John L. Michael’s Early Career: Houston to Arizona

Abstract

My memories started, of course, at Houston, where Jack was teaching Intermediate Statistics, in summer 1957. When he and Lee Meyerson needed a graduate assistant and I needed a job, I was hired to help set up a child operant lab for testing hearing with children and other nonverbal individuals (autistic, intellectual disability, even deaf).Most of my later classroom contact with Jack was in Advanced Statistics and Learning Theory, using Hilgard but with an emphasis on Skinner. Somewhere between the stat class and the learning course, I learned several views of science that were new to me. Although Jack always deferred to Skinner as the origin, most bore the stamp of his own unique analysis. He represented a position that was distinct from the traditional and elitist "princes and kings" approach to the history of science and relied more on the contributions of technology and Mach's appreciation of the artisans that preceded formal science as represented by the universities. My reading and previous undergraduate courses had given a distinctly different view, that of the eminence of man thinking, by theorists who bragged that they "could not walk past a laboratory without hearing glass breaking." Though I took no philosophy courses, there were frequent references to thought experiments and a certain deference to philosophy of that stripe in textbooks and lectures in psychology. At any rate, Jack's view was not a popular position in my undergraduate training. As to my questions about the history of science, Jack counseled me instead to consider the history of technology-which I did, with I think some profit.The learning course was my first and was the first to suggest that something in psychology had a clear application. For my part, I applied Jack's suggestions (or Skinner's) to helping with my child-rearing chores. My daughter, Linda, was the chief recipient of my behavioral engineering, eventually including toilet training, shoe tying, and so on. As a result, I got a brief mention in a book that featured Jack's and others' influence on the application of Skinner's work (Rutherford,