Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–194
TOMBRELLO: Well, of course the candidate is the one who knows the least about it. I knew a
little bit about the [search] committee. I believe that the committee had two concerns. One, they
needed to get things going in the division. Two, they knew that times were likely to be tight. So
they felt that they had to have somebody running the division who could say no. I do not think
they put forward any other names. I don’t think my choice was particularly popular with David
Baltimore—but, anyway. They sold it, and Koonin and Baltimore approved the appointment. I
took over.
ASPATURIAN: Were you surprised?
TOMBRELLO: In a way, yes. I had been asked several times, in previous searches for chairs,
about whether I had any ambitions in that regard. I said, “Look, I have had the luxury”—or
taken the luxury, the liberty—“of saying exactly what I’ve thought all the time.” I knew that was
not popular, and I knew that was a career-limiting attribute, particularly to be something like
chair of the division.
I think of myself as a reasonably sane person, and I knew perfectly well that having taken
such a liberty, or a whole series of liberties, reduced the chance of being division chair to pretty
close to zero. I told several different search committees that. I think they all believed it. Yet I
knew I had been a candidate in the previous search, where they put forward four names. I
thought that the odds I’d be chosen those times were small, and they were zero. I thought—
when I was interviewed in 1998—that the chances weren’t very high then, either. I thought the
division was a bit desperate, because they knew there were priorities that needed to go through. I
think we mentioned that the division staffing committee I set up had arrived at a set of priorities.
The first was to find money for endowed postdoctoral fellowships. The second was to try to hire
Ed Witten, the best elementary-particle theorist they could think of. And, perhaps dead last, to
get that astrophysics building that had been kicking around since 1966. I was certainly prepared
to try to get those things through. We had a new president, Baltimore. I figured there would
probably be a fund-raising campaign. There had been no announcement, but I assumed it was
out there lurking. I didn’t think things were going to be quite as bad financially as the division
thought they were going to be, although the first thing I encountered—I mentioned this
yesterday—was that out of a budget of millions, my predecessor, Charlie Peck, had left me a
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