Frank Young interview: Selected quotes

Growing up the way we did, education was the thing you did. I mean, there was never any question that everybody was going to go to grad school — except at one point. My father moved to the Ford Motor Company and then lost that job after about 13 months. He and Lee Iacocca didn’t get along. [M]y sister remembers him saying that if there is a choice, if there’s a lack of money, that he would choose to send the boys to graduate school or to college and not the girl. She has always not liked that very much. I look at that and I say, “Well, you don’t say such things, but life involves making extremely difficult choices and sometimes people get hurt by those choices. But if you can’t do everything, you’ve got to make a decision as to what you’re going to do.” I think that’s the way my father behaved. I think his mistake was in saying that to his daughter as a hypothetical when it wasn’t real yet. If it was real then you could explain it using different language.

We were married in August because we had to wait for Julie’s aunt to come back from Europe. And then we’re off to graduate school and Julie’s working for the American Friends Service Committee, earning twice what I was earning as a teaching assistant. The first thing that happened was that she’s pregnant. On May 26, exactly nine months after we were married, we got a telegram from some very good friends of my parents saying “Hurray, hurray, today’s the day. Everything is now okay. Love, Ralph and Mary.” And 15 days later we sent out the note saying, “June 11th in he bounces, weighing 7 pounds 10 ounces” and so forth. That was when Jonathan was born.

Cletus [Oakley], the first examination, we were both teaching sections of a course. I had the eight o’clock; he had the nine o’clock. And he said to me, “You write up the first exam.” And I wrote up an exam that covered every single jot and tittle of the textbook. It was impossible. Cletus looked at it and he extracted six problems of varying difficulty that were a very excellent sample of what needed to be tested and included some easy and some hard. He said, “I think this will probably be sufficient.” I said, “You mean you’ll get grades between 60 and 100 on that?” He said, “I think so.” We did. I learned a lot from Cletus.

But I did do one thing that was very good. One of the professors and I ended up teaching a programming language concepts course. Up until that point — this is 1980 or 1981, I think — to that point the programming language concepts course was a really boring course where you said: “Here’s Fortran. Here’s how its syntax works. Here’s COBOL. Here’s how its syntax works.” Boring course. I said, “What we really ought to be teaching is why the language operates the way it does because of the decisions that were made in the language design.” When do you bind a variable to a storage location? If you do it early, what are the language consequences? If you do it late, what are the language consequences? How does that impact the user of the language?

The routine was we had to make … write a paper, a case statement, that says, “Make the case for getting the position.” The department chair wasn’t going to do it. So I said, “I’ve been chair, I’ll do it.” Whenever I wrote a document for the department, I had a procedure I followed. I would go around and interview every single person in the department, asking appropriate questions, and then use the results of those interviews to draft a document that incorporated all of the wisdom of all of the people in the department.

I was teaching things, even at Knox, I was teaching things that were less than five years old. At Rose, I was constantly doing that. My colleagues in other departments, who were teaching material that was well established … they could perfect their ways of teaching it because they could fine-tune their lecture notes. I said, “But lecture notes last for one lecture and then they’re obsolete! We’re putting things in the Introduction to Computer Science course that are less than five years old, that were research things just recently.” My colleagues didn’t understand that outside of the department.

I believed in cooperation among institutions. I didn’t believe you should have silos of departments in institutions. I didn’t believe you should have silos of institutions in a nation, particularly when the institutions are in the same consortium and when they really have similar reasons for existence. That idea of getting people to work together was an important part of the way I felt I should behave as a human being. So, whenever there was an opportunity to get people working together, you’d find me there.

I’ve always tried to cooperate with people no matter what level they’ve been. The AP [Advanced Placement] thing taught me that you judge somebody by the quality of their work and not by the level of their teaching service. I just got involved in things like that automatically.

I’m convinced as an educator that everybody should be at some point the stupidest person in the class, and at some point the brightest person in the class, and at some point in the middle. That those experiences are good educational experiences and everybody should have them instead of what I had going through, always being the brightest person in the class. That was not a good thing for me and later on it had its impact.

And then we started bringing students to SIGCSE and we had some amazing results. First of all, the students were impressed by the fact that everybody knew us, which we thought was not really very interesting. I mean, we knew everybody, so everybody knew us. But they ended up going to some of the sessions and they discovered that some of the sessions were taught by people who were absolutely atrocious teachers. They were horrible teachers. And the students came back and they said to their classmates, “You know, our teachers are really, really good compared to some of the ones that are out there.” And then the students also went to sessions where they understood everything that was being said and they realized that they were getting an excellent education. They came back and they said that too. They also said, “We had an opportunity to interact with some really important people.” There were CS conferences done then at the same time so you could interact with some really big names. We made sure that that was a possibility. Students came back with a lot of respect for us. It was a wonderful experience for us.

[W]e need to pay back the people who gave us opportunities and skills and abilities to do things. But we also want to make things easy for the people in the future, so we have to pay forward as well. My motivation in all of this has been that I owe the past a lot and I owe the future a lot and one of the best ways to pay the past is to pay the future.

My job as an educator is to take the education that I received over 40 years ago and prepare my students today to be contributing members of society 40 years from now in a society, in a world, that I will not experience. And so constantly thinking towards the future and trying to change it, but change it in ways that are good for society. That’s why I teach.