A Practical Education, page 29
20. Otis earned all of his degrees at Stanford: AB, in 1910, majoring in psychology; AM, in education, in 1915; and PhD in education, completed in 1920.
21. Army Mental Tests, 2.
22. Ibid., 3.
23. Ibid., 16.
24. Henry Herbert Goddard, Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1920), 31–32.
25. Army Mental Tests, 16, 20.
26. Ibid., 12, 16.
27. Ibid., 8–9, 16.
28. Ibid., 12.
29. Camplife Chickamauga, clipping, Yerkes Papers, Box 94, file 1782. Reproduced in Joanne Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 113–114.
30. M. C. S. Noble, Jr., “Standardized Group Intelligence Tests as a Basis of Selection of Students for Admission to Colleges and Universities,” High School Journal 9, no. 2/3 (February/March 1926): 32.
31. The Thorndike College Entrance Tests in the University of California, comp. J. V. Breitwieser (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1922), 3.
32. Edward L. Thorndike, Thorndike Intelligence Examination for High School Graduates: Instructions for Giving and Scoring, Series of 1919, 1920, 1921 and 1922 (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1921), 12.
33. Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 28–29.
34. Robert A. McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 268–269. Columbia discarded the Thorndike exam in 1934.
35. Thorndike College Entrance Tests.
36. “U.C. Faculty Asks to Take Intelligence Tests with Students,” SD, January 24, 1921.
37. Lewis M. Terman and Karl M. Cowdery, “Stanford’s Program of University Personnel Research,” Journal of Personnel Research 4, no. 7 and 8 (November/December 1925): 263.
38. Ibid., 263–264.
39. Ibid., 264.
40. “Fall Students Brightest,” SD, April 1, 1924.
41. The study ended up with 1,528 subjects. Edwin G. Boring, Lewis Madison Terman, 1877–1956: A Biographical Memoir (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1959), 429. When Terman died in 1956, the study was taken over by Robert Sears, a Stanford psychology professor who himself was one of the subjects, a “Termite,” as they were called. Near the end of Sears’s life, in 1987, Albert Hastorf, another Stanford psychologist, took over, maintaining the project archives and vowing in 2000 that the study would continue until the last Termite had died. Hastorf died in 2011. Mitchell Leslie, “The Vexing Legacy of Lewis Terman,” Stanford Magazine, July/August 2000; “75 Years Later, Study Still Tracking Geniuses,” NYT, March 7, 1995; “Albert Hastorf, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Former Vice President and Provost, and Former Dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences, Dead at 90,” Stanford Report, September 27, 2011.
42. Lewis M. Terman, “Adventures in Stupidity: A Partial Analysis of the Intellectual Inferiority of a College Student,” Scientific Monthly 14, no. 1 (January 1922): 24–40.
43. Ibid., 39–40.
44. Ibid., 34.
45. Walter Lippmann, “The Mental Age of Americans,” New Republic, October 25, 1922, 213–214.
46. Walter Lippmann, “The Mystery of the ‘A’ Men,” New Republic, November 1, 1922, 246–247.
47. Walter Lippmann, “The Reliability of Intelligence Tests,” New Republic, November 8, 1922, 276.
48. Walter Lippmann, “A Future for the Tests,” New Republic, November 29, 1922, 10.
49. Walter Lippmann, “The Abuse of the Tests,” New Republic, November 15, 1922, 297.
50. Lewis M. Terman, “The Great Conspiracy, or the Impulse Imperiouis [sic] of Intelligence Testers, Psychoanalyzed and Exposed by Mr. Lippmann,” New Republic, December 27, 1922, 116.
51. After the war, Strong taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1919 to 1923, until going to Stanford. John G. Darley, “Edward Kellogg Strong, Jr.” Journal of Applied Psychology 48, no. 2 (April 1964): 73.
52. “Looking for Right Job? Strong Test Reveals All,” SD, March 30, 1948.
53. “Test ‘1000’ for Vocation,” SD, October 23, 1934. The then-current version of the Strong test was described as consisting of eight pages of “pertinent and varied questions calculated to rate occupational interests. Such data as likes and dislikes in occupations, amusements, activities, peculiarities of people, and a self-rating of present abilities and characteristics.”
54. Terman and Cowdery, “Stanford’s Program,” 266.
55. Questionnaires were filled out by 287 men, which was two-thirds of the class. Edward K. Strong, Jr., “Predictive Value of the Vocational Interest Test,” Journal of Educational Psychology 26, no. 5 (May 1935): 331, 332.
56. “Check Your Preference,” SD, April 19, 1927.
57. Edward K. Strong, Jr., “Differentiation of Certified Public Accountants from Other Occupational Groups,” Journal of Educational Psychology 18, no. 4 (April 1927): 235.
58. Strong, “Predictive Value,” 331–333, 343.
59. “Strong Vocational Results Prove Valid After 19 Years,” SD, September 26, 1952.
60. The Stanford University Press sold the rights in 2004. “CPP, Inc., Purchases Strong Interest Inventory Assessment from Stanford University Press,” PR Newswire, September 8, 2004.
61. Lemann, The Big Test, 30–31.
CHAPTER 13. THE STRENGTH OF WEAK TIES
1. “European-American Relations to Be Studied in New Course,” SD, March 4, 1943.
2. Stanford University, Study of Undergraduate Education, The Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford University (SUES) (Stanford: The Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford University, 2012), 17.
3. Grangaard’s father had gone on to earn an MBA at the University of Chicago.
4. The Band’s scatter formations, field-show themes that mock and torment the school’s athletic opponents, and adoption of Free’s “All Right Now” as the school’s unofficial fight song are among its signatures. The Band describes itself as equipped with “the weapons of student autonomy, rock-and-roll music and bad fashion sense.” History page, LSJUMB website, http://lsjumb.stanford.edu/history.html, accessed January 3, 2017.
5. For an introduction to Meraki’s technology, see Randall Stross, “Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers,” NYT, February 4, 2007. The size of the company when Grangaard’s friend had joined in January 2011 can be guessed by Meraki CEO Sanjit Biswas’s mention in November 2012 that the company had grown the previous year from 120 to 330 employees. If the 120 employees refers to November 2011, it would be reasonable to assume that the number in January 2011 would have been fewer than one hundred, perhaps many fewer. “Letter to Employees from Meraki CEO, Sanjit Biswas,” [November 12, 2012], Cisco Meraki blog, https://www.meraki.com/company/cisco-acquisition-faq#ceo-letter.
6. The number of actual employees at that moment would have been smaller than 286, as the employee number reflects the number of employees who have ever worked at a company, not the current headcount.
7. “Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Meraki,” Cisco press release, November 18, 2012; “Cisco Completes Acquisition of Meraki,” Cisco press release, December 20, 2012.
8. For his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, Mark Granovetter interviewed one hundred men in 1969, residents of Newton, Massachusetts, who had changed jobs in the previous year. In addition to the one hundred interviews, he also collected completed questionnaires from 187 other men. The resulting dissertation was titled “Changing Jobs: Channels of Mobility Information in a Suburban Population” and was submitted in 1970. The theoretical formulation was presented in “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (May 1973): 1360–1380. The revision of the dissertation was published as Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1974); a second edition was published in 1995.
9. Granovetter found that 56.1 percent of his subjects in the professional category got their jobs by personal contacts; technical, 43.5 percent; and managerial, 65.4 percent. Getting a Job, 2nd ed., 19.
10. Getting a Job, 2nd ed., 148.
11. Granovetter’s article “The Strength of Weak Ties” would become one of the most cited articles in social science. Google Books tallied more than forty-one thousand citations as of January 7, 2017.
CHAPTER 14. THE SHINY NEW THING
1. Graduate totals are based on searches by major of the database maintained by the Stanford Alumni Association.
2. In 2015, Eric Roberts, a professor of computer science, complained to the Stanford Daily about the lack of resources: “We’re all teaching three times as many students as we were six years ago, and we don’t have any more of us and any more money.” “A Look at Stanford Computer Science, Part II: Challenges of a Growing Field,” SD, April 16, 2015.
3. “John Herriot—Stanford Math Pioneer,” SFC, April 14, 2003. In an oral history recorded twenty-six years after establishing the Center, Herriot described the process of programming the CPC as easy: “It’s not like getting out your solder gun or anything like that.” John George Herriot, oral history, May 22, 1979, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
4. Alexandra I. Forsythe, oral history, May 16, 1976, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
5. George E. Forsythe, “Educational Implications of the Computer Revolution,” talk given at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, Denver, Colorado, December 1961, transcript, 1–2, in H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science Division 1962–69, SCUA. Forsythe pointed out that in 1945 a desk calculator operated by a human could complete one multiplication operation about every ten seconds. But in 1962 it would be possible to have the computer do the same operation in 0.000025 seconds, an improvement by a factor of about half a million. He reasoned that such an improvement could not help but produce epochal changes. He drew an analogy to changes that followed the advent of jet-powered aircraft, which brought a speed improvement over walking of only about one-hundred-fold. “Jets have caused a totally new approach to commerce, vacations, management of industries, and international government. They have brought new industries, new kinds of jobs, new problems, new ways of thinking and certainly new fears,” he said. “All this from an acceleration of merely 100. . . . Now what may we expect of the almost million-fold increase in man’s speed of computation?”
6. Ibid., 14.
7. In 1959, George Forsythe noted that the United States had three thousand “automatic digital computers” installed around the country, and he estimated that each machine needed ten college-trained mathematicians to tend to its needs as programmers, analysts, and supervisors. George E. Forsythe, “The Role of Numerical Analysis in an Undergraduate Program,” American Mathematical Monthly 66, no. 8 (October 1959): 651.
8. As more applied mathematicians with an interest in computing joined the department, a gap appeared between them and some of their colleagues. David Gilbarg, then head of the mathematics department, was uneasy about the “technological character” of computer science and the propriety of keeping the field in H&S. David Gilbarg to Philip H. Rhinelander [dean, H&S], memo, January 9, 1960, H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science Division 1962–69, SCUA.
9. Forsythe, “Educational Implications,” 16. Forsythe could see the case to be made for locating CS in engineering, too, but he was inclined to keep it in H&S. He was less concerned about location than about the “personnel shortage” that afflicted the field. The pool of computer scientists who had not been lured by industry to work outside of academe was small. Forsythe wrote, “The demands of these commercial installations have sucked into industry very many of the persons whose presence on campus is necessary for the development of knowledge in computing. As a result, it is astonishingly hard to find well-qualified persons to assume professorships in computing. Those who come command salaries much higher than their more traditional academic brethren.”
10. G. E. Forsythe to R. R. Sears, January 15, 1962, H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science Division 1962–69, SCUA.
11. George Forsythe to Dean Sears, “Preliminary Budget Planning for 1963–64,” memo, October 10, 1962, H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science Division 1963–64, SCUA.
12. George Forsythe to Robert R. Sears, August 21, 1963, H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science Division 1963–64, SCUA.
13. An example of Forsythe’s reports on the diffusion of computer science is the cover letter he sent out in May 1963 with a detailed report of a new computer science program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He noted that Carnegie Tech, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT still kept computer science within existing departments, but Wisconsin and Purdue had established new programs. George E. Forsythe to Professors Bowker, Gilbarg, Herriot, Lederberg, McCarthy, Parter, Royden, and Sears, “University of Colorado Institute for Computing Science,” n.d. [stamped “Received May 17 1963, Dean of H&S”], H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science Division 1962–69, SCUA.
14. The same year that Stanford established its computer science department, so too did many others. By June 1965, George Forsythe was worried that other institutions were in a rush to staff new departments and would try to lure members of Stanford’s computer science faculty. “Of the top 15 universities, ten either have such departments now or have phoned me personally (Yale, Cornell) in the past few months, requesting advice about organization and personnel! Yet only two or three years ago there were none.” Forsythe predicted, “In the face of this panic, Stanford’s Computer Science faculty are going to be raided very hard. We are going to have to raise our salary levels very substantially to hold people.” G. E. Forsythe to H. L. Royden, June 7, 1965, H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science 1965–66, SCUA.
15. Robert R. Sears to Donald W. Taylor, February 1, 1965, H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science 1964–65, SCUA.
16. The potential usefulness of computing to humanities research was remarked upon in 1965 by Forsythe. Yale University, using a grant from IBM, held a two-day conference that year titled “Computers for the Humanities?” A copy of the program was sent to Stanford by Don Taylor, a former Stanford faculty member, and circulated from dean to faculty member to faculty member. Forsythe passed it on with a note that said, “A year ago the director of the Computation Center at Princeton told me that within five years he expected to get a vastly increased demand for computing from the humanities people. He called humanities a ‘sleeping giant’ [for computing]. I haven’t checked lately on how it has been going.” Robert R. Sears to Professor George Forsythe, January 28, 1965, and George E. Forsythe to Virgil K. Whitaker, February 4, 1965, George E. Forsythe Papers (SC98), Box 6, Folder 6, SCUA.
17. In 1967, Ying Y. Lew, a sophomore, asked the university to permit him to create his own customized major that would be labeled “computer science,” proposing to draw upon courses in mathematics, electrical engineering, philosophy, and physics. “Interdepartment Majors Proposed By H-S Deans,” SD, December 1, 1967. The next year Lew received approval for a revised version of his proposed interdisciplinary major, “computer methods and designs.” “15 Students Receive Approval for Interdepartmental Study,” SD, May 8, 1968. When Lew graduated in 1970, however, his major was not this but English.
18. George E. Forsythe to Julian W. Hill, February 3, 1965, H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science, 1964–65, SCUA. When computer science was still merely a division of the Department of Mathematics, the faculty boasted of their service to undergraduates, teaching 2,475 student-equivalents of introductory-level courses in the 1963–64 academic year. Halsey Royden to Frederick E. Terman, October 26, 1964, H&Sr, Box 8, Computer Science Division 1964–65, SCUA. The Computation Center, for which Forsythe served as director, had grown apace. In 1962, it was used by nearly 1,600 Stanford students in forty-three courses. See “Eichler Awarded Building Contract,” SD, August 2, 1962.
19. George E. Forsythe to Provost’s Computer Committee, “Meeting of 7 July 1969,” memo, July 8, 1969, George E. Forsythe Papers (SC98), Box 11, Folder 20, SCUA. Forsythe said that around 675 undergraduates were enrolled in one of four elementary courses in 1968–69. He then estimated that about 2,000 current undergraduates had taken one of them, or 40 percent. He estimated that another 10 percent were students who had arrived with some computing experience. Consequently, “we feel that 50% of the undergraduates are now being reached with computing.” The expansion of courses was accomplished without full financial support from the administration. In his oral history of this period, John Herriot said that the administration provided support for less than half of the faculty’s salaries; the remainder came from grants, contracts, and funds allocated to the Computation Center. He said, “I think we had 15 people, we had [only] about 6 full-time equivalent positions, or something like that. So, convincing the Dean at all times that we needed more money was one of Forsythe’s big things. It was a hard job.” Herriot, oral history, 23–24.
20. Disclosure: Lyman Van Slyke was one of my two principal graduate advisors at Stanford.
21. L. P. Van Slyke to All Colleagues, “Interest in Computer Applications in the History Department,” memo, January 20, 1969, Richard W. Lyman, provost of SU, Papers (SC0099), Box 14, History Department, SCUA.
22. Ibid.
23. Fred Hargadon to Norman Wessells, “Undergraduate Major in Computer Science,” memo, March 10, 1983, H&Sr, Box 9, Computer Science 1982–83, SCUA.
24. Ibid.
25. Russell Berman and Brian Cook, representing the Policy & Planning Board, “Changes in the Academic Interests of Stanford Undergraduates,” SU, Forty-Ninth Senate Report No. 1, October 13, 2016, 11. The qualifying modifier “about” that precedes the two percentage figures for 1986 indicates that when I pulled them from a line graph, I had to guess the starting points for the corresponding lines in the absence of actual figures.
