BU College of Engineering Magazine
Spring 2004

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On My Mind
By David K. Campbell, Dean

Threat 4: With only a few notable exceptions, leading U.S. corporations have drastically reduced their in-house research efforts in the physical sciences and engineering, limiting their ability to develop and transfer fundamental research discoveries to the production line and to focus on problems of long-term relevance to their core competencies.

Threat 5: The level of technical literacy among the public is insufficient to enable them to make the informed decisions on policies regarding science and technology. In particular, this “innumeracy” leads to a widespread lack of appreciation of the links between STEM research and our national well-being.

Threat 6: The past few years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the outsourcing of positions in leading technologies, which not only has an immediate negative impact on the individuals who lose their jobs but also has the potential in the long term for the loss of key sectors of our technical infrastructure.

Threat 7: Several recent instances have suggested an increase in the politicization of science, in which scientific facts or findings are distorted, modified, or ignored for political ends. The direct interference of politics into science has had many infamous (and often disastrous) historical precedents. One notorious instance is the Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union of the 1920-30s, which destroyed Soviet biological research and nearly destroyed Soviet agriculture. This false science was supported because its concept of strong environmental modification of genetic traits agreed with the prejudices of the Communist leaders of the U.S.S.R. To judge for yourself the extent to which we need to worry about this threat in our country today, you should look at a report issued in February 2004 by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which can be found at http://www2.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/report.html.

What steps should we take in the face of all these threats? The first step is to recognize that, precisely as our metaphor to an ecosystem suggests, that these threats are not independent but are entangled in a complex web of interactions in which they sometimes reinforce, and other times counteract, each other. For instance, attracting foreign graduate students and researchers is absolutely vital to our research enterprise—in 2001, foreign-born students received about 50 percent of our masters and doctoral degrees in engineering—and contributes to the diversity of our industrial development teams, leading to greater innovation. At the same time, some of these students return to the home countries, taking with them their acquired skills and knowledge and perhaps the creating the companies to which our high-tech jobs are being outsourced. In the face of this complexity, we must avoid simplistic solutions that may appear to reduce one threat but are actually increasing another. As H. L. Mencken noted, “For every complex problem, there is always a simple solution. And it’s always wrong.”

The second step is to enhance awareness, both among our colleagues and the public at large, of these threats, and to encourage all parts of our society to work together to develop an ecologically sound, coherent approach to countering these threats. I am pleased to say that such outreach efforts are well underway here at the College and elsewhere at Boston University. As one specific example, I am co-organizing a special workshop this summer at the Aspen Center for Physics that is intended to identify and disseminate best practices in both K-12 and general public outreach.

The final step is to encourage our leaders to appreciate the complexity of the ecology of technology and to develop policies that enhance, rather than damage, this ecosystem. Policies that lead to genuine improvements in K-12 education, to continuing opportunities for critical foreign students and scholars to contribute to our research, to a more balanced Federal research portfolio, to encouraging American industry to increase in house research, to reducing innumeracy in the general public, to eliminating (more realistically, minimizing) the politicization of science, and to confronting constructively the challenge of outsourcing all need to be fostered.

As trained engineers, we are well aware both of the successes of our technological ecosystem and of the consequences of failing to protect it properly. Working together, we can spread this awareness and help to sustain the ecology of technology.

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