Can Massey Forge Consensus At NSF?

WASHINGTON--Walter Massey, poised to become the next director of the National Science Foundation, has succeeded in a series of tough jobs with an approach built on quiet attention to details and a commitment to reaching a consensus before taking action. It's a style of leadership that differs sharply from the outspoken and authoritarian method of Erich Bloch, whose six-year term ended August 31. And it's one that many scientists who know Massey say will serve him well as the foundation tries to fulfill its mission to support basic research, preserve the scientific enterprise, and strengthen scientific literacy among the general population. "He has remarkable people skills," says physicist Gerald Garvey, a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a former associate director for research under Massey at Argonne National Laboratory. "It's quite a contrast to his predecessor at NSF. When you talk with him, you get a sense that the man is genuinely interested in your point of view. And he's very careful to make sure that all sides are being heard." Adds Roland Schmitt, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who served with Massey in the mid-1980s on the National Science Board, which oversees NSF, "He's not quite as blunt as Erich is, but both go after what they want. He'll try to seek a consensus before he acts, but he won't be pushed around." At the same time, some colleagues wonder if Massey's preference to work for gradual change could prove insufficient to deal with the demands on the next NSF director to achieve such important goals as the long-promised doubling of the agency's budget and real gains in attracting minorities into science. "He's going to have to take charge and produce," says Jim Wyche, a biology professor at Brown University, where Massey is a trustee, and an adviser to NSF's biological and behavioral sciences directorate. "What's needed is not consensus but real leadership. If he wants to show results, he's going to have to dig in his heels and get his hands dirty." One of Massey's early mentors, Herman Branson, a physicist and former president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, predicts that Massey may have to become more aggressive on behalf of causes that he has long advocated, in particular the need to expand the pool of scientists to include more minorities and women. "It's always a dilemma," Branson says. "Should you be so insistent that you're not invited to the party anymore, or should you go along and work for incremental change? It's fine to make nice speeches, but you've got to be willing to back it up." (Massey is currently on sabbatical in Paris, studying the European Community's handling of technology transfer issues in preparation for its move toward commercial unification in two years. He declined repeated requests to discuss either his plans for NSF or his past professional accomplishments, but more than a dozen of his colleagues were willing to talk about him.) Nobody pretends to know what Massey's arrival at NSF will mean to the foundation other than that it will be in the hands of an academically oriented scientist who is universally respected for his calm and rational manner. But nobody who knows the 52-year-old theoretical physicist was surprised last month when President Bush announced his intention to make him the eighth director of the science agency, which has a $2 billion-a-year budget. Now vice president for research at the University of Chicago, Massey seemingly has been marked for success ever since a Ford Foundation program for talented black teenagers plucked him out of the 10th grade of a segregated school in Hattiesburg, Miss., and helped him qualify for a scholarship to Morehouse College. It set in motion a chain of events that sent him rapidly through the ranks of academia, first as a faculty member and later as an administrator. And at every stage of his career he's made favorable impressions. In 1979, for example, University of Chicago President Hannah Gray recruited him from Brown to run the Argonne lab, which Chicago manages for the energy department, and to join the UC faculty. "There was a sense that Argonne had lost its direction and focus," says Gray. "And the lab was also going through some difficult times, when there were severe constraints on its budget and the number of staff had to be reduced." Massey stepped in and, by all accounts, turned things around. He made the lab the nation's leading facility for research on civilian nuclear power, and he trimmed more than 1,000 jobs as a way of saving money and making sure the lab would remain competitive in obtaining federal and outside support for new projects. In fact, he was so successful at restoring morale and the lab's financial health, says Gray, that in 1984 she promoted him to oversee both the lab and the university's research budget. She calls him "an extraordinarily effective ambassador for science, with an uncommon ability to communicate the importance of basic science to the public." He had done similarly well in the post that he left, that of dean of the undergraduate college at Brown, says former provost and fellow physicist Maurice Glicksman. "He knows how to make tough choices, to take the resources that are available and use them on programs that he believes are most important," says Glicksman, who notes that Brown was also going through a period of cost-cutting during the 1970s. Glicksman says he first became aware of Massey's administrative skills through his leadership in a program at Brown to train students to teach science in inner-city schools. "He got disparate faculty to work together" on the program, Glicksman notes, which was aimed at improving the quality of education for minority high school students to the point at which they would be better prepared--and thus more likely--to pursue science in college. The issue of making science attractive to minorities was hardly a new one for Massey. He received his undergraduate degree in physics from Morehouse in Atlanta--an experience that he has said was an overwhelming one at first for a shy teenager from a small town--and began graduate school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., both predominantly black institutions. Although he left that environment to earn his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and his first faculty appointment at the University of Illinois, he became immersed in minority issues almost from the minute he arrived on the Urbana, Ill., campus in the fall of 1968. He was the first--and is still the only--black physicist ever hired by the 70-member department. The university had just enrolled 500 black students under a special outreach program, and they immediately began to protest their housing conditions. The situation rapidly deteriorated: the students erected barricades, the police were called in, violence erupted, and hundreds of protesters were arrested. Massey spent his first night bailing them out of jail, and he moved quickly to center stage in prolonged efforts to improve relations among the students, the faculty and administration, and the surrounding (predominantly white) community. "He was in the thick of some very interesting and highly theoretical work," recalls Ralph Simmons, chairman of the physics department at Illinois. "But he also had a heart that was filled with compassion for the students, and he felt that he could not ignore their situation." Anna Coble, a physicist at Howard University and an Illinois graduate student at the time of the unrest, says that the experience gave him a chance to demonstrate his skills as a negotiator and facilitator. "I think he found that he was good at getting people with opposing views to talk to one another and listen to what each one had to say. He found that he had a flair for administration." Exercising that talent in the years to come would cost him a promising research career, however. "At the time he arrived at Illinois," recalls physicist David Pines, the leader of the theoretical group in which Massey worked, "it is fair to say that he was the most promising young black theoretical physicist in the United States." The research that Massey did on the properties of liquid helium at very low temperatures, Pines says, "was a very nice piece of work." In 1970, however, Massey accepted an offer from Leo Kadanoff, a physicist who had moved from Illinois to Brown, to join him on the faculty there. Pines says that he did everything he could to persuade Massey to remain at Illinois. "It was wonderful to have him, and we wanted to keep him," says Pines. "We even told him he could carve out an informal role for himself as an adviser to the administration on minority affairs." But by that time, Coble says, racial tensions between the campus and the community had worsened. "I think he was looking for a change, a chance to work in a smaller and more friendly setting," she says. Although Massey opted at the time to remain a working scientist, it wasn't long before he began to take on the same type of role at Brown that he had played at Illinois. By 1974 he had decided to move full-time into administration, and he received a one-year fellowship to work under biologist Eugene Cota-Robles in the chancellor's office at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "He came here because both schools had expressed a commitment to maintaining both a high-quality undergraduate education and a first-rate research enterprise," says Cota-Robles, now on assignment to UC-Santa Cruz, Chancellor David Gardner. "And he and I also shared a desire to increase access and opportunities for minority students." Unfortunately, he says, those goals were more difficult to achieve than to articulate. "It's easier to reward excellence in research than in teaching," says Cota-Robles, "but if you reward good teaching, people think you have sacrificed research to do so. We developed a plan to give undergraduate education a higher priority, but I'm afraid we weren't able to carry it out. It's a very tough thing to do." It wasn't the first--or the last--time that Massey was involved in unsuccessful efforts to improve the educational system for the disadvantaged. The inner-city program at Brown also fizzled once Massey moved from the faculty to the deanship, says Glicksman. At Illinois, the school's heavy-handed attempt in the late 1960s to improve its racial balance is seen as a misguided response to heavy societal pressure, although most faculty admit that the university has made insufficient progress in the intervening years in hiring minority faculty. The issue has never been far from Massey's mind, however. Twenty months ago, as outgoing president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Massey challenged his academic colleagues in an address to increase the number of minority scientists by attracting significantly more undergraduate and graduate students into their programs and by doubling--plus one--the number of minority students granted Ph.D. degrees each year. "I add the `plus one,' " he said, chiding his audience, "because so many graduate programs are not graduating a single minority scientist right now." Despite that call to arms, Massey admitted recently, the speech so far has generated little more than favorable reviews. "I've heard from many of my colleagues," he said, "but I can't say that the numbers have changed. Of course, these things take time." But time isn't something that Massey will have very much of once the Senate acts on his nomination--a step expected sometime after Congress reconvenes in January after its recess. The topics that he has been so involved with--support for human resources and an adequate supply of scientists--are front and center with Congress and much of the scientific community as well. But that glare of attention also puts intense pressure on the next NSF director to show that he can make a difference. What is Massey likely to do once he takes the helm? He hasn't tipped his hand, and his colleagues offer only vague conjectures. RPI's Schmitt echoes that uncertainty when he predicts that "Walter is likely to strive for a somewhat different balance between NSF's support of large interdisciplinary centers and basic research, as well as between education and research." But Schmitt makes clear that he's not saying Massey will spend more on one side of the equation than on the other. "I'm sure that he'll continue to be a strong supporter of interdisciplinary research and the benefits that it can bring to the real world," Schmitt adds. Even those who venture a guess wind up describing policies that seem different from his predecessor's more in tone than in substance. "His vision will be similar to Bloch's," predicts Cota-Robles, "but he won't be as intense about it. And he'll be able to involve more people in implementing that vision." HIGH MARKS FROM PEERS MAURICE GLICKSMAN: "He knows how to make tough choices, to take the resources that are available and use them on programs that he believes are most important." RALPH SIMMONS: "He was in the thick of some very interesting and highly theoretical work. But he also had a heart that was filled with compassion for the students, and he felt that he could not ignore their situation." DAVID PINES: "At the time he arrived at Illinois, it is fair to say that he was the most promising young black theoretical physicist in the United States." EUGENE COTA-ROBLES: "His vision will be similar to Bloch's, but he won't be as intense about it. And he'll be able to involve more people in implementing that vision." JIM WYCHE: "He's going to have to take charge and produce. What's needed is not consensus but real leadership. If he wants to show results, he's going to have to dig in his heels and get his hands dirty." HERMAN BRANSON: "Should you be so insistent that you're not invited to the party anymore, or should you go along and work for incremental change? It's fine to make nice speeches, but you've got to be willing to back it up."

Can Massey Forge Consensus At NSF?

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