Worcester Polytechnic Institute - Peddler Yearbook (Worcester, MA)

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had several different interests that went quite deeply and I was trying to sort them out. At that time one ' s choice was limited to very traditional engineering programs and very traditional liberal arts programs. Hence, had programs such as the one at WPI been in existence, I would have sought it out. It is not an easy matter to describe how one ' s educational preferences and choices influence one ' s experience and future career. I think that college students have difficulty perceiving how their future career paths relate to their immediate educational experience. Justifiably so, they have difficulty in recognizing that these paths are very tortuous. What one may be doing at age 35 can be far different from what one may be doing at age 45, which is likely to be different from what one will be doing at age 55. It is a mistaken notion to believe that your education sets you on a straight line trajectory at age 20 for your future career. In my own case, my college experience uncovered a strong personal desire to become a part of higher education. I found the course content very stimulating intellectually, but I also wanted to know why things were the way they appeared to be. How did our social and economic institutions evolve? How did different industries mature? How do the technological, human and economic pieces join in influencing the development of society? I acquired an interest in the history of technology. It became clear to me that I was attracted to a career in education, but I did not want that career divorced from real life factors. But within higher education one has a choice of direction. You can become caught up in your own scholarly pursuits, including graduate education, and become divorced from the rest of the educational process. 77ms is very tempting for an individual and it is one of the reasons why many people are attracted to an academic career. The opportunity to isolate yourself. define your own problems, and essentially support yourself through teaching is an attractive alternative. Every academician has to face this decision of emphasis. Higher education is essentially the only institution in our society in which one has the opportunity to pursue one ' s own interests. While I have pursued the scholarly mode at various times in my own career, I decided that at this stage there were other dimensions of higher education which for me were of greater interest and importance. Q: Do you see any changes which will or should come about in the near future in higher education? A: I believe there will be an extensive self-evaluation in educational institutions with respect to the relevance of educational content to the life-long learning needs of individuals in our society. 77ie notion that just the first four or five years in college is sufficient for an entire lifetime is being challenged. I think that even the traditional elite universities will be forced to examine their programs in light of the recognition that learning is a life-long endeavor. Engineering education has experienced this problem for many years as a result of technological obsolescence, and we have tried to meet the need through short courses and continuing education. However, it has been a patchwork, add-on approach and institutions have not looked at modifications of their basic programs. When they do, I think that many of them will recognize the importance of the fundamental elements of the WPI Plan. Although there was a great flurry of activity in the 1960 ' s involving the use of television for education, this development has not penetrated education to the extent originally foreseen. In fact, there has been some disenchantment with so-called educational technology. The technological approach to education is a very passive one unless one utilizes interactive modes such as programmed learning. However, it is now clear that these interactive modes of instruction are quite expensive. We ' ve also learned that the presence of an instructor is important in fostering human interaction and stimulating interest. To some extent we have rediscovered what was intuitively understood in the time of Plato. Namely, from the point of view of human interaction and efficiency, an effective teaching approach is to have a professor talk to a group of individuals in a classroom of modest size. If you try to pick apart the process of education and make it a technological process, you remove the human element. The interchange which takes place through the look on a person ' s face, the way he rolls his eyes, or the way he phrases a question is lost if you reduce education to interfacing with a machine. But after recognizing these limitations, I still believe that educational technology will at some stage come to play an important role in higher education. When educators feel comfortable with releasing certain parts of the educational experience to technological assistance and concentrating their efforts on those parts of education where human interaction is most important, then educational technology will find a very useful role. This will require much hard work and, clearly, we have a very long way to go. Q: Are institutions of higher education in much worse financial condition than they were a few years ago? If so, do you know of any way around the problem? How has the WPI Plan influenced the financial situation? A: The financial position and security of private institutions has eroded very seriously in recent years. Using 1950 as a benchmark year, when fifty percent of the college students were in private institutions and fifty percent in public institutions, we have moved to a present division of almost eighty percent in public institutions and twenty percent in private or so-called 27

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institution. Another reason for emphasizing master ' s level work relates to the development of graduate education since the early 1950 ' s when engineering graduate education came of age nationally. Prior to World War II graduate work was not viewed as a significant component in the life of most engineering institutions. World War II changed all that because engineering systems and devices were very relevant to wartime needs. Hence, a definite watershed occurred so that after World War II there was an awareness on the part of faculties of the role of research and development in industry. All of a sudden this became a very desirable and attractive goal for educational institutions. However, what did these institutions do? The vast majority of them copied the traditions that had been established prior to World War II in the natural sciences — physics and chemistry — which themselves were to some extent patterned after traditional scholarly work in the humanities. So the rapid development in engineering graduate education of the nineteen fifties and sixties was concentrated at the Ph.D. level. Ph.D. programs became part of the fabric of higher education in engineering during this period. The master ' s level was given relatively little attention. In fact, in many institutions it was suppressed so that it was not even viewed as a valuable goal to pursue. The other important major change in engineering education right after World War II was the great expansion of the humanities in undergraduate engineering curricula, together with an increased emphasis on the so-called engineering sciences. As a result, many courses that had provided engineering disciplinary depth, especially upper class disciplinary depth, were forced out of the curricula. Hence, although the education was still of four years duration, the content of that education was changed substantially. The disciplinary depth and sophistication thai was included earlier could now only be achieved if you added another year, a so- called fifth year. Some institutions experimented with a fifth year at the undergraduate level. In fact, Cornell was the leading institution which implemented the five-year undergraduate degree. But, it could not maintain a five-year undergraduate degree program in competition with the great growth of graduate work, where a master ' s degree could be obtained at the end of five years. It was partly a marketing phenomena. So (he five-year undergraduate concept was abandoned and Cornell changed the fifth year to a master ' s year. It is a long explanation, but one needs to understand the history in order to see that the stage was set for the introduction of a graduate program different from the Ph.D. in which research is the main goal. Thus, it became very natural to create a Master of Engineering program with a project component and with a goal distinct from that of the Ph.D. It was also my belief at that time that in the steady state, after the R D industry stabilized and the Ph.D. market became saturated, the master ' s degree would be a very desirable degree from the industrial point of view. I think that the events of the 1970 ' s have substantiated this belief. The validity of this point of view is now being recognized nationally, for many schools are now emphasizing master ' s degree programs. In a sense this is analogous to the M.B.A. degree in Business Schools. Consequently, several factors were present in shaping my decision to give a high priority to a Master of Engineering program. Now, one of the major difficulties at a private institution is the need to fund such programs. The tuition level is high relative to public institutions. Further, the Ph.D. programs which were created relied on federal contracts to support the graduate students. In fact, very few Ph.D. students in engineering support themselves. Federal grants and contracts provide both tuition and a stipend on which to live. The whole thrust of government funding from the 1950 ' s to the present time has been to support contract research at the Ph.D. level. However, most master ' s degree programs do not emphasize research so that these students do not qualify for research contract support. Consequently, before implementing a master ' s program one must provide a financial aid base that is per capita at least equal to that at the undergraduate level. At Cornell one of my major priorities was to raise funds for financial assistance for master ' s degree students. Q: How much of an example do you think a college president should set? Would you consider yourself the kind of technological humanist that the Plan is striving to produce? A: The president has a responsibility not only to support the main program components of the WPI Plan but also to work with the faculty to improve and perfect the academic program. However, in saying that, one must be clear that the academic program is largely in the domain of the faculty and it is their responsibility to implement it. To me, the phrase technological humanist means an individual who first of all possesses technological expertise, while also being aware of and capable of contributing to the social and human environment in which we all live. For many years I have tried to fulfill this concept of the Plan. I believe that all of higher education, including engineering, arts and sciences, and other disciplines should strive to educate students in the spirit of the technological humanist. Q: What are your feelings on the Plan? A: I am very impressed by the Plan and think that the four major degree components have a fundamental validity of their own. I believe that when other institutions strive for educational reform they will, in fact, adopt a number of these components. It could be helpful if we obtained feedback from our graduates after they have had some experience in their work careers. Perhaps we are unnecessarily overemphasizing certain topics, or there may be some things that we ' re missing or not giving sufficient emphasis. As with all new academic programs, once they are introduced and stabilized they can be surrounded by a kind of orthodoxy. We have to watch out that such orthodoxies not get so deeply embedded that modification of the Plan becomes exceedingly difficult. Modern education is a dynamic process and I am an enthusiast for the Plan. Q: Do you see any future changes in the Plan that you will try to implement? 7 A: Although I don ' t see any major changes in the Plan, there are areas which we must strengthen and perfect. All of higher education finds the IQP area a difficult one in which to educate. It requires crossing disciplinary boundaries and the whole structure of higher education is discipline oriented. Educators have been so schooled in the notion that they must have deep disciplinary expertise before they can express a valid opinion on a topic, that they have a tremendous reluctance to educate in the IQP area. Nationally, in the last ten years there have been many programs in this direction, but superficiality and the lack of focus have led to considerable uneasiness on how one should educate in this mode. Consequently, I look for continued efforts to strengthen the IQP area. I would also like to see WPI expand and deepen its real life MQP projects with industry. It is a marvelous opportunity for an institution to introduce the student to the real world of engineering problems. He sees not only the technological factors necessary to getting the job done, but he also sees that other important factors such as human relations, communications, and economics often provide the governing constraint. The way problems are posed in an educational institution leads one to believe that the deciding factors are technological, but real- world experience shows that engineering is a multidisciplinary endeavor. I am a strong supporter of the project mode in education. A co-op program another opportunity for real-world experience. Hence, I will encourage WPI to expand its efforts in co- op education. In doing this we must be careful to distinguish between MQP activity and the co-op work periods, but I believe that we can distinguish between the two. I believe that many students seek a co-op experience and WPI should be alert to this opportunity. Q: If the WPI Plan had been in existence when you were starting as a college student, would you have sought I out the Plan and how would that have influenced your educational experience A: Had the WPI concept of education been in existence at that time, I would have been attracted to such an institution, because at that time I was seeking a real-life dimension to motivate my education. I didn ' t start college as an engineer. Upon graduation from high school I wasn ' t at all certain what I wanted to study in college. I 26

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independent institutions. There is no question but that in the last twenty five years we have witnessed a major societal shift towards mass higher education. If one includes research universities, large state universities, four year colleges and two-year colleges, then higher education has almost become a universal right. Because of that, it has become politicized. These changes between the public and private sectors have major financial ramifications. The private institutions survived because between increases in tuition and fees, income from endowments, and growth in the number of students they were able to remain viable. The growth factor is often overlooked in such discussions, but in the 1950 ' s and 1960 ' s it was the normal technique used to balance budgets. By adding students you kept adding to income. It was this growth in college age children which provided the driving force for the major expansion of the public sector. It ivas considered to be a political good so that political parties adopted programs to provide mass higher education. The economic constraint on obtaining a college education was greatly reduced. Of course, although the public institution appeared to be less expensive to any one individual, the total cost was at least as much as that in private institutions. Subsidies from taxes keep the public institutions in business, but they are spread over the entire population. However, the era of growth is over. We are currently in a period of no growth and the 1980 ' s will be a decade in which the number of students will markedly decline. Hence, the growth factor is no longer available as a budget balancing technique. Another difficulty results from the erosion of endowments, which have not increased in proportion to the increase in the number of students and budgets. Most of the endowments were added in an era in which it was possible to create and accumulate this kind of wealth. Because of government regulations and restrictions, it is now much more difficult to create such wealth. Consequently, income from endowments has become a smaller and smaller part of the income needed to meet the total expense. Another factor causing the erosion of endowment is the effect of inflation. Endowment income averages between five and six percent, so that higher inflation rates inevitably mean a reduction in the value of the endowment. If heavy taxation remains or even increases, if high inflation continues and rates of eight percent or higher become politically acceptable, then there is no way that the independent sector can compete with the subsidized public sector without passing an increased fraction of the costs on to the students through increased tuition. Thus, these government policies of taxation and inflation will create a very competitive situation between the public and private institutions in the 1980 ' s. The competitive battle lines are already being drawn and the private institutions are threatened. Although most of the institutions will manage to continue to exist, some of them will not survive. But eventually survival will depend on some form of subsidization to the independent sector from the public sector. Some giant steps have already been taken in the direction of a public presence in the independent sector through federal and state programs of financial aid. Over half of our students receive financial aid of one kind or another. The question is whether these programs will reach a level enabling the private sector to survive. With regard to WPI, we have already introduced a policy of no growth in the number of students. The physical plant, facilities, and the size of the faculty cannot justify further growth. Hence, we will have to manage our financial affairs in an era of no growth. I think that WPI is in an advantageous position because it has implemented its attractive and innovative plan before the difficult and competitive decade of the 1980 ' s has arrived. Many institutions will be forced to look at their market and they will try to change their objectives by coupling with careerism. Severe institutional strains will occur as financial difficulties arise. You can picture schools running from programmatic pillar to post, grasping at educational straws, and biting off little pieces of the market in one area after the other until the whole concept of institutional integrity becomes unstable. Fortunately, WPI has thought through its program and has it in place before the most difficult period arrives. Intewiew with President and Mrs. Crunch Q: How has your life changed due to your move from Cornell to WPI? A (President Cranch): Apart from the academic side, one of the big changes has been the extensive involvement with students and student groups. That is a new dimension for me because at a big university many of the functions and activities are handled through a large offic e of student affairs. Faculty members and deans do not get nearly as involved with the affairs of students as they do at WPI. Q: Have I read somewhere that you ' re an avid hockey fan? Which team was your favorite before the Bruins? A (President Cranch): In theory I have been a Montreal Canadiens fan, but in practice I have a split personality. I admire the Canadiens for their finesse and talent. It is a wonderful sight to watch them skate and see Ken Dryden play goal. But I ' m also a person who by nature roots for the underdog. I think it would be good for ice hockey if the Flyers, Bruins or Rangers could win once in a while. A long time ago I was a Ranger fan but I gave up on them. A few years ago I rooted for the Flyers before they became so physical and abusive and tried to intimidate everyone. I think that the Bruins have a good team. Q: Does President Cranch bring his work home from the office? A (Mrs. Cranch): President Cranch has his work here right now. There are piles of papers both at home and in his office. One day I set up a card table in our sitting room upstairs to begin Christmas cards and before I knew it there were piles of papers there. He found that it was a lovely sunny spot one Sunday morning so he sat down there to work. He ' s always been that way. I ' ve never seen a professor who didn ' t have piles of papers. (President Cranch): We were talking about careers earlier, and in an academic career your work is with you all the time, twenty-four hours a day. If you track the hours spent, it can easily reach 60 to 70 hours a week. Certainly 50 to 60 hours a week is not abnormal for an academician or academic administrator. You can ' t possibly accomplish everything in the so-called normal 40 hour work week in your office because of constant interruptions and the 28