{"id":2456,"date":"2003-09-15T17:39:47","date_gmt":"2003-09-15T21:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=2456"},"modified":"2014-12-15T17:40:49","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T22:40:49","slug":"rob-roy-28-poo-bah-mentor-industrial-engineer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2003\/09\/rob-roy-28-poo-bah-mentor-industrial-engineer\/","title":{"rendered":"ROB ROY \u201928: Poo-Bah, Mentor, and Industrial Engineer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Innovation, high principles, and a personal touch were hallmarks of Engineering\u2019s third dean throughout his two careers and long life.<\/strong><\/p>\n\"23_2701\"<\/a>\n

Rob Roy would have called it a brag. However, even today, the mere mention of his name triggers an unvarying response. For those former students, faculty, and alumni involved with the Johns Hopkins School of Engineering (or the entire University, for that matter) from the 1940s to the early \u201970s, Robert H. \u201cRob\u201d Roy \u201928 remains one of the most remarkable men they have ever known. In fact, most don\u2019t even bother making a distinction between the high professional regard and the deep personal affection they maintain to this day for the late Rob Roy.<\/p>\n

Roy served as dean of the Engineering school from 1953 to 1966, and after that as dean for engineering sciences until retiring in 1973. As his former graduate student, colleague, and close friend Charles Flagle \u201940, \u201954 MA, \u201955 PhD stated at an on-campus memorial service for Roy in October 2000, \u201cThese qualities\u2014imagination, humanity, decency\u2014Rob himself possessed in full measure….\u201d<\/p>\n

EARLY YEARS: THE EMERGING \u201cPOO-BAH\u201d<\/h5>\n

Born in 1907 in the Walbrook neighborhood of West Baltimore, Roy first revealed his appetite for diverse interests as a student in the accelerated A Course at \u201cPoly\u201d (Baltimore Polytechnic Institute). While there, he favored mathematics, physics, and engineering; served on the student council and yearbook staff; and went out for football and lacrosse. In his 1990 self-published memoir, Bragolections: The Career Adventures of a Poo-Bah, Roy explained the origin of the title. \u201cI was first called a Poo-Bah by Howard Batty, my English teacher at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute,\u201d he recounts. \u201cBy this he meant that I was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none…If the shoe fits, I must wear it!\u201d Roy, however, engineered the first word of the title, by splicing together \u201cbrag\u201d and \u201crecollections.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduating from Poly in 1925, Roy enrolled directly into his sophomore year at Johns Hopkins in Mechanical Engineering, despite his admission that, \u201cI really did not know what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

While his opinion of his undergraduate coursework was mixed (he referred to one lab on internal combustion engines as \u201cridiculous\u201d), Roy developed a steadily growing respect for Hopkins as an institution. \u201cUnlike the reputation some universities had in the roaring twenties, Johns Hopkins was not a country club,\u201d he wrote in Bragolections. \u201cSizeable fractions of the campus population were self-motivated scholars\u2026.Whether these collectively and unobtrusively set the pace I do not know, but, whatever the cause, there was engendered a love of learning that endured.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roy\u2019s first taste of acclaim occurred as a senior when, along with the rest of the Hopkins varsity team, he represented the United States in lacrosse at the 1928 Summer Olympic Games in Amsterdam. In command of the American Olympic Committee was Army Maj. Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The Hopkins team played Canada and England to a triple-tie for the gold. \u201cNobody ever had as much fun as we did!\u201d Roy recalled.<\/p>\n

While an undergraduate, Roy encountered a mentor who would be instrumental in guiding him through his two careers and his lifelong professional focus: Professor A.G. Christie. A world authority in heat-power engineering, Christie was chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department. When Roy took Christie\u2019s course on industrial organization and contracts, a switch was flicked. Roy had discovered his path and passion.<\/p>\n

Still in its infancy, the field of industrial organization would eventually develop into the present-day study of industrial engineering. This study applies principles from both mathematics and engineering in decision-making to predict more accurately various complex system outcomes in order to optimize a given system\u2019s performance. Such systems can be found in industry, government, and the military, and involve materials, equipment, energy, and people. In later years, many in this discipline would point to Roy as one of the leading contributors to its evolution and professionalization.<\/p>\n

\u201cTHE SMELL OF PRINTER\u2019S INK\u201d<\/h5>\n
\"As<\/a>
As a Mechanical Engineering major at Hopkins, Robert H. \u201cRob\u201d Roy \u201928 became intrigued with an emerging field: industrial organization.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During his senior year at Hopkins, following a lead from Christie, Roy applied for a position at Waverly Press. The Baltimore firm, which included a sister company, Waverly & Wilkins Publishers, specialized in printing and publishing scholarly journals. Roy was attracted to the printing business. He was hired, and started work right after returning from the Olympics in the summer of 1928. On his first day, he began by learning how to set type by hand in Waverly\u2019s composing room. He recalled his employer telling him that \u201c…if I ever got the smell of printer\u2019s ink in my nostrils I\u2019d never get it out. He was right.\u201d Roy stayed at Waverly for the next 19 years.<\/p>\n

During his yearlong apprenticeship, Roy learned literally every mechanical and manual operation associated with printing. Then he began training as a salesman for the firm. However, he was finding that his real interests lay elsewhere. Prior to Roy\u2019s arrival, Waverly had adopted a number of systems procedures through consultations with Frederick W. Taylor, the father of modern management science, and Taylor\u2019s two associates, Morris Cooke and Henry Laurence Gantt. (Gantt earned his engineering mechanics degree at Hopkins in 1880. In 1917, two years before his death, he developed his innovative Gantt chart to project the progress of projects over a period of time.)<\/p>\n

Roy was quickly drawn to the idea of time and motion studies, and began devouring books on the subject in the company\u2019s library. He read Taylor\u2019s Principles of Scientific Management and Gantt\u2019s Work, Wages and Profits. Roy also was influenced by the motion-study engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, whose pioneering studies in efficiency (and their amusing applications on the home front) were depicted in the 1950 film Cheaper By the Dozen. This new discipline, coupled with his abilities as a mechanical engineer, led Roy to invent both time-saving printing equipment and procedures for Waverly. The Roy type case accelerated the speed and accuracy of manual typesetting, and his system of compositing press forms greatly increased production. In 1936, he was appointed chief engineer of the firm; by 1947, Roy had become Waverly\u2019s vice president of engineering and was regularly putting in 50 or more hours a week.<\/p>\n

HOPKINS YEARS: \u201cMUCH TO BE DONE\u201d<\/h5>\n
\"During<\/a>
During his 13 years as dean (1953-66), Roy focused on modernizing and broadening the engineering curriculum, as well as on world-class research and teaching.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Although the alumnus had been separated from the University and the School of Engineering for nearly two decades, in one sense Rob Roy had never left. He regularly kept in touch with former classmates and professors. Then in 1939, Christie, his mentor, asked him to teach a class in industrial organization and management in the evening college.<\/p>\n

By 1942, as a part of the University\u2019s Engineering, Science & Management War Training Program, Roy was teaching industrial employees in two classes of 100-plus each, twice a week. While he had permission from his employers at Waverly, the teaching load put an enormous strain on Roy and his family. And starting in 1945, Roy was also actively pursuing a concurrent career as an industrial arbitration consultant. \u201cHe arbitrated huge cases for Lever Brothers, the Louisville Courier-Journal<\/em>, and for Howard Head\u2014the father of the modern ski,\u201d recalls his elder daughter, Mollie R. Bucy, of Baltimore.<\/p>\n

Obviously, something had to give. In the spring of 1947, Christie offered Roy an appointment as associate professor of industrial engineering in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Although the salary was roughly one-third of his pay at Waverly Press, Roy accepted. \u201cI remarked more than once that if I didn\u2019t get consulting we would starve,\u201d Roy wrote in his memoir.<\/p>\n

\u201cHE LOVED THE UNIVERSITY ALMOST SECOND TO HIS FAMILY. IT WAS A WAY OF LIFE FOR HIM.\u201d MOLLIE R. BUCY, ROY\u2019S ELDER DAUGHTER<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Starve he did not. In fact, within 18 months, Roy joined the Hopkins Engineering faculty as a full-time professor and chair of the school\u2019s new Department of Industrial Engineering. \u201cBy the time A.G. Christie invited Rob to teach, Christie himself was about to retire,\u201d recalls Flagle. \u201cHe knew Rob would be qualified to do that, and then to run the new department, because of his broad knowledge of management and organization theory, as well as his experience as a manager himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roy soon discovered that, in his own words, \u201cthere was much to be done\u201d at Hopkins. A steady stream of veterans returning to college on the G.I. Bill had signed up for Industrial Engineering classes\u2014few of which actually had instructors yet. Through his hard work and by leading several classes himself, he soon found his fledgling department was prospering. In short order, Roy\u2019s own star rose as well. He was named an assistant dean in 1949 and four years later, in April 1953, he was named dean of Engineering, succeeding William B. \u201cWild Bill\u201d Kouwenhoven (profiled in the Fall 2002 Johns Hopkins Engineer).<\/p>\n

An entire book easily could be written on the accomplishments realized during Rob Roy\u2019s 13-year tenure as dean. Suffice it to say, the School of Engineering was changed in substance, style, and approach. As Flagle recalls of his graduate school days with Roy in the early 1950s, \u201cEngineering faced two challenges at the time. The first was that of becoming a broader form of education\u2014it was possible at that point to graduate in the four-year undergraduate program with only one elective. At the same time, the technical context being learned was verging on the obsolete\u2014the inventions that won World War II and fought the battle of Sputnik were not in engineering but in physics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"In<\/a>
In the 1950s, Roy wrote the first two of his 40 works. Two years following this 1959 photo, he co-published a seminal text: Operations Research and Systems Engineering.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As dean, Roy sought to modernize and broaden the scope of the engineering curriculum to include courses in the humanities and social sciences, as well as increased emphasis on professionalizing graduate students through real-world research projects and teaching experience. Joint appointments brought in senior faculty from Statistics, Psychology, and Political Economy. Roy\u2019s goal\u2014to build a program that produced not only excellent engineers but also world-class researchers and professors\u2014was finally realized toward the end of his career. In the mid-1960s, the School of Engineering was awarded supporting grants from the Ford Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a total of $2.185 million.<\/p>\n

Within Roy\u2019s Department of Industrial Engineering, which he continued to chair, important changes were also taking place. Following World War II, the Operations Research Office (ORO), which had been administered by Hopkins for the Army, needed a civilian home for its staff of researchers. The University agreed to take the ORO under its wing as a new department. Roy, who had a great interest in operations research and its systems analysis methodologies, lobbied to make the ORO part of his Department of Industrial Engineering. The integration took place, and a new department emerged\u2014the Department of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering\u2014with an instant faculty in the field of management science. Flagle laughs as he recalls the merger: \u201cMuch to their chagrin, all the philosophers, economists, sociologists, historians, and writers of the ORO overnight became industrial engineers. Anything for a parking space!\u201d<\/p>\n