Chemical Education Today
ACS Presidential Election
Chemistry and Education by F. Sherwood Rowland
University of California, Irvine I have been involved in university-level education ever since completing my Ph.D., and have worked with more than 50 graduate students receiving Ph.D.s and about 100 postdoctoral associates, with work reported in more than 400 scientific papers. In the spring of 1964, I was invited to visit the scheduled site for the Irvine campus of the University of California, to be located on 1500 acres of land that had been donated by the Irvine Company, the operator of the 100,000-acre Irvine ranch in Orange County just south of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Soon after, I accepted the offer of the Chairmanship of the Chemistry Department for the 1964–1965 year, and was its sole member until joined by Marjorie Caserio in January and five more new faculty members during the summer of 1965. We also had three first-year graduate students, plus another ten continuing graduate students who had moved with my research group from the University of Kansas and that of Bob Taft from Penn State University. The undergraduate enrollment for 1965–1966 was 1500 students, and my initial Chemistry One course had an enrollment of 342. I remained as the chairman until 1970. Our goal was the creation of a first-rate department with strong research capability, and an equally strong commitment to undergraduate education. We also had the knowledge that the state of California had an outstanding record in its support for education at the university level. And of course, we also knew that the reputations of departments and universities were accumulations of many decades of experience and performance. Now, four decades down the road, the total enrollment at UCI in the fall of 2004 will be about 25,000 students, with a faculty of about 1250 including 39 professors of chemistry. The most recent ACS report (2001–2002) on chemistry department degrees showed that UCI had produced 35 Ph.D.s during that year, evidence that we are now playing a significant role in U.S.
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photo: John Blum
The role of universities has been established over many decades to include three aspects: the teaching of established knowledge, the extension of this knowledge, and public service, with the latter often including assistance both in preuniversity education and dialog with the general public. The ACS plays a major role in the facilitation of all these activities—which become ever more important because they are embedded in a society highly dependent in its daily activities on the fruits of science and technology. The President of the ACS and other officers have a general responsibility to advance these goals, and the President in particular is often the public spokesperson for these activities.
postgraduate chemical education. The number of undergraduate chemistry majors at UCI has averaged 106 per year over the period from 1996– 2002, with two or three per year having laboratory experience in our atmospheric chemistry research group. Global Chemistry
F. Sherwood Rowland
As the standards of living and the human populations of the various countries increase around the world, the prospective burden on the global environment is also increasing. At the same time, the scientific capabilities of most countries are also on the rise, and it seems apparent that many of the potential problems can be ameliorated or avoided by judicious applications of scientific expertise. Chemical knowledge across the broad range from physics through biology to medicine is thoroughly entwined in most of these questions. The scientific questions associated with the increase in global population from 1,600,000,000 in 1900 to 6,100,000,000 in the year 2000 were considered in October 1993 by a coalition of more than 60 national Academies of Sciences, led by those from Sweden, the United Kingdom, India, and the United States. The close interaction among these Academies struck those present as an important forward step, worth repeating on future occasions. I became involved in 1994 as Foreign Secretary of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in the creation of the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues. As Co-Chair of the IAP for five years (with P. Tandon of India) the number of participating Academies from individual countries grew rapidly to its present 85 members. A very important factor in applying scientific solutions across the globe is the presence in each country of a cadre of trained scientists capable of interacting with their counterparts on an international basis. This “capacity building” is a very important task for the immediate future, and is an area in which the ACS can play a very significant role. One final comment—my observation has been that the similarities in the common outlook about the workings of chemistry seem to facilitate constructive discussions of other, less scientific, subjects among people of widely variant national backgrounds and experiences. F. Sherwood Rowland is in the Department of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92697;
[email protected].
Vol. 81 No. 10 October 2004
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Journal of Chemical Education
1411
