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Interview with Bill Bruner

At the time of this interview, Bill Bruner has been Dean of the Library for five years. When he returns to the teaching faculty in 1999, he will continue his current intellectual interests: managing technology and learning to plan in a climate of great uncertainty. Managing the library has made a great case history for both interests: "what 's going on is that we've gone from something that 's very safe and very predictable, and has been for a long time--libraries have been much the same for a long time, and change has been very slow--to very rapid changes. In the library, 'long-range planning' means 18 months--maximum." This knowledge and experience also applies to Bill 's other interests: the economy and the natural resources of our region.

In his teaching, Bill frequently uses works that aren't texts in the field but are books whose theme apply to the kind of management and planning challenges of the present: Joseph Meeker 's The Comedy of Survival, The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod and Aaron Woldavsky 's Searching for Safety.

Mrs. Irby, his 5th grade teacher, might be surprised to learn of the nature of Bill's intellectual, but down-to-earth and eminently practical interests, but she would not be surprised to be told that they began in the library.

"When I was a kid I lived in a sort of dead-end neighborhood in Eastside Tacoma, in a housing project. There was a branch library there. And I found that place at an early age (my parents education was eighth grade and so I didn 't have strong intellectual support there) and I found that library and that really sort of changed my view of the world. I hung out there a lot." One day he went to check out some books and they wouldn 't let him because they were adult books. A librarian who had been there a while said to go ahead because he had read everything else. The library was in a storefront in an early kind of shopping center. "If it [the library] hadn 't been in the neighborhood, I would have never gotten there."

What young Bill was reading was books on astronomy. After he got through those, and one can imagine that, in a place as subject to cloud and fog as Tacoma, an avid interest in astronomy can only be satisfied in books, Bill started reading science fiction. He read all of that too, which provided an opportunity for Mrs. Irby to note in Bill's report card, "For someone who is so interested in other worlds, William has remarkably little interest in this one." What Bill was getting, of course, was an interest in evolving technology, and a tolerance, even a taste for, unknown futures.

In compensation for the necessary vagueness about possible futures, Bill strives to teach clarity in both writing and speaking. The best antidote to anxiety about the future is to know what you are doing in the present. (This is also important for getting a contract with Bill). One of the ways to do that is to be skilled in quantifying, having skill in judging how numbers can best be used as well as skill in generating them. Bill fosters communication with his students and between them working in small groups. Bill likes to lecture, and he doesn 't hesitate to give exams, but students should not assume that the goods he gives them in lectures are answers to exam questions or even final answers to his own questions. A tolerance for ambiguity is prerequisite to working with Bill--and common sense. Students find Bill approachable, they feel comfortable with asking him questions, in seminar or in his office; and though they find his standards of reasoning and writing high, he always takes the time to help them when they ask him to.

Interviewer: Pete Sinclair

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Last Updated: March 15, 2007