Commencement Speaker Dr. Walter Massey on the Value of Science and Education
Dr. Walter Massey, president emeritus of Morehouse College and of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, former director of the National Science Foundation, and former director of Argonne National Laboratory, will deliver the keynote address at Caltech's 131st Commencement Ceremony on June 13, 2025.
Here, he reflects on his remarkable career; the lessons he learned through his work as an educator, mentor, and academic leader; and strategies scientists can use to communicate the value of their work to the public.
Q: Time and again, you've taken on prominent leadership roles. What principles have guided your career and your decision-making process when these opportunities arose?
A: That has changed as I aged. In the beginning, I just wanted a job. During my first job at Argonne, I could do research. And then I wanted to be at places I felt were at the top, so that I could learn from the very best people. That was one of the reasons I went to the U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1968. This was after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I was living in Chicago, and the city was burning—most of the west side. I lived in the same community that I live in now, Hyde Park, and I felt like I was not contributing to the civil rights movement. My decision-making after that started taking into account how I could be personally engaged in doing things that benefitted others, and particularly the Black community. I became interested in positions to get more minorities into science. More and more, as I took on senior leadership positions, my decision-making included the question, "What difference will this job make in society, whether in the scientific world or in helping people?" That became a large part of my decision making.
Q: How did your fascination with physics emerge, and what was your path to becoming a physicist?
A: I liked mathematics in high school, but I didn't take any science classes until I went to college. I went to college in the 10th grade, and I'd never had a physics course or a chemistry course. During my first physics course, I worked with a professor who became a mentor and friend: Sabinus Hobart Christensen. We called him "Chris." I hadn't had trigonometry, so I didn't understand vectors. Chris had to tutor me in trigonometry after class so that I could take the course, and I got a C+. I was proud! Working with him led me to become fascinated with physics as a way to apply mathematics to understand the world around us. What I liked about it was that you could get totally absorbed in trying to solve complicated problems. Speaking of Caltech, I really enjoyed staying up all night working through Feynman diagrams.
I also wanted to be a jazz saxophonist. That's what I really thought I'd do when I went to Morehouse. However, when I got to college, I found out there were people who could improvise jazz much better than me. I was better at math than many of them, so I took the physics route.
Q: Here at Caltech, LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) serves as a powerful example of the value of long-term investment in high-risk initiatives. You were the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) when this project was proposed, and you helped to convince Congress to invest in it. How did you recognize that this was a timely and important endeavor?
A: It wasn't just me recognizing it. There were a group of people at the NSF who had been working at it for years, including Kip Thorne at Caltech. I became immersed in it because it just seemed to me to be something so exciting if you could pull it off. And it was worth us trying to fund it because that was the kind of thing NSF was set up to do. There was no other agency whose mandate would have allowed them to fund it. I had colleagues—Bill Harris and others—who were equally enthusiastic. It was also interacting with people like Barry Barish and others that excited me. Their vision for LIGO was so compelling and exciting that I felt we had to do it.
Q: You've spent much of your career creating opportunities for underserved groups, promoting inclusion, access, and equity. What do you see as the most successful approaches to promoting these values?
A: There are a lot of obvious things you have to do. We haven't reached the point where we can say, "If we do this, we can guarantee the results." But we can say, "If we don't do these things, you won't have the results." Early math, science, and reading courses are important, as is early exposure to science. I like museums. I'm very much connected to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago—I've been a trustee for years. They have youngsters coming to the exhibits. They have classrooms, and teachers who come in and lead hands-on activities just to get kids excited. I think that's very important.
As young people move on, we need to keep them engaged. We need to give them a sense of confidence that they can do science if they would like to. Over the years, in physics in particular, that has been a major problem in undergraduate introductory courses. The dropout rates from first-year physics courses used to be horrible. Students would come thinking they could do physics, wanting to do it, and then they would just leave the course because they didn't think they could do it anymore, or because the faculty member didn't work with them. There has to be a better way of having people discover that they don't want to do something rather than having them feel inadequate. Then they leave having felt less supported and less thrilled by the subject matter than they felt when they went in. I suspect many also become turned off to science because of this.
Q: With recent proposed cuts to federal funding and changing public perception of the value of higher education, what do you think are the most important messages regarding the value of higher education, science, and engineering that the research community can share with the public?
A: We have to remind the public of the benefits that society and civilization have already had delivered to them from science. I think people know this, but we're at a point where, for some reason, people haven't internalized it or can't articulate it. Or they disagree and think, "All these things you've said were benefits have not turned out to be in my experience. I've lost my job because of technological advances. I don't believe the health-related advances have made me healthier. I don't believe in climate change. Many of the things you, as scientists, may tout as breakthroughs—I'm skeptical about how they have benefited me." I think we need to find more ways of countering these sentiments.
In doing that, I do think it would be helpful if the scientific community showed more humility in this regard and less hubris. I think one of the things that made the public less supportive is we scientists have, in their mind, become just another group to which they feel no connection. "These people who are smarter than me look down on me. They lecture to me on why I'm so dumb because I don't agree with them." We have to rethink how we speak to people.
We have to keep reminding the public that scientists are people. They are humans. They make mistakes. We have not emphasized that enough. There are so many unsuccessful attempts made before we announce results to the public. Our method has been that we announce the breakthrough without talking about all the wrong paths we went down, all the mistakes we made, staying up all night, all the frustrations. All the public sees are the announcements of the successful triumphs. We need ways to allow the public to see more of the human side of science.
Q: Without revealing too much of what you're planning to say on June 13, can you share some of your hopes for Caltech's graduating class of 2025?
They are graduating at one of the most significant times in the history of American science and world science, and at one of the most critical times in American society. As graduates of Caltech, they are uniquely at the nexus of these issues. When you say you are a graduate of Caltech, people expect that you are a special person, and you are. My hope for them is that they can figure out a way to stay engaged with the excitement that science brings to them, and they can begin to find ways to see how their science can make a difference in the world.
