The Randy Pausch Phenomenon

News

Well, it’s official: Randy Pausch is a media “phenomenon”. The strongest evidence of this is Randy’s appearance on the Oprah Show last month, where he gave a reprisal of part of his “last lecture” and talked about his condition, his outlook, and the public response to his words. In a few weeks (exact date not yet set) the ABC television show, 20/20, will have a segment on Randy Pausch. And just last week, several news outlets (including, for example, CBS news and Crain’s New York) reported that Hyperion won an auction for the rights to publish a book on Randy’s “last lecture”. Hyperion’s bid was reported at $6.7M, for the book to be developed collaboratively by Randy Pausch and Wall Street Journal columnist, Jeffrey Zaslow.

20/20 was on campus last month doing interviews of many of us. I was asked the question, “What is it about Carnegie Mellon that made Randy Pausch possible?” My answer was immediate: “Oh, Carnegie Mellon didn’t create Randy — he would have been the same person at any university.” But the reporter didn’t seem to accept that answer and thus kept probing. What about the Building Virtual Worlds course? Well, I had to admit that maybe it would have been harder at most universities to put such an interdisciplinary course together and get it immediately cross-listed in 4 separate departments. And what about the Entertainment Technologies Center? Hmm, I guess it’s true that many places have bigger administrative barriers, making it hard for ordinary faculty members to create new centers offering new degree programs, and even determining their reporting structure. The Alice Project, too, is somewhat unusual, in being an educational technology and outreach program with very serious amounts of engineering work going on.

So, anyway, I more or less ended up contradicting myself. I still don’t think that any of the things that Randy worked on here would have been impossible at other universities. But perhaps at other places they might have been just a bit harder to do, so that in total, maybe not all of it would have happened. I still believe, however, that Randy would have been Randy anywhere, and so in this sense I think the first answer I gave to the 20/20 reporter was the right one.

If any part of my interview ends up being shown on the 20/20 piece (unlikely), I wonder how it’s going to come out. Probably I’ll look pretty confused.
;-)

Peter Lee @ November 28, 2007