24
May
2011
A Historian Led Stanford toward Harvard; A Scientist moved the Cardinal Closer to Wall Street,
Yet For Five Decades Our Life Giving Environment Was Beyond the Pale in Palo Alto
Ron Scott, Rensselaer Lally School of Management and Technology, Management/Ventures Degree 1988
Wikipedia Quote:
“Looking back on his creation . . . [ his helmsman-ship of Stanford university ], Frederick Terman reflected, `When we set out to create a community of technical scholars in Silicon Valley, there wasn’t much here and the rest of the world looked awfully big. Now a lot of the rest of the world is here.’ When once asked whether he wanted his university [Stanford] to be a teaching institution or a research institution, he replied that ‘it should be a learning institution’. ‘”
Indeed Frederik Terman achieved his goal and more. I can think of scant few universities I admire more; Cambridge, New Haven and suburban New Jersey included. The continuously improving professional does pause to ask herself the question: What have we overlooked ? What could we clearly have done better ? In what ways were our rightful goals of the preceding decades” lacking in breadth ? How will South Asia, ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea emulate us while adding what we have forgotten ?
Today Stanford University is known as the world leader in taking innovation to wall street and concurrently a first choice for faculty and students wanting their final academic home to be an unassailable one. The 120 year old school is on the verge of joining dozens of other institutions of higher learning in the rich and unmatchable landscape that is New York City.
Regrettably were it not for the internet many Cardinal graduates would not know much of people like historian Wallace Sterling and Silicon Valley founder Frederic Terman. My question is what held Sterling and Terman back from beating less resource rich colleges to the pass on sustainable design, balanced energy security and arts and humanities driven cross cultural knowledge ? It is understood that when universities partner heavily with Beltway interests they can trade funding and fame for a holistic approach; time is not a luxury important Washington D.C. initiatives find much of. Still it would seem that a college growing with each passing decade of the 20th century would have had researchers keen on ecology hoping to win the ear of the leadership of their campus.
The scientific specialists at a handful of institutes can afford to be highly focused in their expertise and in some regard we expect them to be. It would serve surrounding campus communities and the public at large better if some STEM professionals and scholars were to become conversant in the language of demographics, world cultures and human need. I say this with conviction because the elite researchers and educators from decades past have suffered criticism for following funding sources too often and obvious pressing issues of worldwide need not often enough.
The vast majority of scientists are unable to change how we live with a medical advance or a new way of interfacing with the world. It stands to reason then that trained professionals and scholars take a break from the comfort of their disciplines to learn how we got here: regional history, motivations for migrations and so forth which are as informative in understand market demand as modern focus groups and the new social networking. It is a coincidence that internet based social networking and sustainability are mated on center stage as we move ahead in the fresh 21st century ?
I have been actively designing a greener future for 30 years, was published worldwide for such designs at a teen in 1984 and predicted social networking while on international management internship for Bill Beausoliel who invented the IBM PC. I could not have predicted this all important center stage performance; It was beyond the dreams of most of us except I am sure some forward looking thinkers, students and faculty in The Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Japan, California and New York. If such prognosticators enjoying the bounty of holistic world knowledge are welcomed in greater numbers to well funded campuses like Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago I expect to read about the decade ahead of us with accuracy in the blogosphere.
rscott@alum.rpi.edu
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23
May
2011
In a few months Americans will not quite be able to recall the name [ Fukushima Daiichi ]; many will speak only of that nuclear accident in Japan as they chit chat about Arabs and that ‘dead terrorist’ Osama.
Sadly this is the short sighted emotional response of many in the public which results from 150 years of compulsory education in Thorsten Veblen’s “Captains of Erudition” environment factored with the exhaustion caused by stress from work, stress from lack of work and a desire to understand the world. If a generation is about 25 years just consider that five generations ago the job was a new concept if it did not involve farming or an apprenticeship. Arabs know that American culture is new and a result of a hegemonic economy built on the model of the British Empire.
By and large Arabs are not impressed with the state of worldwide understanding of the American public, and given that it was the Arab dynasties that preserved and returned to Europe through Spain early Greek and Roman scholarship. Many people of Arab lands must find it deplorable that the inheritors of European power would be ignorant to this cultural debt. The deterrent that ‘an eye for an eye’ is believed by many to be in the states is proving merely a call to arms for Arabs who see martyrs all around them; Americans would be wise to take this lesson as just one of many experiences in foreign affairs that represent vast omissions from the proscribed curricula in compulsory education.
It is never too late to pick up a book or two from the library on subjects of your curiosity when the news seems to complex to understand. We can all thank Benjamin Franklin for inventing and establishing the public lending library; knowledge is not for our leaders or our teachers — it is there for all of us to find peace and understanding in. Your nation will be better for it.
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18
May
2011
One of the earliest instructors at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan was Thorstein Veblen. He had a name for the men who led school and university boards in their narrow self interest to raise generations of young men proud of Europe and America while being trained in little of Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world. He termed them the Captains of Erudition. How have we come to trust the new hard an fast metrics (SAT,ACT,LSAT,GRE…) of a known to be flawed education system ? Read ahead.
There is much to learn from the student of any discipline who is a quick study and the owner of top 5% scores on graduate admissions exams. Many like me have more to teach that student because most of these high achievers shall never arrive at the academic level of a scholar. To be fair they had to defer to connected establishment born men for so many decades that the story of George Bush following his father and grandfather to Yale and then being admitted to Harvard Business School is rendered as commonplace for a century and a half beforehand.
Many like me have read 1000 books on 50 or so subjects, yet like Generals Patton and Powell, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill and John Major I can expect to be unwelcome at most highly regarded universities. I know something of the culture of almost 200 nations and can tell you their population within 15 percent from memory; this understanding drives my reaction to the reportage of Laura Flanders, Amy Goodman and the BBC.
Should the Masters, PhD and law graduates of the Ivy’s, top technical institutes or famous west coast campuses in Palo Alto and Berkeley be expected to hold broad knowledge? I suppose not though many a local leader and national statesman have leaned on such understanding to prove themselves credible in the face of issues of national security, relations to sovereign states with dire need of assistance or simply seeming electable.
Two generations ago the now retiring law professors and captains of industry were accepted to a handful of famous graduate schools with B and C averages and the nation prospered. Those who were unwelcome at Harvard, Yale and Columbia could head west and enroll at Boalt Hall in 1960 with no questions about having taken an LSAT; a B average was your ticket in. Folks have not steered clear of the University of California Berkeley or thought its training wanting over the decades — on the contrary if you don’t present 168 LSAT’s [well inside top 5%] with a magna cum laude degree you had better have one heck of a personal statement if you think you are walking in nowadays.
All of this to say that perfect ACT’s/SAT’s out of high school are almost a death knell to your chances at top colleges who want well rounded people filling their campus; thin envelopes to non-athletes, non-student leaders and non-public service students of this group are so common that the wealthy and high scoring are advised to”‘pick up public service activity’ so you can get in to the school of your choice. What of the student who makes time to serve others because it is the right thing to do, enjoys study but needs more time to process information, and is an undistinguished student recognized for contributions at a young age ?
I am not unique in having addressed environmental issues, studied infant mortality rates in nations from 10 per 1,000 to 190 per 1,000 or helping peers do well in school even when I did not. Is is unique that a Strategy professor with a Harvard Business School PhD at the top undergraduate business school in America for Strategy and Financial Analysis — the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [per Bloomberg News 2011], insisted that I teach my undergraduate peers. Professor Jeanne Lynch would not take no for an answer so finally I rose and taught my peers what the curriculum was lacking, what IBM had me teach their top engineers and what the Vice President for Research at Bell Laboratories lauded and asked that I continue: the holistic thinking and service oriented problem solving that consistently eludes our highest acheiving graduates.
Who taught Jeanne to be that resourceful when she lacked no ability to make a point in a classroom ? A school in Chicago chose her as the only woman admitted to their Executive MBA Program for over a 20 year period; She finished her degree in 1965 at the school now called the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Famous school for teaching teachers and you had better believe that when she selected for the first and only time a student to take over her class my peers learned a lesson about being learned and being a good student. I was a known C student with health problems and yet I was a learned young man teaching A and B students at a top quantitative and entrepreneurial Bachelor of Science program. Point made.
I think admissions committees are merely choosing the familliar young scholars who appear to have their own hard working style; in too many cases those in the probable admit pile are pre-selected in error, will never be true scholars and do not share the merits of the faculty that displaced the born elites who preceeded them. The elder mentors with little college, little college success or loads of wisdom on offer were not flukes: they represented a class from Teddy Roosevelt to Colin Powell and every great mentor in between.
We need to grow that class again.
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