Spring Term, 1967
The next four lines of the transcript report on the spring of 1967, when course work introduced the disciplines that would eventually feed my family: statistics and survey sampling, under Richard J. (Dick) Light, and social research methodology and the then-brand-new computer field, under Marshall S. (Mike) Smith. These two wise and personable gentlemen, then members of the junior faculty (Dick had just completed his Ph.D in the Statistics Department in the Yahd, and Mike was still working on his Ed.D at HGSE) guided my first steps down the rewarding if bizarre professional path I have followed.
Among the central learnings for which I owe a durable debt to Dick, I must count a practical awareness of the hazards that lurk in statistical inference: of the ease with which one can (and folks do) found policy conclusions on their preconceptions while claiming empirical justification.

Dick remained a friend, colleague, and perennial consultant after I finished up at Harvard. Whenever my projects at Abt Associates encountered particularly demanding problems of research design or interpretation, I would frequently call on Dick and on Jack Cohen: they made an amazingly productive and stimulating consulting team.

Dick (recent photo here—he’s wonderfully preserved) has had a stellar career at Harvard: he’s currently Walter H Gale Professor of Education and holds a concurrent full professorship at the Kennedy School: a challenging load for any three people, but Dick was always a high-energy guy. Just exchanged e-mail with him for the first time ever. The Lights are celebrating her birthday in Paris. Barely-concealed envy, from this end…

Richard J Light

Marshall S Smith
In Mike’s seminar, we learned to punch up and assemble decks of Hollerith cards to instruct the new (PDP-10, I think) computer to apply statistical routines to census and school data. That was painstaking work, but it was easy, alongside the subsequent interpretation of the printed output. He was involved in the big policy issues of the day; we got to massage data from the famous Coleman Report.

Mike went to Stanford from Harvard and became a professor and then Dean of (my old) Graduate School of Education there. Next time I had lunch with him in Washington, he was in charge of the National Institute of Education. When last seen, he was retiring (for the third time) after serving since 1993 as Under Secretary of the federal Department of Education.
Ed.D 1966-67: Courses HP2 Seminary Family 1967-68:
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