Gordon Freedman

In the mid-’70s, Gordon Freedman was a college student in Michigan with no political experience, but went straight for complete immersion: “I literally drove to Washington, D.C. from northern Michigan in my Volkswagen,” he recalls.

He arrived to a frenzied scene and stood in line regularly for a chance to watch the 250 hours of Senate hearings on the Watergate scandal. Someone in line flippantly told him if he was so obsessed, maybe he could get a job – and he did. From there, he launched a diverse career, working as a journalist, then producing Hollywood films (including A Brief History of Time, a documentary about Stephen Hawking, and Money For Nothing, based on reporting by journalist Mark Bowden).

He ultimately ended up in Carmel Valley. Now 64, Freedman runs a nonprofit called the National Laboratory for Education Transformation, which promises to find ways to seamlessly incorporate tech into classrooms. Before starting NLET in 2012, Freedman was a VP at Blackboard, a virtual learning company.

How’d you land the Watergate investigation job?

The administrative assistant heard me [seeking a job at the front desk of Sen. Herman Talmadge, D-Georgia], and said, “Look: We have thousands of letters from all over the country, some with evidence. If you take this over, sort it all out, decide what’s important, we’ll put you on the Watergate committee staff.” I was in charge of going through Nixon’s campaign papers. I had a staff of 13 law students.

Anything interesting come of all those papers?

The Nixon Administration had a program called the “responsiveness program.” It was a Nixon loyalty program; they were slipping people into the civil service in three categories: people who controlled grants, communication and hiring. They wanted to be able to run the government when they weren’t in power. I discovered that, and it became my work.

But your work included just a short stint investigating government corruption.

During those hearings, [Chair Sen. Sam Ervin] used to hold up a copy of the Constitution and he would shake it at these guys like shaking a cross at a vampire and he would say, “This is the law. You guys are not the law.”

I was in college, and I did a paper on corruption. I mapped out how practice becomes principle. Institutions are there to carry out a set of principles, but the bureaucratic day-to-day almost always takes over. That was an important learning for me.

So how does your interest in corruption connect to your other ventures?

I fall into four chunks: D.C., Hollywood, technology and education. I transitioned from Capitol Hill as an investigator to newspaper work, then to television and then to film. There is a logical progression.

Why did you go into the education field?

It’s very simple: It’s revenge against my little school in Michigan, where there was this thick plexiglass barrier between me and knowledge. I felt ripped off.

Then [my oldest of three children] went to kindergarten in Pacific Palisades. I was horrified; it didn’t look any different than the school I went to in Michigan.

What would you have expected it to look like?

The Internet was just happening. There was an ability to explore the world beyond a textbook. I expected it to be experiential. But it was very rote.

The technology we have now supports the school system we’ve had forever. At the same time, dropout rates and performance rates are terrible. When I was at Blackboard, I kept asking the question, why isn’t there a Manhattan Project for education? I decided to create a nonprofit that would take Silicon Valley thinking [and apply it to education].

NLET promises to use tech to provide a more personalized education. Why?

I asked a friend, “What’s your daughter into?” Gymnastics, he said, but she hates school, and she really hates math. But she’s really a geometric apparatus! When she jumps, physics and math are operational right there.

I remember getting to physics senior year and finally realizing math had a point. I wished someone had told me that years earlier, before I decided to check out of math.

It happened to me in algebra. I thought the As and Xs had some secret meaning; they lost me. I might’ve been a scientist, you might’ve been a scientist. To let a school district be the determinant of a kid’s future – that’s really not fair.