Air Products' Donley awarded SCI medal Edward Donley, chairman and chief executive officer of Air Products & Chemicals, will be in New York City Wednesday night to receive the Chemical Industry Medal of the Society of the Chemical Industry. At that presentation, Donley will speak about cooperation between industry and government and between industry and academia—two intertwined subjects that are of special interest to the 58-year-old executive. The road to one of the chemical industry's highest honors has been a 37-year journey for Donley. He joined Air Products as an engineer in 1943, just three years after the company was founded. After World War II he used his engineering and selling backgrounds for commercial development for Air Products. In 1957, Donley was named vice president of the company's process equipment division and in 1966 president of Air Products. In 1973 he assumed the additional role of chief executive officer and in 1978 he was elected chairman of the board. Donley will receive the SCI medal "in recognition of his leadership and contribution to the progress of the chemical industry." The award has gone to such top businessmen in the chemical industry as Irving S. Shapiro of Du Pont, Jack B. St. Clair of Shell, F. Perry Wilson of Union Carbide, Harold Thayer of Mallinckrodt, and Leonard Pool, also of Air Products. Donley's background in working with the government through Air Products and with the company's new commitment to the synfuels program through its joint venture with Wheelabrator-Frye has given him a deep commitment to industry-government cooperation. One of Donley's big concerns is that the three principal sectors involved with the chemical industry—academia, government, and industry—have not worked well together. "We are in a fiercely competitive world," he says, "in which we need to increase selfsufficiency at home. Adversarial relationships between government and industry and academia and industry are counterproductive." Donley, who is something of a student of history, refers often to past events to make a point. "The idea of government and industry being adversaries is not characteristic, as I see it, in the long reach of American history," he says. "In the 1930's when the country was in desperate trouble and Franklin Roosevelt was forging a new coalitioh, he attacked business and called businessmen 'economic royal-
ists.' But in other periods of American history, government and industry worked together very effectively," Donley says. "The classic is the story of Thomas Jefferson subsidizing Eli Whitney in the development of interchangeable parts and the benefit that grew from that for the U.S.— mass production. Even Franklin Roosevelt, when war came, forgot about businessmen being 'economic royalists' and they became 'the arsenal of democracy.' And we won the war that way. Now we are in a war of a different kind—the raw material war or the inflation war—and certainly we need cooperation among these different sectors." One of the areas that must be relaxed, according to Donley, is taxation. Taxes are skimming off profits that can be used for other things, he says. "If the government skims off such a large portion of the transaction that passes through the industrial firm, then the private sector cannot give adequate support to such things as academic research. I think that if the government would relieve the tax burden on industry then we would see money flowing to the education sector, we would see money flowing to new capital investment, productivity would increase, and the nation would benefit." Donley is a great believer in the link between industry and academia. His commitment to education includes membership on the Board of Overseers of the College of Engineering & Applied Science of the University of Pennsylvania, the board of trustees of Carnegie-Mellon University and its Business Advisory Council, and the corporation of Lawrence Institute of Technology.
This commitment is manifest in Donley's attitude that industry should fund academic research. According to Donley, the educational community originally got support from the churches; then in the 19th century support came from wealthy capitalists. After World War II, the government supported academic research. "All of these sources have dried up," Donley says. "And the only real source of academic funds for the future is private industry. That is a good investment. Probably the investment in education is the most high-yield investment that the nation has ever made." Again, Donley reverts to history: "If Abraham Lincoln had not been renowned for freeing the slaves, he would still be one of our greatest presidents for creating the land-grant universities." Donley also believes that industry is the better source of support for education than government, because industry is more pluralistic. "Government is a big monolithic system coming up to the White House. To process anything through the government is a very slow, unwieldy process. The thousands of industrial firms throughout the country can make individual decisions much faster." Donley does see a danger in industry-supported academic research, however; that is industry's insistence on project-oriented research. This can come about because of the present form of corporate ownership, according to Donley. American industry, he says, is overwhelmingly owned by large portfolios. The managers of these portfolios are under fierce competitive pressure for short-term results. Therefore they impose short-term demands on corporate management, and management responds to these. Thus, it is difficult for the corporation to make money available for research that does not have a direct bearing on its own businesses. Donley is optimistic about research for the future, however. "The next one or two decades," he says, "will see a golden age of invention. Every operation we have in the country is designed for economic conditions that no longer exist. Our whole national system is based on cheap energy and so we need a plethora of inventions." Donley is a native of Highland Park, Mich. He graduated from Lawrence Institute of Technology in Detroit with a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering. He is married to Inez Cantrell and has two sons and one daughter. William Storck, New York Oct. 6, 1980C&EN
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