Christopher Dede (BS '69), Educational Technologist

Long before the COVID pandemic introduced remote learning on a mass scale, Chris Dede has developed educational systems, novel technologies, and the necessary policy responses that broaden learning beyond the physical classroom.

As an undergraduate at Caltech in the late 1960s, Dede was part of a group of students who pushed for women to be admitted to the undergraduate student body. In the following conversation, Dede reviews the various factors motivating this activity, and he conveys his satisfaction with Caltech's ultimate decision.

DAVID ZIERLER: This is David Zierler, Director of the Caltech Heritage Project. It is Wednesday, June 15th, 2022. I am delighted to be here with Professor Christopher Dede. Chris, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for joining me today. To start, would you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation?

DEDE: I am the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.

ZIERLER: Who is or was Timothy E. Wirth?

DEDE: Tim had a very distinguished career in which he was a senator from Colorado and then headed Ted Turner's United Nations Foundation for many years and did other things in connection with Turner Enterprises. He was head of the external advisory board for Harvard's Graduate School of Education in the mid 1990s and was originally a graduate of Harvard. Some of his friends from his undergraduate years decided that they would fund an endowed chair in his name. He requested that it be in learning technologies. I was the first person to be awarded the chair.

ZIERLER: Tell me about the Technology, Innovation, and Education Program at Harvard. How did it get started, and what are some of its key missions?

DEDE: Harvard Ed School had long had an ed. tech. program. It was early in that area. In the mid 1980s, it had a program—I don't remember the exact name—but it was related to educational technology. The program went through some name changes. At the time that I arrived in the year 2000, it was called Technology In Education, TIE. Later, we decided the "I" wasn't pulling its weight, so it became Technology, Innovation, and Education. The program, when I arrived, was roughly 40 students a year. It grew organically until about 2017 to 70 students a year. Then a couple years ago, the school redid its master's programs, going from 13 to five, and one of the five was a program called Learning Design Innovation and Technology, sort of a superset of what TIE was. That, last year, had 190 students. So, there has been substantial expansion of design and learning technologies-related work over the time that I have been at Harvard.

The Present and Future of Remote Learning

ZIERLER: I can't help but ask a current question. With the pandemic and remote learning, is this a topic that has been of interest to you?

DEDE: Yes, I have long been involved with different forms of distance education. In fact, my initial work in distance education was in 1978, with Nebraska Public Television, so I had lived through many cycles of distance education, including being in Texas in the late 1980s when the state of Texas announced that anyone outside of the state teaching across distance nonetheless would have to be vaccinated, because that was a requirement for all people teaching in Texas. Of course, they had heard about viruses. They also announced that all those people would have to take Texas history, because that was a requirement for teaching in Texas at the time. So there were some interesting barriers in the early years to distance learning.

The Ed School and every place at Harvard except its Division of Continuing Education was banned from offering online courses until the pandemic. Arguably, Harvard was the worst prepared institution of higher education in the country to face remote learning, because it had systematically refused to allow faculty to do that. But I was delighted, because I had been thinking about this for many years, and finally I was getting a chance to practice what I preached and see how that went. I greatly enjoyed, over the last few years, teaching online courses.

ZIERLER: What have you learned about the experience, and more broadly, once this pandemic ends, if it ever ends, what do you want to revert to, and what do you see as here to stay with distance learning?

DEDE: I recently wrote an article that is going to be published in the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education in which I say that we're going through a sea change. In one's lifetime, perhaps one goes through one or two sea changes. The First World War brought about a sea change. The Second World War brought about a sea change. I think the pandemic has brought about a worldwide sea change. not because of the pandemic any more than the wars somehow persisted, but because of the response to the pandemic. We live in a hybrid world now, and we're not going to go back. We have left Kansas, we've gone to Oz, there's no ruby slippers that are going to take us back to Kansas again.

Because many groups like the hybrid world. They like the fact that now there's an online infrastructure that even skeptics have had to learn to use it, and it has opened up a whole array of new possibilities that I described in the article. The Silver Lining for Learning series that I cofounded and cohost, that we started the week that everything shut down in March 2020 because of the pandemic—we said, "Well, we'll do this for five or ten weeks, and then when the pandemic is over, we'll wrap it up." Well, we're on episode 110, and going strong. It's called Silver Lining for Learning at my instigation because the pandemic is a terrible human tragedy. But it is the best opportunity for educational transformation that I've seen in my lifetime. That's the silver lining, if we can take advantage of the silver lining. The sea change says that we're not going to go back, even though there's lots of people, including many parts of Harvard, who would like to go back. What we need to do now is both/and, rather than think in terms of either/or, and both/and in the true sense of the two being complementary as opposed to thinking about hybrid as kind of an evil twin of face-to-face that's less viable. It's a different animal with different strengths and different weaknesses.

ZIERLER: Broadly conceived with distance learning, what aspects do you see as further ingraining inequalities in education, and where, as you say, are there silver linings to overcome such inequalities?

DEDE: Over half of the episodes in Silver Lining for Learning are from Global South countries. What those episodes are showing is a huge blow against inequalities in education, because the infrastructures are now being put into place to do remote learning for everyone as opposed to face-to-face learning for the privileged few. Creative people are doing really wonderful things with those infrastructures to make sure that the learning is of quality. Those episodes provide a set of models, if you will. The four of us who cofounded it just published an article in the Journal of Digital Politics that is on the Silver Lining for Learning site. The article points out that a lot of what we cover in the show was unknown, even to us. These are not people who are coming to EdTech conferences. They're not people who are publishing in scholarly journals. They are, in fact, the people who are from the marginalized populations, and working with the marginalized populations, in order to address inequalities. So I think that face-to-face education is typically much more unequal than distance learning. Again, the trick is to do both well, and to have the two complement one another.

ZIERLER: I'm curious if, to the extent that your research has policy implications, you work with government agencies, both in the United States or abroad.

DEDE: I do. I'm on the Scientific Committee for OECD 2020. I'm part of a Digital Learning Initiative that's out of United Arab Emirates that has a lot of policy work connected with it. I've been an advisor to the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, so domestically I've done a lot of work on the policy level as well. Basically in the things that I teach, I stress the fact that education is a system, quite a complex system, with many change-resisting loops, and you can't neglect any part of the system, because if you do, those change-resisting loops will come and get you. Policy is an important part of the overall system and something that I try to stress in my teaching.

ZIERLER: In what ways is private enterprise interested in the things that you work on, to the extent that there is profit to be made in thinking about virtual worlds, augmented realities, within an educational context?

DEDE: Private enterprise is quite interested. Later today, right after I talk to you, as a matter of fact, I'm meeting with a very large multinational company that I won't identify, about the metaverse. They're interested in getting advice from experts like me about is the metaverse actually going to happen, are there market opportunities here, how would we make this scalable and sustainable, is there actually any value that's going to be communicated through this, and so on. So, there is substantial interest. One of the problems with educational technology is that so far, the way that people have made money in EdTech is to automate teaching by telling and learning by listening, which is the weak form of learning, as opposed to innovating through different models for experiential learning, which is where my own research has been these many decades. I think that that is starting to change. Once the Berlin Wall starts to come down, then the rest of it may happen pretty quickly.

ZIERLER: To clarify, is the term "metaverse," as you're using it, proprietary coming from Facebook, or is it now conceptually so ubiquitous that we can use it as we call Xerox or Q-tips?

DEDE: The whole concept of the metaverse has a long history in science fiction. Isaac Asimov in the 1950s wrote a book called The Caves of Steel that was essentially about how people have been living during the pandemic, although the reason wasn't a pandemic. Neal Stephenson in 1992 coined the term "metaverse" in talking about work that William Gibson had done in his science fiction genre in the 1980s, the cyberpunk genre. It would be pretty hard for any industry to claim either the term or the concept, because there's so much prior public use, that it's something that they would clearly lose. Of course, they're trying to claim that they have a new, wonderful, novel take on it, but—not so much.

ZIERLER: At the end of the day, what kind of scholar would you call yourself, primarily? Are you a technologist, an educational specialist? What's the best term?

DEDE: I'm an educational specialist in learning and teaching who uses technology as the vehicle for understanding and deepening learning and teaching. The primary methodology that I use is design-based research, where basically I and my colleagues build something, we put it into the real world, we watch wheels fall off, we bring it back, new version 2.0, put it out, watch different wheels fall off. Maybe by version 3.0, we've got something that really looks pretty good, and we've created a demonstration of concept, or if we have enough funding, even a proof of concept to hopefully influence other people in the field, outside of the research community, to start to build and invest in similar models.

ZIERLER: Your sense of the history of the field? Is it more that this came out of education studies that was interested in technology, or technology studies that was interested in education?

DEDE: I would say that predominantly, the history came out of technology, and that technology even today is still too often seen as the innovation when in fact it's the catalyst. The innovation for learning and teaching is things like more powerful ways of learning by doing, links between classrooms and life, the ability to help teachers learn to innovate at scale, and so on and so on. The real innovations are not the devices or the software; those are the catalysts. The real innovations are changes in how we teach and learn.

ZIERLER: Now let's do some oral history. Let's go all the way back to when you were at Caltech as an undergraduate. To set the stage, where were you in high school?

DEDE: I was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I went to a not-very-good public school. In fact, it did not offer calculus, and I had to go to the library and check out books about calculus, because of course this was pre-internet. There wasn't YouTube or anything for me to go learn calculus on my own. I basically had to try to do it through library books, to learn enough calculus that I could do well enough on the exams to get into Caltech. I'm still not quite sure why they admitted me. It may have been that no one had ever been admitted from my high school, or I suspect the Milwaukee Public Schools in general, and so they thought that for the sake of diversity, they would let me in. But I was of course very grateful. I got in actually to four different schools, and with the wisdom of the young, I chose the one that was farthest from home, which turned out to be Caltech.

ZIERLER: [laughs] Did you go to Caltech on the basis of pursuing interests in science and engineering, primarily?

DEDE: Yes, I was one of the 80% of people my year who wanted to be a physicist. I was also one of the 90% of the 80% who realized that they were not going to be a physicist, at least not at the level that Caltech defined being a physicist. There were a lot of us who started with Feynman physics and quickly realized that we were destined for other fields. Actually at the end of my four years at Caltech, I had a double major—Chemistry and English—because I didn't want to be too narrow. My mistake was not realizing that I was the only major in English, and they had majors-only classes, and there's nowhere to hide in a majors-only class when you're the only major. That kind of upped the stakes in terms of me being prepared for my English classes.

I was all set to go to Harvard. I had admission and a fellowship, from the Danforth Foundation, to go on in chemistry. Then at the last second, I shifted to go to UMass Amherst, to a very, very innovative program—crazy innovative, actually—in science education. Everyone thought I was nuts, but in fact, I've never regretted it, and I think I've made much more of a contribution through that shift. And then again, shifting from science education to learning technologies with an emphasis on STEM, I think I've made much more of a contribution than I would have, even with a very good doctorate in chemistry.

ZIERLER: As an undergraduate at this time in the late 1960s, this is really just at the time when the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences was getting started at Caltech. Was that an influence for you at all? Were you following these trends?

DEDE: I didn't really understand the historical context, but two of the professors who were very influential for me had been recently hired by Caltech as historians—Bob Woodbury and Byrd Jones. Those were two professors who went to UMass Amherst as part of this crazy innovative experiment, and I sort of followed them. I was also influenced by some of the English teachers into being—I had always done a lot of reading, and absorbed a lot of literature, and they were very caring and very expert, and starved for students. [laughs] They were desperate to find anybody that wanted to be in their courses except as a requirement. I had a natural affiliation with them. So yes, I was certainly more than most students involved with that side of Caltech.

ZIERLER: Looking back at your undergraduate education, was the quantitative emphasis emphasized throughout the curriculum at Caltech influential? Did that exert an influence on all of the things you worked on subsequent to Caltech?

DEDE: It certainly was consistently part of chemistry. Going through all the advanced courses in chemistry, I had to keep the strong quantitative emphasis in my own thinking. I would say that in my subsequent research, I have found it easier to involve really high-level quantitative methodologists and statisticians than to try to keep my own knowledge up at that level. But certainly Caltech gave me an appreciation for the value of that approach, and enough of an understanding that if I'm working with somebody, I can tell whether they're doing a good job or not.

The Push to Admit Women to the Undergraduate Program

ZIERLER: Let's now turn to the main event of our discussion today, and that is the origin story of the decision to admit women to the undergraduate body at Caltech. If you search your memory, what are the earliest conversations that you can recall leading to the formalization among students to agitate for this decision?

DEDE: When I first got to Caltech, I don't recall anyone in the student body going around saying, "I'm so glad there's only men here, because women could never do this stuff." There may have been people who thought it, but they weren't walking around and saying it. There wasn't an anti-woman attitude in the minds of the student body. There was certainly a substantial interest in women, since there weren't any around. One of the things I did as a freshman is got involved in the drama club—not as an actor; I was sort of the recruiter. I would make pilgrimages to women's colleges or coed colleges or high schools and lure young women into coming to Caltech and being in plays. That was a lot of fun, and it also helped me to see the kinds of interactions that occurred between young women and young men who were really smart, but maybe not as smart socially, including myself. Perhaps some of us were a bit on the spectrum, which also didn't make it easier to talk with women.

There was an affiliation at that time between Scripps, a woman's college, and Caltech, and there was a retreat that was held once a year, where for a weekend, some girls from Scripps and some men from Caltech would all go to somewhere out in the countryside and spend a weekend together and do some interesting things. Since they were intellectual colleges, the retreat involved taking a little-known Ionesco. Some actors performed the first two acts, and then we split into groups, and each group wrote a third act, and then all the third acts were produced. That makes it sound very intellectual, but of course there was a fair amount of non-intellectual stuff that went on. And at the initial dinner that started the weekend, we were given a wonderful meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and Jell-o, as I recall, but no utensils. It was very easy to get off of your high horse when you have to eat mashed potatoes with your fingers. It was very clever on the part of the organizers, really.

So there certainly were highly intelligent women from elite colleges who were interacting with the students, as well as a few women faculty who obviously were intelligent and elite. I just think that it was the 1960s. There was a lot of movement and thinking about giving equal access to groups who had been marginalized. At Caltech the obvious target was diversity beyond fairly elite white males. There was agitation in the student body, and then Joe Rhodes as the sort of symbol of this and the instigator, as president of the student body, was a good leader in that respect.

ZIERLER: To go back to this idea of the 1960s, obviously there's interest in having women nearby simply for dating reasons. Would you say that undergraduates at Caltech at the time were influenced by the 1960s, by things like the women's rights movement? Was that part of the motivation as well?

DEDE: I think some of them were. There certainly were some that were very narrow in what they thought about and worked on, but I would say that some of them were influenced by that. There were women graduate students, and so the women graduate students were around, and they were kind of interacting with the undergraduates and serving as reminders that women could do work as this level just as well as men could. I think if the same group of people had been around in the 1950s, would there have been as much interest in women's activism? Probably not. It was certainly influenced by the 1960s. I think that it also was influenced by other things.

ZIERLER: Of course Caltech in the late 1960s was very different than places like Columbia or Berkeley. Did you consider yourself political at that point? Were you politically engaged?

DEDE: I was politically engaged to the extent that I was very concerned about the Watts Riots, and about racial inequalities, and that was a lot of what led me to abandon Harvard in chemistry and go to UMass Amherst and a school of education that was quite active in antiracist activities. Yes, I was influenced by that. Politically, beyond what I cared about and wanted to change, I had no political sophistication. I vaguely understood how the political system worked, but I certainly wasn't any kind of a high-level advisor to helping people with their political strategies.

ZIERLER: From those early informal conversations among the undergraduates at Caltech, what are your recollections of how that became formalized? What were some of the committees or student groups that started to work on this issue in a systematic way?

DEDE: Here you're up against the limits of my memory. I find that compared to most people, I don't retain really detailed memories of the past. Not because I'm losing my intellectual sharpness; I just never have. The past for me kind of recedes into something where I remember some icebergs sticking above the water, but most of the stuff that's below the water, I just don't remember it. I remember that the Caltech YMCA was kind of an activist group that probably led to the formation of some of those committees, but I just don't remember.

ZIERLER: Do you have a sense of how the YMCA became an activist group in the first place?

DEDE: There were some people in the YMCA as staff who were very much caught up in the trends of the 1960s. One of them had a couple daughters in high school who got involved in the campus both intellectually and socially. The YMCA was taking a political stance that the Institute should be moving and changing. The other thing that I would say about the climate at that time on campus, in terms of the faculty and the leadership, is that there was an appalling erosion of my year. I didn't keep track of other years, but I was part of a class of a little over 200 people, of whom about 110 graduated, from Caltech. That's about a 40% erosion. Caltech was the hardest place in the country to get into that year, which is one reason I was surprised to be admitted. If you go to all that trouble to recruit 204 people and then you flesh out that many people, kind of wrecking their college in the process—some of them dropped out; some of them transferred out—that's not a good sign. I think that issue was raised by myself and other students, and it led to some trauma on the part of the Caltech leadership, because they couldn't argue with the facts. The fact was that they were losing people right and left. They hadn't made terrible mistakes in admission; they were losing smart, talented people because they had a toxic atmosphere on the campus, where essentially they were trying to create three Feynmans out of the class of 204, and what happened to the other 201 was none of their business. I think that we made that point, that that was not the right way to run a railroad.

ZIERLER: When you say "creating three more Feynmans" do you mean that the curriculum was simply too grueling, or that the expectations were too high, or some combination of both?

DEDE: I'll give you one example. As I guess everybody took, I took the Feynman freshman year, with the Feynman textbooks. It was taught not by Feynman; it was the first year after Feynman, but it was taught by—I'm trying to think of his name—a very distinguished professor of physics who was an excellent lecturer, so it wasn't that we weren't getting the quality. But we would take quizzes, and the median score on these quizzes was a zero.

ZIERLER: [laughs]

DEDE: That was the median score. The average score was like two, on a quiz with 20 points. A high score was like a five. That's not a good way to get people to learn physics. Because you're not getting any feedback on your mistakes, right? When it's that above your capabilities at the Caltech level, that's what I mean by kind of having the wrong target. I don't know if you saw the movie that Benedict Cumberbatch was in about the British codebreakers during the Second World War, but he's trying to recruit people, and so he gives them a quiz, and he says, "You've got eight minutes to do the quiz." He's talking to somebody and they say, "Well, people seem to be scratching their heads and struggling." He says, "It took me nine minutes." Then Keira Knightley does it in six and just blows him away. But it was like that. It was like the kind of "I'll give a quiz that only a genius can do well on, and then I'll know who the geniuses are, and I can focus on them."

ZIERLER: Would you say that this toxic atmosphere and the administration's concerns was an influential decision point about admitting women?

DEDE: I can only hypothesize went on in the minds of the administrators, but one thing I know is that it's very difficult to get professors to change what they're doing. I've seen that in my 50 years of teaching at four universities, and I'm sure that that would be true at Caltech as well. The idea that the administration would go to Tom Lauritsen and say, "Why don't you give easier quizzes?"—that's not going to get them anywhere. So what can you change? Well, one thing that you could change would be to try to get away from the kind of too many men and not enough women atmosphere of the place. I think that in that respect, admitting women was low-hanging fruit.

ZIERLER: Do you have a recollection of who, among faculty, was out in front on this issue?

DEDE: I think Harry Gray was out in front on this issue. I knew the Chemistry faculty better than most. George Hammond I think was out in front on this issue. I think the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences in general had more faculty who were out in front on the issue, but I frankly don't remember the details.

ZIERLER: Did you have a sense if the students worked on concert with faculty members in making this case to administration?

DEDE: I didn't get that sense. Now, if somebody said, "Well, we did," then I would say, "Okay, you ought to know, because you were the one doing it." The sense that I got is that the faculty who wanted the shift would go to the administration and say, "You see that lion smashing up his cage, eating all that raw meat and roaring and generally unhappy? You really should [laughs] try to do something about this. You should make this change." So it wasn't so much working in concert with the students as using the students as an example of, "Oh my god, if you keep ignoring this, it will be Berkeley." Now, I don't think it ever would have been Berkeley, but it was an effective threat.

ZIERLER: This beast in the cage, this metaphor that you draw, is it primarily about all of these disaffected young men and the poor grades you were receiving?

DEDE: I don't think that they were receiving necessarily poor grades, but they didn't feel that they were necessarily learning anything. If you get a zero on most of your quizzes, then to be told, "Well, you're still learning a lot of physics at the Caltech level," that's not a very convincing message. Also, it was a time in which there was a lot of just kind of over-the-top behavior because the whole society was engaging in over-the-top behavior, especially in California, and so it just kind of fit right in. I joke that I know what time travel is like, because going from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1965, to Los Angeles in 1965 was a three-century time warp.

ZIERLER: [laughs]

DEDE: I remember the night when the students rented a baby elephant, god knows from where, and Robert Huttenback got on its back and was paraded all over the campus, with torches and so on, I guess because he was leaving, and they wanted to celebrate him. It was that kind of a—it was more surprising to have a night that was calm than to have a night that was like that.

Getting With the Times

ZIERLER: [laughs] Chris, what about the idea as Caltech looked at peer institutions and their decisions on admitting women undergraduates? Was a sense that Caltech was simply behind the times a significant factor?

DEDE: I'm glad you asked that, because you just brought back a memory that I had not thought about. I was part of a group of maybe six people who—it was either our junior year or our senior year—who were sent to different peer institutions across the country to look at their housing and how they handled their housing. I remember going to Bowdoin in Maine, and I think I went to MIT. Across the six of us, I think that we spanned 10 or 12 institutions, going in groups of two or three and looking at the housing and so on. Clearly the Institute was interested, and they were interested in the student side perspective on this, and so they used strategies like sending us out as a way of our coming back and saying, "Hey, we slept in the dorm. We hung out with some of the students there. These are the kinds of things that we saw. Some of these might be things that you would want to adopt."

ZIERLER: Did you have a sense by the time you were graduating that the decision to admit women was a fait accompli?

DEDE: Yes.

ZIERLER: In what way? Was there an announcement? Was there a white paper? Was it the zeitgeist?

DEDE: I graduated in 1969. I think women were admitted, if not in 1969 then in 1970.

ZIERLER: I believe the first class came in 1970.

DEDE: In mid 1969, they were saying at that time, "We're going to be admitting women in a year and a quarter" or whatever that would have been. So yeah, it had been announced at that point as a decision.

ZIERLER: Do you think the decision was more a thousand small points that led up to one big decision, or did something above all else really cause the decision to happen?

DEDE: From a student perspective, it was probably the thousand small points. The overwhelming argument, it seems to me, is just if you say, "We want to maximize the scientific talent in the globe. Why throw out half the population?" That argument alone should prevail, regardless of anything else. Whether or not that was the perspective that they took, I don't know, but it seems kind of obvious.

ZIERLER: It would require, of course, the obvious assumption that women were capable of performing at that level.

DEDE: It would. And of course you had, as you have today, people who don't believe that that's true. Caltech and Harvard are similar in many ways in that you have people who are experts in a very narrow field who believe that they're experts in everything, including areas that they know nothing about, like human capabilities. That is a concern.

ZIERLER: Two last questions, looking at your post-Caltech career. Did you meet any of those pioneer women in the inaugural class? Did you ever interact with them?

DEDE: No, not to my knowledge.

ZIERLER: Finally, in what ways do you derive satisfaction for the role you played in this momentous decision and what Caltech has become as a result?

DEDE: I don't know that things would have been very different if Caltech had not admitted me. I don't have the feeling that somehow I was a linchpin in the change. I was an articulate speaker, and I remember doing some speeches to parent groups that caused the administration to do some kind of back-and-fill, not because I was being obnoxious, but because I was being truthful. They would come after me and they would say, "Well, that was then and this is now," kind of. Did I have some influence? Yeah. But I don't know that I could claim any pivotal influence.

I confess—and I'll put this as part of the historic record—I do feel frustrated by, even today, how Caltech views excellence, because it's notable that in all of the awards for alumni, it's always people who won a Nobel Prize or something. It's always a very narrow conception of scientific and engineering excellence. People like myself who have taken a different path, who may have contributed an enormous amount to STEM education and to improving the number of people who apply to Caltech and the number of people who are prepared to do well at Caltech, is just not even on their radar. I think that's unfortunate. It's the same kind of narrow-mindedness that led them to not admit women in the first place. So I don't think that they really learned very much over the decades about thinking more broadly about their mission, as opposed to again this fixation with how can we take a whole bunch of people and crank out a few geniuses.

ZIERLER: Would you say that these are biases that go all the way back to the foundational days of Hale, Millikan and Noyes, and are still with us today?

DEDE: Probably. Again, you know much more about Caltech's history than I do, but probably. Certainly the attitude of people who participated in the Manhattan Project, which was really the generation that was leading Caltech when I was there—Bacher and Feynman had been part of the Manhattan Project and so on, radar—that attitude was, "Well, we were the geniuses that won the War, and here we are in, in a Cold War, so let's make a whole bunch more geniuses." I'm trying to think of the name of the book—The Child Buyer. That was a book that I thought really expressed well the attitude that underlay the whole reform of science curricula pre-college, and Caltech's attitude, at least in the 1960s.

ZIERLER: This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your insight and memories. I'd like to thank you so much.

DEDE: Thank you.

[END]