Pittsburgher of the Year
Randy Pausch: His "Last Lecture"
Lives On
CMU professor Randy Pausch's last lecture, titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," was a YouTube phenomenon that captivated the world. His book, based on the same principles, became a runaway best-seller. Pausch died last July of pancreatic cancer at age 47. He lived an extraordinary life, and in dying he inspired others on how to live.
By Geoffrey W. Melada
Photos courtesy of the Pausch family
When professor Randy Pausch stood before some 400 students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University on Sept. 18, 2007, to deliver his last-ever lecture, the audience rose to its feet and cheered. "Make me earn it," he mock-chided them, urging them to sit. "You did!" shouted a voice from the crowd.
Teacher. Mentor. Author. Activist. Husband. Father. Brother. Son. Friend. To each of these roles, Pausch, who died this past July of complications from pancreatic cancer, brought the sum total of his energies, even when the disease had drained most of his seemingly inexhaustible supply.
Most people would consider themselves fortunate at the end of their lives to have made just one important contribution to society. Yet, in Pausch's case, people across academic disciplines and representing many causes offer differing theories about the way he made an impact on the world. The astonishing truth may be that each of them is right, and that this Pittsburgh educator, hailed by one colleague as "the most famous computer scientist who ever lived," has the distinction of leaving behind a legacy as bright and variegated as a constellation of stars. In recognition of that vast legacy, Randy Pausch is Pittsburgh magazine's 2008 "Pittsburgher of the Year."
REMEMBERING A LEGACY: "WE WILL TELL THEM"
Now that the lights have long gone down and the stage has been struck since the "last lecture," it seems appropriate to pause and reflect upon the life that earned Randy Pausch that standing ovation and the legacy that remains. The hardest part about examining Pausch's legacy may be figuring out just where to begin.
At Pausch's memorial service on Sept. 22 at Carnegie Mellon, nearly one year to the day after his last lecture, university president Jared Cohon announced the creation of a new footbridge spanning the distance between the school's fine-arts and computer-science buildings, which will bear the professor's name. Future generations of CMU students and faculty, Cohon predicted, will walk across that bridge and wonder just who was Randy Pausch. Added Cohon, proudly: "We will tell them."
Certainly, there was no institution that Pausch cared more about or identified more strongly with than Carnegie Mellon University. He was thrilled when Hyperion, which published his last lecture in the form of a book that rocketed to No. 1 on The New York Times' "Best Seller List," agreed to put Carnegie Mellon's name on the book's cover. But Pausch's memory -- thanks to his book (since translated into 30 languages), Web diary and television appearances -- belongs to a larger community now.
It may be more accurate to say that Pausch's memory belongs to every person -- from Pittsburgh to Paris -- who has heard his message that the only way to face death is to truly live. Before he gave his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University -- the motivational speech titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," which would reach an audience of millions via the Internet -- Pausch was already well-known for a lecture he had given at the University of Virginia on time management.
Pausch, who taught computer science at the University of Virginia for nine years before joining Carnegie Mellon's faculty in 1997, practiced what he preached. At his memorial service, CMU computer-science professor Jessica Hodgins recalled how Pausch used to measure two-thirds of a cup of water for his daily oatmeal with separate one-thirds measuring cups until he found a single two-thirds cup that would "save him one hand motion." Former student Emily Treat, 28, of Boston, recalls that when Pausch's first child, Dylan, was a newborn and keeping him up at night with his crying, Pausch would come into his Building Virtual Worlds class the next day with freshly baked brownies.
"If I'm going to be up all night, I might as well do something productive with my time," Treat remembers his telling her class. "Time is all you have, and it must be explicitly managed," wrote Pausch in The Last Lecture, his 2008 best-selling memoir. "You may find one day that you have less than you think."
PANCREATIC-CANCER DIAGNOSIS
That's exactly what happened to Pausch in August 2006, when, at age 45, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer -- a virtual death sentence. Of the 13 most common forms of cancer, pancreatic cancer is among the most lethal. According to American Cancer Society statistics, 75 percent of pancreatic-cancer patients die within the first year of diagnosis; a mere 5 percent live beyond five years. More than 37,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer every year. There are no early-detection methods.
As fate would have it, this expert in time management now faced the ultimate time-management challenge -- how to spend the last months of his life. He posed that very question to himself in the introduction to his memoir. "I am the father of three young children, and married to the woman of my dreams," wrote Pausch. "While I could easily feel sorry for myself, that wouldn't do them, or me, any good." Obviously, he continued, he could embrace every remaining moment with his family and make the logistical plans necessary to secure their future without him. "The less obvious part is how to teach my children what I would have taught them over the next 20 years."
That's where his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon came in. "I knew what I was doing that day," Pausch explained in his memoir. He had been invited to give the lecture as part of an ongoing series of campus talks called "Journeys," in which professors are asked to imagine what topic they'd wish to lecture about if it were the last chance they'd ever have to speak to a student audience. For Pausch, though, the lecture would not be mere whimsy.
Under the "ruse" of giving an academic lecture to Carnegie Mellon students, many of whom already knew about his illness, "I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children. If I were a painter, I would have painted for them. If I were a musician, I would have composed music. But I am a lecturer. So I lectured," Pausch wrote in his memoir.
But Pausch had another motivation for giving the last lecture. A gifted public speaker -- and not just in comparison with the average computer scientist -- he wanted to perform one last time, to show off his oratorical skills. "An injured lion wants to know if he can still roar," he explained to his wife, Jai, who initially opposed the idea of his giving a big farewell speech considering the precious time she knew he would spend working on it and not with his family. "It's about dignity and self-esteem," he persuaded her, "which isn't quite the same as vanity." It worked. He got the green light.
For the most part, though, Pausch thought of his last lecture as a way to answer the overriding question that his three young children, Dylan (now 6), Logan (now 4) and Chloe (now 2) would someday ask: "Who was my dad?" Unaware that his lecture would vault onto the Internet and be downloaded by millions, Pausch assured his wife that CMU would record the lecture and transfer it onto a DVD for her. "When the kids are older, you can show it to them. It'll help them understand who I was and what I cared about," he told her.
A perfectionist, Pausch devoted many of his final hours to planning the lecture. Still, in doing so, he did not forget the "obvious part" of his time challenge. He saw to the less romantic tasks: planning for his family's financial future, choosing a school for the children and deciding whether to stay in Pittsburgh. Ultimately, the Pausches sold their house in Shadyside and relocated to Chesapeake, Va., to be closer to Jai's family. The decision to move was a hard one, especially after the Pausches had recently finished remodeling their Ellsworth Avenue ranch house into what Randy Pausch's niece Laura Woolley describes as the couple's "dream home," and had already enrolled Dylan in kindergarten at Shady Side Academy Junior School.
Cheryl Little, head of the Point Breeze private school, recalls that her meeting in the fall of 2006 with Randy and Jai Pausch was unlike any other prospective parent meeting she'd had in her career. Normally, she explains, these are informal discussions lasting about 20 minutes in which she asks parents to tell her a little more about their child. The Pausches "took it in a different direction," interviewing her for almost two hours. "It was the hardest, most intense interview I've ever had," she says. Randy Pausch wanted to see a pie chart breaking down the school's financial expenditures as well as the results of its latest self-study for accreditation. "No one has ever asked for that, especially for a 3-year-old," Little adds.
Halfway through the interview, Randy Pausch paused to explain himself. "I know I'm being very intense, a jerk, but I'm dying," he told Little. "I have three young children who are not yet in school, and I have to make sure they are well taken care of and in the best place for them." Little, a parent and cancer survivor herself, understood. She offered to introduce him to the heads of Shady Side's Middle and Senior schools in Fox Chapel, even though Dylan wouldn't arrive on their campuses for years. Pausch insisted on it. "He was the most passionate parent I've ever seen," Little says.