Michael, his son Tycho, my former student and NPR reporter Tovia Smith, and my wife Iris Adler
I had the great privilege of befriending Michael Hawley. I was but one of thousands. A remarkably prodigious polymath, he is a person who for me defines the phrase sui generis. I greatly admired the thinking he epitomized in extolling the virtue and necessity of Renaissance education.
The four years of an undergraduate education (for the minority of the population that gets that far) have become less of an exploration and more of a routine. Even the path to college has become a pipeline of preparatory crash courses, tests, interviews, and campus visits. Graduate schools are even more constricting. In an age that is fomenting the greatest expansion of knowledge – and of its means of distribution – in history, our educational system is churning out ever more narrowly focused scholars. One wonders if, along with biodiversity and cultural diversity, the diversity of the individual mind might be another casualty of modern life.
I was honored when he agreed to be a mentor for Convisero. His dedication to his students was extraordinary, and he will be greatly missed. This virtual Festschrift speaks to his special warmth and humanity.
His adventurous, unprecedented eclectic accomplishments are legendary. I nominated Mike for the 2020 Tällberg Eliasson Global Leadership Prize. Here is what I had written then:
I am nominating Dr. Michael Hawley, brilliant distinctive icon of interdisciplinary thinking, and a champion of the critical need for eclecticism and versatility in education, especially necessary in the digital information age.
At the MIT Media Lab, where he has taught and innovated, and globally, through Fellowships, lectures, writing, and by example, Mike has inspired generations of flourishing cutting-edge thinkers, research professors, friends, and especially his students. He encourage all think boldly about their own educational and vocational pursuits, to dare to create, and to explore the intersections and hybridizations of their interests in innovative and exciting ways.
He lives and encourages others to live in a manner that is open to ideas, deeply intellectually curious, exploratory, experimental, daring, oblivious to failure, but grounded in rigorous preparation, practice and expertise. He is a perpetual student and thinker and tinkerer.
Disinterested in traditional incentives, academic "tracks" and standard rewards, he has courageously followed unusual paths, from the foothills of Himalayas to concert halls, from luge runs to Lucas Labs, to pursue his passions for art, music, photography, computer science, engineering, ecology, artificial intelligence, sport, and so much more.
I have been a teacher and global educator for fifty-five years. As a youth I was inspired by the biography of Benvenuto Cellini. The concept of a "Renaissance Man" never left me. Rarely has an individual approached this, and beyond, and continues to inspire more than Mike. Here is a true modern-day renaissance man. For the founders of the Media Lab - once branded the educational lab "inventing the future" - he is their avatar. From advances in digital publishing for LucasFilm to performance technology for the American Everest efforts he has produced extraordinary tangible results.
I knew of him since 1995 when I organized my Institute's tenth anniversary, and many Media Lab folks, including Mike's mentor Marvin Minsky, were engaged. Years later I read his inspirational seminal lament “Whither the Renaissance Man.” And now I have had the privilege of his personal friendship for the past few years.
What an Eliasson recipient he would make!