Noam Chomsky

today is May 29 2009 I am Karen arenson we're interviewing noam chomsky Institute professor and professor of linguistics emeritus at MIT father of modern linguistics philosopher prolific author and political activist he's one of the most widely quoted intellectuals living today and probably one of the most interviewed he has received numerous honorary degrees in the US and abroad and even had a research chimpanzee nim chimpsky named for him but not altogether friendly act I think for chimp professor Chomsky thank you for talking with us for this series of interviews being recorded for MIT s s we centennial you've been at MIT since 1955 for virtually your whole career and for more than a third of mi t--'s existence what's kept you here all this time I like the atmosphere I mean I've had very attractive offers from other places but never considered them it's a great place to work it's a lot of bright exciting students a good interdisciplinary environment it's just practice place to be so never saw any reason to leave what do you think is and should be mi t--'s role in the world well mi t--'s actual it's sort of the core of its role that has been pretty much to create the advanced economy of the future so if you use computers and the internet information technology pharmaceuticals whatever it may be a good part of it this created here and in some similar places primarily through government funding and it's on the side there increasingly over the years it's shifted from being the years I've been here from being an engineering school which is what it was when I got here - just a science-based university which had a lot of side effects for example one side effect was enrichment of the humanities Social Sciences Department because as the student body shifted from engineering oriented to science oriented they just had different interests concerns and needs of the university adapted to them but the role in the world should be to like any other university place of free inquiry interchange thought this one particular University happens to be focused primarily primarily but though not solely on science secondly secondarily technology because that's become more and more of an offshoot of science a place where students at the most free period of their lives out of parental control not yet into the stage of having to put food on the table and enquire and create to find themselves for the Faculty of same thing constant innovation excitement both from students from other faculty from the outside world and should be an environment in which they can pursue those interests and concerns in a constructive way and to an unusual extent it's been that I think during the period I've been here changed a lot so it was quite different in the 50s is it still as hospitable a place for you as it was then well that's it's grown a lot so in the mid 50s he kind of knew everybody you know so you had a question you wanted to talk to the Provost you know he's a personal friend and so but now it's far for each individual it's kind of more impersonal because it's so much larger and more complex but it remains this in my experience pretty much the same kind of place how good a fit has linguistics been for MIT and has MIT been for linguistics it's it's always been in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences not not in the science School technically but that's that was administrative leave but not actually so the field developed the modern field of linguistics to a large extent develop it at mighty but it was in the electronics lab I mean yes the administrative offices were in the modern language department but the contacts there were pretty restricted no the main contact connections were in orally the electronics lab which is a highly interdisciplinary a lab and in those days in the 50s in fact a lot of the particular specific departments that now have exist exists in a spread around we're sort of sitting there in building 20 with a lot of interaction between them and linguistic fit there perfectly it was right at the core of the emerging cognitive sciences they didn't really exist at the time they were just coming into existence and language was at the core of it and as in many ways remain so it was a interconnection of mathematical interest computational interests a study of increasing interdisciplinary study of sort of mind and a broad sense its implications for other aspects of human behavior and interaction so it has a sort of a natural spot the study of language always has at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities of the social sciences and here it developed very in a very natural way in the pretty unstructured and open environment of the old building 20 the research lab electronics of course connections elsewhere so I worked a lot with George Miller's professor of psychology at Harvard we had close ties to Bell Labs of the back Lincoln labs to an extent but then the various expanding departments here there's a psychology and the cognitive sciences weren't a separate program they grew out of the RLE environment looked over it was one of those who and now that are le in building 20 are long gone unfortunate are those connections still there is their connections are there but you know it's less intimate than when you're in the next room so the the disappearance building 20 was kind of a sad moment in fact there was an effort when some of us to try to preserve it as a historical monument but just Jerry let van who was almost at the point of that you know old lady who won't give up her home cool things are being constructed but not quite yeah but it was a pretty it was a really wonderful place to work first it was totally there was no security you know so you could be in day or night students some students are practically living there no guards the doors it kind of astonishing to me that nothing was ever stolen had a lot of equipment in it and so on and of course this was a at the time this was kind of like an urban neighborhood you know factories the working-class housing and so on but this it was kind of on me and my edge of the MIT campus was at that point edge of the campus and that it was just a very nice look kind of a perfect research environment if you didn't mind the windows falling out every once in a while or squirrels in the walls but you could open the windows I'm sort of yeah we once had a my colleague Marsala and I we're still in next-door offices but we started in 55 we were off in one corner of our Lee which was a second world war temporary build but it was incredibly hot over the summer so we tried to put in an air conditioner but you had F permission so we asked permission from the whatever chain of bureaucracy it was we can be finally got a note back saying could do it because it would be inconsistent with it the core of building 20 so we bought the note as to janitor to put it in for us you see be careful but the other thing in building 20 was that it was a temporary building you can move the walls around so it was kind of randomized inside it which had very nice properties so like for example I I happen to find a little corner of it that didn't have a room but had no windows I figure that I'm gonna use it for anything so I asked if I could use it just for books I said sure it finds a big storage space for books that was nice and yours a current quarters what are they like well it's a very interesting building it shouldn't need a building that's right on top is like building 20 used to be right it's not really a place to work I mean so for example it and I had to my work at home now like I don't even have a computer in the office but and it's for appointments interviews things like that so for example it has a has a slanted wall which is not to make a lot of sense for a faculty office I mean what you need is a place to put books on a blackboard and things like that but but it's a you know it's a it's an interesting attractive building that's fine actually I think it's less it was built to be interactive but my impression is it's probably less interactive than the old building 20 used to be which wasn't built for anything was just put up you know okay do you think that being at MIT has provided you with a kind of legitimacy as your professional career was beginning to develop and in your role as a political activist or in other ways I don't think as far as the profession it was concerned no in fact it's a kind of an interesting fact that what happened in the United States has replicated throughout much of the world modern linguistics developed on the periphery of the academic system so here at MIT not at Harvard and that's been true as it's later expanded throughout the world it was very different from the modern field developed in a manner which was quite different in fact antithetical in many ways to the existing disciplines and was not you know it was it was not welcomed so for example for years I didn't publish in linguistics journals and published in engineering journals or something like that and and in fact it I remember my first monograph which came out in 1957 was published in Holland but shortly after it there was a review of American linguistics by somebody and he had a foot that decision will mention this because this is Dutch linguistics knowing that that kind of thing so it wasn't Madana to journalistic inquiry room that was about MIT press in large measure because the work that was coming out here students and us couldn't couldn't really it was a natural place to put it within the linguistics profession I mean in fact it has interesting roots back in the tradition of linguistics actually back to the millennia back to the early Indian grammarians but that had been almost entirely forgotten by the profession I started working at it myself but by now there's a field of a written much richer field and there was of history of linguistics but that came out of here to a significant extent off on the periphery of the field as I say that's replicated elsewhere I know it was a while before people began to accept some of your ideas and took a while for your first book to come together but I just wondered whether the MIT lustre even then commit may have helped convince some people well maybe we should be looking at it you know MIT thinks he's good right that because remember MIT was an engineering school right it was not then regarded as a major university this place where you went if he wanted to build things in fact I mean had a very good math and physics department but to a large extent they were service service departments teaching the engineers tricks so they could do things what is a my being at MIT meant for your role as a political activist thank you I think it's making those kinds closed arched eyebrows and so forth it was kind of ironic the role that it played Exedy not just me incidentally that there were faculty peace groups in the 50s and the early 60s and they were largely MIT based not not Harvard based my own role was hourly where it was was 100% supported with three armed services and in fact MIT altogether was I think about 90% pentagon funded at the time there was also the center of anti-vietnam war academic center of anti-vietnam war activism resistance teacher and so on and it was there was no interference I'm in the a Kadir Eckerd for academic freedom is very good at them there are a few exceptions but by and large quite good what do you think you're being at MIT has meant for MIT that's brothers do this up but it was it was the source of a lot of things that have happened since so the I'm a perfect personally it was at the time there was virtually nothing and maybe one course and philosophy almost you know psychology was practically nothing I did introduce the first modern philosophy courses and it helped establish what's now a flourishing department and the brain of behavioral sciences sort of grew out of the interactions mostly at Harley and in the late 50s early 60s I was part of it along with others like Luke Tovar who I mentioned yeah I was thinking along the lines of people perceive MIT to be very much in engineering and science a diversity and then they say but it has the top economics department and the top linguistics department and and in some ways maybe it's it's helped convince people that there there's other that there's a breath and an excellent stem IT outside of the things they think of a good probably on the other hand I think that's part of a broader development that took place since the fifties as I say at the time it mainly was an engineering school so students were making things you know build electric circuits bridges students to if you were studying mechanical engineering and civil engineering Electrical Engineering you take quite a different curriculum because you were it was oriented towards the technology at the time well in this after the Second World War there was a substantial change in the relationship between science and technology I mean there had always been a relationship so Archimedes was a scientist but contributing to the armaments but it was a qualitative change during and after the Second World War the sciences became really essential to technology in a way that they hadn't been they in an aid it's kind of like biology and medicine you know medicine of course is paying attention to biology but couldn't contribute much but this transition took place criminal at that time and as it took place the it reflect was reflected at MIT and to a certain extent stimulated by MIT citizen interaction and it shifted the character of the Institute altogether so now it shouldn't really be called Massachusetts Institute of Technology it's a science-based University students in the various fields take pretty much the same courses maybe slightly adapted their own interests and they also have a range of other interests music philosophy humanities and so on so it's kind of a university based around science and I I don't know how much it's understood in the outside world but that's what the way it should be perceived in the role of linguistics and economics and so on just sort of fits pretty naturally in today let's touch a do a brief pass through some of the biographical information can you talk briefly about where you were born growing up your family your schooling I was born in Philadelphia 1928 my parents were immigrants they themselves were pretty much you know sort of a Jewish ghetto immigrant community ghetto not physically like scattered all over the city but their contacts were with social other contacts with other people very much like them now the Jewish immigrant community was split into various different directions and my parents happened to be involved in well for them the primary interest was revival of Hebrew so my father was a Hebrew scholar my mother was a Hebrew teacher the language was being revived the culture was being revived and that's what they did they my father ran the Hebrew school system in Philadelphia my mother was active in it all of my friends and my wife and everyone else we all came out of that media and there was it was not it wasn't it was observant but not religious and it was kind of oriented towards Palestine I was people would have called themselves scientists I did too but in a sense quite different from post 1948 so my father for example was what was called in those days a cultural Zionist feller of the Haddam leading writer in the early part of the revival of Hebrew century ago whose vision was that there should be a cultural center for Jewish life in Palestine and that was pretty much the life you know we were immigrants from my father came at the age of 17 from the Ukraine just in time to escape being drafted into the Czar's army which was a death sentence for Jewish boys and my mother's family came and she came which is about one from what's now builders and in the language they spoke at home and that you can run the initial native language was Yiddish but there was a cult or Kampf going on in the Jewish community between the Hebrew ranted and the Yiddish orietta they were on the Hebrew side so I was I never heard a word few dish that was my parrot it was like their secret language because their native Mike didn't same with my wife she but not Russian or my father knew had learned Russian which was considered heresy where he he grew up in a little village near Kiev and you weren't even supposed to know Hebrew I mean he use Hebrew for prayer or like reading the Bible but you're not supposed to speak it so even looking at modern Hebrew literature which was developing at the time was considered heresy but he went on learns in Russian which I doubt if his father even know about that but that was not part of our background it was you know to the extent that it was not an english-speaking thing that was Hebrew area and your schooling my parents would work working and whether they were teaching teaching all the time so they sent me from at age one one and a half I guess to a private school which and my father was interested he was kind of a very much influenced by John Dewey's educational and other ideas and this was a Dewey progressive school run by Temple University which had a Dewey educational program department and I was there from before too until school ended twelve that was a fantastic environment in fact I remember elementary school much better than high school I remember everything that happened it was on Dewey eight lines there was encouragement of students to think independently work creatively work with others a lot of interaction project so it was virtually no I didn't even know I was a good student until I got to high school because there was no ranking I mean I knew I had skipped a year and everybody else knew I'd skip the year but Batman I was the smallest kid in the class you know but didn't have any other connotations and I think you Indicom nted that pretty much everybody throughout seemed to thrive in that environment well you know it's like a lot of private schools with a mixed story there were kids whose parents were kind of achievement oriented and there were kids who just couldn't make it in the public schools the problem of children so you get a usual mixture but there was a sense that people weren't ranked the kids weren't ranked so the everyone's supposed to be doing their best you know they're praised if they do their best there was it was pretty much accepted by the children in the school I remember him that and then you went to a more traditional high school which you went to a traditional of there in the city there were two academically oriented high schools and one for boys and one for girls my wife went to the girls when I went to the boys Minh and for me at least that's kind of got black hole I barely remembered I hated it it couldn't stand it as I say I quickly learned I'm supposed to be a good student always and that sort of thing but it was it was it was nothing there that really grabbed you nobody everything I did was on the outside it was just a place where you were you did well enough to to go off to Penn yeah I was well yeah yeah I think we were working students you went to the local school there was no other choice and although it was pretty inexpensive at that time I think it was a hundred dollars a year or something couldn't make it without a scholarship so I've got a scholarship went to Penn which was in those days not all that different in fact Penn was I was I got out of high school at 16 I was pretty excited about going to college I thought it'd be interesting I'm done with this boring stuff and the catalog looked great and so on so I took what I thought with the interesting courses but I found that was overgrown high school in fact after about a year of thinking of dropping out that it's changed a lot and is now a major university but at that time was substantially a football fraternity school with a scattering of extremely good faculty so the more academically oriented students who sort of found each other were many of them like me had a variety of interests that weren't connected because you were like attracted by terrific mathematician in my case outstanding countries outstanding linguist a few great philosophers these things in fact by the time I was a junior that was mostly taking graduate courses and really didn't have an undergraduate education but you you contemplated dropping out I think going off and had you not I guess that's a seventeen-year-old kid I know exactly what I do but I didn't see much point she did your parents care whether you got your degree or not or I don't think they even knew you know and in that generation you just didn't talk much to your parents there were a lot of things they didn't know about our lives so for example we we happen to be the only Jewish family in a mostly Irish and German Catholic neighborhood which was rapidly and he Semitic in fact pretty pretty Nazi during the 30s and I was always in the street you know you just sort of figure out what's happening but my parents never knew I don't never talk to them they didn't ask nothing interesting along the way I guess this as a child you you've spent a lot of time in New York City - with relatives of your mother's and my mother's relatives their friends the intellectual circles you know that was cynical circles that was a different crowd I mean her family at least the part I got involved in was mostly unemployed working-class pretty radical some of them had essentially no formal education in fact the uncle who was most influential in my life had never gotten past fourth grade was one of the most educated people I've ever met he was physically disabled so he was able to get it to run a newsstand under some New Deal program and that was the one place where there was any employment and the family so everybody worked there I did too and he collected a circle of European immigrants around him who used to hang around that newsstand and have discussions of the political talks and German psychiatrists and so on and so forth was pretty lively effective for years I thought that was a newspaper in New York called the noose and mirror because people were racing out of the it was it a silly stuff they would run out and ask for the noose and mirror that it was it was a very lively environment and ever had it by the time I was old enough to go to New York by myself like about 12 but immediately gravitate there on weekends and so on it became an education if you came an education and I had another related education there this is us around 1940 you know approximately in there were it was a big refugee population in New York a lot of people fleeing from fascism and in New York at that time the I guess 4th Avenue from Union Square down south was full of little bookstores run by some guy who was a Spanish anarchist here or something like that had a real intricate reading material I spent a lot of time hanging around those the anarchist offices Frye are right there to my office and I guess it was in Union Square and spent time there I a couple of my relatives a particularly my uncle were also very much involved in such things I just got a totally separate political education in fact the first article I wrote was it 4th grade so it would have been was 10 I guess 1939 yeah I know exactly when it was because it was right after the fall of Barcelona so it was February 1939 I was about fall of Barcelona spread of fascism in Europe was just a large part of so you made it out of pen and this is long before I got the pen right in fact what drew me back to college at Penn was meeting zellig harris in a political context shared political interests and he was a professor at Penn I didn't know it at the time but he was the leading linguist maybe the world or the country but and he kind of in retrospect I think he was trying to talk me into coming back to college or something but at the time he just suggested he knew I was planning to drop out or thinking about he just just that I take some of his great courses and then he suggested a couple of other faculty members in particular and philosophy and math suggested I take their graduate courses and then kind of went out there so you did get through college and that record through sighted fillers fellow at Harvard and that's where you did a lot of the thinking about your elastic theory that was I was there for four years and it was a research fellowship with no particular constraints so you could sit in a desk in Widener Library in those days and have the whole resources of the library the university a lot of bright young colleagues so very intellectually stimulating environment and again free to explore in a way it was back to elementary school environment you were you're free to explore or the streets of New York and the bookstore the streets immortal yeah so as long as I just skip that high academic high school you know it's just kind of like a continuity how did you develop your theories that define modern linguistics where did your ideas come from well partly it was just having acquaintance with other fields like logic and foundation of mathematics other things there their concepts that were developed there which did seem to me to be applicable to the study of language now at the time well I just give you an example what at the time the way use when we work I was in an undergraduate student and the formerly in linguistics a standard a term paper would be to go to the International Journal of American linguistics of journal where people did descriptive studies of American Indian languages and take one of the articles you know phonology of Cherokee or something and do what was called a structural Restatement that was restated and a more elegant form using procedures of analysis was sort of like inductive procedures of analysis which were most extensively developed in zelich Harris's book which the first edition of his book was called methods and structural linguistics and that's what it was it was methods in fact I learned the field from proofreading the book for him when I was when we met and he was sort of I presume enticing me back to college or whatever was he asked me if I'd proofread the galleys so I did you know I kind of learned the field that way but that's what you learned methods you applied them and you got a restatement of the descriptive data and that's what we did when it came time to do a undergraduate thesis Harris suggested to me that I do that with modern Hebrew which I knew fairly well perfectly but well enough so I started to do it the way we were taught you know you'd get an informant that's really informant was pretty just about you know from the Jewish community in Palestine Hebrew speaker native Hebrew speaker and yes in this field methods you're taught how to elicit data from an informant so it used the field methods get the data and start organizing and according with the method methods and after a while I was working entirely by myself you know it just seemed to me that this is senseless for one thing I know the answers to everything I'm asking him except for the Parts I don't care about like the pronunciation because I didn't care about Princeton so what's the point so I just sort of put it aside and did what seemed kind of obvious intuitively it is obvious namely write what's now called a generative grammar that is try to find a set of rules and principles from which you can mechanically derive the structures of the infinite number of expressions of the language and the structures have to feed into basically two other systems of the mind or the body the sensorimotor system if pronounce it and the thought systems going to be interpreted so that's what's now called degenerate grammar that this this I didn't know at the time that there was a tradition of doing something kind of similar to that which in fact goes back to the Indian grammarians of 2500 years ago and it sort of persisted and kind of a back strain of the field but it was not what anybody knew about it was off there at some exotic place and by the mid 1950s of the 19th 20th century you could actually do things like this in a fairly precise way after in the 30s 1930s in the 1940s that was the beginning of the really extensive and careful development of the asylums the theory of computability there were major results in the field theory of computability recursive function theory I was studying these things on the side and it did give a comprehend the ideas were kind of in the air but this made them readily available in a precise enough form so that you could actually formulate what was being coming but I later came to be called a generative grammar in these terms pretty much the way you could on the model of the way you can do what's called meta mathematics you know the study of formal mathematics of it in terms of the theory of computability which had really profound results many of them so kind of melding these things together it has an undergraduate it just gave you know I did this these I don't think anybody ever looked at it frankly but anyway it was done and when I got to Harvard I was kind of schizophrenic for a while I mean for a while I was in many ways but for one thing I was committed intellectually to the belief that the procedural approach of the quasi inductive analysis of data must be the right one because that's not what all the smart people we're doing but on the other half of my brain and this seemed to make a lot more sense and I sort of tried to work on both for a while and at some point effect I remember the exact point in 1953 my wife and I were taking the graduate student backpacking trip to Europe so we were on some old half sinking boat going over to Europe and I was completely seasick and there's no but anyhow it just occurred to me that it was actually getting results from the generative grammar approach while the other approach was just kind of technical formalization which wasn't going anywhere so I kind of decided okay I'll drop that continue with the generative grammar meanwhile there was a side issue in this was the period of behavioral science so the social sciences psychology there were studies of behavior and that had a kind of a similarity to the structural linguistics of the period the topic was data and the problem is how to control organize describe to organize and describe data and the control performance that's what behavior psychology was and that was just everywhere you know it was Cambridge for example and where was the these were the dominant thinking philosophy psychology linguistics social sciences it just never made any sense to me I wasn't alone there were a few did you sit around and and kick around ideas with with friends are you two mostly sort of noodle about this in your own mind how did you work there's a small group of graduate students who were kind of resistant to the prevailing sentiment so one of them's Mars Hallie who who was it Harvard with you he was at Harvard with me although he was actually it was a student at Harvard with me but he was actually starting to teach MIT I you know he's he's a fun it was working in phonetics labs so he was working here I don't think he was teaching but he was in the labs at MIT in fact my wife was working in the same lab in the early 50s I met Morris through my wife another was Erik Lindbergh who went on later to become the founder of what's now called biology of language went on to medical school and didn't work and there were few others that one of them was the fellow a junior fellow the same place I was Peter Elias was a mathematician especially was information theory and we did a lot of discussion and work together he ended up being chair of the computer sipping electoral engineering department at MIT you know but there's a very small number just a few of us just didn't fit with prevailing attitudes and we're at the time of how transformational your your ideas would become I mean did you step back and kind of look at well you know there was very little we were talking to each other in fact the first person from outside this small group of students who became at all interested was George Miller it was a professor of psychology at Harvard and the psychology department at Harvard was it was kind of characteristic at at times there were three major professors a BF Skinner space Stevens George Miller Skinner and Stevens both knew the total truth but it was different truths so if you're a student of Skinner you weren't allowed to take courses with Stevens and conversely Eric Lana Berg who was in psychology a lot of problems within and then there was George Miller who was kind of eclectic open-minded you know thinking about other things so students who didn't fit into the straitjackets drifted towards Miller and I met him he was kind of interested in what I was doing and we actually spent a summer together and Stanford working on this stuff and teaching it and and but but even with that there was essentially no residents I'm in the book that I was writing I wrote I was writing a book on my own that the Society of fellows finished in 1955 and you know my wife and I ran off about 800 pages on hectic graphs never saw them but everything in the world turns purple when you we ran off a couple copies for 20 copies for friends and somebody suggest that I submitted that MIT press which I did but it came back pretty soon with pretty sensible comments I either rejected it but the comments from the reviewers were that they had no clue what it was it is no such field where's it belong yeah so so they just didn't make any sense it did how's your reaction their reaction my reaction I didn't care much no sir you were supposed to be at the frontiers of knowledge and that's well this is well there was no interest in it outside right so but it didn't matter you know in your early 20s you're thinking about what you're doing you know where they care what the world thinks so did you have a Eureka feeling as you were doing it though oh yeah there were a lot of things that just seem to be discoveries and I was I was excited about them and a couple of people I could talk to her but then I got involved so to some extent in a formal theory of automata and that I could publish you know I could publish in engineering journals journals of information and control which never at the time you were here at MIT or that's yeah that was ready by the time I was in 1956 so I was at MIT and there there there was a lot of outside interest and it's kind of loosely related to linguistics I mean the formal systems are similar in some respects to the systems of natural language not terribly close but similar and this could go on in parallel it's since become a sub branch of the theory of computation at Sur and other mathematicians got interested in so on but the actual linguistic work was very restricted when you came to our Le Jerry Wiesner was head of it Jerry was head did you talk to him at all about yeah he get them I have the interesting interview with him Roman Jakobson who was great that was a personal friend and she was up at Harvard he was at Harvard at the time but he was a leading figure in the whole intellectual community he knew Jerry Wiesner he suggested I I didn't have any possible academic appointment I had no field when I got my when I got out of the site I felt I was Beach D and everything is I had no thought of going into the academic world because there was nowhere to go but but Yakub sin' suggested I talk to Jerry Wiesner and so I did an appointment with him and you know he asked what I was doing and kind of described what I was doing and then he suggested that I come to orally and work on a machine translation project they had a project of trying to you know develop computer programs that could translate language and I told them you know I don't think the project makes any sense I mean the only way to solve this problem is brute force what's gonna be understood about language is not really going to help and I'm just not interested so I'm not gonna do it so he thought that was pretty good answer and he hired me let me see project but mainly to do what I felt but you didn't do then no because I'm the project made no sense and over the years it's I think become clear why it made no sense but it didn't bother him no he hired you anyway that's what our Lee was like he was just it was just encouraging a lot of innovative strange people with odd ideas some of them worked out some didn't but how well did you come to know Jerry Jerry Wiesner you know people knew each other in those days it was a fairly small community and so you know we're friendly but not close personal friends soon he went off to the Kennedy administration but the Washington back and began four of us but the president later but the same with the others like walter rosenblith who was there later became Provost um it was Provost under Jerry I guess yeah and later but at the time he was in our league like anybody was Jerry let and tybor almost everyone was there at the time they later branched out to different fields different departments but there were internal to the early community there was interest and there was George Miller at Harvard this later by the mid fifties I the the kind of Bible in the sort of intellectual community of this these topics was Skinner's book verbal behavior which was circulating in manuscript when I got to Harvard and that's what you know that Quine who made philosopher studied with him kind of like the Bible and you know I read it didn't seem to make any sense whatsoever so I wrote a I finally wrote a critical review of it got a lot of attention that turned out to get a lot of attention that came out in 1959 ruder than 57 got a lot of attention it was part of the other there was that was that long a lead time and getting that you know just getting published but it was part of a sort of a growing it was part of the growth of cognitive science and neuroscience related to cognitive science and so on and there was a you know undercurrent there of a discomfort with the behaviorist sort of ideology it was kind of like a religion almost and this was so this fit into that and contributed to it and in fact there was work by it it was so considered so out of tune with the main streams that there's a famous brain scientist inventor scientist Karl Lashley who was at Harvard in fact who back in 1950 or so published a really important article on structure behavior in which he showed very convincingly that the various approaches couldn't possibly work but nobody paid any attention to it in fact I was right in the middle of all of this sign of heard of it I found out about it from an art critic Meyer Shapiro and I read it and I saw look this is really important so I my art my review of Skinner maybe the first article that even referred to it I've notice you could do a data they search easily but I couldn't find any reference nor could anyone else and it was apparently novel to the people I showed it to but then there were a couple of other things like that within comparative psychology which was that those days pretty different from Experimental Psychology there was work coming out that was just inconsistent with the behaviorist approach there was also another development was ethology the snow Comparative Zoology with figures like Conrad Lawrence and Tinbergen and others and this small group of graduate students that we were reading that material and you could see that just didn't fit at all with behaviorist ideologies so how did you go from all this research and thinking and there wasn't a linguistics department there were some language courses and well that was become a department formal bureaucratic whatever well we were in the modern language department and we had to pay our dues by teaching Morris it was there I forgave probably teaching German or French or something whatever he was doing but I really didn't know any language it's a minute not that kind of a linguist and the only curses I could teach were in those days they had a cram courses for PhD students to help them fake their way through reading exams and fake is the right word these were a residue of the pre-war period I mean pretty Second World War if you wanted to be the civil engineer so you had to know French and German because the United States was kind of like an intellectual backwater the main work was being done in Europe but all of that changed totally during the Second World War for obvious reasons and none of the graduate students were ever going to read an article in French or German almost unbelievable but they still had the residue of the exams and the only way to deal with it was for the modern language department to run courses in which you taught graduate students enough tricks so that they could fake their way through the exam and then forget about and the exam would be had to read and translate a paper in their own fields well you know take a look at a paper in your own field understand the formulas you know do you understand the the international words you learned that the verb is over here instead of over here and so on they can kind of fake your way through it those are the courses I was teaching sometimes they were quite funny let's jump from there to a department or real well I was I was allowed to teach an undergraduate course in linguistics and philosophy modern linguistics and my own kind of work out kind of work on modern philosophy there was nothing like that at the time and after a while they were students were interested so in fact a number of the students went on and became professionals and exactly one of them was chair of linguistics department somewhere there were mathematicians who became interested and so on got it there was a certain increase in interest among undergraduates and by that time we were getting visitors from outside who just heard about it and wanted to know something about it by about 1960 we we had one visitor who was at a point where he could get a PhD but there was no PhD department so the electrical engineering department agreed to let him get his PhD and Turkish nominalization an electrical engineering department but it was sort of reaching the point where he could think about a graduate department the MIT was pretty free and open so they agreed that we could establish a graduate department and shortly after that also in philosophy because that was building up similar way I was again very much involved in the appointments teaching and so on so the department just sort of formed the realm it was under strat no a graduate Howard Johnson this was still under 1960 as it was early sixties feeling a Jay Stratton I guess maybe Howard trying to get the exact order but I think it was did you care very strongly one way or the other whether it became a department yeah once it became a department we could have students we could have courses this students contribute a lot to the development of the field so it became richer much more exciting and the early graduate students went off and started their own departments which is hard you know we had to try to work their way into the field by the by the late sixties it was at first the only department actually in the world that was dealing with this kind of thing but there were foreign students they went back to their own countries gradually by the 70s it was kind of you know they're at least bits and pieces all over the place did you do much pushing to make it a department or did Morris do that or I mean sir who did the more motivation work exhaustion dirty work he he did most of them that yeah luckily for me but it wasn't that we were pushing against it there was no resistance to it now it's kind of like it sounds like an interesting idea fine let's go ahead and let's just somebody had initiated kind a critical mass right and and work through it was a pretty limited bureaucracy in those days I mean the you know the move from working in an office at orally to talking to the president was a very brief move you know not a lot of stages in between and as I said most people sort of know each other yeah I love to talk a little about that same period but the others side what it was like to be an anti-war activist at MIT in the 60s and 70s we have to remember the environment the war in Vietnam actually started in 1962 that's when Kennedy started the bombing of South Vietnam chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock to rounding people up into camps and so on but there was no protest I mean just non-existent there's a very quiescent period all over the country thing I mean the first talks I was giving were somebody's living room or in a church with four people or something like that by the mid sixties some activism was developing actually in 1965 that this is all on my own time I'd not do with MIT it was a started organizing national tax resistance you're trying to and within a year or two it was much broader resistance fact by 1968 I was coming up for a try federal trial like that was expanded and I was giving lots of talks meanwhile I introduced with a friend is also on the faculty we introduced undergraduate courses on social and political issues so Louie Louie Kent but it was I did it on my own time he did it as part of his it sort of fit into its department but for me it was just you know my own time and by the late 60s hundreds of students and I mean while the the mood and the University was changing it was student activism was kind of taking off here was late but by 1968 it was substantial there were major events that took place which had a big effect on the Institute so in there were just a small number of students who were active but they kind of galvanized the place must have been late 1968 or so on there was a late 1968 there was a the students decided I didn't think was a good idea that they went ahead to set up what's called a sanctuary for a deserter there was a Marine deserter yeah talked to him made sure he understood what he was doing understood the consequences and so on and they just set up a room in the Student Center then had a press conference nobody came to they were said well okay we're gonna stay with this Marine deserter until the FBI comes and picks him up within about within about a week the Institute was half shut down oh yeah half the student body was over there all the time there was 24 hours the seminars rock music everything of the kind that was going on in those days and it had a tremendous effect on the student body it had an effect on the Institute one of the effects was that it just raised in the student body and some of the faculty and awareness that we should be thinking about what we're doing and then came March 4th March 4th 1969 when the Institute was closed for a day just for seminars and discussions and meetings about the uses of technology do how do we think about the consequences were doing instead of just you know making stuff we asked what's for what we should be doing she'll be doing something else that's really the you know individuals had thought about things like this but this was really the first time that there was a an organized concern about it and out of that grew a lot of things in fact the Institute just changed radically and I mean these became central topics the Union of Concerned Scientists came out of that Henry Kendall who was Nobel Prize physicist and had been a pentagon planner you know he was working on planning bombing and Indochina but he kind of I remember him we talked about it just go went through a personal conversion thought you gotta change this and he became a leading figure and the physics were in what became the Union of Concerned Scientists and a lot of other things developed out of it but and it did change the atmosphere of the Institute a lot so these are now kind of did you and Jerry Wiesner ever sit down and talk about what was being done and how it was being done did did he reach out to you because mrs. students got more well he was not very happy I mean he was you know kind of on the extreme Devesh side of the sort of Kennedy administration but and he never really accepted the fact that the students and the activists considered him a kind of a collaborator because he thought he was taking a strong stand against you know War nuclear weapons and so on but from the students point of view that and the activists point of view that wasn't the case and it was never really a reconciliation no so but you weren't altogether comfortable I think with some of the aggressive tactics that the students used in the end oh there was by the late 60s I mean the student movement was really had a very brief existence you know a big effect but a brief existence a couple of years so it started in the early 60s civil rights movement and so on but gradually grew by the late 60s a huge phenomenon by 1969 I was falling apart literally I mean the November actions I guess that's just that but it was you know it was that but a lot more the maintain the president's office yes when I was happening here Columbia other places I it was my favorite myself and like this tactics but students for democratic society SDS which was the nationwide student organization had a rapid expansion in the late 60s but by 1969 was collapsing it broke up into two wings one of them sort of Maoist and the other the weatherman and we had a lot of work Armon kept trying to talk students out of going in those directions and you can understand the attraction you know people desperate upset things but did they get angry with you for trying to talk yeah we had a lot of confrontations and conflicts yeah your friend was right involved in this but well a lot of them the face of the criticism the MIT ended up setting up the what was called the pounds Commission house mission was sent to her to advise it on what it should do with with the two research labs that were seen as being instrumental to varying degrees in the war effort well it was your name - were you surprised that you were off no hesitation about serving her well I got serious personal hesitations because I had arranged to teach in Oxford for a semester I was the John Locke lecture at Oxford and that was the semester in which they wanted the pounce Commission to me so actually the beauty flying back and forth well the Dean really pleaded with me to just be on it so I had four transatlantic trips a week teaching Oxford come here go to a committee meeting go back the next day detox furred again this went on for about six weeks so your hesitation was just that you weren't here and it was I wasn't here and I didn't want to give up I had promised that semester Oxford I didn't want to give that up and the John Locke lectureship I was but I was giving talks all over England at the same time it wasn't just teaching because you know the pounce mission was set up to try to head off a confrontation that nobody wanted I mean the protests against the labs were building up to the point where they were going to lead to a confrontation the administration didn't want the students didn't want so what you do is you set up a committee and the committee was going to review the state of Pentagon related activity at the Institute I think we have just a minute or two just some listen up well you know briefly it turned out roughly actually nobody even knew what the finances were the finances of the Institute were not even anybody's head they were just kind of chaos tonic money was pouring in it turned out roughly that the two military laboratories were approximately half of Institute expenditures but nobody really knew if they were contributing to the Institute or taking from it like how much did the library contributions matter so that had to be sorted out and of the academic side I think about 90% were was Pentagon based but there was no classified work going on on campus I mean indirectly everything could be were related lives except in the political science department some of that had they were working on counterinsurgency under what was called a Peace Research Institute with closed seminars and things like that but elsewhere was in the labs on the other hand the labs are very closely integrated with the Institute so for example my wife was a programmer at Lincoln labs I was in early but it was no particular barrier in fact people would go up and back freely but the real issue in the pound's Commission was whether to separate the laboratories from the Institute there were sort of three views that came out there was what was called the Liberals who said yeah we got to separate him from the campus that were the Conservatives said keep them on campus and there were two or three of us one student one me who were called the radicals who agreed with the Conservatives where to keep them on campus so that people know what's going on and it's a focus of attention and concern and you think of it let's not hide it somewhere we're the same relationships are going to continue but under an apparent administer of break well we lost the Liberals one they were formally sever but it was an interesting time however that's it's about the time of the May 4th and these other developments and that didn't make a change

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Published: Tue Mar 08 2016