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
Perhaps that is enough of a sermon on the moral shortcomings of the architectural profession. This is an