Now, on Mondays, I spend a few hours at Mt. Auburn hospital with nurse Millie Williams plugging me in for IV delivery of 5FU and Leucovorin. Janet has been using this opportunity to read me a book about MIT's remarkable mascot, the beaver. As she describes the beaver's lodge surrounded by the pond that it also creates, I picture the dome of MIT looking out on the Charles River and indeed on a "pond" that is our nation's economic environment. Eternally at work to shape its domed lodge so that it can nurture its young, the beaver is also ever mindful that a dam must be sustained to assure the water level needed to make the lodge secure. Indeed, it is the effects of the pond multiplied by the progeny of the lodge that reshape the ecology of the forest.

What does the beaver do when it finds its work near the dome fulfilling and consuming and yet sees the squandering of its contributions by a national leadership that promotes a hemorrhage in the economic-industrial environment upon which its home depends? Especially, what does it do when its own domed home is vitally embedded in the dynamic, for good or for evil? As Janet read, I learned that a real beaver will even tear down its lodge to mend a threatening leak in its dam.

Actually, I had been thinking about beavers for some time. "Should MIT Try to Influence Public Policy?" Looking back on the 80's in a January faculty forum with this billing, I argued that we should "Let the Beaver Roar", especially when that policy has a direct influence on its own economic pond. But, in doing so, we should acknowledge the existence of three types of beavers...those of the first kind, of the second kind and THE BEAVER. Other speakers were spending most of their time studying and advising on policy matters and therefore were beavers of the second kind. The moderator was MIT president Paul Gray, THE BEAVER. Our subject not only struck to the heart of how an academic institution relates to its surroundings, but to how individual faculty and administrators relate to each other. I began with an allegory.

If a beaver stood on its domed home on the river and roared, there are questions that should be asked. What goes with that dome? The answer is beavers, of various sorts. Activist beavers acting like beavers but disturbed by affairs to roar now and then, beavers who whisper roars as supposedly dispassionate advice and THE BEAVER who roars from the top of the dome. How do we recognize the roar of THE BEAVER? What common interests lend coherence to the roars and how is it there seems to be a space and a need for each beaver as it works from that dome? Why should the world worry when the roaring becomes singing and the dome a choir shell?

In trying to influence public policy, each kind of beaver is responding with different constraints. Those of the second kind, who make policy studies their main preoccupation, tend to see change in incremental terms. From my experience, beavers of the second kind are often a timid lot, so dependent on peer and institutional approval of their work that in an age of change such as ours, their work is more likely to provide historical documentation than guidance that might shorten the turning radius of the ship of state. An example is the book Made in America, brought out by the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity. I am proud of MIT for having fostered that widely acclaimed work. Yet, after trying to little avail to influence the Commission to include the military influence in their purview, I remain critical and disappointed. (Reagan's Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, gave the study an enthusiastic review in Forbes magazine, and that should make even beavers of the second kind have second thoughts.)

Because their pronouncements are generally taken to represent their institutions, the top university administrators (THE BEAVERS) usually feel even more constrained in what they can do to influence public policy. Because their roars are most likely to be heard, I have applauded MIT administrators for a broad interpretation of what is in the interest of MIT, even when I did not agree with the views expressed. The legitimate interests of MIT extend to the reaches of the pond. When America is industrially second rate, Harvard might be Harvard, but MIT will be a very different institution.

In any case, THE BEAVER can either intimidate the faculty so that if it roars at all, it is as members of a "choir", or encourage independence and diversity in the faculty roars, recognizing the value of each voice. During my tenure, I have been fortunate that THE BEAVERS maintained the latter tradition of respect for the faculty.

In looking back at my attempts to "roar" during the 80's, it is important to me that I remained a beaver of the first kind. I tried to be the exemplary Stratton Professor of Electrical Engineering and the industrious Director of the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems. I finished a graduate text, and, with Hermann Haus, co-authored an undergraduate text that defined a new approach to electromagnetic field theory, one that I dreamt would give the student of electrical engineering basic credentials for dealing with the enormously diverse set of problems that we would face once the country decided to look to its infrastructure. With Mark Zahn, I made a series of widely subscribed videotape demonstrations to go with that text. And with my students and laboratory colleagues, I did industry-sponsored research, on approaches to cleaning the ash of low-sulfur coals from the stacks of Midwestern utilities, on the adaptation of electrophotography to single-component toner, on the painting of automobiles so as to minimize hydrocarbon pollutants, on diagnostics for understanding and forecasting the explosion of power systems transformers, etc., all based on good old continuum electromechanics. Altogether, while I was being distracted by Reagan's reign, I managed something like five patents and 30 publications in archival journals.

As an administrator, eternally blowing noses and trying to make financial ends meet, I tried to help individual faculty, staff and students learn to develop a basic intellectually satisfying professional identity that would be the more rewarding for having met the test of problems framed by human needs rather than technical frontiers, and to do this together. The financing of graduate education by framing the research to attract industrial sponsorship while also advancing the engineering sciences is an art learned by example. In a teaching environment, it is akin to what is required of an R&D engineer employed by industries successfully serving civilian markets.

I was a beaver of the first kind.

With the mushrooming of our nation's investment of borrowed money in the military, the only voices of reason seemed to come from the Jesse Jacksons, the Nuclear Freeze movement and at MIT, a core of people like physics faculty colleague and disarmament activist Vera Kistiakowsky. Yes, much as he regarded himself as a true conservative, Jim Melcher was seen with his arm not only around outspoken Vera, but even such left wing activities as the alternative student newspaper. Much as I disagreed with much of what it presented, the Thistle provided some counter to the student trend toward self-indulgence. In desperation, I gave time and money to groups, left or right, that tended to counter the depraved policies set in motion during this period. Early in the 80's, the baton of reason was carried by disarmament groups who sensed that real security would not come from confrontation.

But, throughout this period, my basic concern was that America not become the dangerous toothless tiger that it would be if it squandered the fundamental sources of its standard of living. Trapped by our posture on the world scene following WWII, we had evolved a sham free-enterprise system that was thoroughly distorted by government intervention through the military. Even as we watched our President and Congress finally meet the Graham-Rudman requirements, we saw them hide the cost of project Desert Shield from the public by making it "off budget". Clear as it was that the only way to balance the budget without an extraordinary increase in taxes was to bring our troops home from Europe, Japan and Korea, this possibility was hardly part of the budget debate. For those who, like me, see the importance of having a sustainable military alternative, the words "peace through strength" now have an especially hollow ring.

In 1985, the MacArthur Foundation provided a grant to MIT for disarmament studies. Faculty were invited to submit proposals to an Institute committee. With Richard Tabors, who would provide the expertise in economics and energy policy, I wrote a proposal entitled "In Pursuit of Policies Designed to Create Socio-Economic Conditions That Minimize Incentives for Arming: A Feasibility Study on the Allocation by Beneficiary of the Costs of Military Services". If oil (gasoline) is made cheap by its being subsidized through taxes for the military, people will see arming as being in their economic interest. The proposal was to explore ways of restoring free-market incentives by having the true cost be the one paid by the consumer. For example, with no net increase in taxes, put a tax on imported oil that would be earmarked to pay an appropriate portion of the military budget. Income taxes would be cut by an amount equal to the revenue raised from the import tax. Of course, this did not square with the fact that the money used to support the military was being borrowed. But, that was the best I could hope for during that period.

Probably because of the polemic tone of the prefatory remarks, the proposal was turned down. Our introductory sentence is a reminder of those times and how difficult I found it to suppress my frustrations. It began, "During this Spring of 1985 we have seen our chief disarmament negotiator shuttle back and forth between arms control conferences in Europe and congressional lobbying on behalf of the MX in Washington," and went on to say "Unfortunately, this is not the first illustration of how formal disarmament negotiations can be subverted into being the impetus for escalation."

Inscrutable as the proposal apparently was, surely with the benefit of knowing what has happened since 1985, now it would receive a more favorable review, even by beavers of the second kind. The proposed study bore on "the painful reality that, at a time when the consequences of another war saturate our capacity to comprehend, the evolution of military, economic, social and even religious institutions gives the electorate an increasing incentive to arm." Thanks to declining Alaskan oil output, in 1985 our dependence on foreign oil was more like 30% than the 50% that it is now. That growing dependence was clear to anyone in the Reagan administration, which had set in motion a tragedy by deceiving itself that it made economic sense to secure our most basic energy needs by military means. The dependence of our industrial engine on government subsidization through the military was especially apparent to those of us involved with the research and development that is the life blood of product innovation. Half of all US R&D was supported by the Government and two thirds of that through the Department of Defense.

For me, the political corruption of our free enterprise system and our real security interests had been distilled on an evening in March, 1983. Reagan surprised almost everyone with his vision of a Strategic Defense Initiative...of Star Wars. Although almost everyone agreed that it was as much a political initiative as a technical one, academic research organizations were divided as to how to react. In response to blundering Pentagon efforts to make university pursuit of SDI funds look like endorsement, THE BEAVER (Paul Gray) roared, "not so."

On May 13, 1986, I joined with three Nobel laureates at a Washington press conference in making public 3700 pledges to not take Strategic Defense Initiative funds. We represented professors and senior researchers from 109 universities and research centers who foresaw the folly of Reagan's "Star Wars". It was not just a petition, it was a commitment. I was there rather than Vera, who had taken the lead at MIT, because it was felt that the presentation should include the engineer's point of view. In the process of approaching engineering faculty for signatures, I was rewarded by insights concerning their motivation, their efforts to separate their world (often profession and religion) and their reluctance to buck currents that they knew were ominous. In spite of the internal stress that it created, many engineers were with me in signing the pledge.

The morning after the press conference, Fred Kaplan of the Boston Globe got his coverage of our conference on the front page with a back page interview with me. Although I managed to make it clear that I represented a substantive stand taken by myself and like-minded faculty colleagues and not my laboratory or institution, it was emotion Fred wanted and that he got, but not many complete sentences. At the time, attention was focused on whether or not SDI made technical and political sense, so that the engineer's press release that I handed out was never noticed. Given that the Wall Street Journal editorialized that week that we were "Intellectuals In Isolation", (and later declined to publish my press release as part of a letter to the editor) it is a relief to repeat it at a time when it can be seen as having been prophetic.

"We have no meaningful defense without a healthy economy. The dollars we spend for SDI are from a deficit budget. Pursuit of SDI implies even larger contributions to the deficit in the future. This alone puts our economic future in jeopardy. But, as our balance of payments becomes increasingly negative, it becomes more evident that military spending compounds the economic tragedy by suffocating our capitalistic base. Our industry can either hide from foreign competition by cultivating the Pentagon as a customer or use its capital and human resources to make a profit in products that are competitive at home and abroad. SDI is industries' Pied Piper. As it becomes difficult to buy many US manufactured products even in the US, it is becoming clear that time is running out on the US economic miracle. While the SDI escalates the confrontation with our military adversary, it makes us even less able to compete economically with friends who do not share our obsession for arming."

Now, I would add that we stand at the threshold of war in the Persian Gulf. Beset by debts for money wasted on useless weapons, we are broke, saddled with payments to service a debt that will soon have a service charge equaling our total military budget. For our troops only defending the Gulf, the cost is said to be $100 million per day, wiping out this year's "cuts in the deficit". (Does the public understand that "cutting the deficit" is a euphemism for decreasing the rate at which our debt is increasing!) How does that fit with our ability to sustain a boycott long enough for it to be effective? For sure, someone is asking if it would not be cheaper to go to war now. And, at a time when the USSR's economic chaos could degenerate into a military coup with new fingers on the nuclear trigger, we are unable to provide needed economic aid. As Casper Weinberger said over and over, our military budget had to be dictated by that of the other side. Now, when we too are on our economic knees, our resulting posture does not make for peace through strength but rather for war through weakness.

Engineering in the MIT tradition is a wonderful combination of the intellectual and the human. In the process of using the mathematician's concepts to make from the scientist's basic laws an abstraction and then a reality that serves a human need, the engineer has the opportunity for a rewarding life that is both intellectual and practical. This is especially true because such engineers also find themselves positioned to make basic mathematical and scientific contributions. But, even most engineers of this type work where individually motivated engineering science is subordinate to teamwork, which requires some form of regimentation. At the risk of conjuring the horrible example (even during the past decade) of what this means in the extreme (for the military professional) there is in engineering a need for a command structure with its inherent institutional loyalties. As a result, engineers will tend to be more politically "conservative" than scientists and mathematicians. To be fair, just because it is not possible to make a clear distinction between their professional objectives and those of the SDI, for example, engineers are under a greater stress. At the price of implicit personal and institutional endorsement of an approach to security that was as unreal as the movie Star Wars, engineers were being offered a largess of funding. The talents of my own laboratory were ideally suited. But, our educational objectives were not. Even though I made it clear that I would sign off on a proposal to SDI from individual faculty in my laboratory (essentially one person), I did everything I could to find and encourage alternatives, with results to be proud of. Indeed, given the pressures and the examples set by other institutions, academic MIT also did very well. Like many unfortunate government laboratories, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory did get pushed onto an SDI plank that I suspect is now being sawed off. It is often argued that academic institutions such as MIT, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California should run government laboratories because they can then have an influence on government defense and energy policy. With some insight from having served on MIT's Lincoln Laboratory Faculty Committee and having interviewed similarly involved colleagues at other universities, it now seems clear that academia did little during the 80's to prevent the co-opting of government laboratories by SDI. Let us hope it has a better record in the 90's, when the obligatory demands of project Desert Shield will compete for R&D resources that should be turned toward achieving real energy independence and industrial competitiveness.

By the mid 80's, it could be seen by anyone willing to look that Star Wars was necessary to Reagan as a smoke screen to obscure our declining ability to compete in civilian markets. Even though the SDI was committed to demonstration hardware, once again, spinoffs from this R&D would benefit the civilian sector, we were told. The Common Market countries created their own strategic initiative, Eureka, devoted to fostering R&D having new civilian products as its objective. I often wondered if those responsible for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ever read the right-hand column of their own front page. In 1986, one headlined "Japanese Start Buying U.S. Firms Stressing Latest in High Tech". By June 25, 1990, a lead article also gave some hint of how the nation's economics was indeed MIT's pond. The headline read "What U.S. Scientists Discover, the Japanese Convert Into Profit; In Applying Technology, U.S. Falls Short for Reasons Both Corporate, Cultural; Rising Nationalism at MIT". The benefits of America's military funding of R&D were now going directly to our economic competitors, remember, one-third funded by the DOD. That our foreign creditors would cash in on their IOU was not news to this "Academic In Isolation".

An example that directly influenced my own interactions with industry was the demise of our power apparatus industry. Typical was the closing of GE's large transformer facilities at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ostensibly handing the market over to Westinghouse. Then, the Wall Street Journal announced that Westinghouse was selling its large transformer business to Europeans. Now, as the Europeans and Japanese dominate the power apparatus business, we are looking to a period of expanded capital acquisition by the electric utilities. To anyone bothering to look beyond the often familiar brand names at Radio Shack or the automobile page of the newspaper, the trend is clear. But, this scenario has also been played out to put us behind our foreign competition in reaping the economic rewards of meeting our most basic energy and associated environmental needs during the 90's.

In the meantime, GE found its ordnance manufacturing at Pittsfield profitable. Aware of what this meant for the economic future of western Massachusetts, political and activist leaders in the Pittsfield community have been working for a viable economic base. In 1990, I ran one of the many sessions at a conversion conference in Pittsfield, where the frustrations of the mayoress and other political leaders with the trends fostered by national policy based on the military were so evident.

Much as I had tried to restrict my arguments for an American Perestroika to matters of economics and common sense, my experiences reinforced a feeling that the basic issue was moral. Every institution seemed to divide into one camp that perceived and abhorred the society that we would become if we continued to use our military to obtain more than our share, and a second growing group that disassociated jobs from the larger context and even found itself going to church and synagogue as an escape, as a mechanism for putting immorality out of view while letting leaders do the dirty work.

Experiences included my attempts to find in the Methodist Church a resource for expressing my concerns. In the summer of 1986, my church in Arlington Heights collaborated with one in Pittsfield to have the Conference Board of Church and Society successfully sponsor a resolution by the Southern New England United Methodist Conference opposing militarism and promoting conversion from defense technology and jobs. The resolution included the sentences "Whether viewed in individual, institutional or regional terms, the apparent economic security and gain from engaging in the weapons industry can obviously darken the glass through which we see. However, with each passing day it becomes clearer to others, as it has been all along to our church, that the thrust of our moral stand is toward long term goals that serve our national, regional and individual economic security as well." With military chaplains sitting in the front row while the vote was being taken, and pastors of churches having congregations working for General Dynamics, GE-Lynn and Raytheon worrying about a further loss of membership, it was clear that again the issue was being institutionally and personally internalized.

In a Public Television program entitled The Public Mind: The Truth About Lies, Bill Moyers summarized America's mentality during the 80's. In an interview, psychologist Dan Goleman (author of Vital Lies, Simple Truths) set the stage for seeing our nation as behaving like a distressed individual who sustains a deluded existence by perpetuating a vital lie. He said, "A vital lie is a story that we concoct to protect ourselves from a painful truth... Because in that truth lies something that is so disturbing that we'd rather not face it and live a half-truth than face it and feel the pain." Moyers closed the program with his own statement, which all Americans should have pinned to their bathroom mirrors. He said,

"Nations, like families, can die of too many lies. The founders of our republic knew this and gave us the First Amendment so America would be safe for second opinions that challenge official lies... Because all of us are capable of deceiving ourselves, each of us needs a personal First Amendment operating within. It would protect the quiet, fragile voice that occasionally rises uninvited to say, "that's just not so. That's not the truth." Beneath the distortion and deception of life in America today there is a hard reality. Our earth is threatened with pollution, nuclear weapons have been accumulating worldwide at a cost of $1 million a minute. And the United States is sliding into an inferior status in the global economy. Yet our public mind is filled with images of an America where the vending machines are always full, the wounded always recover and the bills never come due. We seem to prefer the comfortable lie to the uncomfortable truth. And we punish those who point out reality while rewarding those who provide us with the comfort of illusion."

When I have to tell someone that I have cancer and things don't look so good, I often find myself listening to "the doctors were wrong" stories, accounts where miracles interceded or new "just in time" cures were found. While accepting these as messages of support, I am often struck with the denial they communicate. My recognition of my state of affairs does not mean that I have lost hope. It makes little sense to plan what time you have with the idea that in the end something unforeseen will save you. Actually, my hope is for enough time to finish a book with Mark Zahn.

Of all the painful truths that America must face, its need for energy independence is one of the most basic. Maybe there is more oil in Alaska, or scientists will save us by learning how to run our automobiles on water. But let's not plan our children's futures around this hope. As the energy crisis now leads us into a war, we are seeing more clearly the consequences of having lied to ourselves during the 80's about the simple truth of Carter's Moral Equivalent of War.