunately) and to remember how difficult it was to observe elementary moral principles.
Housing provided other tests of our social sensibilities. We had always lived in rented quarters, but as our family grew and we seemed firmly established at IIT, the urge came to buy a house. In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that racial covenants limiting sales of real property to Caucasians were unconstitutional, thereby freeing up most of Chicago’s South Side, which had been bound by those covenants. We then felt we could buy a house without violating our principles, and acquired one in 1948 on 50th Street, a mile north of the University of Chicago campus.
A year later, to our surprise, we were on our way to Pittsburgh and had to sell our Chicago house. Meanwhile, the boundary of the Black Belt had moved up to 49th Street and was continuing to move. Should we show the house to black as well as white families? The answer may seem obvious in the light of our politics and values, but it was not. If we had been planning to stay in the neighborhood there would have been no question, because we could have participated in the solutions of any problems that might arise, and because if there were any financial costs to having black neighbors (it

was generally believed that real estate values would fall), we would share the cost.
But because we were moving away, our white neighbors, a number of whom had become our good friends, might accuse us of copping out or even of being “block-busters,” interested only in money. An issue becomes a genuine moral issue when you feel it in the pit of your stomach. We felt the conflict between our loyalty to our good neighbors and our loyalty to our principles of human equality.
Before we put the house on the market, we discussed the matter with several neighbors whom we thought shared our liberal views. They took the high road, agreeing that liberalism did not mean much if it wavered the moment it touched the pocketbook. We then ignored the few complaints we heard from elsewhere on the block and offered the house through both black and white realty companies. In the end, it was sold to the little Episcopal church on the corner as its manse. Today, and quite independently of our tiny transaction, that neighborhood remains stable, racially mixed, and middle class. Our friends the Rothschilds lived there for many years and sent us news of it each Christmas.
There is one other instance I recall in Chicago that gave me a dubious association with communism. David Hawkins of the University of Colorado published a paper in 1948 containing a theorem that seemed too strong to me. Examining it closely, I soon found a counterexample which I sent to Hawkins. As we began to correspond about it, I also found the (weaker) correct theorem, and we agreed to write a joint paper making the correction and discussing the new theorem, which had interest in its own right. Our paper appeared in Econometrica in 1949. Some years later Hawkins appeared in Washington to testify (with dignity) before a congressional committee as an ex-Communist. I had co-authored a paper with a Communist whom I had never metan excellent example of the potential for guilt by association!
Aside from noticing my NAACP membership, the FBI did not record my several expressions of liberalism during the IIT years. Their absence from the record could be attributed either to enlightenment or inefficiency.
Loyalty Challenged
In 1948, when Congress passed the legislation for the Marshall Plan and set up the Economic Cooperation Administration, part of the political bargain, to secure the right-wing (anti-Soviet) votes that provided half the

support for the bill, was a provision for especially strict loyalty screening of ECA employees.
I accepted Don Stone’s invitation to join the ECA and was required, even though my post was temporary, to go through a security clearance process. It soon appeared that there were difficulties, and I was called in by the security officers to explain the dubious items in my recordprincipally the subscription to the Midwest Daily Record. Had I really read that paper and, if so, why? “Yes,” I answered, “I did. A political scientist reads a great many things in order to keep informed.”
That did not go down well, especially since I did not offer further explanations or elaborations. The FBI record shows that, when one of my inquisitors on that occasion was interviewed fifteen years later by an FBI investigator during a subsequent clearance process, he explained: “If he had simply denied subscribing to it, we would have believed him. But his explanation was suspicious.”
The ECA security people now did not want to certify my loyalty, a certification the law required for my continued employment. Fortunately, Don Stone had no doubts about me, nor did Ty Woods, an assistant director of ECA. After they went courageously to bat for me, I received the certificate of loyalty (suitable for framing, as the saying goes). But I am quite certain that a compromise was reached. The certificate was issued when the Security Division learned that I was only a temporary consultant who would soon go back to his university.
One nugget I later found among my security files, when I obtained them through the Freedom of Information Act, was a card bearing my name from the index file of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, dated 1948 and marked “questionable loyalty.” This label was removed only in 1963. I could not resist writing to the Civil Service Commission to ask how “questionable loyalty” was defined in the law, and was told (without a hint of humor) that it meant only that the loyalty in question had not yet been determined definitively. So the mark of Cain was on me, unbeknownst to me, from 1948 to 1963.
I say “unbeknownst,” but I was not entirely unsuspecting. Starting in 1948, I was several times asked by federal agencies to serve as a consultant, and then found that, after I had responded positively, there was no follow-up. The “certificate of loyalty” from ECA clearly attested to my loyalty only within very narrow boundaries of space and time, and the record of the investigation had not been lost.
The next episode of the story took place in Santa Monica, California, at the RAND Corporation. Financed mainly by the air force, RAND engaged in a large number of classified studies relating to air force strategy and

national security. Some basic research was also supported, and each summer a sort of free-floating crap game was organized that attracted an elite group of academics from all over the country to come to Santa Monica and think and swim. Partly they thought about specific air force problems, partly about the theory of decision making and especially game theory.
Through my connections with the Cowles Commission, and Cowles’s with RAND, I was a RAND consultant once removed. Merrill Flood, a department head at RAND who had been a pioneer in applying management science techniques to municipal operations, knew me and my work and invited me in 1952 to come to RAND as a summer consultant. That, however, required security clearance.
In my reply to Merrill, I mentioned the difficulties I had had at ECA, and said that I would be willing to go through a security clearance only if RAND would not retreat at the first obstacle but would push the matter seriously. He agreed, I filled out the voluminous forms, and the clearance (at the lowest, “Secret,” level) went through, apparently without problems. At least none were brought to my attention.
From the spring of 1952, I was a frequent consultant at RAND, particularly in connection with the Systems Research Laboratory which was created that year, and then, after 1955, with the Computer Science Department. I spent the entire 1960 61 year on leave of absence at RAND. In September of 1960 a new air force decree came down requiring anyone employed in the RAND Santa Monica building to have a “Top Secret” clearance. Accordingly, a new set of forms was filled out (it wasn’t so bada secretary could copy most of the information from the previous set), and the FBI went about its full field investigation.
Months passed without any word. Then I was asked to report for an interview at an air force base in south Los Angeles. The base appeared to be almost deserted; I was directed to a totally isolated small building almost at its center, and in this intimidating setting two air force intelligence officers interrogated me.
Nothing new emerged from the “interview,” except that my father had evidently sent some money to a Russian-American friendship organization during or after the war.
My questioners were particularly interested in the University of Chicago period, a quarter-century in the past, and when I mentioned (in the transcript of the interview, which they edited, I think the verb was “admitted”) that I had had contacts with Communists and with Catholics who also thought they were Trotskyites, they asked me to supply names. Then I did something for which I have always felt ashamed, although it did no harm. I mentioned my old friends Leo Shields (dead on Omaha Beach) and Winston Ashley (safe in his Dominican college). Harm or not, it was a violation of principle.

From my security records I later learned that air force intelligence actually tried to locate Winston, without success.
On my return to Santa Monica, I suggested to Dorothea that we go for a walk (I was not at all sure that the house was not bugged) and I let off steam for half an hour. Walking has always been a good way for me to calm down. I had covered many miles of the streets of Washington, too, during the summer at ECA after my interrogation.
In September 1961 I returned to Pittsburgh without having heard a “yea” or “nay” on my RAND security clearance. At that point I addressed a personal letter to Eugene Zuckert, secretary of the army, whom I had come to know when we both served on the board of directors of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Corporation, stating that "if you could without impropriety express an interest in my application being acted upon within finite time, I should appreciate it.‘’ I emphasized that I was not asking for special treatment, just for getting the papers moved off whatever bureaucratic desk they were on.
Within a few days of mailing that letter, I was informed that the clearance had come through, but it came so soon that I do not think the letter could have had anything to do with it; it was simply a coincidence. Perhaps there was a rule that all such cases had to be acted on within a year. The total elapsed time from the submission of my application to the approval of the clearance was a year and a week.
The RAND incident represented my last serious encounter with security problems. Of course when I was nominated to President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, I had to be cleared at the executive office of the president at Top Secret level, but either because of my clearance in 1961 or because the rules are different at the White House, there was no delay. Since that time I have received Top Secret clearances from time to time in connection with my activities in the National Academy of Sciences. Again, no trouble. But when my security records were later sent me, I noticed that in all of these cases the summary sheets still reported the derogatory information that had been gathered in 1948.
The Loyalty of Intellectuals
In recounting this long tale, I have not discussed the important question: Am I in fact loyal, and reliably so? Or should the government be concerned that I might commit subversive acts or violate security? That is not an easy question. Security specialists have, with good warrant, a general suspicion

of intellectuals. Intuitively, they know that intellectuals seek to be loyal to abstractions like “truth,” “virtue,” or "freedom,‘’ rather than to a national state or its flag. As I write these lines, just a month has passed since young Chinese intellectuals died near Tiananmen while defending such abstractions. What does it mean when an intellectual swears loyalty to his country? Under what conditions can that oath be trusted?
We have some empirical evidence on these matters. First, mostnot allof the security breaches that have been detected in this country since World War II were motivated by greed or blackmail, not by ideology. In exceptional cases, there was, indeed, loyalty to a “higher” goal, often thought by the miscreant not to be inimical to the interests of the United States. I would cite Alger Hiss, as nearly as we can understand his case, and the uncontrite Oliver North as examples, and there were no doubt others.
But in most cases the intellectual, and even the ideologue (it is a little difficult to think of North as an intellectual) is not a good subversive, certainly not a good mole. Normally, intellectuals want to trumpet their ideology and values, not hide them, to lead the revolution, not spy for it.
Thoroughly disciplined members of the Communist party, especially immediately after the war when official attitudes toward Russia were returning from friendly to hostile, are the principal contemporary exceptions. If these had been the main target of our security efforts, it should not have been as difficult as it proved to be to separate them from other varieties of liberals. But perhaps separation was not the goal of the security agencies. We can still remember President Nixon’s “enemies list.”
At the beginning of this account, I mentioned that I have been and am a New Deal Democrat. The reason is depressingly simple, and has little to do with the wisdom or unwisdom of specific policies of either political party. Among the fundamental problems in every society, two stand out. People have to be motivated to contribute to the society, to produce. At the same time, they have to be protected if they are unable to take care of themselves adequately. You can think of it as the balance between incentives and distributive justice. Too much concern with the latter may weaken the former, and vice versa.
Using this simple-minded dichotomy, you can classify people (roughly) into two groups by their answers to the following question: Is it more important that (a) all chiselers be detected and removed from the welfare lists, or (b) no sparrow should fall from Heaven unseen and uncared for? If the answer is (a), the respondent is a Republican; if (b), a Democrat. Either answer is rationally defensible. I just happen to prefer the second one.

The introduction of this autobiography promised you mazes without minotaurs. Perhaps that was a little optimistic, because the maze of loyalty and national security that we have just been through did house a minotaur. Fortunately, and by not too wide a margin, I escaped being its victim. At the same time, I surely did not slay it, nor has it ceased to claim other victims. It remains a dangerous beast at large in a democracy.

Chapter 9
Building a Business School:
The Graduate School of Industrial Administration
Bill Cooper joined the Economics Department at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1947. At his invitation, I visited Carnegie a year later to give a seminar for the economists. Pittsburgh had been for me, as for everyone, the Smoky City, the city where the streetlights had to burn at noon to pierce the sulfurous smog. I had seen Pittsburgh only from an overnight Pullman, which stopped there around midnight on my trips between Chicago and Washington.
Wakened by the shunting and switching of the cars, I would peer out the window of my berth as the train slowly maneuvered through the steep-walled valley of the Monongahela, the hillsides reflecting the lurid red glare of the open hearths, the coke ovens, and the blast furnaces of the great steel mills that lined the valley. Intermittently, a Bessemer converter would send up a great flaming flare, turning the scene almost daylight-bright. With the smoke and flame, the blackness lit by the red fires, it was a preview of hell.
I had a curious first impression of the Carnegie campus, too. I arrived there by cab through a snow- covered Schenley Park on a bright winter morning, catching a glimpse of Henry Hornbostel’s stately Palladian buildings, then sitting almost outdoors, it seemed, in Bill’s many-windowed office, surrounded by snow-carpeted lawns. I lectured to the economists on disguised unemployment in agriculture in “backward” economies, a topic I had explored in the course of my studies of the economic effects of atomic energy. The economists detected a bit of a foreign accent, but were polite.
Pittsburgh was a far more pleasant city than my midnight experiences had led me to expect. I learned of the Pittsburgh Renaissance which was just then ridding the city of most of its major sources of smog and pollution: houses heated by coal (replaced by natural gas), steam locomotives (replaced by diesels), and Bessemer converters (replaced by open hearths). Techno-

logical changes had conspired at this time to make all of these polluters uneconomical, and civic action had introduced strong and successful regulations to clean the air. (Was inventionthe new technologythe mother of necessity here?)
Sometime in 1948, soon after my first visit to Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Institute of Technology received a gift of $5 million in endowment and $1 million for a building for a new Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) that would provide business education for students with undergraduate degrees in science and engineering. The donor was William Larimer Mellon, who had founded the Gulf Oil Company.* From his industrial experience, he had concluded that modern high-tech firms needed top executives who both were skilled in management and understood science and technology. The provost of Carnegie Tech, Elliott Dunlap Smith, had described to Mellon the newly revised undergraduate industrial management curriculum as a rough prototype for a program that would attain these goals. Mr. Mellon was impressed, and the gift followed.
At Bill’s suggestion, I was asked to come to Carnegie again to discuss the plans for the new school with Provost Smith and Lee Bach, chairman of the Economics Department. An invitation to join the faculty as professor of administration and chairman of the Department of Industrial Management soon followed.
I was not eager to leave Illinois Tech, for I had confidence that with Don Smithburg and Victor Thompson we could build a strong public administration program there. We were also writing our textbook in public administration (published in 1950). I had sunk deep roots into IIT. I was finally convinced, however, that the financial resources of GSIA could launch, much sooner than at IIT, the program of empirical research in organization that seemed the logical sequel to Administrative Behavior. My visits to Pittsburgh showed me that it was a livable city, no dirtier than Chicago, perhaps cleaner.
Having made the decision, on a trip to Pittsburgh in April 1949, I took a long walk early one morning through much of the north part of Squirrel Hill. Just before this visit, I had drawn on a map of Pittsburgh a circle of one mile radius around the Carnegie Tech campus, for I was resolved to walk to work instead of commuting, and had checked the census tract data to discover which portions of this area were inhabited by college-educated,

• William Larimer Mellon was a grandson of the banker Thomas Mellon, who had established the Mellon fortune at the time of the Civil War. He was a nephew of Andrew Mellon and a cousin of Richard King Mellon, who in turn was the central figure in the Mellon barony when I reached Pittsburgh and the partner, with Mayor Dave Lawrence, in bringing about the Pittsburgh Renaissance.

middle-class families. I looked in these portions for a house we could afford.
In the last lap of my walk, I climbed the steep slope behind the campus to the Schenley Park Golf Course, and walked east a half-mile on a street called Northumberland. The houses were noticeably nicer than the house we had just bought in Chicago. From the corner of Northumberland and Inverness, I looked at the lawns and flowers a bit enviously, glad that I would soon be able to bring the children to a brighter and greener neighborhood.
That was more than forty years ago. We still live in the house on Northumberland Street that we bought in the summer of 1949, just a mile from the Carnegie campus, from which I have walked back and forth each day, gradually erasing the memories of commuting on Chicago streetcars. I estimate that I have walked nearly 20,000 miles on that one mile of Northumberland Street, enough to carry me around the world if I don’t stick too close to the equator (but only, as a friend has pointed out, if I can walk on water).
After 10,000 trips along the same path, one’s surroundings should become invisible. They don’t. On the first half of the morning walk straight west from home, I proceed down the tree-lined street of affluent homes, noting new construction, for-sale signs, and other marks of change. From April to early autumn, a succession of flowers, shrubs, and trees display their colors. I hear a song sparrow or a mourning dove; occasionally in autumn I catch a glimpse of a flicker’s white rump and red-gold wings. I’d like to say that I spend the time of those morning walks thinking deep thoughts. I rarely do. Thoughts are easily interrupted by any new sight or sound, the chain broken and unpatchable.
At the halfway mark, after crossing Forbes Street, there is a short climb to gain the ridge at the golf course, where, looking southwest far across the valley, I see clusters of houses marching up the hills that form the steep south bank of the Monongahela River, nearly three miles away. The masses of white and pastel-colored houses reflecting the morning light are sharply outlined against the dark green hills, giving them a three-dimensional solidity.
In foreground and middle distance below me lie the meadows and woods of Schenley Park, the contours of the last line of treetops in the park composing a complex counterpoint with the gently undulating ridge on the horizon. As I proceed along my path, the contour continually shifts against the ridge, forming at each glance a new composition. Sometimes I am reminded of the Rhine below Weisbaden, of Gardanne on its hill hear Aixen-Provence, of Siena, viewed from a distant ridgeall different, but each with this sense of human settlement crowding up onto the protective hills,

crowned each by its church or fortress. Mumford’s medieval city, repeated even in New World Pittsburgh.
On some mornings, of course, the far bank of the river is hidden in mists or smog (much less of the latter since the steel mills disappeared). In winter, the buildings on the slope are dark against the snow, a negative of the summer scene. But ten thousand different views present me with new pleasures for every walk. Then the rapid descent down to the campus.
Going home in the evening is another matter. The walk starts with the steep hundred-foot climb to the golf course. These days, even walking slowly, I reach the top winded. (Why wasn’t it possible to arrange the uphill walk for morning and the downhill for evening? Alas, the East End of Pittsburgh isn’t laid out that way.)
Sometimes, looking back, I am rewarded by a spectacular sunset, but, with the light behind them, the houses on the distant hills do not announce themselves with the same sharp contrast as in the morning. The south bank loses its solidity, its third dimension, and becomes a flat backdrop to the park landscape. At the end of the golf course, I turn my back to the view and trudge home.
Getting Started
Life during the early years of GSIA was a three-ring circus. Lee Bach, who was appointed dean of the new school, Bill Cooper, and I played leading roles in developing its faculty and curriculum. Provost Smith, who had an industrial and academic background in personnel administration, was also very active. We had almost a clean slate, but what had previously been written on it is worth mentioning.
First, we inherited the undergraduate industrial management (read “industrial engineering”) curriculum, which Bach, Cooper, and Smith had revamped, and which in fact provided an excellent template for our new graduate program. Second, Lee Bach had come to Carnegie in 1947, at age thirty, with the promise that he could start a small doctoral program in economics, and had hired several economists on the strength of that promise. The first of these two inheritances gave us a good start, the second, as I shall recount, caused complications.
Almost none of the founding fathers of GSIA (except Provost Smith) had extensive backgrounds in management or business education. We were social scientists who had discovered in one way or another that organizational and business environments provide a fertile source of basic research ideas,

and who therefore did not regard basic and applied as antithetical terms. Accurately or not, we perceived American business education at that time as a wasteland of vocationalism that needed to be transformed into science-based professionalism, as medicine and engineering had been transformed a generation or two earlier.
We were most fortunate in that we took on this task at that particular moment in history. World War II had spawned something called “operational analysis” or “operations research,” the use of quantitative tools for managerial problem solving and decision making. Just after the war, a number of people were seeking to transfer these tools to peacetime industrial applications, and new tools (such as linear programming) were being discovered.
At about the same time, the behavioral sciences were flourishing and were being brought to bear on issues in organization and management. (The activities of the Political Science Department at Chicago, Barnard’s The Functions of the Executive, and my Administrative Behavior were examples of these trends.) Publication of the extensive field studies carried out in the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company by F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson (1939) had begun before the war, and our field experiment in the California State Relief Administration was completed in 1941.
The postwar flowering of management science and of the behavioral approach to organization theory provided the substance of applied science we needed. The quantitative undergraduate training of our students made it possible to put that science into the curriculum. Having worked out a Master’s curriculum appropriate to these goals, we developed two major research areas: organizational behavior and quantitative management science. I assumed leadership in the former, in collaboration with Harold Guetzkow, who joined a year later. Bill Cooper took the principal initiative in the quantitative area, but I also participated heavily in that, heading one of his research teams. So during this period I was at once organization theorist, management scientist, and business school administratorthe three rings of my circus.
We got off to a good start, keeping very busy for several years recruiting faculty, launching classes of about fifteen students each, and getting the research programs under way. My unaided memory insists that everything went fantastically well, but my files remind me that our ultimate success was not achieved without pain. The crisis arrived in the spring and summer of 1951. It had two interrelated foci, Bill Cooper and the economics faculty.
Although he was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, I cannot think of Bill as a Southerner. He grew up on the west side of Chicago, full of

plans and projects. From previous chapters, it is already evident that some of his projects have had major impacts on my own life. You will recall that in 1937 he had persuaded a girl named Dorothea Pye to accept me as a partner on a double date. Not long after that, he and I formed the Progressive Club at the University of Chicago as the instrument for our political activities. I have mentioned that a B in boxing was the only grade on my graduate transcript at Chicago, but I did not disclose that Bill Cooper had been my instructor in that class.
Nearly ten years later, Bill had suggested to me that I might like to attend with him the seminars of the Cowles Commission, almost converting me into a full-time economist. Some four years after that, he had persuaded me to leave my position at IIT and join the new venture in business education just starting at Carnegie Tech. Bill Cooper can be very persuasive, with the persuasiveness of the true entrepreneur.
Without his persuasion, my life would have been very different from the one I am recounting herewhether better or worse I cannot say, but different. It would not have traversed the same branches of the maze.
It was the economist Joseph Schumpeter, I believe, who defined an entrepreneur as someone who risks someone else’s money. Put less pejoratively, an entrepreneur is a broker who brings about marriages between ideas and resources. He dreams imaginative dreams and convinces others that those dreams are attainable, persuades them to place their bets on him.
Classically, entrepreneurs were supposed to belong to the world of business. But brokerage of ideas and resources is not confined to business; it is at least as much at home in academe. In a typical major American research university, one-third to one-half of the annual expenditures are funded by the entrepreneurial efforts of faculty members who write their dreams of undiscovered truths in research proposals addressed persuasively to foundations and government agencies.
For the academic entrepreneur, the stakes are even higher than dollars because the resources at risk are human careers. An academic entrepreneur publishes a paper arguing that a particular domain of knowledge is a gold vein of secrets, thereby attracting a swarm of prospectors. He urges some colleagues into a joint venture of exploration. He persuades a graduate student to direct his life into a particularly alluring line of inquiry. Entrepreneurship in science is a Roman gamble: the winnings are more often glory than riches, and the losses, lifelong futility. Bill Cooper has been a highly successful academic entrepreneur, whose successes have paid off not only for himself but for those who have invested in him.
Bill was a Depression child, who, to make his way in the world, started

up the ladder of Golden Gloves boxing. His mental abilities were recognized by the accountant Eric Kohler, who found him caddying on a golf course and put him back on the track of education. Admitted to the University of Chicago without completing high school, Bill arrived on the campus in 1934. I have no recollection of how we met there, but we became friends soon after he came, and a couple of years later were engaged in the joint political venture that has already been described.
Bill came to Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1947, recommended to Lee Bach by someone at Chicago. He had meanwhile spent some years after graduation from college as assistant to the controller of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as a graduate student at Columbia University, as an economist in the Bureau of the Budget, and, just after World War II, as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He arrived in Pittsburgh in time to become one of the entrepreneurs who attracted the six million GSIA dollars to Carnegie.
Bill Cooper was not only an entrepreneur but a revolutionary. His imagination and his indifference to convention were critical ingredients in the successful GSIA effort. That indifference also caused a temporary personal problem for Bill. At Columbia University, where he was writing a doctoral dissertation, his offbeat approach to accounting and economics greatly perplexed some members of his thesis committee. For several years his colleagues at Carnegie urged him to make such compromises and clarifications in the thesis document as would satisfy the committee, for we did not want the lack of a union card to endanger his academic progress.
But Bill’s entrepreneurial luck (or talent) held out here too. After a short time, his contributions to economics and management science became so well recognized that the question of a degree never came up at promotion time. Most people, by then, just supposed he had one; and in any event, it did not matter a whit whether or not he had. When in 1970 Ohio State University awarded Bill an honorary doctorate, I am sure he felt pleased, as all people do in such circumstances; but I am sure also that in the intervening years he did not feel that he lacked credentials for the job he was doing.
Bill’s example probably accounted for the flexibility that the GSIA faculty later sometimes exhibited in deciding what constituted a thesis in industrial administration, awarding the degree, for example, to Allen Newell and to others for research in artificial intelligence. Bill Cooper was never one to think slots should not be as flexible as people.
As soon as the new management science techniques appeared on the horizon, and especially linear programming, Bill understood their potential

and undertook to master them, to push them forward and apply them to important practical problems. He also saw their key significance for the curriculum. Our first class of Master’s students in 1950 was exposed to linear programming in a seminar that Bill and I taught jointly. He soon found in the Mathematics Department exactly the right partner, Abe Charnes, for pushing research that used this tool. After forty years of partnership, the team of Charnes and Cooper continues today to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the linear programming (LP) formalism, and the range of its real-world applications.
The contributions of Charnes and Cooper being matters of public record, they do not have to be recounted here. I will just mention how their entrepreneurial skills were tested by their first great successthe introduction of linear programming into the oil industry for blending gasoline in refineries. Prudent businessmen, like prudent educators, always follow Alexander Pope’s precept: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried; nor yet the last to lay the old aside.” The problem of the entrepreneur is to persuade someone to go first; the others will follow readily enough.
In the case of the refinery problem, Gulf Oil’s Philadelphia refinery agreed to provide Bill and Abe with access and data; models were tested; and results were obtained (on paper) showing the superiority of the new model over traditional rule-of-thumb decision methods. But no amount of persuasion convinced the company that they should be “the first by whom the new are tried.” So Bill and Abe could publish only their on-paper results in a scholarly article.
But that did the trick. The article came to the attention of ESSO, who assumed that surely Gulf was already using LP and that ESSO was lagging behind its competitors. Work was soon under way at the ESSO Research Laboratories, and a genuine application became a reality, with everyone congratulating himself on not taking the first, big risk.
Bill Cooper also played a central role in creating the Institute of Management Sciences. When Carnegie Tech received an endowment for a School of Urban and Public Affairs, Bill became its first dean. More surprisingly, he later held, for several years, an appointment at the Harvard Business School, which we had always regarded as The Competition. He evidently thought (and no doubt correctly) that Harvard had not yet wholly digested the message of management science and needed reform in that direction.
Still later, Bill rejoined his former colleagues Abe Charnes and George Kozmetsky at the University of Texas Business School. I will leave Bill’s story at that point, and return to my account of events in 1951, having noted that Bill’s entrepreneurial activity continues as vigorously as ever today.

Stormy Weather
Of the three members of the triumvirateLee, Bill, and Ithat assumed the leadership of GSIA, Bill was the radical, the least constrained by the established conventions of business education or by the realities of organizations. (At the same time, of the three, he had had the most extensive organizational experience.) His influence prevented Lee and me from conceding too much to the pressures of the outside business and academic worlds. His many innovative ideas also included some that seemed pretty wild to us. When there was disagreement among us, it often ended with a 2-to-1 vote, with Bill in the minority. (Lee did not take his deanship lightly, and did not settle things by formal majorities. He discussed and listened and was most unarbitrary, but in the end, he made the decision.)
Bill also brought into his research team several researchers who seemed to Lee and me to live in a very abstract world having little contact with real management problems. Space constraints displaced this little group to another building, 500 feet from the rest of usan enormous social distance, as anyone who is familiar with organizations and the importance of proximity for social communication will recognize.
Relations between Bill and me were soon badly strained, as he and his companions became more and more frustrated by the 2-to-1 votes. The situation worsened when one of Bill’s close associates decided to leave because we would not meet all the terms he had set for remaining. Since, wearing one of my three hats, I was part of Bill’s project, he had also injected himself into my continuing consulting relation with the Cowles Commission, which he viewed as a conflict of interest or of loyalty. Finally, he dragged his feet on providing support for the empirical work I wanted to begin in my scheduling project. We had all the ingredients for a good feud.
Meanwhile, the economists were becoming unhappy, believing they were being pressured (and perhaps they were) to move their research in directions relevant to a school of business. We didn’t think of it as ''pressure" but as opportunity to participate in research for which we had found funding: a study of the use of accounting data by factory managers in their decision making; a study of the roles of forecasting and feedback in scheduling factories with uncertain demands for their products.
Here were settings in which we could compare the ways in which decisions were actually made in business firms with the ways that economic theory and textbooks said they were made. These were not settings, however, to which economists were accustomed or in which they felt comfortable. There were few precedents in the profession for studying the decisions of individual firms at first-hand. Nevertheless, an economist, Gordon Tyndal, participated

in the accounting study, and three economists, Charlie Holt, Franco Modigliani, and Jack Muth, in the study of production planning; and both studies produced results of considerable value.
But there was another difficulty with the economistsperhaps the real reason they felt coerced and threatened. I had not for some years (certainly not since my association with the Cowles Commission) kept secret my skepticism about mainstream neoclassical economics. I was prepared to preach the heresies of bounded rationality to economists, from the gospel of Administrative Behavior, chapter 5, in season and out.
At first I did not recognize that when you are in a position of authority you cannot debate freely with people in your organization without some of them believing that they may endanger their careers if they disagree with you too vigorously. Perhaps they are rightI like to think not in my case, but self-deception is easy. People who agree with you are apt to seem a little more intelligent than those who don’t. Power does corrupt.
But behaving differently as administrator than as colleague by pulling my intellectual punches did not (and does not) appeal to me as a way of life. In my previous administrative posts, in Berkeley and at IIT, my colleagues had not taken any guff from me. Perhaps I had been too young and inexperienced to be intimidating to them. And in my previous associations, we were almost all political scientists; I didn’t come from an alien discipline.
GSIA, with its plurality of economists, was different. I began to acquire a distaste for the intermingling of academic with management roles that undoubtedly contributed to my later decisions gradually to retreat from administration. I would rather see my ideas gain acceptance by their merit than by administrative fiat; but at the same time I cannot be neutral about the directions taken by the organizations to which I belong. The conflict is eased when I do not have line authority. Then I have to persuade.
At any rate, I heckled the GSIA economists about their ridiculous assumptions of human omniscience, and they increasingly viewed me as the main obstacle to building “real” economics in the school. That was the other half of the crisis, which became acute when the two dissident factions, Bill Cooper’s research group and the economists, sought to unite.
Early in July 1951, I had a long evening’s conversation with Bill at a bar in Shadyside called The Fox Cafe, in which tempers were kept but all of the dirty linen was hung out for inspection. Bill described me as intimidating the faculty who disagreed with me, and proposed that I give up my formal authority as chairman of the I.M. Department. He even proposed an “autonomous” research project in administration, with its own $100,000 budget as compensation!

I listened for a long time to Bill’s description of my shortcomings, then allowed as how I didn’t think I would resign my chairmanship and counterattacked by discussing my problems working within Bill’s research group and what was needed to solve them. The conversation ended inconclusively but in what I would describe as a tentatively friendly mood. The next morning I recorded the conversation in a four- page, single-spaced aide-mémoire, which I carefully filed in case there were later disagreements about what had transpired.
After I had confirmed with a few other faculty that morale was truly low, I directed a memorandum to Lee. As I reread it now, I find the tone of the document in some ways curious. I nearly always refer to our colleagues as “staff” instead of “faculty.” Some of the references to the culling of the faculty that Lee and I had inherited have a rather cold-blooded sound. There is a straining for objectivity, and perhaps no more defensiveness than one would expect under the circumstances. The document seeks to conceal rather than convey the anger and anxiety I was feeling. The mood is one of diagnosis and treatment rather than blame.
In my memorandum, I told Lee that I had verified the generally low level of morale. The economists were ambivalent “about the special character of the school as a school of industrial administration,” and were “desperately intent on retaining their professional roles as economists.” They felt that they had no representation in administrative councils and that he, Lee, had ceased to look at things as an economist.
There was much misinformation about the plans and intentions of the leadership, and in the griping, the faculty sometimes referred to themselves as "vassals.‘’
The faculty in industrial administration had been urged to associate themselves with the economists in their opposition to current policies. While feeling themselves excluded from policy making, the faculty also complained about the long, inconclusive staff meetings, where they did not think they had a real influence on the decisions that were reached.
Having detailed the problems, I went on to list some possible actions: A committee composed solely of economists could be created to guide the graduate program in economics. A chairman could be appointed to take charge of this program, although there was a danger that he would either be “captured” by the economists or rejected as not loyally representing them. The troika of Bach, Cooper, and myself should be expanded to bring in other economists (balanced by faculty from industrial management). Lee should avoid transacting business conspicuously with me at lunch. I should probably participate more actively in Bill’s research group, avoiding "methodological discussions about the need for economists becoming psycholo-

gists." More concern should be shown for the morale of faculty who would probably not be retained indefinitely. Additional administrative assistance should be provided for Lee.
I concluded the memorandum with the ringing declaration that “as I look over the situation . . . I see nothing that calls in question the basic directions the School’s development has been following I see
no real proposal for an alternative direction, but a rather high concentration of the stresses that commonly go with rapid organizational change.” I then expressed optimism that we could rebuild morale and “agreement as to the School’s function and focus” and “allay the fear of the economists that they are being made the victims of an empire-building attempt by the I.M. group.”
The memorandum is a good example of my approach to an administrative crisis. Reading it after passions have had nearly forty years to cool, I am struck by how much it draws on theory from Administrative Behavior, and particularly the theory of organizational identification and loyalty, as the basis for its diagnosis and recommendations. Evidently I believed what I had written about organizations well enough to apply it to my own administrative problems.
Much of my later article on the organization of a business school (1967a) is already present in my analysis of this crisis. The crisis was ended, as most crises are, by gradual exhaustion, by applying a few Band-aids (some of them suggested in my memorandum), by the departure of some of our more alienated colleagues, and by the completion of the new GSIA building, which allowed us to reunite our faculty in one compact group.
The building, which was supposed to cost $1 million, was designed by an architect, with the usual recklessness of that profession, to cost $1.6 million. Since we were not about to dip into endowment, we reduced cost nearly to budget by postponing the installation of air-conditioning and eliminating the elevator (the building is only three stories in height). A few years later, needing more space, we installed an office for an associate dean in the elevator shaft.
To puncture as much as possible the disciplinary boundaries, we distributed the faculty more or less randomly throughout the building, so that there would not be compact pockets of organization theorists, economists, or finance specialists. Of course they gradually found ways of reuniting themselves, but we were able at least to delay their segregation into disciplines.
The problems that created the crisis did not wholly go away; they were built into the fabric of the GSIA mission. One problem was the fascination of abstract mathematical techniques, which sometimes emphasized the

mathematics more than the management applications. A second problem was the partial mismatch between the “pure science” values economists acquire from their discipline and the interest in real-world applications that characterizes a business school. A third, related problem was the near incompatibility of the behavioral theories of economic decision making that some of us were developing with the neoclassical theories espoused by most of the economists.
Keeping the balance of the scientific and the professional, of the economic and the behavioral, was an arduous job. Only the complete dedication and strong leadership of Lee Bach held the venture on course. In my paper on business schools, I wrote that “organizing a professional school . . . is very much like mixing oil with water: . . . And the task is not finished when the goal has been achieved. Left to themselves, the oil and water will separate again. So also will the disciplines and the professions” (Simon 1967a, p. 16). By hard work, we managed to keep GSIA pretty well emulsified, at least until the 1960s.
In my essay from which the preceding quotation comes, I explain why these problems are endemic to professional educationin medicine, engineering, and business. This law of nature, learned during my first two years at GSIA, continued to influence the development of the school.
The great thing about such controversy as we had in GSIA was that it was more about principles, issues, and policies than about personal or organizational advantage. I see Mr. Freud smiling, but he is wrong, as he should have known from his own controversies. Only people who believe deeply and almost fanatically in a dreamas many of us in GSIA didcan struggle so hard without inner doubt and conflict, and without losing, in the presence of frequent disagreement on particulars, a deep sense of common purpose and mutual respect.
Nor do I want to make conflict seem to play a greater role in GSIA than it did; but the story of a marriage that pretends there were no spats is always a little dull. More important than internal agreement and disagreement was the position of GSIA vis-à-vis the world. Evolutionists have discussed the advantages and disadvantages, for progress, of an isolated island community. GSIA was such a community, open and hospitable to alien ideas blown in from the sea, but protected from the need to defend the tender mutants it had bred against constant confrontation with all the established mainland species. Its success speaks for the island as a locus for innovation.
The island metaphor was only one part of GSIA’s external posture. We also had David and Goliath much in mind. For several of uscertainly for Bill Cooper and methere was no greater pleasure than being the underdog,

unless it was the pleasure of being the winning underdog. And we often portrayed in such terms our struggles against the Goliaths of traditional education, conventional business practice, and classical economics.
More Colleagues
I have observed that the spectacular growth of GSIA owed much to the leadership style of Lee Bach, who served as dean from 1949 until 1961, and whose strength of conviction and character kept the enterprise on course. It owed a great deal, also, to Provost Elliott Dunlap Smith, who played a very active role in the early development of the school, and an educational role throughout Carnegie Tech that was exceptionally important for my own development.
Business schools (GSIA included) are sometimes accused of not teaching management and leadership. I expect that generally they do not, mainly because they don’t know what to teach under those headings or how to teach it. Possibly, just possibly, we could start with biography, with the styles and behaviors of outstanding managers. It isn’t very analytic, but maybe it could do some good.
Lee Bach serves as an example. His talents are very different from the entrepreneurial talents of Bill Cooper, yet he managed with immense success the venture capital that W. L. Mellon had entrusted to him. When I try to describe his style, it always seems too simple, too obvious. It’s like saying of a tennis ace, “He always hit the ball squarely and with force, placing it precisely where he aimed.” If you can do that, you can be a great tennis player. But is the advice worth teaching? What do you do with that information? I will try to describe Lee Bach’s methods, but with no conviction that what I say will make great managers or entrepreneurs.
Lee Bach persuaded us, by example, to set the goals of GSIA sky-high, stretching the limits of the possible. And as aspirations were attained, goals moved higher. Second, Lee always found a way to reconcile technique (we were loaded with that) with common sense (sometimes in short supply). Third, Lee was always more interested in getting the job done, and done well, than in placing blame when something went awry along the way. High aspirations, common sense, and responsibility for getting results. It seems simple enough.
I have traveled a good deal in Japan, mostly for enjoyment but also from curiosity about Japanese methods of management. I have learned the Japanese language (badly); I have read widely. Over even a longer period, I have had at least four close Japanese friends. I have learned about the ringi

system of decentralized and consultative decision making. But I have also met some of the founders, like Matsushita, of the Japanese electronics industry. With all the talk of “decentralization” and “participation,” these executives are tough cookies, men of decision and action. Perhapsprobablythey listen, but I doubt that they lead from behind.
The moral I have drawn from these journeys abroad and my studies is that a strong rudder and motivation on top are not antithetical to openness to ideas from below, from abovefrom everywhere. Management does not have to be weak to be “participative.” All it requires is a manager who is strong enough in his inner convictions not to feel obliged to defend himself from ideas that come from without.
Lee Bach was also (and is) a tough cookie. He led from strength, but he was never afraid of ideas, even the ideas of others. He was not afraid because he had confidence in his ability to separate sense from malarky; he was never bowled over (to use his favorite phrase) by technological virtuosity and fireworks.
Lee spent a year in law school before he opted for graduate study in economics. Possibly as a result of this experience, he is a formidable cross-examiner, as anyone who has been questioned by him at lunch or in the classroom will testify. When the cross-examination ends, the proposal under consideration has been dissected thoroughly, and its muscles, blood vessels, and bones are all clearly visible on the dissecting table. And the scalpel was ordinary English, no mathematical equations or technical jargon.
Lee has a sense of legitimacy and hierarchy that today may seem a little old-fashioned (undemocratic?), especially in a typical academic environment. But Carnegie Tech was not a typical academic environment. It had come out of the tradition of technical universities, very different from the tradition of liberal arts colleges, much closer to the organizational tradition of business and industry. In that tradition, Lee never let you forget that the dean was responsible for the final decisions in his school, or that he was dean.
On the other hand, I rarely felt that Lee pulled rank on me or others, because decisions were made after full discussion, and consensus was reached more often than not. Lee was enormously patient in conducting lengthy Quaker meetings of the faculty, which usually reached agreement and rarely took a formal vote.
Sometimes he did arrive at a meeting with a knowledge of what the outcome must be, but generally he was open to advice and persuasion, and invested little of his self-esteem in trademarking ideas with his own name. If decisions had to be made within specified ground rules, because of Carnegie Tech policies or for other reasons, he was open and explicit in stating the constraints.

Lee was sometimes regarded as cold by those who did not know him well, a reputation that stemmed from his concern for formal organization. His greatest weakness was his inability to delegate detail to others, which left him with an immense workload. In a year when he was on leave of absence and I was acting dean, I had great difficulty convincing him that nothing terrible would happen if he simply forgot about GSIA for a while, and by budget time in the spring, although his leave had not ended, he was back nearly full-time. If I had really wanted to manage rather than spend my time on research, I might have been quite unhappy that year.
I did accomplish one thing as acting dean. It always seemed to me important that Lee, with his reputation for aloofness, should have a secretary who would present a gracious and smiling face to those who came to see him. That did not describe his secretary at the time I took over. I quickly made her sufficiently unhappy with my managerial style that she quit. Lee never said much about the departure of his secretary, but I think he forgave me when he found his public relations significantly improved with the new one I had hired.
When I returned from my own leave at RAND in 1961, Lee informed me that he was going to resign as dean. He had learned that he was suffering from an illness that would be aggravated by heavy administrative responsibilities, and he was unwilling to proceed at half steam. A few years later he moved to Stanford, where he did not have an official administrative position, but where his advice and counsel played an important role in the rapid progress of the Stanford Business School and in top policy making in the university as a whole.
I warned you that I would say little about Lee that would tell you how to be a good manager, and I have made good my warning. The principles of good management are simple, even trivial. They are not widely practiced for the same reason that Christianity is not widely practiced. It is not enough to know what the principles are; you must acquire deeply ingrained habits of carrying them out, in the face of all sorts of strong urges to stray onto more comfortable and pleasant paths, to respond without inhibition to provocations, and just to goof off. Lee had the self-discipline actually to apply the principles, to behave like a good manager and leader. Not many of us do.
Another person of great importance to GSIA, to Carnegie Tech, and to me was Elliott Dunlap Smith, the provost. Smith was always careful to point out that his name was spelled with two l’s and two t’s, thus distinguishing his line from the more prestigious New England Eliots. Still, and in spite of the additional fact that he was raised in Chicago, he never forgot, or allowed you to forget, his New England roots or his ties with Yale.

As an unchallengeable patrician, he permitted himself a full quota of those idiosyncrasies and crotchets that mark the gentry of England, both Old and New. Occasionally there wafted from him a hint of condescending anti-Semitism, but had I been Irish, I am sure I would have detected corresponding condescension. In my experience, it never translated into acts of partiality; he was simply aware that he was a Brahmin, and did not reject the sense of superior birth that came with that endowment. His wife, Marie, was as New England as he.
Graduated as a lawyer, Elliott Smith had spent much of his professional career as personnel manager for the Dennison Manufacturing Company, a leading manufacturer of office supplies. There he educated himself to be rather a good amateur psychologist (I am not sure that the word amateur is even fair here), concerned with applying psychology to industrial management. His 1928 book, titled Psychology for Executives, has an appendix listing “good books on psychology” that references the core psychological works of that timeJames, Woodworth, Watson, Koffka, Dewey, F. A. Allport, and many othersbut not Freud. The book is full of sound functionalist psychology and common sense.
Elliott Smith was to distinguish himself mainly not as a writer or a scholar but as a passionate teacher and trainer of teachers. His own teaching was largely in the domain of human relations, first in Yale’s industrial administration course in its Engineering College, then in Carnegie Tech’s undergraduate industrial management program, and finally in GSIA.
Perhaps his interest in human relations had its origins in his early exposure to John Dewey’s experimental school in Chicago, which he attended as a boy. Perhaps this interest was encouraged further by the fact that his own human relations often left something to be desired, as I shall explain. Certainly the interest matured as a central professional concern in his work at Dennison.
His course, “Human Relations in Industry,” was built around a combination of lectures, role-playing sessions, and pure Elliott Smith. He was one of the pioneers in the use of role playing as an educational device, and probably unique in hiring and coaching students of the Drama Department to play roles opposite the management students. The management students interviewed secretaries, applied for jobs (with Smith as prospective employer), presented consulting reports, and disciplined erring employees on the GSIA stage, in front of their fellow students and critiqued by Smith.
One of Smith’s favorite performances, early in the semester, was to read aloud on the stage and comment upon the genuine application letters he had received from his students, who were required to apply in this way for the position of teaching assistant. No student whose letter was thus read

(anonymously, of course) and dissected ever forgot the vivid thumbnail sketch of his character that Smith provided. The whole procedure would never have passed a university review committee on human subjects, an institution that did not then exist.
The character analyses were all hunch and no science (but of course that is the way the real world works too). I think Smith believed his diagnoses, but that is not the point. What he demonstrated to the students, unforgettably, is how we reveal ourselves to others, intentionally or not, accurately or not, by our written and oral words.
As befitted one who followed James and Dewey and ignored Freud, Smith’s course provided a highly rationalistic view of human relations based primarily on learning theory. His central aim was to show students how to manage their own learning, of human relations skills or any others, and to set their own goals for learning. Fundamentally, he was a teacher of skills, not of knowledgebelieving in the latter only as it contributed to the former. It was more important that the students understand a few basic psychological principles and apply them than that they be sophisticated in academic psychology.
Hence the course was built around a simple, but sound, catechism of learning theory combined with exercises for applying the catechism. Learning requires knowledge of results (reinforcement). The student learns from doing, and only from doing. (The teacher is relevant only in influencing the behavior of the student.) There were other principles relating to problem-solving skills and human relations skills, but these will give the flavor. The entire catechism was handed out to the students at the beginning of the semester on a couple of mimeographed sheets, expressed in a highly esoteric ideographic code that Smith had developedI guess as a mnemonic device. Woe to the student who did not learn to use this encrypted language accurately.
At Yale, Smith had met Robert Doherty, electrical engineer and dean of engineering, who, upon becoming president of Carnegie Tech, brought Smith there as provost. Hence, Elliott’s full stage, ranging over all of Carnegie Tech, was much larger than the one on which he acted with his management students.
A tall, lean man of enormous energy and speed of stride and speech, Smith was always full of ideas, some new, some old, which he supported passionately as long as he held them. He was not a stubborn man, but, as with most of us, his changes in mind usually took place between conversations rather than during them. Placed in authority, his vigor and activism were often a source of terror to his subordinates. (Some referred to him privately as “El Toro.”) When one had been overwhelmed by his stream of arguments

(it wasn’t enough for him to order, he felt impelled to convince) and had agreed to do something that was wholly unreasonable, one would hope that Smith would forget what had been promised. And the hope was often (not always) realized.
Once when I was auditing his class (for a time he hoped I would under-study him, but ultimately let me go my own way), he made a particularly sweeping statement, then turned to me and asked, “Isn’t that so, Professor Simon?” My father had carefully taught me, “Never sign in the presence of the salesman,” and I had learned that valuable lesson well, to the point of reflexive response. Recovering from my momentary shock, I quickly replied, “On the whole, it seems reasonable.” Smith turned to the class and, his voice dripping with sarcasm, said, “Professor Simon says on the whole it seems reasonable. I tell you it’s so.”
As head of the Industrial Management Department, I had occasion to confer with Provost Smith frequently. Finding myself often unable to meet his arguments in “real time,” I soon devised a defensive stratagem: I always brought along another colleague when I was summoned to the provost’s office. It was the task of the colleague to wave a distracting conversational red flag at Smith when he saw that I was at the point of agreeing to something I ought not accept. That made life simpler for all of us.
I have painted Elliott Smith as a character, one who was rather difficult to live with. But he was difficult mainly because he expected you to think deeply and well about education, to justify your views on first principles, and to carry them into well-designed practice. Moreover, the first principles on which he himself operated, however idiosyncratically expressed, were almost all quite sound. Hence he had an enormous and lasting positive impact on education at Carnegie Tech and ultimately, by imitation and borrowing, at many other institutions. Those of us who had any considerable contact with him regard him as a major influence on our own educational thoughts and ways, and find ourselves frequently quoting and plagiarizing him, nearly forty years later.
From observing Elliott Smith I learned that being a decent person is terribly important, but being a “nice guy” is not important at all. Elliott Smith never attained high office. He was passed over for the presidency of Carnegie Tech when Bob Doherty retired, and he never achieved the influence with Doherty’s successor, Jake Warner (who placed more emphasis on research than teaching), that he had with Doherty. He retired with some feelings of bitterness and failurethe latter, I think, quite unjustified. He would probably have made a terrible chief executive for any organization, but he was much more influential, by virtue of ideas, not position, than are most chief executives. I suppose my own reluctance to go the managerial

route was partly influenced by my observation of Elliott Smith’s career, and by comparison of my human relations skills with his.
The New Model Business School
Having weathered its first crisis, and holding to its social science emphasis, GSIA quickly gained national visibility as the new model for a business school. European universities, moving cautiously into business education for the first time, generally found the scientism of GSIA a more comfortable model than the unfamiliar case method of the Harvard Business School. Two national studies of business education (whose directors came from liberal arts backgrounds and were extremely skeptical of business education in general) picked GSIA as the example for other business schools to imitate (R. A. Gordon and
J. E. Howell 1959; F. C. Pierson et al. 1959).
Within about five years, GSIA came to be regarded as one of the two or three best business schools in the nation. To avoid constraining our ability to innovate, we did not seek national accreditation until our reputation was so well established that the accrediting body could not put pressure on us to conform to conventional ideas.
The status of the school at the end of 1957 can be illustrated by the supremely arrogant letter I wrote to Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton of the University of Chicago on December 26, 1957, and his remarkably gracious reply of January 6:
Dear Chancellor Kimpton:
Certain passages in your recent message to alumni were reminiscent of the contempt for extra-Chicago academia that was so often exhibited in Bob Hutchins’ utterances. The particular barb that stung most sharply, of course, was the reference to business schools. That the business schools need reform is no secret. But your comment about “even the best” suggests that Allen Wallis hasn’t informed you very fully about what has been done over the past decade in the Graduate School here at Carnegie, more recently at MIT, UCLA, and to varying degrees at other institutions. In fact, even the Harvard Business School, whose conception of reform would differ considerably from ours, has been moving at least as rapidly as Chicago toward bringing itself into closer relation with fundamental work in the behavioral sciences and economics.
When you announce that the Business School at Chicago is henceforth going to stress quality, fundamental social science research, and a quantitative approach to business problems I guess I do not really expect you to append a footnote acknowledgment to Carnegie as the origin of this con-

ception. However, if you or Allen would like a concrete picture of what your school will look like when such goals are realized, we will be most pleased to welcome you to our campus. Sometimes, in our immodesty, we think that we have done for business education here what MIT did for engineeringif it was MIT that did it.
But if there is disappointment in the fact that a fine new invention has been anticipated, perhaps there is consolation in the fact that most of those responsible for the anticipation were products of the Chicago of Bob Hutchinsincluding Lee Bach, Bill Cooper, Jack Coleman, Harold Guetzkow, and me. Perhaps it was because we acquired at Chicago some of the same brashness that I complain of in Hutchins that we felt as free as we did to flout tradition.
With best wishes to you and Allen in bringing the Business School at Chicago into partnership with the effort to make this stem of university education as fundamental and vital as the best of the other professional schools, I am
Sincerely yours, Herbert A. Simon
Professor of Administration

Dear Professor Simon:
I appreciate your letter of December 26, 1957. Occasionally I let my prose run away with me, and I certainly did on my statement on business schools. I have an enormous admiration for what you and your colleagues have done at Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Since we have spent a lot of time in the last few years trying to hire you and Lee Bach, and a number of other people from your Business School, I think our actions prove how false my flippant words are.
I appreciate your good wishes on the development of our Business School. Allen is doing a superb job, and I should confess to you that I told Jake Warner [President of CIT] the other day if only our Business School could begin to rival yours in quality, I would feel that we had made a great success. Please forgive me.
Very sincerely yours, Lawrence A. Kimpton
The Ford Foundation, seeking to improve business education, used its golden carrots to push and pull other business schools toward the road GSIA had pioneered. GSIA faculty staffed a number of summer schools that the Foundation financed for business school faculty who wanted to learn about the new methods. GSIA students regularly won the Foundation’s

annual awards for the best business school dissertations and its graduate fellowships. The Foundation also funded some of our research (though never on the scale we thought we deserved for our services to it). Many of our doctoral alumni soon became deans of other business schools.
The Setting and the Culture
Since I never met Henry Hornbostel, the architect of the Carnegie Institute of Technology campus and first head of the Architecture Department, this tale is not about the man but about his buildings. But, having lived in and around his buildings for forty years, perhaps I also know the man. I do not know whether, in building the campus, beginning in 1904, he stayed within budgetfortunately the bills were paid generations before my time. What I do know is that he was a man of great imagination and that my gradual awareness of the beauty of the campus buildings has been a source of substantial pleasure to me during my sojourn here.
When I first saw the CIT buildings, they seemed quaint, with their Beaux Arts symmetry and decorative detail. In spite of my experiences with Mies von der Rohe’s department at Illinois Tech, I was rather addicted to the Bauhaus and the International styles. Hornbostel was a disciple of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, or more accurately, of the fifteenth-century Leon Battista Alberti. The campus was laid out in a large open quadrangle, its long axis running east to west along the boundary with Schenley Park and having a distinct downward slope of about four degrees.
The east (upper) end was bounded by the Fine Arts Building, an Italian palazzo, Hornbostel’s jewel, the floors inlaid with mosaics showing the floor plans of celebrated buildings, and the facade that faces the quad decorated with a series of empty niches intendeduntil the budget ran outto be filled with sculpture. The west (lower) end was bounded by Hammerschlag Hall, an engineering building that was also the power plant. The tall chimney was encased in a splendid cylindrical Italianate campanile, so that I always thought of the building, especially in winter when smoke and steam billowed from the campanile, as the Samovar. It is exquisitely proportioned, the facade, facing the quad, showing a strong resemblance to the facade of San’Andrea di Mantova, one of Alberti’s masterpieces.
On the south, or Schenley Park, side of the quad are Baker and Porter Halls, the one joined to the other by a 500-foot central corridor. Since the axis of these buildings slopes, the buildings have to slope, so that the corridor has a grade of several degrees, making roller skating from east to west a great sport. You can get a good idea of the first-floor corridor, viewed from

the east portal, from Vincent van Gogh’s well-known painting of the interior of his insane asylum, Saint- Paul Hospital at Saint-Rémy. Near the east entrance of Baker Hall is a beautiful, tiled circular staircase.
Of course the floors in Baker Hall don’t slope (although you have to remember to step down when you enter my office from the adjoining secretary’s office). Planarity is achieved by locating most of the space in wings that lie at right angles to the main corridor. The arched openings to these wings, as indeed all the doorways, are banded with thick strips of black iron, a constant reminder of the economic base for Pittsburgh and Andrew Carnegie. The exteriors of all the buildings and the interior corridors are lined with yellow brick. Originally, the roofs were of red tile, but we had to install a less costly material when they were replaced a few years ago.
There is much more I could say about these original campus buildings, but perhaps I have conveyed a sufficient idea of them. If my description sounds quirky, even irreverent, it conveys correctly the first impression the campus has on most people. Seeing the buildings constantly, living in them, one slowly learns that they are masterpieces. Perhaps the recent architectural fad that erected Palladian structures with their round-arched windows in every city in the land helps in the instruction. But I had discovered that they were masterpieces before then.
One of the University of Chicago Aristotelians, whose name, I think, was Nils Fuqua, had a habit, whenever some aesthetic heresy was uttered in his presence, of saying, ''Hear more Mozart!" So I say, “See more Hornbostel!” You don’t even need to come to Pittsburgh. He designed the Oakland, California, City Hall (which unfortunately is to be demolished after being damaged by the 1989 earthquake), and the architectural treatment for the Hell’s Gate Bridge, the large arched railway bridge that is visible on your right as you cross the Triborough on your way to Manhattan from La Guardia Airport. Come to think of it, it was a picture of that bridge in an atlas I owned as a child that first entranced me with the beauty of Hornbostel’s style.
My description of GSIA and its programs, and particularly my account of its early administrative crisis, may well astonisheven shockreaders whose experience of academe began during or after the troubles of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War period, or whose academic lives have not brought them in contact with institutes of technology. In the United States, institutes of technology, including the engineering and agricultural schools of the land grant colleges, have had rather different traditions from the liberal arts colleges, and even from the nonprofessional divisions of research universities.
The liberal arts tradition (if not always the practice) is one of extreme

decentralization. In its limiting form, a faculty is a collection of individuals, each expert in his or her own field and each possessing an autonomy called academic freedom. To be sure, collective decisions have to be madenew faculty selected, students evaluated for admission, curricula formulated, and so onand most of them are made with broad faculty participation.
For administrative convenience, the faculty is organized in departments along disciplinary lines (that is, members of a department generally hold their degrees in the same discipline, have had very similar training), and the chairman of the department is primus inter pares, most often elected by the members of the department. While curricula are determined by group processes, as they must be, individual faculty members organize and conduct their classes as they see fit, with a minimum of coordination with other classes.
In universities and colleges where research is part of the role of faculty, the researcher chooses his or her own topics. Senior researchers in major research universities are often, and quite correctly, described as feudal barons, whose academic freedom consists in the right to run their baronies without much interference from higher authority. Usually they acquire that independence by their entrepreneurial activities in raising most of their own research funds, and they are delegated broad authority to manage their research teams.
Of course, what I have described are ideal types. Few colleges operate precisely in this fashion. Presidents in small colleges, and deans and department heads in larger ones, have more than one votesometimes the only votein personnel and salary decisions. In universities, large introductory courses are sometimes taught by teams, who have to coordinate their plans and efforts. My earlier description of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science under Charles Merriam makes clear that it was less than a pure democracy.
At the time I came to Carnegie, institutes of technology lived much closer to traditions that came out of industrial practice. The administrative hierarchy was clearly defined, and deans and department heads, usually appointed from above after a modicum of consultation with their subordinates, had real authority. It was not unthinkable for research areas to be defined by a department for its members, or for faculty members to be urged or persuaded to aim their efforts in particular directions.
Carnegie Tech, and GSIA within it, clearly belonged to the tradition of institutes of technology, not the liberal arts tradition. Those of us who had responsibility for leadership in GSIA had no doubts or qualms about our duty (right?) to define research and teaching goals for the school. The research memoranda of 1950 and 1952, to which I have referred, are examples

of the way we went about discharging that duty. The research directions we outlined were also much in our minds when we recruited faculty. We were looking for able teachers and researchers who would find these kinds of missions challenging; we were not expecting them to define their missions wholly independently.
This perception of the world was congenial enough to most of the faculty members recruited on the industrial management side of our roster. Our environment and assumptions were not noticeably different from those of other business and engineering schools. It was far less congenial to faculty members recruited from psychology and economics, disciplines that usually reside in the liberal arts colleges of their universities and that do not often gain access to the large-scale research funding that produces baronies. So part of what we were seeing, in the tension within GSIA, was a conflict between two academic cultures that had different definitions of the academic role and of academic freedom.
That Lee Bach, Bill Cooper, and I came out of the liberal arts culture (the same University of Chicago in all three cases, in fact) but accepted the premises of the other culture requires explanation I do not feel fully able to provide. The fact that we were the leaders no doubt made us more willing to define the leadership role broadly. The fact that we had substantial funds for research from both internal and external sources required us to manage the activities that used those funds.
As a consequence, neither teaching nor research were areas of full faculty autonomy. The organization had more than a little concern and involvement with the content of both. We frequently drew conclusions about the particular talents of young faculty members, and advised them to move in one direction rather than another. Merton Miller, for example, who has had a very distinguished career in the economics of finance, had no initial intention of going into that field. When we convinced him that the area was underpopulated and that his abilities might shine there even more brightly than elsewhere, he prepared himself with great effectiveness to move in that direction. Such advice is not unknown in the world of liberal arts colleges or research universities; it simply was more common in our environment.
I hope that a note of apology has not crept into my voice as I describe these administrative arrangements. They have always seemed to me good for a university, enabling it to pursue goals vigorously, to innovate, even to change the world in modest ways. In such a university, I find the roles of both follower and leader generally comfortable, although I must confess that I have had more experience with leading than with following.
Academe had changed in some fundamental ways since World War II. One change has been toward gradual grass-roots democratization even of

those schools that descended from the tradition of institutes of technology and professional schools. The democratization was greatly accelerated by the student Troubles of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Today, in most universities of even modest distinction, a dean cannot be appointed without strong support from the faculty of the college, nor a department head without departmental consensus. Even in the case of the university president, the views of the facultyespecially if it unites behind a candidateare likely to be as important as the views of the Board of Trustees, at least important enough to impose a veto on an undesired candidate. The last time a president of Carnegie was appointed from above with minimal faculty participation was in 1965.
It is harder today to bring about real innovations in a university than it was before the democratization took place. I regret that, and think the price of organizational democracy has been high. Moreover, I do not believe that this kind of democracy within organizations has any connection with, or relevance for, democracy in the society at large. But that topic is beyond my purposes here.

Chapter 10
Research and Science Politics
Not all of my time after I came to Carnegie Mellon was devoted to organization and institution building. This chapter is devoted to a discussion of our research there and my professional activities outside the university.
Studying Organizations
During the first six years of my research at GSIA, I filled out, empirically and theoretically, the decision- making framework I had laid down in Administrative Behavior. My files yield a planning document that Harold Guetzkow and I wrote on February 28, 1952, probably the basis for a grant proposal, outlining a five-year plan for research in organizations. With Administrative Behavior as its theoretical starting point, it proposed field and laboratory research as well as theoretical studies, emphasizing the need to bring together empirical findings from many sources, not just our own work, in order to build theory.
The most interesting substantive recommendation in the document was that decision making in organizations should be related to learning theory: “Our work has led us to the conclusion that there is an intimate connection between organizational structure and the learning of frames of reference and roles by members of organizations.” The source of the idea could have been a combination of Harold Guetzkow’s previous psychological research on the topic of “set,” or frame of reference, and my experience in helping organize the Economic Cooperation Administration a few years previously. The idea foreshadowed the critical importance of reference frameswe would now call it “problem representation” or the "frame problem"in problem solving and learning. Problem representation is still high on the

agenda of research in cognitive science today, thirty-nine years after the date of that memorandum.
Even before our planning memorandum was written, we had begun our first big empirical study, the “Controllership Study” (Simon et al. 1954). It took us into factories and sales offices to see what use was made by operators of blast furnaces and sales managers, as aids to their decision making, of the company accounting and cost accounting records and of the services of the accountants.
The Controllership Study was an adventure to me, both watching George Kozmetsky (whom we hired from the Harvard Business School as a young Ph.D., and who already had extraordinary facility in analyzing accounting records) extract information from our respondents, and trudging through the reddish brown dust of the National Works of U.S. Steel in McKeesport to learn how a steel mill was actually managed and how its decisions were made.
In the Controllership Study, as in the later empirical work on organizational decision making we did in GSIA, I worked with a great many colleagues, the nature of the collegial relation being a mixture of those I had experienced in Berkeley and at Illinois Tech. As at Berkeley, a number of my co-workers were young academicians who had joined our group with the understanding that they would be associated with such research projects. I was their colleague, but also their project leader. Of my co-authors during this period, eight fall in this category.
Four other co-authors were more senior faculty colleagues, my relations with them being similar to my relations with Don Smithburg and Vic Thompson, with whom I wrote the public administration book at IIT. In addition, during the first five years at GSIA, I published papers with eight students, only two of whom (Ed Feigenbaum and Allen Newell) were my own doctoral students. Following the general custom of that time in political science and economics, I did not generally co-author papers based on the doctoral dissertations of my students, and even in recent years have done so only half a dozen times, and at the student’s invitation.
At Carnegie, the project team usually met weekly to report progress, assign tasks, and, most important, to discuss the research. In the project on organizational decision making, we recorded and circulated minutes of these meetings, and in all the projects members of the team prepared frequent working papers, submitting their ideas to criticism and discussion with their colleagues.
Outside the projects, my collaborations have usually involved a single person, occasionally as many as three or four. Again, we hold regular weekly meetings, as I do with my graduate students. With individuals, the meetings

are usually scheduled for an hour, with working groups, they may last several hours. Each member of the collaboration spends much more time in individual empirical or theoretical work between meetings than at the meetings.
Initial drafts of papers that are ultimately published may be written by any of the collaborators. Since I write easily and fluently, I probably do more than my share of the writing, and certainly of the final editing, of papers of which I am co-author. Names on publications are alphabetical, unless one or two members of the team are clearly principal authors.
Throughout the rest of my career, I have continued to work with many students and faculty colleaguesI have had more than eighty co-authors in allbut not usually within the framework of large empirical projects involving many people. The years at Berkeley and the first five years at Carnegie were my main experiences of large-scale empirical field work.
The Controllership Study was followed by a Ford-funded project that involved detailed case studies of specific situations in companies that gave us access to their decisions in the making. Both Dick Cyert and Jim March were attached to that project, and in that way began the collaboration that led to their pathbreaking book, The Behavioral Theory of the Firm, in 1963.
In the minutes of the working sessions in which Harold Guetzkow, Jim March, I, and others participated, our language for describing decision-making processes developed in an interesting way. We had long talked about “decision premises” and “islands” of such premises that could be communicated from one manager in an organization to another as inputs to decisions. When Harold brought to these sessions his earlier research on problem solving, we began more and more to see decision-making processes as essentially the same as problem-solving processes. My own economic theorizing was leading me in a similar direction. Hence, as early as 1951, the language of problem solving began to creep into the minutes of our working sessions.
Our growing interest in problem solving led us to restudy the writings of psychologists who had done research on that topic, especially Gestaltists such as Norman Maier, Max Wertheimer, Karl Duncker, and George Katona. This was a first tentative step on the road that led soon afterward to my collaboration with Al Newell and Cliff Shaw in building a computer simulation of heuristic problem solving.
Jim, Harold, and I also undertook to produce a “propositional inventory” of organization theory that Bernard Berelson of the Ford Foundation commissioned. Jim March and I co-authored, with Harold’s help, a book called Organizations (1958), which represents our interpretation of that assignment. It was successful in systematizing organization theory, less successful in marshaling the empirical evidence to support its propositions.

In particular, though we were acutely sensitive to the need for using field research to test and extend our theories of organizational behavior, we did not know how to compare information from diverse case studies that used relatively informal and wholly unstandardized methods for gathering and analyzing data. Much research effort was subsequently aimed at that problem at Carnegie, but we cannot say that we learned to handle all, or most, of the methodological difficulties. Perhaps our foremost contribution has been to show how human thinking-aloud protocols can be used as objective data, especially in conjunction with computer simulations.
Berelson did not think our book contained much of a propositional inventory, but the theory that it does contain has aged well. Jim and I have talked a few times about revising it, but have agreed that it would be difficult to come together again from our diverging professional paths. (Perhaps each of us should issue an independent second edition and see which sells better!)
Harold left in 1957 for other, presumably greener pastures, and Jim followed in 1964. After 1956 I was considerably diverted by the new computer simulation work. In 1961, Dick Cyert became dean of GSIA, greatly curtailing his research time. Since our research on organizational decision making was nearly unique, at least in the United States, we were generally unsuccessful in recruiting replacements for the original quadrumvirate who had provided the leadership. They simply were not being produced by other Ph.D. programs.
By the early 1960s, the Golden Age of organization theory and the behavioral theory of the firm had ended at Carnegie Institute of Technology. As we shall see, GSIA came to be dominated by research on sophisticated mathematical techniques in operations research and economics and by neo-classical economic theory. The economists’ aborted revolution of 1951 achieved a large measure of success in the 1960s.
The Mathematical Side
In my management science and econometric research, I retained my consulting ties and close contacts with the Cowles Commission and, through it, with the RAND Corporation, then enjoying tremendous success and visibility as a new way of enlisting research talent to help advance applied goals. Beginning in 1952, as I discussed earlier, I made frequent trips to RAND in Santa Monica and spent a number of summers and one full year (1960 61) there during the following decade.
At Carnegie Tech, my management science research, as distinguished from

my research on organizational behavior, was part of Bill Cooper’s project, as explained in chapter 9. The plans for that project were laid out in a basic planning memorandum dated February 21, 1950, a year and a half prior to the crisis I have told about. Under the heading of “production technology,” both the Cooper- Charnes linear programming work and the Holt-Modigliani-Muth-Simon* factory scheduling research were foreshadowed.
There was also a good deal of emphasis on the effect of financial data on decisions, an area of special interest to Bill Cooper. This led ultimately to such products as Charles Bonini’s computer simulation of a business firm, which demonstrated how changes in the accounting system could trigger changes in operating decisions.
My own mathematical and econometric work at this time had a number of themes, both substantive and methodological. A good overview of it can be found in Models of Man (1957a), a collection of some of the papers I wrote during my first five years at Carnegie. Part I contains papers on causality, deriving from my work with the Cowles Commission on the identification problem. Part II undertakes to show the utility of making mathematical translations of several current theories of social interaction (the theories of George Homans and Leon Festinger). Part III proposes several models that explicate how Barnard’s and my organization theory can be related to the economic theory of the firm. Part IV formalizes and explores the concept of bounded rationality. Four chapters deserve special mention for their influence on subsequent events in my life and in the economics profession.
Chapter 14 of Models of Man, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice” (first published as 1955a), mostly written in 1952 during my first RAND summer, represents my first major step toward formalizing the psychological theory of bounded rationality. Although the term satisficing, a key concept in my subsequent work, was not used in it, the satisficing conceptsearching for “good enough” actions rather than optimal onesis already present. Of all my writings on this topic, the “Behavioral Model” paper comes closest to the mathematical format with which economists are comfortable. Hence, economists who wish to refer to bounded rationality and satisficing most commonly choose this paper for citation.
What made the paper distinct from most contemporary economic writing was its explicit concern for the process of making decisions, for procedural and not just substantive rationality. Because of its concern with process,

• The economist Charles Holt came to GSIA from the University of Chicago and Franco Modigliani from the University of Illinois. John Muth was one of our own graduate students.

the paper also represents a first step toward computer simulation of human behavior. The manuscript contained an appendix, never published except as part of a RAND technical report, outlining how a chess-playing program for a computer could compensate for its bounded rationality by using selective search guided by heuristics (see note 4 of the published paper). This proposal for a heuristic chess program is an extension of ideas that Claude Shannon had published in 1950, but my emphasis was on human simulation rather than chess prowess.
What motivated this part of the work was a talk that John von Neumann gave at the 1952 RAND summer seminar, emphasizing the difficult problems that had to be solved in order to program a computer to play good chess. I thought von Neumann overestimated the difficulties substantially, and moreover I believed that I had some solutions for them which I proposed in the appendix to the RAND technical report. This chess discussion disappeared from the final manuscript of my paper. Perhaps referees thought it irrelevant or perhaps I excised it when Al Newell began to carry the chess ideas much farther as he developed his 1954 paper on the subject.
Chapter 15 of Models of Man, “Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment” (first published as Simon 1956), was a companion piece to chapter 14. Adopting again a satisficing point of view, it provides a sort of Darwinian model of rationality. Bracketing satisficing with Darwinian may appear contradictory, for evolutionists sometimes talk about survival of the fittest. But in fact, natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing. The paper showed how relatively simple choice mechanisms could enable an organism, searching through its life’s maze, to survive in an uncertain environment in which several incommensurable needs had to be met. It depicted a procedural rationality for organisms that was squarely based on satisficing rather than optimizing.
Chapter 15 had a curious by-productthe only short story I have ever written. Since no one has ever told me that it has any literary merit, it should probably be read as philosophy, not literature. It uses the metaphor of the maze to explore the relation between satisficing and basic human values, a free translation of chapter 15 from model to metaphor; I will recount it in the next chapter.
Chapter 11 of Models of Man, “A Formal Theory of the Employment Relation,” was a harbinger of the New Institutional Economics that has been nurtured in recent years by Oliver Williamson and others. In it I attempted to cast some aspects of organization theory in the mold of neoclassical reasoning. In this sense it is reactionary, a throwback. In my 1977

Ely Lecture before the American Economic Association, I apologized for it thus:
In my 1951 paper, I defined the characteristics of an employment contract My argument requires a theorem and fifteen numbered
equations, and assumes that both employer and employee maximize their utilities. Actually, the underlying functional argument is very simple The rigorous economic argument, involving the idea of maximizing behavior by employer and employee, is readily
translatable into a simple qualitative argument that an employment contract may be a functional (''reasonable") way of dealing with certain kinds of uncertainty.
Thus, most of my theory of the employment contract can be expressed without either equations or maximization. But in that qualitative form it would not have captured the attention of economists, who, in the “new institutional economics,” continue to pour the new wine into the old bottle of neoclassical reasoning. At least we have some new wine.
Chapter 13, “Application of Servomechanism Theory to Production Control,” started Charles Holt and me off on our operations research venture in scheduling a paint factory. More accurately, it led us to a new operations research tool for dealing with a broad class of dynamic planning problems under uncertainty, for which the paint factory provided an application.
By making strong approximating assumptions about costs, we were able to solve an exact maximization problem with little computation. That is to say, we satisficed by finding the optimal policy for a gross approximation to the real world. The dynamic programming project later was joined by Franco Modigliani, and by several graduate students, including John Muth. Its main direct product was the Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon book, Planning Production, Inventories, and Work Force (1960). It also had an indirect productrational expectationswhich belongs to the next segment of the chronicle.
The Systems Research Laboratory
Apart from the consulting relation that took me to the RAND Corporation in 1952, another aspect of my association with RAND from 1952 to 1955 has a great bearing on what followed.
During the GSIA period up to 1952, while we were busy with our studies of decision making in organizations, four peopleJohn Kennedy, William

Biel, Robert Chapman, and Allen Newell (all in the Santa Monica part of the forest)conceived the grand, or grandiose, design of studying in the laboratory the behavior of an air defense organization. The laboratory (christened SRL, the Systems Research Laboratory) would simulate an entire air-defense early warning station, staffed with perhaps fifty men. The U.S. Air Force was to supply the budget and the airmen-subjects for the simulation.
When, in the planning stages of this imaginative project, the group came to me for advice, because of my previous experience in conducting the California SRA experiment and other organizational studies, I became a consultant; and, on my first visit to RAND early in 1952, I met Allen Newell. I had not known him previously, but I was familiar with a couple of mathematical documents he had written, in which he tried to formalize organization theory. I was only mildly impressed by the mathematics, which seemed to me to contain more definitions than theorems (always a bad sign for formal theories), but I was well disposed to anyone who had the disposition and skill for applying mathematics to these kinds of questions.
In our first five minutes of conversation, Al and I discovered our ideological affinity. We launched at once into an animated discussion, recognizing that though our vocabularies were different, we both viewed the human mind as a symbol-manipulating (my term) or information-processing (his term) system.
The SRL experiments provided the most microscopic data one could want on how radar operators and air controllers made their decisions. A vast body of such data was accumulated from a series of experiments conducted over three years, during which all of the communications between subjects were recorded. Yet Al and I suffered from continuing frustration in trying to write formal descriptions of the process.
Somehow, we lacked the necessary language and technology to describe thinking people as information processors. As a result, we were never able to produce a good analysis of the phenomena we observed in the SRL experiments, and only one relatively innocuous paper was ever published about them.*
The frustration that Al and I experienced with the SRL experimental data had major consequences, the first of which is reported in chapter 12 of this volume. In simplest terms, it determined the rest of my life. It put me in a maze I have never escaped fromor wanted to.

• SRL was not all futility, however. If it made little substantive contribution to basic science, its technology was subsequently more fully automated with the help of computers, and its training program was spun off to the Systems Development Corporation, which for many years was responsible for training military personnel to operate the Dew Line air defense system and later systems.

The Politics of Social Science
My gravitation toward the sun soon led me into professional activities in political science, and in social science generally, outside the university. Since my involvement in science politics began while I was at Illinois Tech, I will return briefly to that scene, beginning the tale just at the end of World War II.
In view of my education as a political scientist, it is perhaps not surprising that I devote considerable space here to the politics of science. My activities in this domain divide into two parts, the first concerned with the social sciences, the second with the relations between the social and natural sciences. I tell the social sciences part of the story here, the social and natural sciences part in chapter 19, as it relates more closely to events that took place after my election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1967.
Political Science
I entered into the world of science politics as a political scientistthat is to say, into a world quite segregated from natural science (“real” science, some would call it). During my tenure at Illinois Tech, I was active in the American Political Science Association, as one of the Young Turks fomenting the behavioral revolution in that discipline whose origins were recounted in chapter 4. Administrative Behavior and the published articles that had preceded it gave me some standing among the insurgents, but we had little success in finding a credible senior to lead us (V. O. Key, who was our candidate, was a gradualist, more or less committed to behavioralism, but not to revolution).
All I now recall of this activity was meeting with other conspirators in my hotel room at the (then new) downtown Washington Hilton during an APSA convention; and defeating the re-election of the incumbent APSA secretary at a later APSA meeting in Chicago. Our goal was to make sure that research within the behavioral framework would be received sympathetically by the American Political Science Review and would have an appropriate place in the annual meetings of the association. The behavioralists gradually captured the association, but it was the passage of time and the retirement of the old guard rather than revolutionary activity that accomplished the change.

The Ford Foundation
About 1951 Bernard Berelson came to consult me about the prospective program of the new Behavioral Science Division of the Ford Foundation, including a very tentative plan for a training center. Arnold Thackray (1984), in a historical account of the Ford program, notes that I was early designated as a potential adviser, possibly because I was acquainted with Don Marquis of the University of Michigan, one of the framers of the program.
My first advice to Bernie, given at a meeting he had called in Chicago, was that the Behavioral Science money of the Foundation should be used for research grants, and not for such boondoggles as a training center. The most useful role for the program, I thought, was to fill the gap that had been left by the omission of the social sciences from the charter (and hence the funding) of the National Science Foundation.
The advice I offered at the Chicago meeting was followed up by a long letter of December 10 to Berelson. I argued that “the rest of the Ford Foundation program is so heavily oriented toward application that Program Five resources should be jealously guarded for fundamental work.” I again expressed my opposition to the training center idea, opining that it would be much better to distribute the money among three or four institutions, to free a few senior faculty in each for research and working with talented advanced students. These schools should be required to cooperate so that promising graduate students could divide their doctoral work among several institutions, and the Foundation should “season the brew with a competitive fellowship scheme at the undergraduate and graduate levels.”
Expressing a concern I had long had that students are seldom exposed to the social sciences before fixing on a career in natural science, I proposed making grants to permit a few institutions “to experiment with procedures for attracting to the social sciences at an early stage in their training a few men with outstanding research potential.” I also commented on the Foundation’s proposal to support interdisciplinary research:
The problem is less one of bringing unlike social scientists together than one of bringing unlike social sciences together in one man. There has been failure after failure of interdisciplinary “teams” to integrate anything . . . except to the extent that individual team members became interdisciplinary. I would not give a dollar to assist a typical political scientist to collaborate with a typical economist unless each one of them gave me a sworn statement that he would study seriously and not in a dilettante’s way the discipline of the other for at least a year.

After more than three pages of such criticism and comments, I expressed the
hope that, in spite of these points of disagreement, I conveyed to you in Chicago my enthusiasm for the general objectives and emphases you have pointed up in the program. . . . [I feel we have] the same basic convictions as to . . . the job . . . to be done: to provide the trained human talent that is needed for the progress of the behavioral sciences, to facilitate the cumulative and interactive development of theory and empirical research, and to build research progress around the core disciplines . . . represented by social psychology and sociology.
But the Ford Foundation was already more than half committed to creating a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), so I was soon a member of the committee that was helping Berelson to plan it. The idea of such a center had emerged from the fertile mind of Paul Lazarsfeld of Columbia University (a long-time associate of Berelson), who conceived of it as a place where young postdocs would come to sit at the feet of the masters and learn good methodology.
As this seemed to me (and others) a terrible idea, we gradually turned the plans around to eliminate the proposed bimodal distribution of “juniors” and “seniors,” and substitute a cadre of scholars distributed over the whole range of age and seniority. The Center would be a place for research and writing, rather than for postdoctoral training, and it would recruit the best social scientists it could find, who would spend a year there, preferably at a time when they had completed a major piece of research and were in the reflective and writing-up stage.
Part of my reason for opposing the original plan were my doubts that the elders were the persons best equipped to teach good social science method, and that the postdoctoral “juniors” would want to continue to sit at their feet (I was about thirty-five at the time). Perhaps more important, I thought that there was no lack of social scientists who knew how to do good empirical and theoretical research. What was lacking was money to support it. If there was to be a Center at all, its resources should be devoted, so far as possible, to subsidizing research. This change in the plan for CASBS destroyed Paul Lazarsfeld’s dream, and although we remained friends to the end of his life, he never quite forgave me my part in its destruction.
On another issue I was less persuasive. After several possible sites for the Center had been considered, the hill above the Stanford campus was selecteda beautiful spot in Lotus Land that I would not have chosen to enhance productivity. This had the unforeseen (or was it unforeseen?) con-

sequence that Stanford University was able in the 1950s and 1960s to assemble a formidable social science faculty from California-smitten veterans of the Center.
The main consequences for my personal career of this involvement with the Ford Foundation and CASBS was that I became visible throughout social science circles and acquired an enormous amount of information about the current research picture, especially the names and numbers of all the players.
Another consequence was that, by virtue of my strong opposition to the Center, I always felt embarrassed at the idea of spending a year there, and never did. (There were other reasons for my reluctance, toonotably its lack of suitable computing facilities.)
The Social Science Research Council
During the 1950s I was invited to membership on a couple of committees of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), an organization that had been created in the 1920s by Charles Merriam and others to encourage interdisciplinary research in social science. A Committee on Business Enterprise Research brought together economists interested in the business firm with sociologists and others interested in organizations. Some years later, a committee of three (Carl Hovland, George Miller, and myself) was set up to administer a small grant from the Ford Foundation for what we would now call cognitive science.
In 1958, I was invited to join the Council’s Board of Directors, continuing to serve on it until 1971 (incuding five years as chairman). During most of that time, Pendleton Herring was president of the council. At the top of my agenda for SSRC I placed the support of mathematical training for social scientists and the erosion of boundaries between disciplines.
As the council had been pioneering since 1952 in activities aimed at raising the level of mathematical sophistication in social science, on this topic I simply supported what was already going on and encouraged the expansion of mathematical to include computer simulation. The council’s committee on mathematical training for social scientists was later spun off as an independent entity, mostly funded by the National Science Foundation. This committee, over the years, was highly effective in diffusing mathematical skills, particularly in sociology and political science (mathematization was already proceeding apace in economics).
The encouragement of interdisciplinary activity had been a principal motivation for founding the Social Science Research Council. But at the meetings of the council, I was appalled at how often I heard such phrases as,

“as a historian, I . . . ,” “as an economist, I . . . ,” “s a sociologist, I . . . ,” and so on. I challenged these phrases each time I heard them, but it was like trying to purge ainnuh (“Isn’t it so?”) from the lexicon of a native of Milwaukee.
My free-floating experiences at the University of Chicago, and my many interdisciplinary contacts at the Cowles Commission and RAND, had not prepared me for the fierce disciplinary loyalties I encountered in the heart of the social science establishment. I came to see that disciplines play the same role in academe as nations in the international system. Academicians typically live out their whole careers within the culture of a discipline, rarely shaking off the parochialism this isolated existence engenders. (Still later I learned from my encounters with economics that disciplines undertake imperialistic adventures with the same zest that nations do.)
As best I could, I encouraged those activities of the council that cut across boundaries, and questioned activities that seemed more appropriate for the professional associations of the disciplines. My efforts had, at most, modest success. In 1966, the year before I took over the chair of the council, there were ten committees that were genuinely interdisciplinary, but at least six whose activities lay within single disciplines. That ratio didn’t change much over the years of my activity in the council.
But there was a bigger problem. The Ford Foundation had become deeply enamored of area studies, which produce experts in Russian or East Asian or Latin American or African affairs. Almost all of its grant money, and especially its fellowship money, was being diverted in this direction. Funds for the council’s traditional fellowships for interdisciplinary training had almost dried up. By 1966, the council already had nine committees dedicated to area studies, not counting the fellowship selection committees for the training of area specialists.
But weren’t these area studies just the sort of interdisciplinarianism I was looking for? Perhaps I judged them too harshly and from insufficient information, but I thought not. Too often, they seemed to aim at training disciplinary specialization within area specialization: experts on the Russian economy, the Chinese government, the Indonesian family. And because of the necessary emphasis on language skills, combined with a frequent attraction to current events, they seemed often to degenerate into high-grade journalism.