In the evolution of the office, I suspect a deep feminist struggle was started by Muriel Cooper, who always championed her independence and unpredictability against a male-dominated world, especially when very few women were in primary or leading roles in furthering MIT as an academic institution. This struggle was intuitively joined by Jacqueline Casey. It is very intriguing to see the instinctive push against John Mattill, the founder of the office, whose contributions were consistently minimized, nearly ignored, or only begrudgingly recognized. If one looks at the accounts of the Office of Publication, John Mattill and William T. Struble, both directors, are rarely mentioned and mostly ignored, and therefore also slighted by the design media. Unfortunate lacks of journalistic accuracy make Muriel Cooper head, founder, and director of the MIT Office of Publication, which she never was, or suggest that, in the institutional evolution, the office morphed into the MIT Office of Design Services when Casey was appointed director, after William T. Struble decided to retire. 

Also, Muriel Cooper was never director of the MIT Press. However, it is true that the design of the monumental “Bauhaus” book and door-stop brought enormous humanistic prestige to the MIT Press. The Wingler book opened up an institutional logjam for publications in the arts and architecture. However, Cooper’s editorial influence waned quickly, because the institution was entering a period of financial constraint, and the audience for art and architecture books was pretty small. The design media continued its warp of reality. The erroneous information was never challenged or changed.

It is never mentioned that both Mattill and Struble were science writers and amazing copy editors and word-smiths without whom the MIT Office of Publications could not have achieved its level of excellence. For instance, John Mattill was one of the cofounders of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a must-read monthly for administrators and faculty alike. It started as a cooperative project with editors of the leading US colleges and universities to investigate issues in higher education in perspective. Both Mattill and Struble became the administration’s chroniclers of institutional events. Both were responsible at one time or another for the editorial quality of the contents at the MIT Technology Review. In addition, their insistence on accuracy in spelling and grammar required the support of a whole group of full-time and part-time editorial assistants and proofreaders, from which all designers benefitted. 

With this focus, Mattill directly challenged Georgy Kepes, head of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, who in a lecture presentation had insisted on a unproven affect in communication, that the image held primacy and superiority over the word, which of course has not turned out to be correct, as each has a different function and each has communication blind spots. But the design community, in its struggle for identity and professional acceptance, adopted the axiom, to which we no longer subscribe. The culturally naive statement, that “an image is worth a thousand words,” never held any water in the first place, because we have learned that each context declares which form is more efficient or effective, the visual or the verbal.