Dropout Gates Drops In To Talk

Harvard’s most famous dropout returned to his alma mater yesterday, imploring students to pursue computer science—and stay in school.

Bill Gates, Class of 1977, who withdrew from the College in his junior year and never looked back, addressed a full house in Lowell Lecture Hall last night. He touted the advantages of careers in computing and teased his audience with prototypes of Microsoft’s nascent technology.

“The holy grail of computer science is artificial intelligence,” Gates told the crowd of mostly engineering and applied science students.

In an interview with reporters yesterday morning, Gates said Microsoft and its competitors still need Harvard graduates.

“The world as a whole has a shortage of elite, computer science people,” he said.

Gates himself abandoned a Harvard degree for the computing world but said yesterday he held fond memories of his days in Cambridge.

“I had this terrible habit of not ever attending classes,” he recalled.

But Gates encouraged one audience member last night to complete his education at Harvard and enter the field of computer science in the traditional fashion.

In his introductory remarks, Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences Venkatesh Narayanamurti gave tacit approval to Gates’ path in higher education.

“He spent precisely as much time here as he needed to,” Narayanamurti said.

In his hour-long address, Gates stressed the value of speech recognition software and translation technology.

“User simplicity is the way forward for this business,” he said.

Gates’ goody bag of technology included a portable media player, similar to an iPod, which can display a user’s text, music and video.

The tech baron also sported Microsoft’s new multi-function “smart watch” on his left wrist, although Gates, who scratched his wrist repeatedly last night, was clearly not a regular wearer of the device.

Gates praised the effects of globalization in the computing world but said advanced positions at Microsoft are not in danger of heading overseas.

“The lion’s share of our work is done here—and will always be done here,” he said.

While officially condemning illegal file-sharing, Gates struck a measured tone on the issue and acknowledged many of his products facilitate the practice.

Gates said media industries were partly to blame for initially resisting digital technology.

“It’s made it too easy for people not to license,” he said.

Gates and his former classmate-turned-business-partner Steven A. Ballmer ’77 donated $25 million to Harvard in 1996 for the creation of a new computer science building.

The building, Maxwell Dworkin, was dedicated by Ballmer three years later, but Gates said he had not stepped inside until yesterday.

Gates has long maintained—and repeated yesterday—that computer programming lured him away from Harvard. But a 1993 biography said Gates dropped out when Harvard objected to his use of University computers for private business.

“There was a flap, no question about it,” Gates’ father, William H. Gates Sr., told the Boston Globe in 1998. “My son felt put upon by the Harvard administration’s attitude.”

Gates’ departure grouped him with a host of Harvard dropouts who achieved post-Cambridge fame.

Edwin Land, Class of 1930, invented the Polaroid camera after dropping out and went on to pay for the building of Harvard’s Polaroid-camera-shaped Science Center.

But drop-out William Randolph Hearst, Class of 1886, snubbed Harvard fundraisers after forming the nation’s largest media empire. Hearst instead financed the castle of the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.