Reunion 2015, Dr. Howard Morgan, Class of 1965, Keynote Address

Thank you Barry, and thank you all, President Coico, distinguished fellow alumni, and guests. I'm really pleased to be speaking to you tonight. I don't usually get to hear my eulogy. It's too tall, but I would like to talk a little bit about CCNY: Resuscitate, Access, Prosperous, or Look Behind, Look Here, or Look Ahead, or Look at the Past, Present, and Future: The City College Model. So I'm going to do a little bit of each of those tonight.

Most of our class arrived at the college in September of '61, a few of us, including myself, a year later. But at a time when JFK became president, the country was between wars, the middle-class dream was alive and well, and City College was still known as the proletarian harbor. It afforded a great education for all, and for me, it was important because it was a shockingly low price of free. And I not only got it for free, but I got a Regent scholarship which was $250 a year to pay for the small fees that there were—I think it was $35—and also paid for my subway tokens, which were astonishingly cheap given where they are today, although now I'm able to get a senior citizen MetroCard that I use, and for my textbooks as well.

President Kennedy had challenged us to ask not what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country. And CCNY, always a highly political place, took this to heart. Many of us, many of our fellow students, volunteered to help people both locally and around the world. And around us, the Civil Rights movement was raging, not just down south as an abstract thing, but right up in Harlem, in the middle of where City College was situated. SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, CORE, the Congress on Racial Equality, all those other organizations were recruiting heavily at the college. They recruited students to join the Freedom Rides. I'm very proud that many of my classmates did. They went down to work in the South, including the famous march at Selma, which has also been in its 50th anniversary. There were a lot of CCNY people there.

For me, as a science physics major in 1961, President Kennedy had challenged the nation with a goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It's a goal that we attained with a great national effort and a great support for science that sadly is not as strong today as one would like. But the adjustment from W.C. Bryant High School in Queens, where I came from, to the very rigorous workload at City College was most welcome. I was very fortunate. I was put in something called a Selected Student Program. We had a few special courses; we could tailor a major, and my major was physics and mathematics. It was a joint major. But the professor who stood out for me was an English professor, Morton Cohen, who passed away a number of years ago. Not only did he challenge us to think and to write, a skill that has definitely served us really well, but he indelibly etched the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in my memory, one that I'm thrilled with. Well, anyway, I won't, but sadly I don't get called upon to do it much anymore, although I can do quite a bit of it.

He was the only professor at the time in City who actually had the entire class down to his apartment in Greenwich Village for parties twice that I can recall during the first semester. And with his friend Alan Bennett, who is part of the Beyond the Fringe group with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, he really got us all into theater, drama, literature, and areas that I, as a math and physics major, would not have otherwise gotten into. And yet that has served me really well. I have a lifelong appreciation for literature. We're gigantic theater buffs.

I was also fortunate in that 1962 saw City College get its first computer for student use. It was a Royal McBee LGP-30. It was about the size of a big desk. And I noticed a poster—you know, before Facebook and Twitter, they had these things you put on walls, they're called posters—and it would tell me about a three-session course in programming that you could sign up for. And so, of course, I wanted to sign up, but it conflicted with my physics class. And I went to Harry, and he said, 'Okay, as long as you get all the homework in, you can cut those three classes.' Cutting classes was not typically done by us in those days, but I did, and I learned to program using punch paper tape, and that pretty much changed my life. The following year, we got a transistorized IBM 7040. The director of the computer center, Professor Ming Pei, who had gotten his PhD at Cornell—which set me on the road to Cornell—hired me as an operator and a programmer. So now I was actually earning money. I was not only learning at City College but earning money. We wrote a compiler for a language at the time called MAD, the Michigan Algorithm Decoder. And my great achievement was getting it to print a picture of Alfred E. Newman, 'What, me worry?', as a header of every printout that we got.

There were sad times, right? I mean, I'm sure all of us remember where we were when we heard the news about President Kennedy's death, and many of us remember President Buell Gallagher ringing the bells at City College to announce that. But perhaps the most important interaction in my young life, other than meeting my wife almost 48 years now, was with a scientist who mentored at City College. Dr. Richard Hammond was a better life scientist and used to come up once a week through the engineering school and the computer center—there was no computer science center—and work with those interested in computing. And one evening, it was March of 1965, he said to me, 'What was I planning to do when I graduated?' I probably told him I'd received a fellowship to MIT in physics. And he said, 'Howard, you're a smart guy, but physics is very crowded. Getting Nobel Prizes is hard, although we have 10 City College graduates who've done it.' But then, just like in The Graduate, he kind of leaned over me and said one word: 'Computers.' He said, 'That's what you want to do.' And fortunately for me, I realized he was right. I enjoyed working with them more than the theoretical physics stuff I was doing. And other graduates, my fellow graduate Don Trott, the late Don Trott, who ended up as a professor at James Madison for 30 years, was probably going to do better at it than I would. There are actually three of us who graduated in 1965 in three years. The other one was Ethan Aiken, who after getting a PhD out at Berkeley, at Princeton rather, came back to CCNY, where he's still a professor. So the class of '65 is still having a daily impact at City College.

I stayed in academia after going to Cornell for a PhD for 14 years, as you heard, and became in 1982 a founder of Renaissance Technologies with Jim Simons, and then First Round Capital, which is a venture capital firm whose best-known investment is Uber. If any of you have been drinking too much tonight, please take an Uber home. He'll do really well. But enough about the past. Let's talk about access.

One of the things that happens today is that I keep learning over and over again about illustrious City College graduates and some of our classmates and a few others, some of which you may not know. I mean, but you know that we had an astronaut at City College a little bit later, Mario Runco, did a spacewalk, actually did two space flights. But did you know that Don Draper was a City College graduate? If you read the backstory, it says that Don Draper went to CCNY at night while he was courting Betty. Toby Ziegler from West Wing was a CCNY radical, as is the tradition of things. Lenny Briscoe from Law & Order is keeping the place safe as a City College graduate. It's the most important one. Elena has been trying to get him to give to us for years. And Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, who's who if you're in the movie, says, 'I've done pretty well for a City College boy.' So hopefully we'll get him yet, Elena.

About two years ago, I took another look at CCNY today and was very pleasantly surprised at what I found. The spirit that we had back in '65, and which some of us feel was lost a little bit in the '70s, is back and well. Entrepreneurship is thriving. The Design Innovation Center, which I've joined the board of, is terrific. The new applied sciences building—if you guys were up there on Friday, or if you get a chance to go up there, it's absolutely amazing. And it has CCNY doing what it does best: helping talented students, many without great means, to get the highest quality education and start in life. And the diversity is amazing. I saw—I judge these accelerator competitions all around the country because as a venture capitalist, we like to see the new things. I have never seen the diversity of teams that I saw at the Zahn Center in the competition that President Coico mentioned before. You know, the Dominicans doing food delivery, African-Americans doing things, the Muslim women doing work on cosmetics—just a whole different slice of life than I see when I go out to Stanford and judge the accelerator there, which is basically, as I described to one of my colleagues, like First Round Capital. I said, 'I go to the Stanford accelerator or Y Combinator, it's white guy, white guy, white guy, Asian guy, you know, white women, and then maybe some diversity, maybe an African-American.' You go to City College, and you get the melting pot, which is what we grew up with, which is what made us and our generation great, with City College helped us to do that. And they have great ideas, and that's why I love what City College is doing.

So, prosperous: what lies ahead for us and for the college? Not only is it the diversity, but President Coico is reaching down to high schools and even middle schools to help increase STEM enrollment, particularly among women and minorities. The arts and social sciences, with the Colin Powell School and other things, are being grown and made stronger and stronger. So for me, City College was absolutely critical on my way to having a fortunate and very successful career. I urge all of you to keep those memories that you have warm and to support the college in its effort to get the new generations to have what you and I hope all of you got, what I got: a great education as a stepping stone to a productive community. Thank you.