Michigan:
* A
bi.
S
Future
in
Education
Continued from Page 9
million monstor providing 2000 or so jobs.
The accelerator, or a similar project in
the future, could easily fall to Ann Arbor
and the impact would be tremendous.
ONE ASPECT of the problem in setting
off this sort of development has been
the University's engineering school. Un-
like the dean of engin schools, MIT. it
has been slow to involve itself in new
trends, reluctant to seek to develop a
new and more exciting and politically
and economically sophisticated breed of
engineer..And the engineer is closer to
the real world research corporations than
the pure scientist.
Creative thinking and innovation there-
fore become the task of the new dean.
Gordon van Wylen, who has, certainly. a
great deal to work with but a lot of old
thinking to rout out. Similarly he is
close to the probiem of the Willow Run
labs, which could contribute mightily to
exciting research developments here, bu
which are largely stifled in security. red
tape and isolation.
Two very real blocks to Michigan de-
velopment exist in two widely diffeing
contexts, the antiquated state tax systerr
and the middle class affluence of the
auto companies coupled with a disdain
for local probiems (and they are, un-
fortunately, thriving on it),
Haber urged the state-wide income tax
at a press conference announcing pub-
lication of "Michigan in the 1970's," but
a solution here is continually getting-
fouled up in political maneuvering.
THE POSITION and psychology of the
auto companies, led by General
Motors, is much more deep seated. They
presently are accumulating, for instance,
huge amounts of cash. with very little
to do with it. Put to work creatively, and
only a fraction of it is needed to build
all the cars we can possibly use. it could
go a long way toward setting the area
economy on the right track,
Large. nontransportation research and
development programs might also be un-
dertaken by them as a means of diversi-
fying, with supporting programs under-
taken concomitantly within the Univer-
sity's er- gineering school to provide the
type of manpower needed. (Chrysler's re-
cent grant of $1.3 million is a shot in the
arm, and a step in the right direction.
but just one.
Again, these are important things for
van Wylen to think about. Thus far,
there is practically nil productive alliance,
direct or indirect, between the University
or its graduates and the auto firms. They
think in different worlds, and, for now,
the great potential of working together
is aoing unrealized.
°rf1E CRUCIAL long-rainge problem that
must be attacked is the loss of the
edfcated. creative. innovative population.
There are no solutions yet, even in theory.
But there's no reason there can't be.
President Harlan Hatcher, speaking be-
fore the Economic Club of Detroit in
Fenruary 1964 said:
We have the brains, in both the
universities and industries; we have
the facilities and institutions; we
have a state government sympathetic
to the cause of educational and eco-
nomic growth. But in this, as in so
many other matters, the race is to the
swift. We must move on all fronts-
educational, industrial and govern-
mnntal. We have, ready to our hands,
the means to make this state. and
particularly this Southeastern portion
of it, an intellectual. scientific, and
industrial center equal to any in the
nation."
Constantinos Doxiadis. who heads a
famous planning firm headquartered in
Athens, was in Detroit last spring to an-
nounce some work his firm is doing for
Detroit Edison. At a press conference he
speculated on the future of Southeastern
Michigan to the year 2000.
He foresaw, on the basis of the first
phase of his studies of the area, approx-
imately $200 billion invested in new fa-
cilities in this area between now and
20^0, and he said he considered the
Great Lakes region to be the second
fasteest growing region in the United
States, second only to the Eastern Sea-
board.
THIS TREMENDTUS growth will come
about because the Great Lakes region
is like a "great plains." with no natural
or other barriers to growth. Shortages of
water elsewhere in the nation (now with
us in New York and always threatening
in Los Angeles) will make this the fast-
est-growing area in the U.S. and number
one in terms of over-all impact in the
nation. Doxiadis declared.
The abundant water supply of the
Great Lakes thus becomes the prime asset
for human growth and transportation
needs. It will simply be a matter of going
where there is water, and the Great
Lakes region is the only place.
The problem, of course, is to translate
this potential into something more mean-
ingful than words and phrases, and to
plan for the growth, so that the short-
term situation is livable and the long-
term turns out the why we want it and
not worse than what we now have.
To do this, one can look first at the
educational institutions and situations
that now exist. Michigan is behind in
facing squarely the problems of educa-.
tion, but the foundation is fairly strong
from past generosity and much is being
done and planned now.
THIS TREMENDOUS growth will come
out of the penny-pinching years into
a period of relative affluence. Its status
in terms of faculty salaries, facilities and
internal strength in terms of both quan-
tity and quality is rapidly being regained
through a combination of a level of
basic quality that was held together
through the worst years by dint of heroic
effort by all concerned; federal money
attracted, partly with the aid of good
administration to this quality; and im-
proved relations with a newly-affluent
state legislature.
When the $55 Million Program, new
federal legislation to provide building
money, and a still brighter picture in
Lansing are added together, things begin
to look a little better. This is not to say
that the future for either the University
or the state system of higher education
will be easy by any means. It is only
to say that it is not insoluble.
At the PhD level Michigan ranks 3rd
nationally in the production of all Mas-
ters degrees, due largely to the Univer-
sity's graduate program. Continued
growth in this type of manpower has
been questioned, however, by Wallace R.
Brode in a January issue of Science
magazine.
Brode claims that a ceiling has been
reached in the number of well-qualified
scientists and engineers that the U.S. can
produce, as evidenced by the slowly grow-
ing graduate engineering and science
enrollments in spite of greater and great-
er number of undergraduates and the
strong enticements to them to join these
fields. He warns that standards must be
watched carefully in spite of pressures
to turn out more degrees. ,
THIS MIGHT AFFECT the enrollment
projections of the engineering school,
which call for an increase of 150 per
cent in graduate enrollment from 1964-
75, a much greater increase than is
projected for the University as a whole
or for the other large schools. Graduate
engineering enrollment grew only 11 per
cent from 1960-65 at the University.
The U.S. House Subcommittee on
Science, Research and Development has
projected a growth rate through 1980 of
four per cent per year for BA's in all
fields. This would give the University
about 5500 BA candidates in 1975 if its
proportion relative to the state stays the
same. This is in line with the University's
undergraduate enrollment projections
(30,000 undergraduates in 1975).
More serious is the question of PhD
candidates. The University has projected
a similar (four per cent) growth rate
for them through 1975 as has the state-
wide Blue Ribbon Committee, yet, as the
Blue Ribbon analysis makes clear, much
higher rates are clearly needed to provide
the well-educated population needed to
accelerate the state's development and
provide the broad, strong base of well-
trained teachers and administrators on
which the state's educational system
must rest.
What is happening is that the college
enrollment boom is coming up from the
bottom in the educational system, yet it
must be met with a response from the
top, with well-trained professional people
to run the burgeoning community college
system as well as the older schools. A
tremendous squeeze on the system results,
and right in the center of the problem is
the University, which provides almost
half the graduate-professional education
in the state.
SO THE FOLLOWING questions become
crucial to the future development of
Michigan, and many of the answers will
depend largely on planning and thought
within the University:
-Can the Universit,0% r'ie of national
leadership in education be translated into
a role as valuable to the state?
-Can the University community begin
to provide the type of environment that
will attract the creative, innovating class
needed to pull Southeastern Michigan
out of its automobile-building orienta-
tion?
-Will the Detroit metropolitan area,
which will before long be stretching out
to Flint, Saginaw, Jackson and Toledo,
solve its many problems of organization,
accommodate a burgeoning Negro popu-
lation and a huge factory worker one
and start providing a more suitable en-
vironment throughout for the culture
and suburb orientated upper middle class
such as New York, Chicago or San
Francisco do?
-Can all this be translated into new
sources of economic support for ",he area
(Meier has suggested the education in-
dustry as most suitable for Southeastern
Michigan, but that requires a drastic
revision of our methods of financing
higher education).
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is pres-
ently providing many programs aimed
at positive solutions-poverty money in
Detroit, research and education money in
Ann Arbor-but it is hard to tell hw
far these programs will go, how much
they will expand and exactly what tbeir
effects will be.
Neither can the posture of the auto
companies be predicted. What will happen
when and if automobiles hecome less
lucrative is hard to telt, and that date
may be far off yet. It would seem likely.
though, that General Motrs won't be
one to watch idly while its profits enter
an inexorable decline. Driven elsewhere
for profitable enterprises, there is no
telling where corporate interest might
light.
Be that as it may, fhe Univeimty of
Michigan has a role to play. Its profes-
sors are at the vanguard of knowledge
and technology, as much so overall as
any other place in the world. Its students
are not far behind and will (more liter-
ally than we generally care to suppose)
be tomorrow's leaders.
Whatever intellectual Lone, whatever
cultural quality is to be imparted to
Southeastern Michigan must to a large
degree come from the University. Stim-
ulus to the world's exotic new industries
and occupations to take root here will
have to come from the University. And
when you consider that half the occu-
pations 15 years hence will be ones
unheard of now, that's a big order.
The Univrsity brings the best students
from all over the country and the world
to Ann Arbor and creates from them,
over 7000 (and the figure is rapidly
approaching 8000) degree holders per
year, 3500 students who have acquired
their BA, 2400 their Master's, 850 other
graduate-professional degrees and 400
their PhD's.
That's potential, and problems, un-
limited..
Schlock
Culture
Continued from Page 11
symbols to be sure, but not its funda-
mental nature, the words of Professor
Galbraith written in 1958 assume some
degree of irony:
"We have not yet seen that . . . our
economy immobilizes all but a minor
fraction of the (national) product in
private and, from the standpoint of na-
tional security, irrelevant production. We
have not seen that the problem is far
more than one of a bigger budget-that
it is one of our attitude toward the goals
of the society itself. A society which sets
as its highest goal the production of
private consumer goods will continue to
reflect such attitudes in all its public
decisions.... We have yet to see that not
the total of resources but their studied
and rational use is the key to achieve-
ment."
THE MICHIGAN DAILY MAGAZINE
Z' 1 P
Sfr~iAu
MAGA:A
Sunday, December 5, 1965
Vol. XI[, No. 2
Aerial view of Detroit and Windsor
....................... ....... . . . . ............
MAGAZI N E
f Vol XII, No. 2 Sunday, December 5, 1965
IS MICHIGAN HEADED FOR THE ROCKPiLE?'
By Robert Johnston.. Page One
... . .
AN INTERVIEW WITH ROGER HEYNS
...Page Two
HENRY VI: ERA OF CHAOS
By Gail Blumberg ..........:.............. Page Six
NEW POWER IN SOCIETY; THE SCHLOCK CULTURE
By Mark R. Killingsworth................................ Page Ten
MAGAZINE EDITOR - Gail Blumberg
Photos: Cover: Willow Run Labs; Page 6, 7, Thomas R. Copi.
Robert Johnston, Editor of The Daily, is a Senior majoring in honors history.
Mark R. Killingsworth, a Junior majoring in economics, reports national affairs for
The Daily.
Gail Blumberg is a Senior majoring in English.
P'g T
Page Twelve
Is Michigan
headed For
The Bockpile ?
Sociologists, planners and economists, look-
ing into the future of Michigan, forecast un-
employment, crippling economic specializa-
tion and inadequate education unless neir
and imaginative programs can be developed
and supported-a role the University of
Michigan should take the lead in.
Analysing and forecasting, used for
just such thinking ahead, serve to pin-
point potential trouble spots, areas where
problems can be expected to develop
unless steps can be taken early to combat
them.
SOME of the problems foreseen for'
Michigan are:
-A projected youth unemployment
rate of 30-6 per cent going into the
1970's;
-A need for 500,000 new jobs in Mich-
igan by 1975;
-Lack of economic diversification in
the Detroit metropolitan area;
-Inadequate and poorly planned high-
er and vocational education in Michigan;
-A static economic and class position
for non-whites;
-Lack of regional authority for posi-
tive making and implementation of pol-
icy in the Detroit metropolitan area; and
-Lack of sufficient state revenues to
support promising programs.
THE three publications that have
sought to collect data, bring it to-
gether in coherent form, and stretch it
out into the future in the necessary na-
tional context to ascertain prospects
and problems ate:
-Michigan in the 1970's: An Economic
Forecast, edited and with an introduction
by Dean William Haber of the literary
college and Profs. W. Allen Spivey and
Martin R. Warshaw of the graduate busi-
ness administration school;
-Proposals For Human Resource De-
velopment In Th
Richard L. Meiel
school; and
-Research En
versities by Frar
trial Developmen
tute of Science
The broad que
social and econo
state add' up to
answer it, is nec
study down into
of the componen
opment into the
variables as pos
done, the parts :
together again i
and social syster
SOME of the c
-Pooulation:
hy birth and de-.
By breaking do
one gets estimate
have to be avai
built. and the q
will beneidId fr
local overnmen
-Education:
man resources d
determining how
develnnment is
education. throw
vides the skills
a sophisticated
economy.
-Economic
Contii
By ROBERT JOHNSTON
SYSTEMS analysis is "in." Poverty is
newly in. Forecasts are coming in. And
interdisciplinary planning is just begin-
ning to become respectable.
For example, the 1964 report of the
Mental Health Research Institute talks
of conflicts, "one of the most potent
sources of disorder and breakdown in so-
cieties," as a "systems phenonenon" being
studied at various levels: "among indi-
viduals, groups, institutions, nations, and
the international system,
Several University publications over the
past year have attempted to use some of
the tools of economic and social analysis
to put together forecasts of various lines
of development for the state of Michigan
over the nex't 10-20 years, then to put
these forecasts together to predict sources
of conflict, tension or friction among
these trends.
Their findings indicate that Michigan,
while it is continuing to prosper in the
midst of an unprecedented national eco-
nomic boom, will suffer severely when
there is even a mild slowdown.
WORSE, the state, by relying on the
presently prosperous auto industry
for its economic foundation, is not taking
the steps to correct the ills in govern-
ment and in the use of human resources
that are needed to move from a Henry
Ford era into the space age.
It is simply not thinking ahead or
heeding the future.