I’m been meaning to blog about this topic for many weeks. I even tried to bring this passage into a staff meeting at one point, though in my advanced discombobulation at the time I couldn’t find the book, much less the passage. Now, however, on a rainy Labor Day, sitting in Boatwright Memorial Library room 321, I’m prepared.

The excerpt is from M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Penguin, 2001). Ernie recommended the book to me a long time ago. I’m very glad he did. The book is a masterpiece. It took me several weeks to read it all, not because of the book, which although sprawling and compendious is very readable indeed, but because my life was taking several sharp turns during the period. The association was fortuitous: whenever I think of this book or read it again (as I most assuredly will), I will also think of a time of tremendous change, excitement, confusion, and hope. Not a bad set of associations, that, and a liminal moment I will do well to remember.

I’ll be dipping into this book for blog topics often. So much of it delights and instructs me (Horace would be happy) that I’m spoiled for choice. Today, however, I want to quote two magic paragraphs that express some of my major aspirations these days. I may not hit Lick’s target–no shame in that, he was the visionary at the heart of what became the Internet, after all–but at least I can aim in the same direction.

Indeed, Lick was already honing the leadership style that he would use to such effect a decade later with the nationwide computer community. Call it rigorous laissez-faire. On the one hand, like his mentor Smitty Stevens, Lick expected his students to work very, very hard; he had nothing but contempt for laziness and no time to waste on sloppy work or sloppy thinking. Moreover, he insisted that his students master the tools of their craft, whether they be experimental technique or mathematical analysis. On the other hand, Lick almost never told his students what to do in the lab, figuring that it was far better to let them make their own mistakes and find their own way. And imagination, of course, was always welcome; the point here was to have fun.

The Licklider style wasn’t for everyone, and not everyone stayed. But for self-starters who had a clear sense of where they were going, it was heaven. Good people liked to be with Lick; he seemed to be surrounded by an atmosphere of ideas and excitement. “He communicated the feeling that you could understand any field you wanted to,” explains Jerry Elkind. “He loved gadgets and putting things together. He loved to apply information and new ideas. So any area of science was interesting to him; he pulled in ideas from all kinds of domains. And he was always looking for novel ways of challenging your understanding of the domain, by constructing problems or puzzles that would require insight into the theory to solve.”

Licklider wasn’t perfect. He had his share of foibles, dropped balls, and oversights. By the mid-70’s, his thinking had ossified a bit, to the point that he could no longer see his way to supporting Doug Engelbart’s work on augmentation. (To be fair, Engelbart’s lab was not making as strong a case for itself at that time as it had just five years earlier. Still.) All of that said, Licklider dreamed big, and with great intelligence and deep delight he changed the world.

J.C.R. Licklider died on June 26, 1990. He lived to see the accomplishment of much he had worked for. Though he did not see the first explosion of the Internet as a public medium, he knew it was coming, and that he had helped to bring it about. He is a teacher, a thinker, and a leader I wish I could have met–and, after all, one from whom I have learned a great deal, even before I knew who he was.

That’s how teaching and learning go, sometimes.