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INTERNATIONAL TRANSACTIONS IN OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
IFORS’ Operational Research Hall of Fame C. West Churchman A philosopher, logician, and humanist who explored the intellectual foundations of Operations Research (OR), expanded the field’s use of the systems approach, and served as a leading spokesman and moral conscience for the discipline. Born: 29 August 1913, Philadelphia, USA. Died: 21 March 2004, Bolinas, California, USA. Education: B.A. Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania (1935); M.A. Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania (1936); Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania (1938). Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley. Key positions: Philosophy instructor, University of Pennsylvania (1937–1942); Assistant Professor, Philosophy (1935–1948); Associate Professor, Philosophy, Wayne (State) University (1948–1951); Professor, Engineering and Operations Research, Case Western Reserve (1951– 1957); and Professor, Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley (1957–1981).
for Advancement of Science; LEO Award for Lifetime Exceptional Achievement in Information Systems (1999); and Honorary doctorates, Washington University of St. Louis (1975), the University of Lund, Sweden (1984), and Umea˚ University, Sweden (1986).
Awards: Academy of Management’s Best Book in Management Award (1968); McKinsey Book Award (1968); Fellow, American Association
Key OR roles: Founding member of TIMS and President (1962); and first editor-in-chief, Management Science (1954).
C. West Churchman devoted his career to applying rational and systematic thinking to promote human flourishing. He defined OR as an intellectual tool ‘‘to secure improvement in the human condition by means of the scientific method.’’ His view of the field and its possibilities was wide ranging, sweeping in all disciplines and all walks of life. Every word in his conception of the field as developed in his major writings had a deep meaning for him. r 2004 International Federation of Operational Research Societies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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Churchman wrote a series of books that collectively establish a rich and pragmatically oriented philosophical foundation for OR and the management sciences. These include: Prediction and Optimal Decision (1961), which explores the relationship between problems of value and problems of fact; Challenge to Reason (1968, Academy of Management’s Award), which asks whether it is possible to understand the whole system well enough to guarantee the real-world validity of scientific results; The Systems Approach (1968, McKinsey Book Award), a widely read and taught exposition, that argues that a great deal can be learned about society’s problems by applying systems thinking and stating the results in a clear, debatable form; The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971) which draws on the epistemological insights of leading philosophers – Leibniz, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Singer – to propose a general theoretical approach to systems thinking and to social systems design; The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979), which argues that other approaches to solving human problems (such as politics, morality, religion, and aesthetics) place limits on the power of rationality and therefore must be incorporated in order to secure improvements in the human condition; and Thought and Wisdom (1982), a personal reflection on his career in applying OR to a wide variety of social problems, which states that thought, as reflected in the systems approach, stresses the pursuit of the truth but that successful solutions also require wisdom and an emphasis on the good and the beautiful. Charles West Churchman was born on 29 August 1913 in Philadelphia to Clark Wharton Churchman and Helen Norah Fassitt, descendents of old line Philadelphia families. Curious and precocious, his first intellectual love was for philosophy and this far-ranging love for wisdom captivated him to the end of his life. Churchman received a B.A. in philosophy (1935), an MA in philosophy (1936), and a Ph.D. in philosophy (1938) from the University of Pennsylvania. Under the direction of the noted logician Henry Bradford Smith, he focused initially on logic and statistics, writing a dissertation Toward a General Logic of Propositions in which he proved that a family of logics could be derived from a more parsimonious set of elemental premises than previously thought possible. But the teacher who most influenced him was Edgar A. Singer. Singer had been a student at Harvard of the philosopher and psychologist William James who taught that the truth of any proposition is judged by its practical outcome. Singer sought to systematize this fundamental assumption of pragmatism. Churchman, soon thereafter with the aid of Russell Ackoff and Thomas Cowan, dedicated himself to carrying out this project and showing the breath of its application to society’s problems. Churchman’s passionate devotion to this point of view resulted in considerable contributions to OR, management science, systems thinking, information systems, peace studies, and other fields, and it also sparked controversy. A gentleman who expressed moral outrage at human injustices, Churchman frequently was at the center of intellectual controversies. As a young Assistant Professor in 1945, he was elected Chairman of Penn’s Department of Philosophy, one of the most prestigious in the world, because he was the only faculty member whom both the contending analytical philosophy faction and the pragmatists could agree on. During World War II, Churchman served as a mathematical statistician at the Frankfort Arsenal of the US Army working on experimental methods for testing small arms ammunition. There he challenged the accepted approaches to statistical quality control based on theories of Walter Shewhart, Jerzy Neyman, and Egon Pearson by showing that a lot of ammunition with one percent misfires had a better than one-third chance of being accepted. This was potentially disastrous for the hundreds of thousands of troops who in battle might attempt to fire hundreds of rounds a day. Ethics and values – a policy’s effects on real lives – trumped
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mathematical purity for Churchman and he persevered until the Army Ordnance changed its method. Following WWII, Churchman, with Ackoff, tried to found an ‘‘Institute of Experimental Method’’ at the University of Pennsylvania in hopes of applying Singer’s philosophy to humanities’ problems, much as he had done at the Frankfort Arsenal. But this effort was not acceptable to the other members of his department. Churchman resigned as chairman in 1948 and eventually Ackoff, Cowan, and he moved to Wayne (State) University in Detroit where union leaders and others had promised support for their project. This support, too, failed to materialize. (However, he met his future wife Gloria in Detroit. Ackoff and Cowan met their wives there, too.) In 1951, Churchman and Ackoff moved to the Department of Engineering Administration at Case Institute of Technology to apply their way of thinking to the incipient field of OR. There they designed the first graduate OR program, from which the first PhD (Eli Naddor) graduated in 1957, and published the highly influential textbook Introduction to Operations Research (with E. Leonard Arnoff, 1957). A crucial difference between this text and Morse and Kimball’s 1951 classic Methods of Operations Research was its methodical grounding in an interdisciplinary Singerian philosophy and its heavy emphasis on the systems approach. Churchman was among a splinter group of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) who believed, with Mel Salveson, that eventually every practising manager would need to master the power of the management sciences and that ORSA alone was not up to accomplishing this mission. He was an active participant in the December 1953 meeting in New York that launched The Institute of Management Sciences and became the first editor of its journal Management Science. In 1958, Churchman accepted a position at the Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of California at Berkeley. There he founded the school’s graduate program in OR and helped establish the leading edge Center for Research in Management Science. Meanwhile, from 1962 through 1963, he served as research director of System Development Corporation. In 1963, following conversations with NASA Director James Webb about the need to apply OR to society’s problems, Churchman also became University Research Philosopher and Associate Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory and Director of its unique interdisciplinary Social Sciences Program. But many believe that his greatest contribution is to his many and quite varied graduate students. Most were divergent thinkers who shared West’s passions. Many have become leaders in a variety of fields throughout the world. A great number of them sport sweaters he knitted for them. Throughout his career, Churchman was concerned with the problem of implementation of OR results. Like William James, he believed that the truth of an OR application ultimately lies in its ‘‘cash value.’’ In many respects, he served as OR’s conscience, challenging its core assumptions while extending its range of justifiable application. Yet he never denied its ultimate utility for humankind. His bias, as he said in the closing sentence of The Systems Approach, is that ‘‘The systems approach is not a bad idea.’’ Richard O. Mason
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Selected original works Churchman, C.W., 1961. Prediction and Optimal Decision: Philosophical Issues of a Science of Values. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Churchman, C.W., 1968. Challenge to Reason. McGraw-Hill, New York. Churchman, C.W., 1968. The Systems Approach. Delacorte Press, New York. Churchman, C.W., 1971. The Design of Inquiring Systems. Basic Books, New York. Churchman, C.W., 1979. The Systems Approach and its Enemies. Basic Books, New York. Churchman, C.W., 1982. Thought and Wisdom. Intersystems Publications, Seaside, CA. Churchman, C.W., Ackoff, R.L., Arnoff, L.E., 1957. Introduction to Operations Research. Wiley, New York.
Biographical material Ackoff, R.L., 1988. C. West Churchman. Systems Practice, 1, 351–355. Dean, B.V., 1994. West Churchman and operations research: Case Institute of Technology 1951–1957. Interfaces, 24 (4), 5–15. Ulrich, W., 1999. An appreciation of C. West Churchman. http://www.isss.org/lumCWC.htm Ulrich, W., 2002. A Bibliography of C. W. Churchman’s Writings from 1938 to 2001. Werner Ulrich’s Home Page, http://www.geocities.com/postfach1/cwc_bibliography.html
