CHAPTER 11 Restructuring the University It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. —Albert Einstein When I moved from Stanford to Yale, it was entirely because of the efforts of Bob Abelson, a psychology professor who became my good friend and wonderful colleague during the 15 years I was at Yale. Bob had been instrumental in helping to create the Computer Science Department at Yale, which is the department that wound up recruit- ing me( Bob had hoped I would be outside the department structure since I didn’t really fit in anywhere very well, but he couldn’t win that argument.) Bob told me a story about the creation of the Computer Science Department at Yale, which involved his having to argue with another faculty member on a university committee about why a department should be created around a machine. He said that one member of the committee actually asked him whether there should be a department of lathe science as well. We both found this to be pretty funny at the time. Now, however, I have to admit that the guy had a point. I have been a professor in quite a few academic departments in my university career: linguistics, computer science, psychology, edu- cation, and electrical engineering. These departments all have some something in common: They have no real reason to exist. One would assume that departments represent academic disciplines that are co- herent in some way, but it simply isn’t so. The people in a computer science department, for example, have in common that they all think about computer-related issues, but so do people in other disciplines. Some parts of computer science have more in common with math- ematics than they do with other parts of computer science. There were many people in the departments that I was in who worked on things that I didn’t understand or care about. All our interchanges were about 157 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023903