We Need Our Own Surge....
In Technology and Science

In the 1950’s, after the Second World War and Korea, and the GI Bill, many of us went to school believing that Engineering was the key to even greater prosperity and a life style that would be the envy of the world.



At CUNY, that education was free of charge. I and a thousand others on my campus enrolled in Engineering in the same class that Colin Powell enrolled in, except at a different campus of the University.



On our campus, we were told to look around, because by the end of the year, the persons on either side would not be there. If they were looking to sow fear in us, it wasn’t working. We still thought we were great for graduating high school at the upper one third.



Nevertheless, the head of the Department had been right; they weren’t there.



And at the end of two years, there were fewer than sixty of us left. The composition was about 55 men students and 5 women. That was a sign of the times in the decade where women were thought qualified to be only nurses or secretaries or librarians.



Some of us changed course after three years.



I found I liked English, History and Mathematics better so I switched majors.



If ten or fifteen out of the thousand that started, it would probably have been about average.



At the time, CUNY was graduating the most PhD’s in the country and ranked high in the teaching of mathematics, chemistry and liberal arts subjects. It ranked among the top fifteen of all campuses in the teaching of Chemistry. The head of the math department was an associate of Einstein so this little liberal arts college had its share of great teachers.



Colin Powell had also switched careers before graduating.



Nevertheless, we still envisioned the acceleration of the technological age and an evolution out of conventional manufacturing.



We led the world on patents and innovations; our graduate schools were considered the world’s best.



But in recent years, all that has changed. We now lag in new patents and are down something like forty percent from a decade before.



Our schools are no longer the magnet they once were.



And students from other schools around the world consistently beat us in competitions in mathematics and science.



In the meantime, our educational infrastructure has grown mired in the past and there have been movements afoot to denigrate the role of science in our lives.



Darwinian theory has taken a hit from virtually everyone connected with this White House.



There is little acceptance among senior republican politicians for the effects of global warming and consequently very little is being done to change the status quo.



In my book, A Blueprint for Winning, I point out that educationally we are at a crisis stage. We need literally something on the style of a Roosevelt type program to revive science and mathematics in this country and to make us competitive on a world scale again.



Science and technology hold the hope of finding alternative fuel solutions that can free us up from our dependency on foreign oil It can promulgate alternatives to global warming and re-energize this country to move forward at the technological level after so many years of stasis.



Viewed through a long term lens, putting science and technology on the back burner is no longer a viable option; if we fail to act, we may be witnessing not only the transformation of this country but also surrendering to the idea that nothing can be done about the deleterious effects of global warming.



Carl Sagan, even with his lasting doubts, was always optimistic that with the right kind of commitment, we could always find a solution. We hope that the spirit of Carl Sagan and others and the character of the American people will rise to the challenge and help us reemerge as a bright shining beacon for the rest of the world, made more so by our renewed commitment to science and technology.



Les Aaron

The Armchair Curmudgeon