Lloyd Morrisett

As of 2008, the series has received 118 Emmy Awards — more than any other television series. An estimated 77 million Americans watched the series as children. In addition to Sesame Street, at least seventeen indigenous, locally produced versions of the show are seen in countries around the world. Sesame Workshop's other shows have included The Electric Company and Pinky Dinky Doo.

In his final presidential essay, “Philanthropy and Venture Capital,” published in the 1997 annual report, Morrisett wrote: “In September of 1969, when I became president of the Markle Foundation, I began to hear questions from friends and acquaintances such as, ‘Okay, so you are a foundation president. What do you do, give away money?’ Since I did not really believe that ‘giving away money’ was what we were about, I struggled with my annoyance at the question and even more at not having a ready answer...

Morrisett was also a board member of RAND (a research institute dealing with domestic public policy and national security issues) for thirty years and chairman of the board for nine years, 1986-1995. He continues as an advisory trustee.

In 1971, Nixon's Enemies List was compiled — and Lloyd N. Morrisett was number 200, though it could have been Morrisett Sr., who was singled out as one of Nixon’s political opponents. Neither of the Morrisetts played an active role in politics.

On November 10, 1969, Sesame Street — starring Jim Henson’s Muppets — debuted. “Lloyd underplays his role in the development of Sesame Street,” said John Gardner, former president Carnegie Corporation of New York. “He’s modest, but people who saw the beginnings of Sesame Street agree that he played a very significant contributing role as a member of that very small group.”

“The years since 1969,” he wrote, “have been a voyage of discovery to see if the metaphor, ‘venture capital for social benefit’ really is the best description of what the Markle Foundation has been trying to do.”

In February 1966, at a dinner party at Cooney's Gramercy Park apartment, she and Morrisett talked about his work with early education. Morrisett says he asked Cooney, "Do you think television can be used to teach young children?" And she said, "I don't know, but I’d like to talk about it." Television seemed like an ideal platform to use in the Carnegie foundation's goal of reaching children.

In December 1965, as Morrisett's then 3-year-old daughter Sarah watched the test patterns as she waited for her cartoons to start one Sunday morning, her father noticed something. "It struck me there was something fascinating to Sarah about television," he said.

Morrisett first encountered the Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropic foundation focused on education, while he was at the Social Science Research Council. Morrisett joined Carnegie as an executive assistant to Gardner in 1959, later becoming vice president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He stayed with the corporation for ten years. One of the main contributions of Carnegie during those years was the creation of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is the only nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas.

In 1956, Morrisett landed a teaching job in the School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley, but he was having doubts about academic life. It lacked mystery and excitement, he thought, and he was “unimpressed by the seriousness of his students.” He joined the Social Science Research Council in New York as a staff member from 1958 to 1959. While there, he met Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell. Simon and Newell, both faculty members at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon), are “credited with laying much of the groundwork for the emerging field of cognitive psychology, which became Morrisett’s lifelong scholarly passion.” They based their theoretical models on computer simulations of the thought process.

Inspired by Maltzman, whose area was human learning, creativity and human thinking, Morrisett attended Yale in 1953 for three years and earned a PhD in experimental psychology. There, he met and apprenticed with Carl I. Hovland, a leading psychologist who founded the Yale Communications and Attitude Change program. In later years, Morrisett would credit that apprenticeship with sparking his interest in communications.

Morrisett attended Oberlin College and received his BA in philosophy in 1951. Originally, he had wanted to become a chemist, but after taking a fascinating course in his junior year, he realized he wanted to study experimental psychology. He became an Oberlin College trustee and was chairman of the board from 1975 to 1981. He did graduate work in psychology for two years at UCLA, where he met an assistant professor named Irving Maltzman, whom he describes as “very important, very influential in psychology.” Morrisett became Maltzman's research assistant, and together, they co-authored six papers and studies.

Morrisett was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the son of Jessie Watson and Lloyd Newton Morrisett. The family moved to New York City in 1933 to escape the hardships brought about by the Dust Bowl and the Depression. After the Great Depression, the family moved to California, where Morrisett met Julian Ganz, a middle school classmate who would later introduce him to Joan Ganz Cooney, the co-founder of Children's Television Workshop. Morrisett assumed he was headed for a life of academia like his father, a professor at UCLA. “I was brought up to believe that being a professor was the best job in the world,” he said.

Lloyd N. Morrisett Jr. (born November 2, 1929) is an American experimental psychologist with a career in education, communications, and philanthropy. He is one of the founders of the Children's Television Workshop (now known as Sesame Workshop), the organisation that created the children's television shows Sesame Street, in which Morrisett created with Joan Ganz Cooney.