Editor’s note: The IEEE Information Technology Society’s Newsletter regularily publishes a column by Anthony Ephremides in which he describes various events in IEEE’s and the Society’s past. Here is his “Historian’s Column” that appeared in the September 2001 issue.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Ihave written before about the infamous Irwin Feerst. As many of you know (or recall), he was a feisty IEEE member who campaigned often for the Presidency of the Institute (and, once, came dangerously close to winning it). He was the ultimate populist whose main stance on almost everything was that IEEE should be an organization of (and for) “working” U.S. engineers and not of (or for) intellectuals, scientists, or ... “foreigners.” Ordinarily he would command as much attention as a buffoon, but as he came close to rising to the top management position of the Institute, he posed enough of a threat to receive an inordinate amount of attention. The peak period of his activity was the 70s and the 80s.

Our Society was a frequent target of his. He singled us out as anathema to what he thought IEEE ought to be. The organizers of the 1977 ISIT in Ithaca had the bright idea to invite him for a debate with his opponent Ivan Getting (both were candidates for IEEE President) at the Symposium. I reported before briefly about that memorable event but my memory was refreshed recently as I was perusing old issues of our newsletter (that date from the era of Lalit Bahl’s inimitable editorship).

So, during that debate, Irwin was challenged by several of our members who either asked him tough questions or reacted to his answers. Aaron Wyner was the first one to ask the following question: “Mr. Feerst, you have made some very disparaging remarks about the IT Transactions in your newsletter” (author’s note: Feerst used to publish a notorious newsletter, more on which a bit later). I quote: ‘Many of IEEE’s publications have taken on the aspect of a modern sewage plant – a lot of crap hidden behind a pretentious exterior. These include Spectrum, the Transactions on Information Theory, Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, and Transactions on Electronics in Medicine and Biology. We must change the management of these periodicals and present papers written by working EEs for working EEs’. Would you care to comment?” The answer was: “The IT Transactions are indeed full of crap. Most of the papers are written by academics and foreigners (author’s note: remarkable pairing of categories). There is nothing in there for working engineers like me.” And he concluded with the famous quotation: “In fact, I can’t even tell if I’ve got it right side up or upside down.” There was pandemonium in the audience with catcalls and individual utterances like: “Maybe we should charge him double” or “If you think our Transactions are full of crap, you should read our newsletter.” As the reaction subsided, Lee Davisson followed up with: “Since the Transactions are self-supporting, if we want to publish crap, then we should publish crap.” To which Feerst replied: “I am glad you brought that up, I have ...”, at which point Fred Jelinek intervened with: “Could you speak a little softer or move the mike a little further away?” Feerst complied and continued: “I have here in my hand document S3437 (author’s note: no clarification about what kind of document that may be) which shows that the average cost of printing a technical journal is about $131 per copy. So, your $8 (of dues) doesn’t go a helluva long way towards paying for the Transactions.” Amidst new catcalls the following was overheard: “I told you we should charge him double.” Dave Forney politely remarked that the Transactions are supported by page charges and library subscriptions. Marty Hellman wondered aloud: “The IEEE has about 180,000 members. Assuming that the average member gets 9 issues of IEEE journals per year, the total cost exceeds 200 million dollars. Where on earth do we get this money?” And Jim Massey concluded with “The reason that the Transactions look the same upside down or right-side up to Irwin Feerst is because we use the binary system!”

The session went on pretty much in the same vein and, as is evident from the above sample, it achieved high levels of entertainment value.

To be fair, however, we must grant Mr. Feerst that he was not wrong on all counts. Among his targets were some truly objectionable practices by the top IEEE brass which unfortunately persist even today. Generally speaking, these have to do with the use of IEEE funds for ventures by some individuals that are of dubious value and merit. For example, in the late seventies, the early years of the China-U.S. “rapprochement,” there were many eager intrepid travelers from within the top ranks of IEEE management who wanted to visit China (in the name of cultivating bilateral technical contacts). In addition to the basic question of whether these ventures were planned properly, there were also questions of style and form. Take a look, for example, at a news release from the Institute entitled “IEEE delegation will visit mainland China.” It started by saying (note the grammar and syntax): “There will be ten delegates from the Institute who will visit the People’s Republic of China as well as their wives”(!!) A follow-up from that trip surfaced in Irwin Feerst’s newsletter a few months later. It quoted from the publication Optical Spectra (p. 43 of the 12/77 issue) that was reporting on the trip headed by IEEE President Robert Saunders that read “The IEEE chief (sic), who is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, recently returned from a three-week visit to mainland China. A ten-member IEEE delegation found many technical areas lagging behind, but noted a rapid change in the rate of progress.” Again, note the “quality” of the writing. In any event, Feerst’s commentary was: “Naturally our curiosity was aroused as to who paid for this trip. We wrote to Robert Briskman, IEEE’s perpetual Secretary-Treasurer to ask him. Briskman’s straightforward reply was ‘I assumed you knew that the type of information requested is not normally furnished.’ Marvelous. Super. So, now, we ordinary working EEs are not permitted to know too much about IEEE’s finances. But we are, of course, expected to pay our dues. Sounds as though Saunders and his entourage ate their two favorite dishes while in China – ‘You Pay Dough and You know Zilch’!”

Apart from the crass style and the offensive (to our Chinese colleagues) use of phonetics, there was a point in Feerst’s fierce protest. And as recent financial woes of the IEEE demonstrate, the same type of misfeasance and malfeasance at the top of the Institute may very well persist and survive even today.

Tony Ephremides, who kindly granted permission for his article to appear here, is a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland. He can be reached by e-mail at a.ephremides@ieee.org.