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{shortcode-097912bcb5705790fe60eafaa545d1c65c60540e}uring our interview, I ask Jim MacArthur a hypothetical question. If he were advising the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on its current budget struggles, where would he recommend cutting back? The question stops him mid-sip of water. He laughs, sets down his cup, and says, “Get rid of me. It seems to make the most sense.”
MacArthur manages Harvard’s Electronic Instrument Design Lab. He fulfills specific instrumentation requests from faculty and students, especially in the Physics and Music departments, functioning as what he calls a “short-order engineer.” After 25 years, he’s announced his retirement with a year’s notice, but he doesn’t know if a replacement will be hired.
MacArthur, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, first started as a design engineer for private companies. He began working at the Lab through a connection with Emeritus Professor Paul Horowitz ’65, who still works across the hall from him.
We sit in a corner next to his soldering station, where he has placed two chairs between the instruments that I accidentally hit with my backpack. Amid the tables, shelves, and floor overflowing with electronics equipment, a whiteboard stands in front of the door. He tells me that scientists sometimes struggle with communication, so he puts a marker in their hand and tells them to draw. “And they will draw a box.” That gets them going.
As he explains, the Cruft Laboratory — home to the Electronic Instrument Design Lab — is “kind of built funny.” It was constructed in 1915 as a radio lab with 100,000 volts “wandering through the walls” and 100 engineers working in it. After World War II, research shifted to other places within Harvard, such as the McKay Engineering Laboratory. By the 1990s, the remnants of the Cruft Lab’s seminal work in electronics, sonar, and radio were piled up by its windows.
He found his place in this “big pile of junk” by embracing what he calls his “adrenaline rush personality.” MacArthur’s work is rare and fast-paced — most research institutions, he explains, are “balkanized” into small groups, each with its own specialized engineer. Instead, MacArthur works with whoever walks through his door. And while a typical engineering cycle takes around six months, he gets six hours.
MacArthur’s job includes bringing an efficiency-conscious engineering mindset to scientific research. The University, he says, gradually lost sight of this principle during what he calls its “spending bubble.” Since World War II, Harvard’s resources have grown, and so has its waste. Labs replicate each other’s experiments and use unnecessarily complex (and expensive) instruments. “There’s beauty in being efficient,” MacArthur says, “and doing things as elegantly as possible.”
MacArthur teaches scientists how to think like engineers when setting up experiments. “They want a 400-volt Gaussian pulse generator. And my job is to say why? What about your experiment actually needs that?” he says. “Do you realize that’s going to cost $5,000, but for $500, I can get you a 300-volt Gaussian pulse generator?”
Researchers, MacArthur explains, also tend to be secretive about their work. “Which is odd, because they’re doing science — they are creating knowledge to tell the world,” he says.
“But before they tell the world, they’re terrified of being scooped away,” he adds.
As a common resource, MacArthur works to break down the communication barriers between research groups. Recently, someone came in and asked him for a high-frequency generator. He told them another group had done the same thing the previous year. When they realized they were duplicating each other’s work, he laughed. “Of course you are! That’s what you guys do.”
But Harvard’s spending habits are beginning to change, as the University tightens its budget across the board. “It does feel to me, and this is a sense of 25 years at Harvard, that Harvard could afford to be sloppy,” MacArthur says. “And sloppy is not necessarily good for science. So training people to use every penny, even when they’re rich, is just a good thing.”
He believes that removing some money from the University can actually be healthy, but he argues for moving the money towards smaller research universities rather than away from science. “There was definitely a problem,” he says, “and the solution involves surgery, not explosives.”
MacArthur is so committed to efficiency that he considers his own job redundant. It’s why he volunteers to lay himself off in the hypothetical exercise about budget cuts. “At the end of the day, though, you should lay off the 64-year-old man, you really should,” he says. On Thursday, SEAS Dean David C. Parkes announced that the school will lay off dozens of staff and restructure several offices.
Later, he admits that he’s nervous about what comes next. “They teach you a lot of things in life,” he says. “They don’t teach you how to retire.” He plans to leave when he turns 65. “I like being driven, I love the adrenaline rush, so that does not necessarily translate well to retiring.”
The lab is crowded with hundreds of devices he has built over the years. He first shows me a collection of small boxes. They are modular components he started building during the Covid-19 pandemic when he couldn’t access machine equipment at home. “That started to turn into this little environment where I can just put things together, not even in hours, but in minutes,” he explains. “Like Legos or something.”
“But I have to say that the music stuff —” He moves on quickly. He picks up a small device that resembles all the other circuit boards in the lab, and pushes a small button to turn it on. It is a granular processor. “It takes voice or music and just cuts stuff into pieces,” he says as the device repeats his explanation with a faint delay.
Then, his smile drops and he slips into a flawless Marvin the Martian impression: “The creature has stolen my Space Modulator!” His face stays serious, eyes locked on the device as he twists the knobs, making the pitch wobble, stutter, and smear as if a small alien were trying to escape the circuit. He finally smiles.
“How could you not like that?” he asks. “I could just do this all day.”
