Susan Hockfield Interview (page: 6 / 8) President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Print Interview

Why would you abandon your research, the ability to spend as much time in the lab as you wanted, to become so involved in university administration?

Susan Hockfield: This is a very common question. "How can you leave the lab for administration?" And people usually have very long faces when they say "administration." I loved working in the lab, and had the same amount of skepticism, disdain, whatever the right word is to describe how many faculty, particularly young faculty, feel about administration. You know, "Why are they there?" One of the joys of working in a well-run university is you don't have to pay any attention to how the place is run, you just do your work. It's a huge, huge privilege that we accord our scientists, engineers or scholars in the American research universities. When I got to Yale, I had already started doing various administrative leadership tasks earlier when I was at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, actually at my first very serious assignment, administering science rather than doing science myself. My graduate experience for me was absolutely transformational. People talk about peoples' most profound allegiance or affinity being to their undergraduate institution or their undergraduate experience. I don't feel that way. I feel that for most of us who have done graduate education, that is the identity -- for me -- part of my life.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. College was fine, but it was really in graduate school that I found my life's work. And I found my life's work -- I discovered how to push myself beyond the limits that I thought I had, I learned new ways of relating to people, I learned new ways of learning. It really was probably the most formative period of my life, very important, and I value it highly. When I was at Yale University as a professor, another extraordinary privilege, the graduate students --many graduate students -- weren't having that kind of sense of this being the most important part of their education. And I worried, because golly, I didn't enjoy the privilege of going to a graduate school like Yale! It's a spectacular educational environment. And it made me very sad that we weren't utilizing the potential of the Yale graduate experience, and the students weren't feeling the kind of acceleration and exhilaration that I had. And when the president of Yale, Rick Levin, invited me to be Dean of the graduate school, there were some things that I thought I might be able to help. And it was really a sense of service, a sense of giving back. My graduate experience had been so important to me. It was my responsibility now to help make the graduate experience for the Yale graduate students as rich and fulfilling as I had experienced. So I agreed to do it, but I had assumed it would be a very short service -- three years, perhaps four years. But what I discovered, once I was actually Dean of the graduate school, was just how interesting, important, exhilarating this other kind of service to the world can be.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Did you continue teaching while you were Dean?

Susan Hockfield: I didn't teach formally, but my faculty appointment at Yale was in the medical school, and my primary responsibility was actually teaching in the context of my laboratory. So I kept my research lab. I had graduate students and post-docs in the lab, I continued that. I think I gave a lecture or two, but I found it very difficult to take on the kind of commitment that's involved in teaching while having this enormous set of commitments and obligations as Dean of the graduate school.

You talked about taking on the position of Dean because you thought there were things you could bring to the position. Can you talk about those for a little bit? The "Take the Faculty to Lunch" initiative, for instance.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Susan Hockfield: I actually embarked on my service as Dean of the graduate school more intuitively than rationally, but things that I learned then I've used again and again. One of the things that's very powerful is listening to what people say and then telling them what they've said. I might listen to you, I might've listened to ten other people over the course of the previous several months, and may have heard the same thing expressed in different ways. So the exercise, if you will, of my telling you what I've heard is telling you what I've heard from you, integrated over what I've heard from who knows how many people. It's a powerful way of moving an organization, and what I heard at Yale was a sense of being lost about the purpose of graduate education. And again, my own background had produced an experience, if not an articulation of the experience, of the importance of graduate education, and it's a fascinating paradox. The importance is very personal. I've described my graduate experience as something that was personally fulfilling, that it's intoxicating, exhilarating. That's a very selfish kind of view of things. But the wonderful paradox is that when you're doing advanced research, when you're doing advanced scholarship, you're not only doing something which is personally enormously satisfying, it also does good for the many. And that's the magic, is figuring out what you can do that you really love, but that also is service to the many.

What I did at the graduate school was to take every opportunity to articulate back to the community why graduate education is so important for the individual, for the institution, but also for the larger world. That's kind of at a high philosophical level. There's some very practical things that I sorted out, and they seem almost obvious to me. I once said, the way I do these things is when I walk down the hall and I see some garbage on the floor, I pick it up and I put it in the trashcan. It's not so hard. It's not brain science, we like to say. So there were some just operational things that I sorted out, but I think probably what I view as my most important contribution was offering inspiration around the power and importance of graduate education. There were days that I felt that I was an incredibly corny person, just saying stuff that everyone knew. But invariably, someone would report back that the way I had captured their thoughts had helped them understand what it was they were doing at Yale. Very powerful. You mentioned "Take a Faculty Member to Lunch. "

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There were many more opportunities at Yale for undergraduates to engage with faculty than for graduate students. When you're a graduate student it's important that you go very narrow, very deep. You don't want it to last, you know, for too many years. And so to accomplish what you really need to accomplish in a doctoral program you need to focus and be very direct. And that means for most students they're interacting with only one faculty member, but usually in the context of the lab or the library or the work. So there weren't very many social opportunities to just seek mentorship, to build a community. And so Take a Faculty Member to Lunch was not my idea. This was, as most of my ideas people think are my ideas, an idea that came out of just talking to lots of people. And someone at some point said, "Well, hey, we could do that by encouraging the students and the faculty to have lunch together." We had a little competition for the name of the program -- it became known as "FEAST" -- Free Eating Attracts Students and Teachers -- and the prize for the student who named that, a student of psychology, was lunch with the Dean in the graduate school dining hall, of course.

For so many of these things, if you just provide the opportunities that people are asking for, it can be very effective. So it became a way of bringing people together. We had Bring People to the Graduate School. There were departments that started using this FEAST program as a place to have departmental meetings or group meetings between graduate students and faculty. It was very effective in building community.

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