CLICKME for his website
from the UW’s Young to MIT’s new hire
Ed. Yesterday I heard that China should surpass the US as the world’s #1 1 economy by the end of President Obama’s next term. Perhaps, and Mussolini made the trains run on time! What these scenarios miss is the huge strength of American diversity.
Three recent events, one in China, one in Seattle and one at MIT, Seattle, illustrate that strength. Both have appointed men without PhDs to high positions in Academia.
China can not even tolerate diversity among its own people. Meanwhile here we have seen a non PhD, Republican, devout Mormon become President of the University of Washington while MIT has appointed a college drop out to head its Media Labs.
Neither of these events is imaginable in China.
The University of Washington has announced that Michael Young is our new president. Mr. Young is an attorney, and expert in Asian law and foreign trade. He also speaks Japanese, is a Republican,a devout Mormon, and an outspoken proponent of the ACLU. Mr, Young’s only higher education degree is the “JD” given to lawyers, a practical degree. Like other academic lawyers and like many MDs, Mr. Young has used his doctorate to pursue research. Mr. Young is an American.
In an odd way, Mr. Ito is also an American without a doctorate. (some content from NY Times)
Joichi “Joi” Ito will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory on Tuesday. Mr. Ito is a 44-year old Japanese venture capitalist who attended, but did not graduate, from Tufts where he briefly studied computer science but wrote that he found it drudge work. After working with Ovshinsky on amorphous solar cells, Ito attended the University of Chicago where he studied physics, but once again found it stultifying. He later wrote of his experience:
“I once asked a professor to explain the solution to a problem so I could understand it more intuitively. He said, ‘You can’t understand it intuitively. Just learn the formula so you’ll get the right answer.’ That was it for me.”
Raised in both Tokyo and Silicon Valley, Mr. Ito was part of the first generation to grow up with the Internet. His career includes serving as a board member of Icann, the Internet’s governance organization; becoming a “guild master” in the World of Warcraft online fantasy game; and more than a dozen investments in start-ups like Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter. In 1994 he helped establish the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan. He is cofounder, with Lawrence Lessig, of the Creative Commons. (more on Ito from Wiki)
Even among the internet generation, Mr. Ito has been extraordinary in the degree to which he has lived his life publicly and online in blog posts and on a dizzying array of social media. Last year he traveled about 230 days, and it is possible to follow his adventures on a Web site he maintains in text, images and video including a diving trip this month that involved feeding sharks in the Caribbean.