Transcript of CE Advisory Council meeting with Dean of Engineering

Transcript of March 10, 2001 Meeting

Dean BALMER was introduced by Steve Gyroy, Chair of the CE Advisory Council.

Questions are in RED and Blamer's replies are NORMAL TYPE. Periods (....) in text indicate inaudible sound.

BALMER: I'll stand, I make a better target if I'm standing. It's difficult to know exactly where to start. When I first arrived at Union College I met with Roger Hull several times. And he would say things to me like `I want either an excellent engineering program at Union College or I don't want any engineering programs at all.' I thought well that's fine, that's good PR. ..... And I thought that we had excellent programs and so it really wasn't an issue. Ah... But then things didn't die down. We kept getting pressure; I kept hearing from Roger that well maybe we ought to have General Engineering. Some of you know there was a Task Force put together a year or two before I got here that looked at engineering. not the first time ...happened, not the first time the engineering program has been looked at in some detail. Engineering programs are expensive. And ah they are programs that don't necessarily mix well, they're professional programs don't necessarily mix well with the rest of campus. And so to have engineering under the microscope wasn't terribly unusual. It has happened at most engineering schools at one point or another.

Then things began to accelerate last summer. Roger was going to set up another committee to study engineering. ....But when he was talking to his colleagues he changed his mind, he decided to hire instead a consultant to come in and advise us as to what we should be doing. And what we should be doing to become excellent. And he found somebody; he found this team of people in California that were recommended to him by Steve Cesinski one of the Trustees and an engineering alumni. So we contracted with those people and they just have a final report that you may or may not have in front of you. He contracted with those people, six of us went to California in, I think, early October. There were two engineering faculty, two liberal arts faculty, myself and Christi Sorum. When we picked those faculty we chose them to try and create a team of forward looking people who could actually work on resolving issues, because when we went to California, we didn't know exactly why we were going there. Because there wasn't a clear problem stated. What we discovered when we were there as engineers we, we saw a problem. I mean that's what we are trained to do. So it would have been nice if someone said...one of the Trustees would have said, here's what the problem is. This is what you need to address. Because we never got that....and still don't have that. And they don't operate that way......

So we went to California, and we spent the entire first day just discussing why we were there. What were the issues. As we discussed it with our Liberal Arts Faculty, Christie, Tom Werner and Doug Klien from Chemistry and Economics, some issues began to bubble to the surface as to why engineering wasn't as good as some people seem to think it should be. And then once we began to understand that there were issues here, then the second day we got to play some problem solving skills .... These are the problems and let's figure out how to address them. We identified five areas in which we thought we could improve ourselves at Union College. They included things like .... activity, diversity, expanding the foreign experience, experience, of things, like bringing us closer together by maybe having liberal arts minors for engineering students, and, I got all five of them? I loose track when I go through this thing. There's another one, it's something. Oh, the core program, of making a more efficient use of the first two years by bringing the courses closer together making them more effective, and requiring fewer sections. So those are the things that we thought we could come back with. And we did, as a start.

I talked to the faculty about those things, I ... selected committees, we have every faculty member in the Division working on one of those five committees. And they have a very specific charge. They came forward with various reports on the charges, most of them work on them over the break last winter, on the committees. And I think maybe three of the committees have finished and two are in the final stages of ....... And that was fine, it was just going along. We were just going to trying to address some of the issues that we thought were important. But then I began to get other messages from Trustees that told me things like if you don't come - because I was scheduled to make a board presentation, this one or the one before that - he said if you don't come to the Board with some new and exciting ideas about engineering, I don't think engineering is going to survive at Union College.

I began to get very concerned about that. Because how am I supposed to come up with new ideas about engineering when every engineering college in the nation is trying to feel the future. How are we going to find new ideas. How are we going to do something different that no one else does that turns on a group of Board Members. The five committees that we've been working on were all right, in that they were alright ideas, they weren't anything new and novel. Those things had been done, and are being done, and should have been done here a long time ago. They were just stop gap issues to try and get us up to speed to where we should be. And I struggled with this for a long time. How do we move forward?

I had met before, earlier, with the new president of Olin College. Most of the students don't know, but we have an Olin building over here. And the Olin Foundation has been giving money for buildings on campuses all over this nation. Almost any other primary campus you will find at least one Olin Building. And they have decided they are going to stop doing that. I think maybe our Olin Building is perhaps the last one they gave out, or very near the last one. They decided to stop doing that. They were going to take the remaining $350 million that they have and going to start a brand new ... college, from scratch. A bare piece of land. And then build it up, staff it, and develop a curriculum around what they consider to be different than what anyone else in the nation is doing. And I thought that must be the answer. These people must know what they are doing. They have all this money. ......Hand selected, hand picked group of people to start this college. So I talked with these people. And they were over at Babson campus, do you know where Babson College is? They bought 70 acres.

And I came away very disappointed, because what they were going to do, what they are going to do, is to have a fairly standard engineering program and they're going to weave entrepreneurship through it beginning in the Freshman year and integrate through the variety of courses up through the senior year. Entrepreneurism is something that is pretty important today. I mean it is what drives business. But to develop a College around it might be alright to do one, but certainly not an idea that can migrate to Union. And certainly not an idea engineering schools across that nation should pick up on and all of a sudden decide they are going to graduate entrepreneurist.

But that didn't seem to be an answer to what I was searching for. And then a couple of days before Christmas I came up with this idea of ..... interactions of people of what really is going on in the outside world are all these high technologies are coming together and melding in a way to produce new technologies and it's accelerated. And it seemed to me that that might be the kind of theme that could work at Union College. We're small, we're flexible, we can adopt new ideas. And we can produce engineers that are on the leading edge, or at least knowledgeable about the leading edge, of a variety of technology that are out there. I'm talking about things like, biotechnology or nanotechnology or mechatronics. Or mems, hydrolictronic circuits. Those kinds of things that are really driving industry today for the large part. So I ran this idea by a few people to see what they thought of it. The more people I talked to the more excited people seemed to get about it. And I began to get the idea that maybe this was the solution.

We have an alumnus at IBM, actually we have three alumni at IBM, that are senior vice presidents of IBM. ......... They are right below the President of IBM. There are six senior vice presidents, three of them are from Union. Those three people manage 50 billion dollars of IBM's business. One of them I had been corresponding with in the past on budget issues. And I had written about this idea. And he came to Union and talked with Roger about a variety of things. And he talked, has talked to me. And on his way home from his visit, he had an idea and he emailed me that same night. He talked about what I was doing, he talked about the technologies. He said this is such an interesting idea I think I would like .... to be in the center of converging technologies. Now I have no idea what that meant, and I am still struggling to find what that means. But with that kind of hit at that kind of level I was convinced that I was going in the right direction. .......I called one of our other alumni, the VP of Texas Instruments. I went over and talked with the new director of GE research and development. And nobody said this was really a stupid idea, everybody said Oh yeah I know what you're talking about, I know where you're going. That sounds really exciting. And no other engineering school in the nation has caught up to it yet. And so I thought well here's a chance for us really to move forward, really to excel ..... and go back and revisit the era in which Steinmetz was here and Union was so well known because it was at the leading edge at that point in time in electrical technology.

We can pick up on this new technological revolution, and there is about to be one, and be part of it. And so that's kind of the message I began to develop, refine, the message I took to the Board of Trustees. A week ago Friday night, afternoon, did a presentation on it and they seemed to love it as well.

So that's the good side, that's the positive side of all this stuff. We have a chance to become extraordinary at Union College, again.

The bad side is that during the Fall semester while these five committees were working on what they were doing, I set up another committee designed to look at the loading of engineering. Two faculty members who basically looked at the courses that were required to be taught for all of the majors that we have, and we have five: Computer Science, Computer Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering. Looked at all those courses that need to be taught to graduate students, looked at the number of faculty that we had, and asked the question how much. do we have enough faculty to teach those courses? Of course the answer was no, we don't have enough faculty to teach those courses. But we kind of knew that from the beginning because I kept signing these forms for adjuncts, teaching adjuncts.

Now, when I got here I was a little surprised to see how many adjunct forms I was signing. But I came from a state school and it wasn't that unusual. I had about a third of the courses taught in the engineering curriculum by people from outside of engineering, who had other jobs and would come in and teach a course on a part time basis. But I wasn't particularly concerned about that, but then as I got to know Union a little bit better I began to realize that if all we've got here, if all we can offer you is what you can get at a state institution then we're not going to be in business very long. You're not going to pay ten times the tuition you pay at a state institution ..... And that really began to bother me.

So these two things surfaced at the same time. We don't have enough staff to teach what we do have, we do have already. I'd have to have a new initiative to move us forward. And so how are we going to do that. I would ask the people here from industry “how do you do that?” It's a business decision, a resource decision. You have a company, I'm a middle manager. Management comes to you and says you have to develop this new area, but you have no new resources. You have nothing to bring to the table. You have to do it internally. What choice do you have.

Well you reallocate. Reallocate means stop doing something you currently are doing to move those resources into the area that you have to .... And that's the reason we are here today. And that is the dilemma that I face. Now a decision has not yet been made. It probably will be made in June. I say probably because I don't know what's going to happen between now and the Board meeting in June. The Board of Trustees makes this decision. When I made my presentation to them last Friday, and I'll make the same presentation to the engineering faculty this coming Thursday, I indicated what all these good things were, I indicated what the staffing problem was, and I indicated that the program that we currently have that's least consistent with where I think engineering should go is Civil Engineering. And so that's where we are, I mean that's what got us to the place we are today.

The root cause of all this is the lack of new resources. I think you could probably ask the question how can you ask your people to move forward into a new area and develop something or treat your problems. And if you're serious about it, why not provide them with some resources. And I don't know the answer to that. The faculty here know at least that there are going to be 20 new lines added to the Liberal Arts faculty. As a result of this new fund raising campaign that they're about to launch.... And I have asked the question repeatedly, and so have some of the faculty here, and Roger answered the question at the last college faculty meeting, that he was not going to put any more resources into engineering. That it was already too expensive from his point of view.

So, with that then, I guess I'm ready for questions. That's where I'm at, and I have, I'm between a rock and a hard place. I have no other answers. Let me mention one thing though, this question's going to come up I know. We have graduate programs in Computer Science, Mechanical and Electrical. It's a small graduate program, master's level, serves the local community college.... And it's something that we could sacrifice. We could say alright we're just going to get rid of the graduate program. It turns out it's not really big enough to have an impact here. It has probably two full time equivalent adjuncts associated with it, because it overlaps with the senior courses that you take. The 100 level courses that are available to students are available to both graduate students and undergraduate students. But by the time we sort those two things out and realize that some of those courses have to be taught anyway, whether there are graduate students in them or not, we'll probably end up saving something like the equivalent of two full time equivalents. Now I - the loading report indicated that I need eight full time equivalent faculty, .... to teach these classes. Without hiring people, I have a whole spectrum of people because they teach one or two courses, but I may hire 30 people or 40 people as adjuncts .... these students. And it's not right. You, students deserve more than that. I don't care how good the adjuncts are. They have a career elsewhere. They're not professional educators. They don't have to deal with scholarship, they don't have to deal with university life. They're not, they're not faculty. Not really. And they need to be here, they need to be, I need to turn this around too somehow, they need to be involved to in the nurturing process. The value added in an institution as expensive as Union is have to have this from their faculty. And so having that many adjuncts, it's just inconsistent with my view of what we should be doing.

Alright, so let me now open it up to questions.

One comment you mentioned before was that last fall CS and entrepreneurship that you spoke about are high tech. I can understand that Roger Hull would look around and say that we have NASDAQ at 5,000, these start up internet companies are doing well, we have an alumni that gave $100,000, he started up his own internet company. We need to encourage that. And when the NASDAQ was at 5,000 that was realistic. At 2,000 were getting back to basics again and maybe..... these technologies were sexy back then. But it seems maybe that balloon has burst and in reality the economy is getting back to the basics again. And those basics were on the new yesterday when the American Society of CE executive director was on CBS saying that the United States has a one trillion dollar infrastructure need to repair our high ways. So I think it seems to be that here we are in the spring trying to come up with a policy that seemed pretty good last year in almost a different economy and not in the slow down economy or the more realistic economy we were in. And it seems like there is an impression out there that CE is not as computer oriented or as fancy or as well suited to an internet start up company as say electrical or mechanical. And unfortunately we have vast strategy combined with some flawed data in this report that we have looked at the beginning, including the US News and world report which is last year's data and when we looked at it this past week we see that Union's Civil Department is ranked eighth in the country for engineering colleges without a PhD program where we come it, and Rose Hulman is at that top of that. Union and Lafayette are tied at number 8 in civil. Mechanical is rated, but Electrical didn't even make the top 15. So for Union to take a quality program like Civil that's helping Union's overall ranking in US News and World Report come up and to take Civil and have the idea that Civil should come out and that we should concentrate on more electrical engineering seems to be a bit of a flaw. I think that Union is making a big mistake in not recognizing that the 150 year old program that we have here has been steady, it has the history that Union offers which the state schools don't offer, it's a small program where we're getting the liberal arts and engineering together that the states don't have. Union is making a mistake if it thinks it can take a precious jewel like a centuries old program that has been there and just decide to get rid of it because a blip in the economy shows that computer start up companies are better and civil isn't included in that. I can go on but I will ... I think we have to be careful before we decide to sacrifice civil. In any case if we were going to sacrifice civil we would have to give the civil department some goals and say you are on probation for a year or two, meet these goals for what we want before we just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

BALMER: Let me respond to the last first. It's not that there is anything wrong with Civil Engineering. Giving them goals really isn't the issue. The issue is who do we cut? It's that simple. With no new resources, do we just do the status quo. And I've been told we can't do the status quo. Who do we cut? Should we cut the weakest program? Should we cut Electrical?

No, why do you have to cut... Union's best professor is in the room here right now, rated highest by the teachers. Why would you want to cut Civil Engineering professors to bring in some other computer science start up internet tech professor, or a biotech professor? Why would you want to cut a proven professor to bring in the idea that there is a better professor out there? There is no reason to move towards this temporary internet startup type philosophy.

BALMER: Right. Let me try and address that part. But I want to try and come back to my original point. I understand, and I thought a lot about this thing. Is this a fad? I certainly don't want to attach my goals to a fad. And I've been looking at this a lot, I've been reading a lot in this field and I am absolutely convinced that this is not a fad, that we are on the verge of another technological revolution that is going to change life as we know it in the next 30 years. And it's not the start up companies. It's all of this micro electronic stuff that's happening. The molecular level stuff that's happening. It's just absolutely going to revolutionize what we did. And I believe that. I don't know if I can convince any one here that that's true, but I'm not sure I need to at this point in time. But aside from that, how do I get myself in a position where I don't have to hire 8 full time people, the equivalent of 8 full time people. ..... I can't do it. I can't have quality programs assuming I don't change anything having all these adjuncts come in. Where do I get the resources to have faculty come in ..... Civil, Mechanical and Electrical, Computer Science - Computer Science is understaffed by 4 people now. How do I solve this problem. Where do the resources come from?

..............Paraphrases what .... is trying to say. You said that in your mind in the decision of the future, that Civil Engineering doesn't fit in to that vision of the future. And I guess ....why that is. People around this room I don't think agree with that.

BALMER: And I can understand that. It's what I call ..... because the development work being done in these areas, call them high tech areas if you want or convergent technology areas if you want, is not being done in the Civil Engineering arena. Civil Engineering ends up being users of a lot of this stuff. Smart buildings, smart structures, and all that sort of thing. But the development work, the work that's at the root of this stuff is largely done in combination Mechanical, Electrical, Civil, Biology, Chemistry, what else do we have out there. Math to some degree. It's that combination of things that's leading the forefront of this thing right now. And that's the root of my argument as to how I choose which one are more consistent and which ones are least consistent - that's all there is to it.

.....Military contract, had all kinds of research money. Compete with the big boys, try and make the best use of the information coming out of the big boys.

BALMER: Yes, That's true. And I'm not competing with, I'm not thinking about starting up major research programs here. That's not what Union's all about. What I want to do with these topics, and I don't know which ones they're going to be yet because I've just spent the last tow weeks talking to the Chemistry department and Biology department to find out what their strengths were. What do they have to bring to the table. I laid all that out on the table, and said if I put these people, these people and these people together I have a critical mass in something. I don't know what it's going to be yet. But we're not going to have a massive research facility here. I mean that's not the intent. The intent is to weave the concept of current high technology into the course structure and then have a couple junior level courses or senior level courses that focus on one or two or three of these things. And I don't want to call them survey courses because I am implying something that I don't mean to imply. But courses that would get students some background in a nanotechnology area. Which by the way is a huge field all by itself. So some piece of that specificity. Um, We took a tour last week of the new Albany disk fabrication center. I don't know what to call it. They make silicone disks and computer chips. They want to work with us, they work with RPI. If they work with us, it will allow us access to facilities that we don't have to build because they want our under graduate students to do projects there, they want them to do that because they want to attract them into the graduate programs. And we certainly want our students to consider going to graduate school as well. And getting into some of these extremely hot developing areas. So that is sort of a long answer to your question. I wasn't, I'm not trying to make Union into a research institution. But I wish it wasn't as much as it is. One of the shots I got when I came here was that Union seemed to be, in the back of its own mind, was trying to be a mini research institution. And that's not going to, you can't do that. You can't compete with RPI. You can be what you are.

One thing that hasn't been explained to us that I just heard recently is that we need 7 or 8 new faculty lines. It is really a two part question. Explain why we need 7 or 8 new faculty lines in this program when it seems to me that we really need one, and if it's to get rid of adjuncts and have regular faculty there. We have several of our adjuncts here in the room (BALMER acknowledges) and I firmly believe that our adjuncts add a lot to our program. They don't take away from it. (BALMER acknowledges) The experience that they add, they're a vital part of the program. So where are the 7 or 8 coming from.

BALMER: The adjunct issue I agree with you to a degree, to a point. I think adjuncts in capstone courses sometimes work out very well. But, my experience with adjuncts, and I've had a lot because the state schools have them all over the place, is that very few of them are really superb. Um, the 7 or 8 ... loading report was the loading report that, you know that, Spinelli and Ann and Mohammad put together. And the biggest part of that is the four positions that Computer Science needs. We have filled one of them, so I need to fill three lines, I mean to put three lines in Computer Science because Computer Science is not an engineering program, it's a program that's supposed to serve this entire campus. And it doesn't even come close to it. We should be having CS 10, CS 15 courses. We can enroll all of them that we can offer, and we don't really offer nearly enough of them. And this campus needs to look at technological literacy for its liberal arts graduates. I'm, I'm really concerned of what the future of liberal arts colleges is. If you look at their history, they have been dwindling and dwindling and dwindling and the number that still exist that are successful keeps getting smaller and smaller.

Let's attack one problem at a time (BALMER agrees). Thanks

You just said that Computer Science isn't part of an engineering program. And it serves the whole community. So why is it part of engineering (BALMER interjects: So why are we saddled with it) Then why aren't we sacrificing (BALMER interjects: I don't know) the CE department to fulfill the computer science need.

BALMER: I don't know the answer to that. In our division, in my division .... it becomes part of our responsibility. And again I've asked this question as well. I mean, if you're going to have 20 new positions in liberal arts, and Computer science is really a liberal arts program, I mean it really is. If you just look at the structure, what it does and how it is put together it happens to be, it happens to have spun out of Electrical Engineering but ... that normally happens. I can't give you an answer as to why we are not being allowed to either move it out of our division, which probably wouldn't be a good idea, or to staff it from resources from outside the division. All I can tell you is what I'm told and the arguments that I've made that just falls on deaf ears.

If you need to cut something, then why don't you cut the computer science program and know that ... it is going to be picked up eventually at a liberal arts college by liberal arts program ...

BALMER: I suggested that, in fact. In fact it is probably the easiest solution to the whole process just eliminate computer science. Engineering is not that big of an issue, we can teach our own computer courses. I mean what we need to teach engineering .... computers.... But that really rankled my upper administration because (then why) they want computer science, (why) so why don't they split it? I don't know the answer to that.

An option ... for supporting that.

BALMER: I haven't thought of it as an option because I've been told that it's not an option. Now maybe I should rethink that.

I can see why it might rankle, but I think it ought to be pursued. Because one thing that you probably know is that every computer science professor is not an engineer. So it ought to be in the math department rather than Division 4.

BALMER: (hesitation) Yeah I think you're right. Yeah. We have 3 computer science who are not engineers. They basically all have .... to fit into division 4. But aren't there some faculty who are in George Williams would be the only that have the title of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Yeah, But other than that they're all non engineers. I can certainly pursue that again. I tried that very early on, but ... I should revisit that and see what happens.

You just said that ... that the CS department is small and needs help and is not part of engineering program. Right there, that single thing, why wasn't that pushed and pushed by you as an engineer, as Dean of the engineering department. Why wasn't that one of the options that you would have pushed, as in like your convergent technology. Which could be a good idea, but...better idea.

BALMER: Well, but yeah. I addressed it and the people that I was talking to about it, you know, the .... said no that is not an option. This is in your division, you have to fix this problem.

An employer ... would try to look into the next few years of the environmental and structural needs. You can pick up a student with a computer science degree from almost anywhere. And they just don't have the experience to know what they're doing. Whereas what you really need is an engineering student that has gone through the manual calculations and understands moments and understands fluids and thermodynamics and know what that computer is telling as a result. That's the person you need to hire to be productive to use the computer. But to hire just programmers is not Union's mission. And Union's Civil Engineer brings together the basic knowledge and experience and knowing. Union's graduates give you the experience of an engineering program combined with working with computers. And when we graduate, we spoke before this, we all just use computers all the time in our businesses. But what distinguishes us, the engineering leaders, is that we know what is happening physically, we know if that computer is making a mistake and it's not the right result that we need. We know that. And that's what Union has to bring to employers. People that understand the results of computers and know how to work with computers. And that's to valuable a program to sacrifice for somebody that just knows how to program or something. Or knows what's going on the surface of that ... . We shouldn't be in that area. We should specialize in our strengths which is the application of it. ... engineering, ..... have to get back to our basic definition of engineering, we are not scientists. You can't expect the engineers here to be research scientists coming out with the latest technology. Our job is to use scientific research through the application of the project. And that's what .. we've been training here at the top of the country. And that's what I think we have to continue training without looking and trying to saying OK computers are important and we need to abandon the core of Engineering and emphasis more straight computer programming instead.

BALMER: I think I understand what you're saying. And as I said a minute ago we could, within engineering we could probably teach all the computer literacy we need - ourselves. But it's not just an engineering issue. It's a campus wide issue. And it's really important for the campus. And some of the faculty here know that we are very late in waking, this campus is very late in waking up to the existence of the computer. We aren't wired the way we should be. I mean it should be a wireless campus. We should be doing lots of leading edge things that aren't happening and it's (stopped speaking).

I just want to add to that a little bit. On the outside world .., I'm the president of the ASCE chapter here in New York State. We had a major problem with Civil Engineering and Engineering period. First of all, .......where it should be. In a lot of cases there's also a lot of lobbying groups out there who seem to be able to take away a lot of ...., land surveyors, ..., water engineering, .... site developers .... . Certificate programs ... . You've got people who are inspecting schools and signing a report that the school's adequate and don't know the first thing ... about the complexities of the structure of the school. It seems to me that we've got to start strengthening Civil Engineering and there are so many new things coming out, in fact I'm involved in the state level, traffic technology, Greenville initiative, high speed rail, ...you can't get those things on computer generated programs. They have to be engineered. You've got engineered subway systems. New York City is falling in, the streets are falling apart. You've got to do a lot of things with the infrastructure to improve it. You've got high speed rail, a tremendous amount of infrastructure all through our big cities. You can't just ...... complexities, superstructure, infrastructures ... and that requires civil engineering. And I think we've got to be stronger in this area. ...... I did give you a call by the way. I was one of the adjuncts who called and asked you to support engineers week. .... Very passionate about the fact that we should be out there and doing it. Quite frankly, this kind of shocked me that you're looking at a program as strong as this program and try to take it and put it in more of a computer science mode. I'd like to have you revisit this and look at .... .

BALMER: I wish Civil Engineering had some of those things in it. And you just mentioned, some of the. Sounds to me like.

Well actually you have to start at the basics to get there. But that's another reason why I believe a capstone course is so important because it ties in a lot of the theories, a lot of the teachings that these people do to get there in this field and start to pull together and they can do a project related to that course. I think it's great ..... requires foundations, structures and ... systems and maybe transportation technologies of the highways and waterways. And so we have to engineer that. But you can't learn it all at the undergraduate level. But you got to start with the basics and try to get yourself to a point where you can develop a new program . Students going out to get jobs .... engineering right from the get go. I strongly disagree with the idea that your ... computer science. I think it's important. I do agree with this gentleman over here that it is something that is being taught by people who are into that stuff. But to cut a program ... “I” beam ... they understand where it comes from. And you can't just say drop the program ... If the data is inaccurate coming in, the data coming out is wrong.

BALMER: I agree.

So it is very important to understand why you are plugging in a number, where you're plugging the number in, how you are working the complexities of the design. And I used to do a lot of that whey I was at Clough Harbour, we never trusted any ... programs when they first came out. ... long hand calculations to back it up to support what was generated by ... . Over time we got to be more comfortable with the results, but initially we challenged it, we found a lot of mistakes in the program. When somebody plugged this stuff in we realized there were other things that you could look at, ..... and that's something that engineering background comes up with. Trig. At an undergraduate level. And so I'd just like to put a plug in, if you can do anything at all to ... a program. I think you want to strengthen it, do the thing you're trying to do with convergent technology, bringing together “Building Big”, or whatever you're going want to do. But strengthen it and not make it go away.

Over time, not here today to change your opinion that civil engineering doesn't fit in to your vision of the future of convergent technologies, I think.

BALMER: It's not that it doesn't fit in. You need to understand that. It is that I have a budgetary box and I have to do something. And those that I have to work with, Civil Engineering is the least, but I mean I can probably be convinced that it is not the least. But I don't know about that right now. It's not that it doesn't fit in. Certainly there are ways of bringing convergent technology to civil engineering (voice drops off.) But I completely agree with you about your comments about programs. Especially civil engineering when you have so much public trust in your hands. You can't turn this thing over to some computer program, unless you're sure it is absolutely sure it's going to work.

Inaudible question. As an adjunct professor in the civil engineering department I've gotten to meet a number of the mechanical engineering students. Their freshmen year, they're either civil, electrical or mechanical or they're undeclared. When we finally tell students that we're going to eliminate civil, we have wiped out the potential civil engineers that are going to come here. We've also wiped out the ...... And if you look at the mechanical engineering department now, if we wiped out ... four years ago, there would be a shortage of students there with not a real need for mechanical engineering... . Are you planning on lowering your students in the mechanical engineering department. How are we going to make up the.

BALMER: You won't ... majors. A lot of the students come here , you probably know this as well as I do, because somebody said they should be an engineer. Their parents or their uncle was an engineer, or their high school guidance counselor said they're an engineer. It's up to us to win them over in the first year or so.

But you won't have the first year. If they go to Buffalo, if they don't know if they want to be a civil or mechanical, ... a large number.

BALMER: Oh I see your argument, there's one or the other. Yes, I see your argument.

....four students the whole thing becomes more expensive and they look ... and say you know we can't afford engineering at all.

BALMER: Right. That's right. That's right. That is an enormous risk.

This is the first step possible of closing down the ...

BALMER: That's an enormous risk. Yes. If this doesn't work.

Does union have 2,200 students right now in the undergraduate?

BALMER: I think it's capped at 2,000.

Now why is there a cap, why can't we just say we'll accept 2,300 and take the hundred ... biotech computer internet start up company entrepreneurs. Why don't we just take in 100 more? If we have Seward Housing? What is that cap.

BALMER: I don't know the answer. We tried that last year. I mean we have the capacity in Engineering to take in another hundred students. I mean we could have taken in 10, 15, 20 more freshmen.

It's facilities, it's housing, it's the library, it's the food services. It's all that combined that another 200, 300 students would really impact a lot of that.

But if you have that 200 more students and you have that much more tuition and you have those people, then you just hire these eight professors you need to teach those 100 extra students. And the library's bigger, you don't need to put on an additions and cafeterias to do it. We have the housing in Seward, we can continue to go out and house everybody and let's just roll a little more if you feel you want to do this. But grow and keep our same morale school atmosphere with the quality professorship where you get to go to Professor Harlow's house on Sunday afternoon and we get to hear a practitioner come in at night so we don't feel that we are just in academic. We have the benefit of both, and let us just grow a little bit more. Whether it's 2,200 to 2,300 isn't going to change fraternities. But it shouldn't be that in order to get this type of students in you must prevent, you know, the civil.

BALMER: That's an interesting argument, that I haven't thought about recently. And I will go back and do that, because there some relatively simple calculations you can show how you can justify positions by additional students. Now you also realize that tuition is relatively heavily discounted here, so we have to take that into account.

What does that mean?

BALMER: Discounted means that we give a lot of merit aid. High percentage of tuition ends up being given back as merit aid. I don't know the number on that.

An awful lot of engineers ... either civil or mechanical and so I think we loose a lot of those. But a bigger problem ..., and I talked to somebody in ME and EE about this. They are afraid that you're playing right into Roger's hand. Because, it's common knowledge that Roger really doesn't like engineering, it's expensive. And he probably would like to get rid of all of it. By getting rid of Civil Engineering it's the first building block and the rest are going to come tumbling down. And I'd like you to comment on that, how you feel about that.

BALMER: I've thought about that - a lot. And I've talked to some people about that myself. Roger of course says this is not the case, but he's said from the very beginning that engineering is the thing that makes Union unique and there's no way that it's going to go away under his tenure. And I believe him. But he also has said it is not going to go away as long as he's there. But he also been a proponent of this general engineering program concept which I think it could be just as bad as (inaudible question from attendee) yeah, but there are no majors, you just get a general engineering degree. There are no civil, mechanical, electrical; there is just a program. (Inaudible comment from attendee) Yes, it's a disaster. No one goes from a program to general. If you want to start a program from scratch you might start one in general and then go off, but no body goes. But it was his way of containing it. Of actually shrinking it, because we could do it with half the faculty we've got. We'd end up with, you know Trinity has one of these things. Their freshman class is 10, their entire student enrollment in engineering is like 50 something.

And that's why - my son looked at Trinity. He looked at Trinity and I said this is a start up, you're not going anywhere near there. And you're not going where every high school senior in America wants to go to take computer science. “ oh, my son is good on the internet, he's going to go to college and learn computers,” I hear that from everybody. That is no good, they have to do the basics at the undergraduate level. They simply must and Union just has. ... You're going to send someone to Olin College that's just starting up and borrowing money and a brand new campus. What kind of education are they going to choose.

BALMER: You have to understand that tuition is free at Olin. If you ... cover the tuition.

My point now is at this point, you said that Roger has said that he is not going to get rid of engineering while he's here, but didn't he also say he's not going to get rid of fraternities?

BALMER: I don't know what he said. I think he would probably say he hasn't done that.

Well, you and I know that's not true.

BALMER: He has, I'm glad I'm not in his place, frankly, he has an enormous set of problems. He has defined it in such a fashion that fraternities, Schenectady and engineering are in the same category, at the bottom of his barrel. I'm trying to get out of that container with engineering. So long as he feels as though we're not effective or that we're not fit. The issue oddly enough isn't so much how we're perceived on the outside it's how we're perceived on the inside. This is the main battle I'm trying to deal with. And it's stupid.

What do you mean by that

BALMER: Internal respect for engineering across the campus particularly from the administration. Now, yes

I give interviews for the Admissions Office, and they send me all the engineering ... the school. So for the last two terms I have given 10 a week and 90 percent of those students ... engineering, people want to come because there is engineering here. And I've discussed first hand the civil engineering part of it. A lot of these people have already been accepted, early decision, and they think there's a civil engineering program here. I feel awful. I don't know. They keep communications with me, they thank me, they send me letter. I didn't what to write back to these people. And I feel as if I should have been told earlier the office should have been told ... (inaudible).

BALMER: You keep going. We do not have a decision yet.

But I feel as if ... . I cannot sit there and talk to these people about engineering.

You're right they have until May 1 to make a decision on a school and if they decide on Union and it goes past May 1 and wait until the June trustees meeting, it's too late for those students to turn around.

BALMER: You should talk to Dan Lundquist about that. I think it's a serious problem.

It's just not fair to reel them in

BALMER: If the decisions were made in the fall say, we would be looking at next year's class, it would be different. I don't know what the answer to that is. We'll need to talk to Dan and I need to talk to Dan about what this is going to mean to these students.

Why is this scheduled as a three year phase out. Why so quick.

BALMER: Well it was a two year phase out a little while ago. Why so quick, I think once the decision is made you do it. You start to get beyond where you're at, there's no point in extending the pain any more than you have to. That's a simple answer to your question.

But I think that any student that enters union believes there's a civil engineering program and finds out well that gone now will be cheated. Why not make this a seven year plan. I find it hard to believe they truly can't ... money ... for seven years. If they can take out 20 million dollars to renovate housing they can get it to them, our students can have knowledge beforehand that the program is no longer -

BALMER: That might be the answer to your question actually. I don't ... fairly arbitrary and was under the assumption that we would have a freshmen class ... freshmen class then why, why damage those students. Why not just.

Bob, this is something we need to know right away. Because ethically I can't tell incoming freshmen that we're going to be here. And I didn't ... can't participate in the Admissions things that are coming up ethically. We need

BALMER: I understand. Then I need to talk to Dan and Roger. The three versus four is probably something that is flexible. I don't know the answer to that. It's something that I really need to pursue that.

If you had a longer phase out you would have an opportunity to see if your convergent technology is going to work (BALMER: That's right) ... and whether or not civil engineering can fit into (BALMER: That's right) that in any way. So I feel as if a three year phase out is almost as if you have made your decision and you're not willing to see whether or not Civil Engineering fits into it.

BALMER: Especially, especially when you consider the fact that the tenure faculty members in civil engineering are going to stay here. Some of them.

To stay and do what Dean Balmer. To stay and do what, to stay and do what.

BALMER: To phase and to help us do some of this other stuff in convergent technology. (Inaudible from group, then laughter.) Are you telling me you can't do it?

I tell you I can't be left here to die on my own doing no research and having no facilities and no lab and absolutely in three years you will say Ash you were a superstar three years ago where are you today.

BALMER: If you were a superstar three years ago, you're a superstar ... .

Sir, I am a foundations engineer and I'm no stranger to getting no appreciation at all for the work I do because it is always underground, and no body appreciates that my foundation is supporting a great building, it's what makes this building great. But the point is we cannoot be forgetting about the foundation that is supporting the building. In order to graduate great engineers you need to have a great foundation. ...... but if you think that this group will probably stay here until they die I think the school is mistaken. And I think because of the so many open ended questions to all this procedure, I think this just demonstrates the lack of vision and lack of sense of direction. I'm sorry I get so emotional about these kind of things. It is true that I have job security, but job security is not the problem. Do you think I will stay until I have a line on my resume in which I say Ash Ghaly left a dying department. And I think all the CORE committee and all the people who went to California must add this line on their resume because it will be a great help for them in their next job.

I have a question, Bob you mentioned your converging technology committee, that you formed in November I believe.

BALMER: The one that went to California.

No. the one you mentioned

BALMER: The five subcommittees.

You have a committee you said you quoted as saying you set up to discuss convergent technology. Can you just clarify who those members are?

BALMER: No, no, no, there wasn't a committee that discussed convergent technology. There were five subcommittees that were set up as a result the discussions in California.

You said a committee set up to discuss convergent technologies and then you also quoted a committee set up on loading, and that was after you made your five committees.

BALMER: No, I just said I misspoke. We did not have a committee to discuss convergent technology. I had been (can you tell us) discussing it with the CORE committee, and the CORE committee

And the CORE committee does not consist of a Civil Engineer?

BALMER: That's right.

So it was predisposed.

BALMER: It had nothing to do with Civil Engineering. I mean, we weren't discussing programs we were discussing content.

But I think we need clarity on why you feel convergent technology does not include civil engineering and you predisposed yourself by not including civil engineering on the committee.

BALMER: But it does include civil engineering. It's just that civil engineering largely are end users of convergent technology as opposed to innovators.

But we're not going to be researchers here anyhow ...

BALMER: That's true.

Can I ask you the question in a different way. You said that you've been put in this box ... things that we can do. I'd like to know what are the options that you looked at and how did you come to the conclusion that civil engineering, or how did you pick the option of getting rid of civil as opposed to.... I mean did you look at anything else.

BALMER: Yes, yes. That's a fair question. Let me go over the options that I have. One of the options that I had was I would go to the Board and I would tell them to go to hell. That they have no idea what they were talking about and that they should just give us what we need to do what we have to do. And I thought a lot about that, and of course nobody in the administrative structure would even let me stand in front of the Board if I was going to say that. But I did ... that was going to work. If this was ten years ago, 1990, maybe it would have worked. But I think that from the history of engineering being ... as long as it has been I think that would have been a huge mistake. What I'm trying to do is build a partnership with the Board and a partnership with the administration so we can go forth together. So that was one of the options. Third option was that I should just tell everybody to go to hell and I'm just leaving. Give the problem to somebody else, let them solve the problem. And it would just be another person or another committee or another consultant who would come probably to the same conclusion that something has to go or that we need a new direction. And it may or may not be the easiest direction. And, I mean I just don't walk away from problems like that, I'd rather solve them. So I decided that wasn't a valid solution. Then I looked at each of the programs. We talked about computer science and that would have been the easiest. Well, nobody thought that was a good idea. And when I say nobody, the people I talked to within my sphere of influence having to do with what they think will work and what won't, that includes Christie and Roger and the CORE committee and some of the people from industry that I have dealing with.

How can you, you're not talking to everybody (BALMER: No, no ) You say you talked to .... (inaudible)

BALMER: I understand your frustration. It's at this point that we're talking to everybody. I mean that procedure got us to this point, we're putting everything out on the table and we're saying here's the situation. We don't have a decision, we're going to have to make one in June.

We already discussed it will be a little too late for ....

BALMER: This only happened in the last, what is this early March, this happened beginning in mid January, when I got to the point where I was required by Roger to make a recommendation. So were six weeks into this thing, so it's not as though it's been going on for that long. But let me talk about the rest of them. I looked at, EE's isn't a strong department ... . Certainly put some faculty ... . The fact that the forefront of where I wanted to take all this stuff, and ME is in mechatronics and mems is tied into it as well. And, computer systems engineering doesn't require any staff, it's just a merging of existing courses. So that's ... . And that just brings us to Civil. The reason I chose Civil, I'm mentioning Civil, is for what exactly I've told you, that Civil engineers end up being users of a lot of this technology, but they are very seldom are in the forefront of innovative. And I'm looking at the stuff at the nanotechnolgy level, I'm looking at the biotechnology stuff. I know that infrastructure is important, I know that smart highways and intelligent buildings involves all of this. But I'm in a position of making a decision, and that's the decision that I've made and that's why I'm here.

And that you've also made the comment that there is a high risk involved.

BALMER: Oh yeah.

What steps do you think you're going to try and take to eliminating this risk?

BALMER: That's an extremely important question. Roger also understands that he is taking enormous risks with this fraternity issue. He is taking an enormous risk at borrowing 20 million dollars out of the endowment, at an 8% rate and the endowment won't earn 8 percent. So our endowment is going to go down. And I think, I don't want to get into the future of liberal arts colleges. But I think Union is at a critical point in its history. How does it get off this limb that it's on, how does it move forward, how does it get to where it wants to be, how does it maintain it's rankings and go up in the rankings which is what seems to make these liberal arts colleges so successful. When it has so many problems. One of the solutions to some of these problems is to reach out to our alumni. Engineering alumni in particular have never been approached from an engineering perspective. You're all approached. But it is sort of a general fundraising scenario. I'm convinced that if you go to the engineering alumni, you paint this picture of what you're trying to do and where you want to go, that's my job and you may not agree with the direction and I may certainly not get many civil engineering alumni, but that's the mitigation process. So I've got to bring people on board outside the campus ... and that sort of lead me to this fellow at IBM and two other compatriots that are very high level. Now are they actually going to write checks and but money on the table. Well they damn well better at some point. Cause they need to know what kind of a risk this is as well. Plus rolling this into a PR program that tries to explain to parents and students how important this is.

I guess the risk that I'm interested in speaking to is the one that's recruiting students into the program. (BALMER: The risk of?) Recruiting students into the program that you are describing. That seems to me to be a significant risk that you haven't marketed.

BALMER: That's a marketing problem. I don't mean to trivialize that, but I'm also convinced that when we put the words together correctly and talk about what's going on in the world today, and talk about what kind of education they're going to get at Union that makes them understand that world better that they would at any other engineering school. That will deal with that issue, that I will get the enrollment that I need. I believe that, it has to be done.

You've said a couple of times now that engineers require convergent technology which I agree with. And that's the way it should be. And you've also said that ... But how are we going to get the ME and EE departments innovation and development work without massive infusion of capital ... (switched tape sides) ... That means your arguments are not valid.

BALMER: Well, But the types of things I want brought down though are topics out of the nanotechnology industry. Now, civil engineering can do that (Who is going to conduct those topics?) Ah, we have, these are going to be courses that are developed by engineering and the liberal arts faculty. WE have people doing nanotechnology in biology, we have people doing nanotechnology in chemistry, I have people interested in nanostructures in engineering and they will come together and create this environment. And this has never been done before, this is another part of the risk.

Will they be the people at the leading edge doing the research?

BALMER: They will have some research experience. I don't think there is anybody at Union College who is at the leading edge of doing, you know, this type of research. (Do you expect them to develop ...) No, no. The literature is out there. They need to reach out into the research literature and bring it down into the undergraduate level. I mean this is what our faculty do, this is what their strength is. And if they can't do that then.

Nanotechnology integrated into the … would it be a class.

BALMER: Yeah, I think of it as a technical elective. I think it would be a series of technical electives of which that would be one.

And then, so you would take as a mechanical, you would take core courses in mechanical … and then maybe junior year or senior year you would take one or two

BALMER: Right, but in addition. But in addition to that the core courses would have, would be revisited to see what can be added to that.

…towards nanotechnology?

BALMER: Well, not necessarily nanotechnology, any of these leading edge things that we're talking about. For example in mechanical engineering, fluids mechanics - Tom teaches fluid mechanics, we've all had fluid mechanics. Fluid mechanics is a second course, typically deals with things like flows and networks of parts and machinery and things of that nature. We're going to do one in the spring in ME and I'm going to be part of that, and we're going to add to that computational fluid dynamics … computer, we're going to bring in some fluid power which is power mechatronics. You know, valves and manufacturing equipment, now pneumatic hydraulics are fluid power. It's always been in the industry for a hundred years now and we never teach anything about it in college. So we have a piece of that, and I'm going to do a section on … mechanics which deals with biofluid mechanics, it's going to deal with polymer flows, the things that aren't simple fluids anymore. And that's going to give them a state of the arts fluid mechanics course so that when they go out and they hear … or they have a fluid which is different than normal they'll know how to deal with it.

And you said you would teach this class to who.

BALMER: It's a technical elective in ME right now. Experimental stuff.

We take our fluids class with Professor Jewell, we take our hydraulics class with Professor Jewell. How come that's not offered to civil engineers? In the future. They're going to take these similar type classes

BALMER: Yes, Civil engineering buys into this, yeah alright, that's something that I think our people should know. And I think it's something that our people should know.

I totally understand, but I'm siding again with Professor Jewell … that we are the least consistent of our programs. Because we can use pretty much everything that you said. Our department can use it. And how are we least consistent. How does that make us the weaker link.

BALMER: I can't say, I can't give you more insight than what I've just said. It's a perception that I have, it is certainly a marginal perception because, I mean I'm looking for, I have to organize these four programs.

To make a decision … you have to know that. You have to deal and present that. Straight out … read and understand why. Because so far we haven't figured out why. There has been a few motivations, definitely one is economics. I want to know why certain things. And I haven't been answered that.

BALMER: And I'm not sure I can. As I say, I have to make decisions, I have to make recommendations , it's my perception of that. Now is it right … I'm sure that some (inaudible response.)

I have a concern generally about this program in convergent technology. It seems to me there are two directions you can kind of head with it. One where you're graduating people who have very specific course loads in high tech, what ever that is, with these specific courses. Or another where people are coming out with a degree that is just kind of general … and they `re taking all kinds of different courses in all kinds of high tech areas. And how is that different from just a general engineering degree, where they haven't really taken any specific course loads to get to the point where they can be functional, professional engineers. Where they're just seeing, I'm not going to spout out all the different names that you've got, I've no idea what they are. But if you just get a smattering of all these different things through computers, through ME, through EE, and you come out and you really have no core in any one area, then how is that different from the general engineering degree that you've said you didn't want other than it's a general high tech engineering degree as opposed to a general traditional engineering degree.

BALMER: Well, you won't be general engineering, you'll have a degree in a major. That eliminates the concept of general engineering. And the program is simply to insert as a technical elective the option to become knowledgeable in some of these areas, plus the more important part of it, and perhaps the more difficult but I don't think so really, is the weaving of new ideas into existing courses. You know faculty are not, faculty have no incentive to do that generally speaking. You buy you get the book, you teach the book, nobody's writing the book that has any of this stuff in it today and so engineering … is largely flat.

I don't think Dean Balmer is arguing that these new technology potential courses cannot be integrated into Civil engineering. They certainly can be and add value to the education I've gotten and you are getting. I think it really comes down to his view of where he is going to find the dollars and has chosen civil engineering. So what do we have to do, give you another option to find dollars. Do you need a sponsor? A corporate sponsor.

BALMER: I don't know. It might help, yeah. (Does the CS department have sponsors, or the EE department.) It is a resource issue, I need resources. Now either that or you want me to convince Roger that Computer Science is not our problem. Or we find money to bring to this program. Or, or or, but it's not an anti civil engineering thing we're doing here. I'm simply trying to make this program

Only that you've chosen

BALMER: Only , that's right. Only that.

You mentioned in the beginning that a senior VP from IBM … investing … if that worked out, would you want to get rid of civil too?

BALMER: He spent a great deal of time with me. He spent time with me telling me a fairly complicated story about how he had to phase out a micro electronic division ….

But his grant wouldn't be sufficient to cover …(inaudible.)

BALMER: We have to prepare a proposal now for … for this center.

Why are we

BALMER: But, to keep civil I need six faculty lines. 1.5 million per faculty line. So that's 9 million dollars right there. I mean I don't know that they are going to jump on that that quickly. If it were environmental engineering or something it might be more in their line of thinking.

The engineering program right now, most of us have taken four courses a term. On top of that we're hearing that … has to be liberal arts. To include, … graduate level courses… . You can't take five courses a term, I know I've tried, It's not fun. It seems like if you're going to bring these courses in … (inaudible question.)

BALMER: That is another one of the constraints that's on civil engineering. You have more requirements, more severe constraints on your program than any other engineering program. You have to have courses in four majors with two in-depth, courses in four areas with two in-depth. And no other engineering program has that. So there's a little bit more flexibility in the other programs. And that's part of the problem. And it's also part of the problem as how I can redesign courses, or change courses or eliminate courses … . Change does not occur easily in a university environment.

Bob, we've got a lot of hypothetical questions going here. And I want to ask one that may be a little easier to answer. We're talking about convergent technology and you've done a lot more research on it than I have, because I've done none. My understanding of it is that it's more educating folks on the big picture and how all the different, for example I'm a construction manager I'm called on to get folks electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, civil engineer, end users, funnel all their ideas and needs into an end product, converge them so it works. Professor Lashway was talking earlier about … transportation and you have a lot of converging technology there. You have concrete, you have structures, mechanical. We put forth our curriculum proposal we addressed many of those issues and how we thought that civil definitely fits in to the convergent technologies theme. And I'm wondering if that was I'm not sure that it has been reviewed yet, if it has been reviewed yet what was your take on it.

BALMER: There were two things put forth, is this the first or the second.

This is the second.

BALMER: The one in which they showed fresh changes.

Yes.

BALMER: It came in probably at the wrong time. I mean it should have been there. It showed some course changes which is what I've been looking for. It probably didn't show enough of those changes. But I have not responded to that in any way. I probably should have. (it's still under review?) It's still on the table. Yes. But you know, it's not a problem figuring out how to utilize civil engineering in this environment. The problem is economics. I mean something has to go in order for us to move forward.

Have you considered the graduate program?

BALMER: Yeah, I talked I spoke to graduate programs. They don't contain enough substance to satisfy.

Issue of your resource argument ... . If you want to propose this convergent technology you're going to need leading edge people to teach these courses which are going to require more adjuncts which you already mentioned that you don't want to increase. And if you're not going to be a research institution, you don't want to go that direction, how are you going to manage to maintain leading edge information... .

BALMER: Very good question. Some faculty can do this right now. Some faculty who are in fields that fit in this area right now. I have support from at least IBM who are willing to take our faculty in their environment for a month or a summer and provide them the background that they need to move up to these levels. So I have industry support that will supply the knowledge base that is necessary to do some things that are new, so the faculty buy into this market. So the issue of getting the knowledge base into the faculty is something for which they would provide the solution. Some of it's there, some of it I can move in from the outside. And they won't be adjuncts. It's a moving forward of the entire body of students and faculty. And that's what I'm supposed to do, that's what I was told I was supposed to do.

You mentioned before Dean Balmer that if you were to go before the Board of Trustees and you should take them to task that you might not be permitted to speak before them again. I have a problem with that. If we're being recorded I'd like to go on record for a couple of things. The Board of Trustees probably does not have any civil engineers and for many years ... it's not engineering oriented. I would think a qualification to get on the Board of Trustees is to be able to interact with people in liberal arts background. That's where we're trying to educate our engineers. But most the engineers are scientific and they're not great communicators. They're not as eloquent as say a Poli Sci or a History major or an Arts major that would come out. Therefore I would expect our alumni that are on the Board of Trustees to come from those majors, and I wouldn't expect the Board to be heavily engineering oriented. But with that ability to communicate and do what it takes to be a member of the Board of Trustees comes a responsibility to look out for those that cannot communicate as well which are the scientist and the mathematics end of the university. And it seems to me that they may be looking to themselves, if this were a board meeting and we were all liberal arts and maybe there was some representation of mathematics fields in here, then we would, the psychology comes into play here. Everybody's concerned about their own background. `I was a history major when I was here and I think that was important. I wasn't a civil, nobody in here is a civil right now so actually what do we care. Our priority for Union should be...' And Roger is not a civil engineer or an engineer. He has a background, that's not engineering, and therefore I don't think we have proper representation. You are our representation with them and it seems to me that when you can't come in and they close the door and they speak amongst themselves they're not doing their job properly because they're using their own experience in what their own background was. And they don't see, they don't know about the civil engineering and they apparently don't want to learn about it. Now that's where Roger comes in, and it's up to Roger to communicate for the science and math and engineering majors on campus. To communicate their roll in this university and what makes Union so great that we have both. Roger has something more important to do right now than being here and I can't imagine what it is that he didn't have an hour or two this morning to be here. The same thing happened over at the Terrace Council meeting at the World Trade Center and Christie Sorum came before us and spoke ... everyone expected Roger to be there to talk about the fraternities, they knew that was going to come up. And she came to the podium and said I have to apologize for Roger he couldn't be here today. We said What, this is be so important, fraternities. The Terrace Council has a million questions. She said, sorry it's his son's birthday today. And this is a Thursday night. And everybody says, why didn't he tell us to meet him on Wednesday night. My question is when can our group meet with Roger. I know he wants to have you as the insulation between him, and he's too important and too busy to speak with us. But as some point he has to step in as the leader of this college and come in and face us. He should be seated here right now listening to this because there's information is more important to him that whatever he is doing right now that he thinks is more important. And I really think that Roger should be taken to task and he should respond to his responsibility as our liaison with the Board of Trustees.

BALMER: I don't quite know how to respond to that. I'm not here to criticize Roger Hull, there's enough of that. But I understand what you're saying, I agree with you. I was, I had hoped to speak to the Board earlier. You know, in my tenure here. But was never offered the chance. And this time I was told by Roger that I had ten minutes and I took an hour. He knew it because I had slides laid out and he knew what they were, and Christie was the buffer at that point in time. I don't know. I've heard the Board called dysfunctional. There are some leaders on the Board now who are really trying to get it cranked up. They are putting in place things that Roger Hull has never seen before, like um, tasks that he must do, that he must respond to. So his life is different now in terms of his responsibility to the Board and then to him. This is all recent, this has all happened in the last year. Yeah, you're right.

Could I ask you a question about the current status of the design of this program convergent technology. Just this morning at 9:30 I picked up and started to read Appendix A. And it would appear at first glancing through it that it's a vision, a concept, and it's kind of, the four corners ... taped into place. It is totally a fair amount of design development work ... needs to be put into place. And the reason I'm surmising that is that I had the opportunity to work with the Division faculty throughout the General Electric Grant. So even thought, I say work with, to be aware of the effort the time and complexity that they put into that, all the issues that they had to face on that. It strikes me as being in some ways at least as complex and probably more complex in terms of unknown transformation as implicit ... . Now my question is could you share with us your thoughts as to realistically how long it would take to do all the academic development here so that this can be transitioned into the teaching process here at the college.

BALMER: My first cut at that was a three year transition process. And it breaks down like this: one year to develop the course; one year to integrate them into the program; one year to do a pilot run, to test things out and see how they work. It's a very rough schedule obviously from what I told you. ... three is probably a realistic number, how long it's going to take to get this thing up and running ... stability. And you're right, the document is a first cut on white paper. A eureka document, one that I wrote back in late December when I first came across some of these ideas. And the next document that I will produce again based on what I've done, having talked to all the science departments and engineering departments is where I think we should go. What specific areas I think we should try convergent. But that hasn't happened.

That's down the line.

BALMER: That will be tied into the GE proposal, I'm sorry the IBM proposal as well. Those two will go hand in hand.

And what do you think the timing would be before those are kind of presented to the thought leaders within the faculty and administration prior to going to the Board.

BALMER: It has to be less than a month. The people at IBM are anxious to do something, to move forward. I don't want to let that dry up on me. So I'm going to move as quickly as I can.

And the second unrelated question, you described earlier you were talking to a group of people. (BALMER: Yeah) The principle component of that was the CORE committee?

BALMER: Right. What I call the CORE committee which is the group of people that went to California.

And it seems that in this interaction you include a process of making a decision of which department made ..

BALMER: Not with that committee, I need to clarify that right up front. That committee was not asked to make any kind of recommendations. Nor does anyone on that committee agree with what I've done. In fact there's probably no one in engineering that agrees with what I've done.

When you say don't agree, do you mean the same as disagree?

BALMER: Yes. When I say about what I've done, I mean about the prioritization of programs including civil engineering as the one ... . They do not want to be there. In fact they do not want to be, take part in this decision. It's not something that they would ever agree upon, this is my job.

This entire screen, this intellectual screen, is yours and yours alone?

BALMER: Of the programs, yes. Not of the ... Yes, The interaction that I have with the CORE committee has to do with convergent technologies on how, how, what that means, how that's going to move forward.

Which leads to my last question, is this. As you worked on the question of what is and what isn't ... convergent technologies, why wasn't that opportunity taken to add somebody from civil to that group. Was there some sort of an insurmountable pediment to bringing in the last missing element to the division?

BALMER: No, not really. I mean it just didn't seem important at the time. I had developed a group of people that worked well. I had not come across a lot of effective teamwork on this campus when I got here. So I got a team of people that did seem to effectively work well. I just continued to work with them. There's nothing wrong with my doing that now. I mean I can have a civil engineer there too at this point. A decision has not been made, discussions will continue to go on. The rote problem is resources, period.

For someone who has spent most of my career helping organizations ... organize themselves and strategies ... I highly recommend to you that you include all of the effective stakeholders in that process. And it seems to me that civil engineers...one of the stakeholders. Not only for the faculty, but also for the students who are, who came here expecting a vibrant civil engineering program, including the ones who have indicated civil in their applications to the college next year.

I have total respect for your job ... talking about, you've got an idea, you're ... up a small group of people. Something we talk about in our management classes. (Inaudible question.)

BALMER: Maybe, I don't intend to compete with UV or any of the major institutions. We're not developing new technology, we're simply bringing that information to the class.

... people want to be education in that area, then go someplace that has it. These guys ... the competition.

BALMER: Not necessarily, the places that have this is the RPIs, MITs, these are all graduate level things. If people don't get them, they don't see them. My theory is if we can bring this into the undergraduate level, we can be the first to do it.

Question (Inaudible)

BALMER: Then what should be do, do nothing.

Bob, in going back to what John said, as far as, we're not going to compete with them ... they're not going to attract students here in the program. Because they go to the big schools and see all this new stuff. They don't want ... as an undergraduate. That's show and tell. And that counts a lot to high school students going to these schools. You're not going to be able to use it as a incentive to get good students. We're much better off tooting the things we're really good at like the international programs and the other things we're good at as far as recruiting students. That's my feeling on it.

BALMER: I don't quite, I guess, understand your point of view. Because we will have it in the curriculum, and we will have a curriculum that really is advanced at the undergraduate level, advanced beyond what the undergraduate curriculums at these other institutions are.

But they don't understand that. Parents and students don't understand that.

Two questions: One is maybe you can describe what a first convergent technology class would be like. What it would be. Secondly, ... what Dennis brought up earlier, ... industry support ... something that this campus would be uniquely positioned to put together right now without adding a single class. Number two, get back to basics. Program management, problem solving, ... .

The question is what, I didn't quite hear the first question.

The first question was if Dean Balmer could describe what a convergent technology course be like. That's the first one. The second one would be what, would be a good proposal to put forth with as convergent idea on this campus as we already know that has industry support.

Program Management?

Did you read the paragraph ... Bob what his comments were and he states: “ We have no quarrel whatsoever with the scientific skills we see in students coming out of this nation's engineering schools. But what we do have a problem with is their ability to see the big picture. Program management, problem solving, timing, the principles of quality these basic business principles need to be an integral part of the core curriculum. “ Combine those, converge those.

There are several of us in the room, for several weeks who basically have an invitation with members of the faculty, about doing exactly that, addressing that. Building off existing strengths on the campus, on the college, as a whole. Because the issues we're talking about in large scale, project management or program management, particularly today when it takes so much negotiation or very diverse ... community. Those skills that ...here on Union Campus, Political Science, Department of Economics, Department of life sciences, all kinds of people that we probably have to deal with, that I deal with, that you deal with. Those are all things that we had to learn about after we left Union, because the curriculum didn't focus on those. It makes a lot of sense if you can learn that a lot better in a small setting like this where you can manipulate things interdisciplinary interactions, might be more useful here than you can do at a place like MIT or Perdue or Cornell.

We've set ourselves up to be extremely successful.

leverage for the next step would to begin to think about this issue of sustainability and sustainable development. Probably one of the most pressing social issues of the 21^st century. And we have within our arms reach here, we have the kind of people who need to get involved with that whether they're anthropologist or philosophers or whatever. I think maybe some of you may remember in 1992 we had two philosophers in residence from the University of Colorado, Ralston and one of his associates. One of the culminating events of this year in residence was held right over here in the auditorium of the Reamer Center where you had two day long debates about ethics in the environment and the roll of engineering, the roll of science, the roll of philosophy, the roll of economics, the roll of this, that, anthropology. Perhaps one of the most dynamic experiences ever held on this campus was in 1992. Those are the kind of things you can design and implement in a setting like Union College. That clearly you could not do very well, it would get lost in the shuffle at a place like Cornell or Pennsylvania or some place like that. Certainly would never happen in a place like Perdue. MIT talking well we're going to do this ... they're not oriented for that. Yet you can do that here, you can do it at LaFayette, you can do it at Bucknell, you can do it at Swarthmore, you can do it at Harvey Mudd, you can do it at those kinds of colleges. Those are our peer groups, in terms of liberal arts colleges that have engineering or engineering schools that have an enormously successful liberal arts community wrapped around them. Those are things that could be designed and implemented with existing divisions and faculties, put in place in a year. And they would be unique. No competition with the research institutions of this size. Does that answer your question?

I'd say it was ... you and I are on the same page with it. If we could do something with liberal arts should definitely be suggested as a better way to implement convergent technologies here on this campus. But I guess my first question still stands: what would a first convergent technology class be like.

BALMER: We, we've done. I've talked about what a ... course would look like. One of our problems, . problems is that first year, how do you really turn on young people that are coming into engineering, who think they might want to be engineers but you really can turn them on to something. And so people have been experimenting with introductory engineering courses all over the country for a decade now. This past year, we had, for the past couple of years, we've been reforming our freshmen year. And this past year I decided that it needed to have a theme. Now I'll give you a little more structure than that. It needed to theme because, and we constantly monitor student feed back, all sorts of evaluations and try to find out what works and what doesn't work. And the students didn't quite see the connections between the different majors that we were trying to talk about. So we decided to give it a theme. So we came up with a theme of a smart car. And it turns out that automobiles today are incredibly complex things, they are the result of a very convergent technology, with distributed computing all over the cars. Very sophisticated engine designs and mechanical designs. And of course the transportation infrastructure built in the cars. And so that was the theme that we used, and its an example as to how you would bring a converging technology scenario into an existing course and talk about how all these things come together, that you're not just going to be a double E or a ME or a CE. You're going to have to deal with all kinds of very complicated issues out there. And, this, I mean you're not just going to be a specific type of engineering anymore. You've got to be good across the board. And that seemed to work very well. We're going to expand on that and try and polish that a little more – next year. The other piece to that course is we're going to do ... design in that course. And so we teach a three hour design lab once a week in which we talk the elements of design, talk about how about one goes about doing design. This is all in the freshmen year so we don't have all this mathematics to ... What happens is we give them a box, which has duck tape and dowels, and a design challenge. And they have to design and build and compete their product for the course. And that has been working quite well. Student responses at the end of the course has been generally quite good, we hold it in the Reamer Center, everybody is there on that day. We do a run off and there is only one winner out of the whole Freshmen class. And we give them some astounding prize like a T-shirt or something of that nature to make it all worthwhile. But that, I mean, that's how I bring that in at the very first of the engineering curriculum. That's an example of what I mean by that stuff.

How does that tie into convergent technology? For example, microelectronics. How do we get ... combine two or more.

BALMER: The freshmen are combining mechanical and electrical and computer science in a thing that they deal with every day, the automobile. Most people done even, adults don't understand how complicated cars are. For those in my generation, I went to college because I wanted to be an automotive engineer. The kids to day want to be computer people. And the automobile is so incredibly complicated, that we give them insight to how these things work. (inaudible) So they end up with a little bit of computer science, a little bit of ME. They talk about engines, they take an engine apart and put it back together again. Hands on experience with lots of different things that show them these major, these pillars of engineering are actually interlocked with each other. You can't just give them one thing.

I just want to add that one third of that program should be infrastructure.

BALMER: Yeah, I know, you're right.

Transportation, roads, highways.

BALMER: Right. So we've brought civil engineering into it.

Not only that. All these great complicated cars won't run on rocky road. It has to be a very flexible pavement and the air has to be very clean, otherwise it will contaminate all the electronics on the car. The point I'm trying to make here is on January 3 when you met with us, civil engineering faculty, you told us quote `I'm trying to do everything in my power to save the department and I need your help, and you need to take a fresh look at your curriculum. And I was always under the impression that you were really the friend of civil engineering and you were trying to do something to help the department. Then I was really shocked to learn that it was your recommendation, not only that, nobody else shared this opinion with you on the CORE committee. What did you do to the department, and why do you feel this recommendation is good despite the fact that nobody else shares with you.

BALMER: When I met with you on January 3, I challenged you to save your own department. I asked you to come back with some results and you didn't do it. I mean you dragged your feet for weeks to give me something that you could have done in a half a day. And you'll argue about that but I know damn well you could have put together a curriculum that looked like what I was asking you for from the very beginning. And I got the final curriculum the afternoon before I was supposed to go meet with Roger Hull to give him a recommendation. It was too little, it was too late. That's the answer.

But you just said it's not too late to even consider what we've already done.

BALMER: No, it was too late for when I had to talk to Roger. It's not too late now. No.

But the issue is not the damn civil engineering part of the curriculum. It is the resource issue. Try something else, or

Has anything else been looked at besides, I don't think anyone here wants to cut any. You don't want computer science to go, or civil engineering.

BALMER: Right, right.

What other alternatives were looked at besides cutting?

BALMER: None. I mean is no alternatives. Normally when you come to a group like this and you want them to go forward you provide some resources so they can do that.

Sponsorship. Well, I don't know how to construe that.

BALMER: I don't either.

Ok, But there's one possible one. And I bet we can come up with five other possibilities ideas that don't involve cutting anything.

BALMER: Good, good, please.

I think we've got, the one Dennis and I was just talking about, we don't have to cut anything, we don't have to add anything. We just got to make civil

BALMER: No, No, No, No, No. You're forgetting I have this huge adjunct load that I will not accept. You cannot have the quality of engineering program at Union College that we want by bringing in so many people from the outside. I don't, I mean I know you're all good adjuncts and so on and so forth, but I won't accept that. I need to have, I need ...

I'm curious, what department hires the most adjuncts?

BALMER: I don't even know. I think they're distributed pretty much across the board. No I'm sorry about that. Because Computer Science is so understaffed, they're the ones with the highest adjunct load.

Is there a problem, their hiring adjuncts, you've already said that they'd be ... in going to the math department (BALMER: Yeah) Therefore they fall under their department funding.

BALMER: Yeah, but it's not that simple. They won't let that happen. I have asked them. I have pursued that avenue and the answer's no.

I'm just trying to follow the logic, or the process, with which things are done. And you've said that you offered civil engineering a chance to save ourselves by presenting a new curriculum for which it is still not too late. That we can work on a curriculum that may work. But it IS too late, it always has been. Because the fact is that somebody's got to go. And so you're going to cut civil engineering. So, is there a possibility of us staying at all. Or is this entirely

BALMER: I don't know the answer to that. I don't think so. I'll be frank with you. Unless you can come up with a way to solve the resource problem and maybe getting support from the outside is an answer. I don't know where you're going to get this much money.

Wouldn't it ... to send us off chasing, wouldn't it have been better to say two months ago “we need to come up with the resources to save civil engineering and you may have a better sales pitch if you can change your curriculum around to better meet the needs of tomorrow,” than to say “go off and come up with a new curriculum,” not mentioning the fact that we have this serious resources problem and put us two months behind what we really needed to do to get to the core of the problem.

BALMER: It would have been better plain talk. I don't think we on our end had our heads that much together that point in time. This was fairly early in the process. So it would have been (fade).

My question is, right now ... why are we the ones forced to go out and ... sponsorship.

BALMER: I'm not asking you to do anything. (laughter) It is up to you to decide what you are going to do.

Why, it keeps going back to why.

Moderator: We'd like to talk about other things today. I think we have taken up a lot of the Dean's time with some of the burning issues. I think we've covered most of the key parameters that we need to think about and work on. I don't know the solution yet, but I don't think we are going to find that solution with the Dean here today. He's laid out the problem pretty damn clear to us, he really has.

Has he laid out how we can solve the problem.

BALMER: If I could hire a consultant I would tell you.

How much money, like how much money are we looking at.

BALMER: To endow a faculty, to pay a faculty member's salary and overhead on this campus you would need to add 1.5 million dollars to the endowment and I need six .

I'm a freshmen engineering student and I was accepted to this school and several other pretty good engineering schools. I came to this school because when I came here I came on a tour ... I decided to come to this school because I'm expecting ... this engineering department. But by senior year, with a three year phase out ... guaranteeing me that a professor like Mafi. Why wasn't there was not an asterisk on my acceptance letter saying that I might be accepted into a engineering department that is in the downfall .

BALMER: All this has happened. To answer your last question, all this has happened in the last couple of months.

So that means it was a mistake to be a freshmen here.

BALMER: No, No. We do not, a decision has not been made even though I keep alluding to the fact that I don't know what other decisions are available. You can help if you can find a way, I'd be more than happy to. I have no choice the Board makes the decision.

Is the Board going to wait until June. Because students have to make a decision by the May 15, ... informed that there's just not going to be an engineering program here, but a lot of the engineers coming to this school are going to be civil engineers. That's not fair at all. There's going to be a lot of people visiting campus this spring, and I'm not going to lie to them.

I have a question and that is the CE Advisory Board and council has been good enough to come here and discuss this with you. I would like to know when you plan on reforming your Dean's Advisory Council and your Executive.

BALMER: I don't , I don't have time to do that. I lacked the leadership on that council and I haven't found it yet. I don't intend to take that

You don't intend to.

BALMER: I don't intend to now.

So you never discussed this whole issue with them either as your Advisory Council.

BALMER: No, I found that Council not effective.

This is solely your decision ... .

BALMER: yes, it's my job, my decision.

Could you, restate your position on the level of tenured faculty, full time faculty, endowed faculty verse adjuncts. You, I think I heard you say, you've really got to reduce the number of adjuncts as a percentage. Now, is that your decision. Or is that something, is that absolutely

BALMER: Yes it is absolute, but it's not only me. I mean if you look at, the only other department on campus that has anywhere near as many adjuncts is modern languages. I mean, I don't see how you can say that this is a select private institution when you bring in so many people from the outside, irrespective of how talented you say they are, that are not professional faculty, that are not here all the time. That can't deal with students, that don't know half of the student problems, that don't have the time to deal with students. This is just a shame. We're talking about the sophomore level, the junior level courses and everything. I'm talking about the capstone level. I mean I will agree that there is real value in having experienced people talk to students at the senior level. But

I get the sense that somewhere you feel you have to get to by September 1. Or is this something you can work out over a period.

BALMER: It will, no matter what happens it gets worked out over period of time. I mean the tenured faculty, there are tenured faculty here. There not going to go, I've got to place them with.

No, I wasn't talking about that, I was talking about the increasing the proportion of endowed professors. You said

BALMER: Oh, Oh, oh. in terms of trying to deal with that issue. Probably would have to be by June, there would have to be significant progress towards doing that by the Board meeting in order to demonstrate that it could be done.

The same number of teaching positions, but relative proportion of adjuncts you're distributing. You're saying you can't tolerate the percentage of adjuncts any longer. (BALMER: Right) Can you tolerate a phasing toward your goal over a period of time?

BALMER: Yeah, right, absolutely. I can't do it any other way.

Well that's something you have to clarify here before we can do anything.

Moderator: I think we really need to move on. I'd like to thank the Dean for coming today.

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