NOBEL FEVER: Why The Engineers Left The Shop Floor
Rowe, Jonathan
NOBEL FEVER: Why The Engineers Left The Shop Floor BY JONATHAN ROWE Bruno Weinschel is the president of Weinschel Engineering, a suburban Washington high-tech firm that makes specialized...
...Added the head of a Massachusetts communications company, “We have a hard time integrating guys coming from places like Raytheon or GTE (both defense contractors...
...Now, he observed, American engineers “get into computerization, not into the workshop...
...This gusher of federal money has twisted the enterprise of engineering itself, especially at the schools at which engineering is taught...
...They are becoming indifferent to production, period...
...By spending about $9 billion total, they were able to skim the cream of the research on which we had been spending Sums which grew from $20 billion to $SO billion: over the period...
...When they relegated manufacturing engineering to the community colleges and the technical schools, it was the beginning of the demise of American manufacturing .” In this drift to what the dean of Fresno State engineering school calls “psuedo-scientific” engineering, the engineering schools themselves were only-too-willing accomplices...
...Jean Mayer, president of Tufts University, lamented the result...
...The cost-plus contracts also enable defense contractors to grab the best engineering talent and inflate salary levels, thus making it harder even for firms which are not defense contractors to meet the overseas competition...
...the time came when it was necessary to crack the books...
...Furthermore, more funds meant a university could hire additional faculty, who in turn could raise funds...
...Over all, from 1973 to 1980 the United States was first in defense spending among Western democracies as a percentage of GNP, and last in manufacturing productivity growth and fixed investment...
...is going wrong in this regard...
...Eric Alterman is a research associate with Business Executives for National Security Inc., a trade association that monitors defense...
...In this way MIT, for example, was able by 1970 to quadruple its faculty, increase its graduate student population by almost six times and its sponsored research funding to over nine-thousand times the 1938 levels...
...The Massachusetts Institute of Technology arose in part from nearby Harvard’s reluctance to soil its scholarship with utility...
...Eric Alterman Such proficiencies could become lost arts...
...As the NASA and Department of Defense- funded research projects became more esoteric and remote from life needs, so too did the curriculum...
...Shinto recalled what he found...
...Whenever a competitive situation exists between a United States and a Japanese firm,” an MIT professor said, “we find that they have about twice as many engineers working on the problem...
...Employers reported some reluctance among [engineering] graduates to work in production .” The same, unfortunately, may be said of ourselves...
...But you hear it from engineers themselves...
...In many schools mechanical engineers do not have to learn how to weld and civil engineers do not have to learn how to survey...
...That’s a lot of engineers...
...Steel chief whose idea of meeting the foreign competition was to buy an oil company, is an accountant...
...Defense R & D is increasing dramatically, with corresponding decreases in the civilian share, and the administration wants to spend $26 billion in R & D on its Star Wars defense scenario alone...
...Is it surprising that our best engineering grads might see greener pastures in aerospace, defense, or new high-tech firms, than they do in traditional industries in which engineers take a back seat to the lawyers and financiers...
...The issue is not really trade deficits or cars...
...This impulse was reinforced by the emigration of prominent scientists from Europe that began when Hitler came to power...
...You’d also expect it to show some concern over the shortage of industrial engineers that the National Science Foundation anticipates...
...Too long” he wrote in the Educational Review, “have we submitted to be considered as furnishing something which is indeed more immediately and practically useful than the so-called liberal education, but which is, after all, less noble and fine...
...After the war, however, “the government drew off the brains into the nuclear industry...
...It’ll teach you something that the books won’t I’ A Trophy If you are only a casual reader of the national press, you may well have the impression that we have become a nation of laggards in the technology arena, left in the lurch by the eager-beaver Japanese...
...But it’s a little like going to Boston by way of Biloxi...
...While their engineering schools are not that different from ours, that changes the first day on the job, as mentioned above, when engineers are assigned to production work before anything else...
...Even to interest students today in industrial engineering, says Delbert Esar of the Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics at the University of Florida, “you first have to convince them that they are not nincompoops...
...All told, only 26 percent of the top managers of US...
...Production before prizes Such corporate stupidity aside, the federal government has been the chief villain in this tale, and you’d expect the Reagan administration to be the first to point an accusing finger...
...In the 1950s, when the change here had not yet appeared above the ground, Hisashi Shinto was employed by a Japanese shipbuilding company, and he came to America to find out what made us so successful...
...Since 1950, the United States has won more than 50 Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics, while West Germany has won ten and Japan only three...
...The defense contractors always pay more” he says...
...These turned our best engineering minds away from factories and bridges and towards the rarified realms of what is called, often disparagingly, “engineering science...
...Then too, there is the way the Department of Defense’s cost-plus contracts have made whole industries less cost-conscious and therefore less able to compete in international markets...
...In other words, the kind of rigid hierarchy that we used to snicker at in Europe and the Orient, has become a chief impediment of our own...
...But “those incredibly complex VHSlCs the military wants don’t seem to have any uses elsewhere,” one computer executive observed...
...Why did the H. J. Heinz Company resort to buying a German-made labeling machine, explaining, “There’s no American equipment that is comparable...
...In his book, Profits Without Production, Seymour Melman details the effect upon our machine tool industry...
...But to a foreign visitor coming back to this country after a 30-year absence, the change was dramatic...
...The Nobel prizes are an honor, but they are also a symptom of an approach to engineering in this country that is not all for the best...
...The theory people rule the academic roost...
...And on the other hand, some of our traditional industries were showing a remarkable indifference to the need for improvement in manufacturing and design...
...How can you expect to produce anything succesfully...
...Ironically,” Noble observes, “the scientists with their newly won respectability often enough lined up with the classicists against the technical educators across town .” MIT president Francis Amasa Walker gave eloquent expression to the resulting frustration engineers have felt, then and now...
...GM is not in the business of making cars...
...Foreign automobiles, particularly Japanese ones, are preferred by a large part of our population f’ There are a host of reasons for this drift, and the cataloguing of them has become something of a national pastime...
...One looms larger than the others, however...
...We are pursuing ‘Nobel Prize’ R & D while the Japanese and others are pursuing ‘Engineering’ R & D. We get the trophies while they make the sales...
...They are turning out too many engineers who think their worthiness is measured by their distance from the shop floor and from life needs in general...
...Our industrial firms just never believed that [manufacturing] research was the source of their salvation,” says Peter Smith, who now heads Michigan’s new Industrial Technology Institute, which was established in part to help reverse that attitude...
...In his book, Profits Without Production, Melman shows how the drive for efficiency in the traditional utilities waned, and prices rose partly as a result...
...Accordingly, even when leading engineering schools do offer practical courses, or ones related to traditional industries, the best students often don’t want to take them...
...I say give’em leather...
...Why have we lost half our market for machine tools, when not long ago we made, indisputably, the best in the world...
...Remember your social studies textbooks...
...We just didn’t commit the engineers to this effort...
...The major technology spin-off of the post-war years has not been from space or defense R & D to civilian uses...
...NOBEL FEVER: Why The Engineers Left The Shop Floor BY JONATHAN ROWE Bruno Weinschel is the president of Weinschel Engineering, a suburban Washington high-tech firm that makes specialized microwave equipment of such high quality that he exports it to West GermaTiy and Japan...
...Eugene Ferguson, who taught engineering for 20 years at Iowa State before changing to the history of science at the University of Delaware, recalls that “you planned your research so it would be the kind that was fashionable...
...Of all the board members of German corporations 60 percent came up through engineering...
...Radar, integrated circuits, jet engines and other innovations were indeed spun off in this fashion...
...In West Germany, even the elite engineering graduates-those who receive the so-called Dip1 Ing-must work for six months in industry before they are eligible for a degree...
...The scorn they heap upon the production worker is reciprocated...
...Henry Ford “hated abstract learning because it was ‘non-productive’ and because he possessed none of it himself,” a contemporary observed...
...The faculty is judged by the number of papers they write, not by whether they solve problems .” Adds Adams...
...While the reasons for the Japanese economic success are many, this step surely contributed to the remarkable quality of their products...
...In Carl Swift’s day, steel had been the mother lode, and he came up the old way, starting as a carpenter at the Weirton (West Virginia) Steel Company during the Depression and taking technical courses in electroplating at night...
...Einstein in particular became a superstar in America...
...Instead, the administration is making the problem worse...
...This research army was marching largely to the tune of the federal contracts that were feeding it...
...The GM chief whose policies nixed the extra $100 for the better suspension for the Corvair was a finance man based in New York...
...People tend to teach what they are researching,” said Joel Yudkin, a former Lockheed engineer who is now with the Mid-Peninsula Conversion Project in California’s Silicon Valley...
...Your young engineers were working in the workshops, along with the workers,” he said...
...At the same time, facilities for teaching these became out-of-date...
...Before I could graduate,’’ he recalls of his student days in Germany, “I had to go through a half-year practicum [practical experience] at the Carl Zeiss Company...
...The trouble is, he says, “it just doesn’t have many students .” Says a professor at another school, “A very small fraction wants to make the steel mill better, and they are not the best .” A major reason is that according to the present pecking order, such endeavors do not rate high...
...When Japanese companies open factories in the United States, by contrast, they complain about how hard it is to get the engineers out onto the shop floor...
...and the problem is yet more fundamental...
...Jamie Merisotis provided research assistance for lhis article...
...There is a story that former MIT president Jerome Weisner pleaded with thenPresident Kennedy not to embark upon the space program for precisely this reason...
...and as the engineering schools found ways to charge their general operating expenses onto the research contracts, they became hooked...
...The Pentagon just about launched this industry back in the fifties and the commercial uses have been undeniable...
...These come in handy if you are building a cruise missile...
...We still have about twice as many engineering researchers as does Japan, and through the seventies we maintained four times the level of technical activity measured by patents, value-added in manufacturing and the like...
...Historian David Noble points out in his book, America by Design, that by the turn of the century when engineers had gained admittance to the academy, they were still treated as second-class citizens, even by the physical scientists with whom they were once allied...
...The engineering faculty is “probably the last to see the need,” he says...
...The engineers knew the production program, and they knew how to use machine tools...
...It would not be fair to blame the engineering schools entirely, or even mostly, for this regrettable turn of affairs...
...It’s values...
...France had Pasteur and Currie, Germany had Einstein and Planck...
...A whole new generation of budding young scientists and engineers was suddenly dreaming of mastering the General Theory of Relativity rather than aspiring to build a better mousetrap...
...While this inclination to specialize is native to most academic faculties, defense contracts with their secrecy requirements have made it especially severe...
...We need to combine engineering and finance...
...That’s true...
...Ralph Nader and others have criticized the engineering schools for failing to question the projects to which they, and their graduates, are hired to lend their hands...
...There’s a saying around Detroit that when the federal government first enacted air pollution regulations, Honda hired 200 engineers while the American companies hired 200 lawyers...
...It doesn’t take a genius to see that we need to show much more concern for the translation of research into practical use...
...I had to get my hands dirty...
...David M. Roderick, the U.S...
...Then, as though addressing the world outside that car, he added, “Go out and get your hands dirty and your fingers burnt...
...Faculty were hired in part on their potential for attracting research grants, and were expected to bring in a set amount each year...
...At the same time the engineering schools were neglecting some of the basic industries, they were becoming highly specialized, with individual faculty members knowing more and more about less and less...
...It did until World War 11...
...Seymour Melman of Columbia University cites the utility industry as an example...
...On this particular day, Swift was giving me the tour of Weirton’s facilities, which are spread out over town...
...This elitism, which our engineering schools help breed, carries over into the workplace, where it is especially destructive...
...Considering the problems our industries are having in meeting the challenge of imports on that score, this is cause for concern...
...Great Britain, the other Nobel prize champ, spends almost as large a share on space and defense as we do...
...Equally serious is our neglect of the processes by which products are made...
...We can put people on the lathe in there and determine what they can do, not just by a diploma, but by actual experience .” For no particular reason, I asked him if he felt this approach was being neglected today, if Americans were putting too much weight on academics...
...On the one hand, the federal government was plying them with money...
...They advocate their own programs .” Quality control is another aspect of the production process that is “badly neglected” in our engineering schools, according to a vice president of the Intel Corporation...
...The Japanese are especially assiduous about wiping out any traces of elitism among their engineers...
...When one Ira Remsen, a chemistry instructor at Williams College, requested funds for laboratory equipment, he was told to keep in mind that Williams was a “college and not a technical school...
...Engineering school enrollments actually doubled over the last decade...
...The totem pole of status,” said Ferguson, “has the physicists at the top, the electronic engineers next, and so on down to the industrial engineers at the bottom .” The engineering schools used to be places for problem solvers, but now a “scientistic culture” began to prevail, in which research was valued more than invention, according to one midwestern engineering dean who asked not to be named...
...But the ideal of applied science, of learning connected to the needs of the people, could and should have prevailed...
...Weinschel reels off the list: video tape technology developed by Ampex, transistors by Bell Labs, and so on down the line...
...Ultimately, he became one of the company’s chief trouble-shooters and helped develop the processes that made Weirton a synonym for tin plate of the highest quality...
...There is a laboratory across the hall...
...The director of career planning at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, the heart of steel country, says that such recruiting has dropped to “near zero” in recent years...
...Then they built this technology into high-value products such as stereos and cars, and sold it back to us...
...They erase the social stigma first,” says Professor Tsurumi...
...companies listed in Who’s Who in Finance and Industry, are engineers...
...The result of [this] secrecy is that you have no relation to the end product of your work,” an MIT scientist said...
...It takes a while for that thought to penetrate...
...There was lots of drafting and attention to machinery...
...Domestic companies seem incapable of engineering such relatively simple products as subway cars...
...Power” used to be a staple in the engineering curriculum, Melman recalls, and the attendant proficiency and commitment helped keep electricity prices falling for industrial users...
...He has strong ideas about how to run a company...
...it depends what game you are playing...
...he says, and the design and operation of traditional power plants seemed pretty dull stuff by comparison...
...The public “can’t see it,” the former salesman replied...
...In Japan, by contrast, engineering is perceived as the linchpin of commercial enterprise,” according to the “Finniston Report,” and upwards of two-thirds of the chief executives (and half of all directors) there have this kind of background...
...Partly in reaction to such indignities-though also because engineering was becoming more sophisticated-the schools stressed “engineering science” more and more, leaving practical training to the employers...
...This sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect from knee-jerk, anti-weapons types when they want to sound practical...
...This remark made me think of a conversation I had months before, with a retired engineer from a very different industry-steel...
...The Department of Commerce has found that it takes ten man-years of civilian R & D to produce a commercial patent, while it takes 1,OOO man-years of defense R & D to produce the Same result...
...It happened so gradually that most Americans weren’t even aware of it...
...Because they knew the production process in detail, they were able to get greater productivity and high quality...
...He shares profits with his employees and provides for their continuing education because they are, he says, his most valuable assets...
...The chemical industry, for example, “is not close to ultimate energy efficiency,” said Dick Foster, of McKinsey & Co...
...It was in this ground that the Manhattan Project, the space project, and the arms race took root...
...But you can’t study this...
...Collages of disciplinary areas aligned with the basic sciences,” Peter Smith, the former technical director of the Office of Naval Research, calls them...
...Well, let’s consider another fact...
...Tsurumi is skeptical that efforts to deal with problems of industrial America can succeed unless we eliminate this cleavage...
...Moon tune Indeed, when you subtract out our space and defense R & D, which is close to one-third the national total, then the amount left over lags behind both West Germany and Japan, which spend only 8 and 2 percent on space and defense respectively...
...Before the war,” Adams explains, the curriculum was “empirical...
...Suddenly, there were millions in federal dollars for research that was not only in disputably scientific but sexy as well: It was goodbye bridges and assembly machines for factories...
...From the beginning, engineers have suffered from an acute status problem in American academia...
...There is more to this than money,” he says, pacing his den-like office, which has piles of papers and technical journals on just about every horizontal surface, including the couch...
...Great Britain, after all, is number two in Nobels, far ahead of West Germany and Japan, and it has hardly been a model of economic pr0wess.A parlamentary inquiry into the state of engineering in that country, called the “Finniston Report,” saw the problem...
...They just tended to pick up whatever innovations came along .” The steel industry has been especially blase in this regard...
...Semiconductors are an example...
...Then why the litany of industrial decline that has become so depressingly familiar...
...The problem, he says, is that we “fail to apply and market our innovations competitively.’’ Ferguson offers the example of the original Metroliner cars, which were “loaded with sophisticated control gear, but [were] unable to run in a snowstorm because the fan sucked snow into the electrical system I’ This is the same mentality that can produce a technically marvelous M1 tank, the only deficiency of which is its questionable ability to operate on the actual battlefield...
...They have no sense of the scope of a project .” It is difficult not to connect this overspecialization, this obsession with parts to the exclusion of wholes, with our puzzling inability to make things that work well...
...Moreover, the secrecy required of defense R & D often precludes such spinoffs since the Pentagon isn’t about to let a vital new technology find its way into a radio that a Russian diplomat might buy...
...As we devoted more and more resources to the space program and defense, important areas were neglected...
...The arrival on our shores of people like Einstein, Fermi, Teller and Von Braun made “science” more exotic than it had ever seemed before, and propelled it into the airy realms...
...The MIT course catalog, for example, devotes a couple of prosaic paragraphs to manufacturing and materials processing, while the Department of Nuclear Engineering gets a page-plus paean that reads as though it was written by an industry publicist...
...Like Weinschel, Swift is a courteous and deeply thoughtful man who follows a question intently, his eyes focusing inward as though trying to grasp the principle of a machine...
...Too many people try to work out the problem who have never worked the job,” he said...
...Tom Daly of Keltron, a Massachusetts high-tech firm, described his difficulty finding a quality assurance manager, a speciality in great demand among defense contractors...
...It makes about half the R & D effort of its Japanese counterpart, and major engineering schools such as MIT, Cal Tech and Purdue cite a sharp decline in steel industry recruiting...
...Originally rejected from such citadels of learning as Harvard College for dealing in practical matters ill-suited to the education of a gentleman, they had to strike out on their own...
...One of the Pentagon’s more recent projects, however, is the Very High‘ Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSlC) that is 100 times faster than current models...
...To many of our engineers think their worthiness is measured by their distance from the shop floor and from life needs in general...
...Regis McKenna, a high-tech business consultant in California, points out that between 1950 and 1978, Japanese firms bought roughly 32,000 licenses from foreign-mainly US.-firms to use technology that had been developed in those countries...
...Not so long ago, we were the practical craftsmen, the ingenious Yankees...
...During World War 11, Vannever Bush, Dean of Engineering at MIT and Director of the Office of Scientific Research for the military, had to call his engineers “scientists” because otherwise the officers did not show them sufficient respect...
...As Lewis Smullin of MIT put it, “The Japanese aren’t wasting brain power investing in Star Wars and MX missiles...
...They in turn then needed more graduate students...
...On numerous occasions large companies have tried to buy him out, for very large sums of money...
...It’s made many major contributions to the ferrous metal field,” which is no small matter, given the state of our steel industry...
...This one seemed to touch a chord...
...Eiitism is just one of the problems that the changes in engineering education have wrought...
...The engineering schools used to have tinkering places,” says Yoshi Tsurumi, a professor at Baruch College, who has studied carefully the reasons for America’s economic misfortunes...
...The engineering schools aren’t just agnostic regarding what we produce...
...It didn’t show up for a while because we had plenty of engineers in the pipeline,” observes Weinschel...
...It’s been from our Nobel Prize R & D generally to the Japanese and others who are more disposed to put such research to commercial uses...
...Not so...
...I was a nosy type of person,” he said...
...They bring in all these quality circles and fancy things, but my prediction is that they are not going to make any progress until they deal with the class structure in their own plants...
...With 20 percent of this industry now devoted to defense contracts, we import 25 percent of our machine tools, compared to only 4 percent in 1961...
...Then the direction of our engineering endeavors began to change...
...but he, or at least his company, built an automobile that worked and that millions of people wanted...
...They feature analysis rather than synthesis, what Melman calls “microcomponents,” instead of wholes, whether whole products or whole processes by which products are made...
...They can smell it .” Had GM been willing to spend a mere $100 on a better suspension system and other improvements for the original Corvair, that car might have been the smashing success that could well have turned the domestic industry towards economical small cars in time to meet the foreign competition...
...Florida’s Tesar agrees...
...This indifference to engineering is related, in turn, to the kind of individuals who run our major industrial enteprises...
...Courses that emphasized design, manufacturing, and drafting were pretty much dropped...
...Graduate engineers lack the qualities of practical application and understanding of industry,” the report concluded...
...He stopped his car at a hangar-like structure in what looks like an industrial park...
...I liked to improve the machinery...
...Engineering professors there are required to have industrial experience...
...Kennedy of course persisted, and the influx of NASA dollars, to be joined by those from the Department of Defense, insinuated themselves into the nation’s engineering schools in a way that Bernard Roth, engineering professor at Stanford University, has described: “Once they (the schools) obtained contracts,” Roth said, “the faculty needed students to do the research, (and) the result was an expansion of graduate programs...
...But now those people are getting old and there is no one to replace them .” An electric utility company endowed a chair at a midwestern engineering school, and “we had a helluva time filling it,” a faculty member there recalls...
...Your side was extremely competitive in turbines and main generators-and they were of such high quality...
...From the fifties through the oil shock of 1979, the auto industry’s idea of innovation was not likely to stir the imagination of a first-rate engineer...
...The United States had higher productivity, even though your wages were five times higher than they were in Japan,” Shinto explained later...
...The old elitism of the universities provided fertile ground for the millions of dollars the federal government began to bestow on them, first for the space program and nuclear development, and later for high-tech defense...
...Our government is more active, too, funding twice the percentage of overall R&D as is the case in Japan...
...But since our culture is so fond of prizes, I’d like to propose a new one-a Nobel for applied engineering...
...The object aimed at is culture, not practical knowledge...
...It would reward not esoteric research, but the application of discovery for concrete human good...
...You [weren’t] going out to the boondocks to improve the capability of local industry...
...It is the federal government...
...Still, the curriculum was geared heavily to production, and respectability was hard to come by...
...American engineers consider it beneath their dignity,” says Tsurumi...
...The untutored genius of an Edison or Ford could not carry us forever...
...here was a scientist who conferred with world leaders and hobnobbed with movie stars like Charlie Chaplin...
...Why did Hewlett-Packard determine that Japanese-made microchips were at least twice as reliable as the ones made here...
...As the engineering curriculum changed, so too did the spirit of the schools themselves...
...Yet another sign that we are doing better than we commonly acknowledge...
...We need to rethink the plant...
...It is in the business of making money,” Alfred P. Sloan, the GM patriarch, had said...
...The machine tool industry has recently joined the auto and steel industries in seeking protection from overseas competitors...
...Too long have the graduates of such schools been spoken of as though they had acquired the arts of livelihood at some sacrifice of mental development, intellectual culture, and grace of life...
...Not so fast...
...Lee Iacocca, the president of Ford, expressed the prevailing view when asked in 1974 about front wheel drive...
...Why can’t we build a television set or a car to match a Sony or a Honda...
...That’s the training center,” he said...
...By getting their R & D at such discount rates, and having no defense or space or establishments to support, the Japanese could target their engineering resources on designing better products and manufacturing them better...
...Japanese research and development comprises less of the gross national product than our own...
...The sense of hierarchy to which academia is always inclined became more pronounced...
...Such inventiveness, combined with our vast resources, was a foundation of our economic strength...
...Under the “need to know” principle, the Department of Defense tells an individual researcher no more about a given project than that researcher needs to know to carry out his or her little component...
...Another problem, as Robert Reich of Harvard points out, is that “commercial needs and defense needs are further apart than they once were,” so the possibilities for spin-offs are fewer...
...But we had our workshop wizards such as Edison and Goodyear, Singer and Bell, and who cared who got the prizes...
...As Chalmers Johnson, author of MITI and the Japanese Miracle, and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “We are pursuing ‘Nobel Prize’ R & D while the Japanese and others are pursuing ‘Engineering’ R&D...
...Why is half the sewing equipment used in American textile mills foreign-made...
...Let 'Em Drink Tang The standard justification for the massive diversion of America’s engineering talent toward the military is the abundance of “spin-off” technologies that supposedly occur...
...We get the trophies, while they make the sales...
...Yet when he came back to America in‘ 1980 (this time as president of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, the Japanese AT&T) he found it very different in this respect than in the 1950s...
...While the disparagement of practice is regrettable in any field, in engineering the consequences have been especially grave...
...When Shinto returned to Japan, he and other managers installed this approach into their workplaces...
...We were talking about engineering and where the U.S...
...Jonathan Rowe is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...I didn’t find the same kind of intelligence in the workshop...
...Every graduating engineer was put to work in the factory before he did anything else...
...Its not that we can’t innovate...
...In Science magazine in December 1982, Mayer wrote: “Steel companies are arranging for Japanese engineers to install the process controls they have been unable to plan internally...
...We need institutions that do this, like Japan’s Agency for Industrial Science and Technology, and we need to restore an ethic of practice and service to our engineering schools...
...He has refused...
...The federal dollars changed that...
...Meanwhile, research-oriented faculty sought out more people like themselves, so the “swing perpetuated itself,” in the words of Jim Adams, an engineering professor at Stanford...
...Today, we don’t make them get their hands dirty...
...Here was stuff that could hold its own at the most highbrow cocktail party in Cambridge...
...They are mutually paranoid and think you are making off with all the money,” he says...
...Look for more Nobel prizes, but look for more Toyotas and Japanese machine tools too...
...And while these changes were most pronounced in the prestige schools such as MIT and Cal Tech, as they go, the others tend to follow...
...We don’t have the advanced design skills .” It is hard to introduce such training to the engineering schools, Foster says, because it cuts across different departments...
...Weinschel is very concerned about the kind of engineers we are graduating from our engineering schools...
...There are many steps we need to take, such as more practical courses, and more teachers who solve problems instead of writing abstract treatises...
...They’ve merely been the vehicles (though willing ones) for a much larger social change...
...MIT has a distinguished metallurgy department,’’ a professor there said...
Vol. 16 • June 1984 • No. 5
