Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–133
sciences. They were going to build up the HSS Division in the social sciences. We had very
good people in the humanities when I came here—Hallett Smith and people like that. They were
very, very good. And the Huntington Library, of course, was such an asset. We got people in
the humanities because of the Huntington. It’s been a wonderful, special relationship. I hope it’s
preserved forever. But we started hiring people in social sciences, and even then—I always have
opinions about things, sometimes wrong, maybe mostly wrong—but one of those opinions was,
This is a ratchet. If you hire good people, they’re going to leave, because in this area we’re a
farm team. You hire bad people, you’re stuck with them.
ASPATURIAN: In the social sciences.
TOMBRELLO: There is something to that, in the social sciences. That you can do it, but you have
to be absolutely ruthless. You hire only the very best people. You get turned down nine times
out of ten, and you just keep going.
We learned later that Bacher did try to hire Stephanie’s father and brother as a package
deal, which says a lot about Bob Bacher. It was not amazing to go after Robert K. Merton. He
was well known in the history of science. Well known in the sociology of science, the sociology
of a lot of different things. Inventor of the self-fulfilling prophecy, unintended consequences.
He even invented the focus group, though he didn’t like to talk about that one. But the package
deal was to hire Stephanie’s little brother, who was still down in the tall grass. However, Bob
must have noticed that he had been a major player, even as somebody very young, in the optionpricing-theory
thing. Bob knew about it. This didn’t come out of the HSS Division; it came out
of Robert Bacher. He had figured this out and went out after those two. Didn’t get them, but it
showed a lot about Bob Bacher.
But even so, I don’t think they [the HSS Division] thought through the fact that they
could be left in a situation where the social sciences were a perpetual farm team, which continues
to this day. It was hard to keep the good people, and you couldn’t get rid of the people you had
tenured who might not be as good. It makes it hard to go forward in social sciences here. I think
it would probably surprise Bacher, if he were still alive, that there has been minimal progress
there. That’s my very opinionated view. I think what progress there is has come at the expense
of the humanities, which are probably not as strong as they were when I came here.
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