Brian Iwata: My First Student, Who Shaped on My Behavior

My life changed in the fall of 1970. A few days before the beginning of class, I was in my new office on the 3rd floor of the Florida State University (FSU) Psychology Building, busy unpacking books and trying to get settled in when there was a knock at the partially opened door. A young man in his early 20s pushed the door open and said, “Hi, I'm Brian Iwata. I'm your new student.” I replied, “Welcome, Brian. It's nice to meet you.” Brian followed with, “And what do you do?” Unaware that I was getting a graduate student because the selection process occurred the previous spring while I was still at the University of Kansas (KU), this came as quite a surprise.

Jumping ahead a little, I would have to say that this was the most fortunate thing that could possibly have happened to me. Someone on the admissions committee did me a giant favor that would make an enormous difference in my career. Sadly, I never learned who that was. But, back to the story.

I explained that I was a new assistant professor and that my specialty was behavior analysis, applied behavior analysis to be more specific. We chatted a bit about Brain's trip to Tallahassee from Baltimore. He told me he was newly married and this was a big adventure for him and his wife, Peg, as they had not been to Florida before. I believed that our initial meeting went well the second that Brian gestured to my partly filled bookcase and said, “Do you have anything that I can read? I'd like to learn about this field of yours.” I pulled out my heavily marked-up copy of Science and Human Behavior (Skinner, 1953) and Case Studies in Behavior Modification (Ullman & Krasner, 1965) and gave these to him as good introductions to behaviorism. I explained that these books included important examples of how applied behavior analysis could be used to change behavior. I concluded with pointing to the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) sitting on my desk as I said, “And this is going to be the primary journal for our new field. Mont Wolf is the editor. I studied under him.”