MIT lost a revered avuncular figure three years ago today. MIT Sloan School of Business Dean Abraham Siegel passed away on January 16, 2011 at the age of 88. Siegel served as Dean from 1981 to 1987, and as Associate Dean from 1967 to 1981.
“Uncle Able” was a mentor and an inspiration who lives on in my heart. I remember him with aloha not only for the environment he created for the Class of 1984, but also for his moral support during a personally difficult time, my experience of what we now call the Impostor Syndrome.
I vividly remember the first day on campus in the fall of 1982. I was still reeling with surprise to find myself at MIT, the school where my dad spent three years during Naval Officer Training during World War II. Did I really belong here? My math — learned over the summer from a rather amazing book, Quick Calculus, a self-teaching guide by two physicists, one a Nobelist — was pretty shaky. In a Freudian slip, I had misspelled calculate on my applications essay (“calclucate”).
Yet now, here I was with the incoming MIT Sloan School of Management Class of 1984, sitting together expectantly, waiting to hear from our Dean. These were his first words:
“Look to the right of you; look to the left of you. Look in front of you; look behind you. And thank your lucky stars you’re not at Harvard!”
“If you were at Harvard,” Dean Siegel’s voice continues in my memory, “one in five of you would be gone by this time next year. Here at MIT Sloan, our approach is different. We admitted you for a reason. We value your differences, and we intend to keep you around.”
Teamwork is what succeeds in business, this pioneering organizational behaviorist told us. “ If you want to become a leader someday, you need to start out by making a contribution. And to contribute to an organization, you need to play well with others.”
With emphatic eyebrows, Dean Siegel went on to explain his plan to encourage collaboration by loading on more homework than any one person could do, and to give full credit to joint submissions. As an expert in organizational design, our Dean knew this incentive structure would teach us to look to each other as allies.
Bottom line, “Uncle Abe” organized, motivated and rewarded our class to pay it forward.
“Be helpful, whenever, however and to whomever,” his advice lingers in my memory, “and the help you need will always be at hand.”
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Cast your bread on the waters…
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I did my best to take the Dean’s advice. Feeling like a fraud because I was little help to my study groups, I told jokes, baked cookies and gave rides. Struggling with Remedial Math and Introduction to Computers that first semester, I wondered whether I would ever catch on.
I will never forget the look on Uncle Abe’s face when my dyslexia came to light.
Working ourselves into a frenzy over first-semester mid-terms, my study group members noticed that my notes were different from everybody else’s. The difference between, say, from vs. form, or newtwork vs. netowrk vs. network, can be discerned from context when reading words, but in math it is deadly. Especially when the math takes up three vertically stacked blackboards, one board for the numerator, one for the denominator and one for the legends. My notes were a mess and so was I.
In the ensuing investigation, Dean Siegel showed his true colors. As one of the forces behind the diversification of the Institute, he was all in favor of talent in whatever kind of human package. That said, a kid who couldn’t see the board correctly was probably not a recruiting goal. (Back then, dyslexia was not widely known, let alone its flip side of as a wonderful gift of creativity.)
When I confided my problem, there was a brief spike of the giant eyebrows. But Uncle Able never wavered. He expressed no amazement. He betrayed no disappointment or disbelief. Handing me a Kleenex, he stuck to his position that MIT Sloan had admitted me for good reason, and that we would overcome this obstacle by working together.
Dean Siegel arranged for me to be evaluated by a teaching assistant and the Infirmary. The diagnosis was a relief: no more bluffing my way past my secret obstacle. From that point on, for all things mathematical, Dean Siegel asked all my professors to prepare written notes to be handed out in advance so I would not have to copy equations from the blackboard. To keep a level playing field, these special notes were available to all in the class.
The next year, I was back in Uncle Abe’s office with a different challenge, the assembly-language programming in Stu Madnick’s course, which was a requirement for MIS concentrators. 0111? 1011? 1110? All looked the same to me. The Dean found a workaround for this, too.
At the time, the MIT Sloan felt like an overwhelming challenge. Without Dean Siegel’s assistance and encouragement, I might have washed out. I am deeply grateful to Uncle Able and to each and every one of my professors and teaching assistants. I know at least one TA was relieved to the point of astonishment when I graduated, LOL. I think my father was, too.
When in difficult situations today, I always think of Dean Siegel’s advice, the words that have become my MIT Motto:
“Accepting that it feels impossible, let’s figure out a way to make it easy.”
It’s an elegantly useful attitude. Aloha
PS: My story is just one more reason to agree with MIT President Rafael Reif, “a gift to MIT is a gift to the world.”
Sunset Moment 