Michael Scriven, a longtime Inverness resident who won a chance to meet Albert Einstein and was known as the godfather of the academic discipline of evaluation, died last month at a retirement community in San Rafael. He was 95 years old.
Mr. Scriven was a master of many subjects and could offer nuanced arguments on philosophy, mathematics, computer science, psychology and education—not to mention knives, fast cars, rowing and parapsychology. He was best known for his work in evaluation, which brings intellectual rigor to assessing people, products and programs. He taught at elite schools, including Harvard, Stanford, Swarthmore and the University of Auckland in Australia, where he received an honorary doctorate.
For all his arcane knowledge and prolific writing output—over 450 journal articles and 12 books—he wanted his legacy to be more than a pile of dusty academic tomes. He believed that good evaluative thinking could be a powerful tool in the hands of ordinary people, not just decision makers, said Jane Davidson, a longtime friend and colleague who served as his teaching assistant at Claremont Graduate University.
“He was very concerned that evaluation should be focused on making improvements to social policies and programs that would benefit the people who were most disadvantaged in society,” she said.
Mr. Scriven often noted that imbedded in the word evaluation was “value,” and he felt evaluators should draw conclusions about the worth of whatever they were assessing. It wasn’t enough to measure a person’s or program’s individual attributes. An evaluator needed to decide which of those attributes were most important. For example, if a car has an excellent sound system but lousy brakes, clearly the brakes are more important and should be weighted accordingly in an overall assessment of the car.
It was this line of reasoning that once got Mr. Scriven into a heated back-and-forth with the publishers of Consumer Reports, whose reviews gave a numerical rating to a product’s features without reaching conclusions about which ones mattered most. Although he was an avid reader of the magazine and believed it had done much good work, he proclaimed that the quality of its evaluations had declined over time and were uneven due to flaws in its methodology.
In a detailed article, he wrote that a co-founder of Consumers Union would “turn in his grave” at the magazine’s failure to evaluate its methodology and accept criticism.
“This failure is both professionally and socially irresponsible: professionally because it guarantees unnecessary errors, socially because it shows a lack of accountability to its membership, and incidentally to the U.S. taxpayer, since contributions to C.U. are tax-deductible,” Mr. Scriven wrote.
The Consumers Union president sent him an indignant reply, referring to his piece as a “diatribe” based on conjecture and shoddy research. “The result is a document overwhelmed with incorrect statements,” she wrote.
Mr. Scriven was blunt even with those who funded some of his work, said John Hattie, a close friend and colleague at the University of Western Australia and the University of Auckland. Mr. Scriven once wrote a scathing review of an Apple software program and published it in a journal he edited—even though Apple had provided funding for the publication.
“They were very upset and said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ And they withdrew the funding,” Mr. Hattie said.
Mr. Scriven was born in 1928 into a wealthy family. His father was British and his mother was Australian. He spent the first years of his life in England, where his father was a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, but the family moved to Australia when Mr. Scriven was a young boy. There his father served as president of the Bank of Australia and they lived a few doors down from a young Rupert Murdoch.
In 1956, Mr. Scriven received a doctorate from Oxford University, where he studied philosophy. While there, he was a standout on the rowing team and once won an essay contest for which the prize was a chance to meet Albert Einstein. His essay—on a topic related to astronomy—won out over a submission from the head of the British Astronomical Society.
“He was a true polymath,” Mr. Hattie said.
By all accounts, Mr. Scriven was also arrogant, and his teaching style intimidated many of his students. Tall and heavyset, he was imposing both intellectually and physically. He made an impression when he walked into a room. Although his blunt style put off some people, his friends cared for him deeply.
“He was a brilliant and deep thinker,” said Rhonda Kutter, a Point Reyes Station resident who worked as Mr. Scriven’s administrative assistant for seven years. “He gave me a great opportunity. It was an extremely interesting and varied job that gave me a chance to work with his interesting colleagues all around the world.”
Among the many assignments he gave Ms. Kutter was typing letters he would dictate in long, complex sentences. Even after several paragraphs, without referring to notes, he might return to the first sentence and ask her to remove a comma.
“He was a great writer, but his sentences were very, very, very long,” Ms. Kutter said.
Mr. Scriven had moved to Inverness in 1970 with his wife, Mary Anne Warren, a professor of feminist philosophy at the University of San Francisco who was 18 years his junior. “They were absolutely crazy about each other,” said Ms. Davidson, his longtime friend. “It was an epic meeting of the minds as well as the hearts.”
They lived off and on in a home at the end of Drakes View Drive with an ocean view stretching from Limantour to Chimney Rock. Mr. Scriven had to rebuild the place after it was destroyed in the 1995 Vision fire.
The couple had no children, and Mr. Scriven leaves behind no surviving family. Donations in his memory can be left to the Faster Forward Fund, which Mr. Scriven founded to support innovative evaluation projects that benefit people with unmet needs.
A virtual memorial service will be held in late October. For information, email [email protected] or visit https://fasterforwardfund.org