Ted Brown and the Beckman Institute: A Personal View
Ted Brown
Ted Brown was chosen as the first Director of the Beckman Institute before the building was completed and officially opened in 1989. As Vice-Chancellor for Research at Illinois in the 1980s, he had taken part in discussions about creating an interdisciplinary research center on campus and it was his memo in the spring of 1983 to key faculty members called “Development of Program Statement for a Major Center” that helped to get the proposal rolling. Subsequently he played an integral role in the process that resulted in Arnold and Mabel Beckman donating $40M toward building of a premier research facility on campus. Brown is writing a book about the history of the Beckman Institute called “Crossing Divides: The Origins of the Beckman Institute”. In November of 2007 Brown sat down with Beckman writer Steve McGaughey for an interview about the past, present, and future direction of the Institute and the role he played in helping make it one of the top facilities for interdisciplinary research in the world.
Q: When you left in 1993 you wrote about a strategic vision for the Beckman Institute. How have developments since then fit or differed with what you visualized back then?
A: I was thinking about that very recently. If somebody had asked me to write down what I thought the major subjects of interest would be at the Beckman Institute 14 years from the day I stepped down, I would’ve probably gotten it pretty wrong. So much has happened in the meantime that could not have been foretold. What you can say about the Beckman Institute is about the dynamics of the place: the kind of social activities and the structure of it, the interdisciplinary character. That has, I think, flowered very nicely because of people like Jiri Jonas, who I think did a fantastic job of organizing the Beckman Institute’s overall programmatic efforts into these major research thrusts. I could see the need for it but hadn’t gotten it done by the time I left. Jiri put into place an order and a structure. He said ‘people, if you want to be in the Beckman Institute, you’ve got to be part of these groups. You can’t just go off in the corner by yourself; that’s not what this place is about.’ I was saying that all along, and getting people to move that way was not happening the way I wanted. I think Jiri really brought that home to people. In terms of the management style, administrative style, the way in which the focus is on interdisciplinary research, I couldn’t be happier with the way the Beckman Institute is going. And you can see it. It’s a big, big success.
Q: You’ve had a lot of achievements in your life, including being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Where does your role in birthing the Beckman Institute rank as far as your accomplishments?
A: I really am proud of it. It could’ve gone wrong in some ways. It could’ve gone off and failed. The fact is it still draws really good people in and it has an attraction. I think some of that, and a not inconsiderable part of that, is this building. That is one of the things I’m very proud of, although I didn’t have very much to do with it. But I did work right from day one with the architects on the building, all through its construction phases and had my hard hat in my office all the time (laughs). It was just great fun to see this place come alive and become a building. We tried a lot of different things. There are some things that people were not very sure of at the outset: the office arrangements, that modular arrangement. They said ‘oh you can’t put students and postdocs in spaces like that, that just isn’t going to work; there’s too much noise around, they don’t have enough privacy.’ Well, the whole point was to diminish privacy to a certain extent and force people to talk to one another. I think the building has been really successful. I think it’s been a success mechanically; look this place is 17 years old and it still looks good. It’s held up extremely well. As a piece of construction and style, I think it’s been very good. The ideas that motivated things like the bridges, these little gathering areas, the cafeteria, those things seem to me like they have worked. People say it could’ve been better or there could be more people and that’s true. But we’ve had success with it. It seems to serve a real function of bringing people together, and making the building seem more than just some cold place to do science.
I always thought about interdisciplinary interactions in terms of a concept of reach. How much of an intellectual reach you have to have. If two guys are working on electrical engineering, signal processing and transistor circuitry and one guy is using one algorithm and another is using another, that’s not much of a reach. If you’ve got a guy who’s using signal processing and a biologist is working on frogs and signal processing, then data begins to get interesting. I think that happens here. For example, (Psychology Professor) George McConkie’s work; he got involved with people in electrical engineering. That happened because of the Beckman Institute; it would never have happened otherwise.
Q: Do you have any thoughts on where future research might be headed, or what topics Beckman researchers might be working on 20 years from now?
A: I think science is going to have to get more serious about working on and solving societal problems. We’ve got plenty of them coming in the area of energy. It isn’t just that it will make the Beckman Institute a vital place. We’re not talking about just technological solutions like ‘we’ll just make windmills or we’ll figure out more efficient batteries.’ All of that is very important but every one of those technological advances, if they are implemented in a large-scale way, raises all kinds of social issues. Take windmills. Do people want those things in their neighborhoods? There’s got to be more attention paid to the social structures that will support technological change. I think the Beckman Institute is an ideal place to bring people together from the social sciences and from the science and engineering fields to talk about ‘OK, these are technologies that have been implemented, so what are the processes by which society adapts these things or fails to adapt them?’
Q: So would that mean bringing in faculty members like sociologists?
A: Absolutely. And people interested in psychology, people who are interested in public policy; people who think about public policy and technology. They have to talk to one another. You could say they are in different fields but I think that somehow right now people see that there’s a need for those groups to talk to one another. But I think that it’s important for scientists who are working on solutions to the energy problem, for example, to understand what the boundary conditions are in the social sphere. What are people willing to give up in order to do this? People are going to have to make a lot of sacrifices and some technologies will demand more than others. Can they be implemented just because of that factor? You can talk about fuel-efficient cars but what are people not willing to give up? What kind of economic and social pressures need to be brought to bear in order to make these changes in society? It’s going to be hard to get people interested in the other side. But it happened here in the Beckman Institute with the cognitive scientists and the linguists, for example. They tended to cluster. And somewhere along the line you get them to talk to an engineer about signal processing and then face recognition, and all sorts of other things develop from that.
Q: At the time that the idea of an interdisciplinary research center first started being floated in the early 1980s, you were serving as Vice-Chancellor for Research at Illinois. How did you end up becoming the Beckman Institute’s first director?
A: I was involved in putting together the proposal to Arnold Beckman and he gave us the money in October of 1985. I had already told the Chancellor and (Vice-Chancellor) Ned Goldwasser that I wanted to return to Chemistry at the end of that upcoming academic year. So my plan at the end of September 1986 was I was going to go back to being a chemistry professor. I had been doing this vice chancellor thing for six years and enjoyed it tremendously and felt I made a contribution. But I wanted to get back to doing research. Then this money came in and I became the acting director of this project. All of a sudden we had to find an architect and do this and do that. We rented space over at the Johnstown Center on Johns and I spent half my time there and half my time in the Vice-Chancellor’s office. Then they started a search for a director of the Beckman Institute and they did a major search. You could see that this was going to be a difficult thing to do because a couple of them came in and saw themselves moving their laboratories in here. One wanted to use five thousand feet of lab space. That was in September of 1986 and I was going to go on sabbatical but I put that off and stayed on as interim director. I kept getting more and more deeply involved and finally I got to the point where I said, ‘you know, I’ve got so much invested in this and I love this idea so much that I would like to be a candidate to be the director.’ So I put my name in and after a while – it took longer than I hoped – they finally offered the job to me. In March of ’87 I became the director and of course we had just barely started construction of the building. I just decided OK, I’m going to do this and it is probably going to be one of the most interesting things I ever do in my life. I don’t regret it for a moment. It certainly was the best thing I’ve done in my life as far as my work goes. I had a good career as a scientist and I might have had more scientific accomplishments if I had gone back to being a chemist. But, although I kept my research going, you can’t do science and something like this at the same time (he said with a laugh).
Q: With funding growing and new research discoveries every year, the initial success seems to be going strong.
A: It’s the result of good leadership and tremendous support from the campus. A lot of things had to work. But you have to say that it got pushed in the right direction to start with. It’s like anything else; if you push yourself into the wind you are not going to get very far. I was only one among many people, but I felt that I could play a central role and a guiding role. So from that point of view I feel very, very satisfied that I did the right thing. I feel that what came out of it was pretty wonderful.”