The Panel Discussion Following the formal papers, a pnnd discussion chaired hg Glenn Crovby was presented, consisting ofthe speakers joined hy Dr. A. D. F. Toy and Professor H. C. Hnwn.
7) Safety is mandatory in industrial laboratories and students should be made consciou~of this during their rducathmal yean.
8) Studentsshould beeneouraacd to take enainrrrinr clectiven. 9) Students should be taught how to keep lahoratbry notebook
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A. D.F.Toy: Stauffer employs over 400 chemists with de-
which will stand up under legal scrutiny. Many industrial patent attorneys would he receptive to invitations to lecture at your universities on this topic.
grees of whom 200 hold the Ph.D. I would like to remark about recent concerns in the ACS ahout the teaching of inorganic general we chemistw with articular relevance to industrv. In "~ in indusiw give'chemical educators high mar& on the quality of preparation of graduates in chemical fundamentals, although on occasion we find graduates of Ph.D. programs so narrowlv. prepared that it is difficult to place them. - . I have several suggestions to offer thkchemical education community: ~
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Finally, everyone would benefit from more interchange hetween industrial and academic chemists: by this I mean seminars given at universities by industrial chemists and summer proarams in industrv for teachers. H. C.Brown: Perhaps I c& give you a perspective on what has happened in chemical education over the oast 50 vears. For onething textbooks have grown enormousiy in size. For example, in organic chemistry hack then we studied from Con&t's hook &d we spent two full semesters covering about 350 pages. each page there was one half to three quarters of the material which now appears on the average organic text page. The amount of material we were given to read and study was ahout ten percent of what students today are expected to cover. We were expected to learn the material not only to the place where we could answer questions directly from the material, but so well we could apply it to unfamiliar situations, a practice unheard of today. I n general chemistry we used Demming, and Latimer and ~ i l d ~ hwe ~ learned ~ ~ d ,all of ~~~i~~~ and ~ i l d ~ and h ~ ~ ~ d in the process picked up a real knowledge of descriptive in"ganic chemistw. Every chemist who does exploratory work must know the properties of the reagents he works with. AU chemists should have a firm background in inorganic chemistry. W.F.Coleman (Department of Chemistry, University of
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I) At the.graduate level, broader, more general training in chemistry . IS needed. 2) Students should be prepared during graduate study to cope with the unexpected phenomenon in research. The student should expect to observe phenomena directly and not to leave all the laboratory work to technicians. 3) One approach to descriptive which students find widely appealing is to relate the properties of compounds to their final uses. 4) Students should be introduced in an elementary way to chemical economies and he trained to develop alternative approaches to chemical syntheses on the basis of cost of materials. 5 ) I do not know who has the key to the solution of this problem, hut your graduates cannot write! We have to hire instruetors to teach writing skills to new Ph.D.'s. Perhaps you should return to the practice of requiring students to organize and write laboratory reports. 6) In industry you work day in and day out, sometimes,with people you do not really Like. Students must somewhere along the Line learn to get along with others.
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768 1 Jownal of Chemical Education
The Additional Panelists Herbert C. Brown is Wetherill Re-W search Professor Emeritus at Purdl University. drance was refuge of puzzled organic chemists," h studies;ofm contrikuted effects as a havior. His : tion led ta a auantitative theon, based < the ne\v Bra on aPPlicati dihorane to organic synthesis have had revolutionary impact on syntheticorganic chemistry. Finally, the new horohydride preparation of active hydrogenation catalysts was discovered in collaboration with his son, Charles A. Brown, and this in turn led to the new simplified Brown-procedure for lahoratory-scale hvdroeenations. Professor Brown has received numerous " ., nwnrds and honors in rerwnitim uf hLSachlevemm~i.the most recent of which was the iiohel h i r e for Chrmi\try f i w 1 9 3
Arthur D. F. Toy is Director of Research, Stauffer Chemical Company, Westport, Connecticut. He received his PhD Degree from the University of Illinois in 1942. His own research interest is in the area of inorganic and organic phosphorus chemistry. Many of the processes and compounds he and his eaworkers discovered and develo~edare now used commercially in the area of plastics, insecticides and flame retardants, etc. Dr. Toy is the author of two; $. books, more than 24 scientific papers, and over 80 United States patents. Ih. T o y has Iwen acrivr in the ,\nwri,.an ('hemirsl Swirry; he served as Chairman of the t i e \ \ Cork Sertim from 1 x 1 tu 1976, and is now n memhcr ofse\t.raIACS committees. He has lectured bath in the United States and abroad on the various aspects of phosphorus chemistry. ~
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The Symposium Organizer
Glenn A. Croshy, Professor of Chemistry and Chairman of the Chemical Physics Program at Washington State University, received his BS from Wayneshurg College in 1950 and his PhD from the University of Washington in 1954. Since 1961 when he joined the Washington State University faculty,he has taught regularly in the freshman, upper division, and graduate programs, has instituted a computer-based advisory system that provides individual testing and advising for all students entering the freshman chemistry sequences, and has guided the development of auto~tutorial remedial courses. His research interest is in the field of moleculnr electronic soertrosmov with an emohasis on inoreanic -~~~~ . materials. He is a memllrr i i 9 : ~ 80, of r i p .US~ d u r n r ~ m ('mnrnission and chairman of its commitrw m prerollvyr rd. ucation and was recently elected Chairman-Elect of the Division of Chemical Education, ACS.
Edward K. Mellon is Professor of Chemistry and coordinator of general chemistry at the Florida State University. After enlisted service in the US. Marine Corps (1954-56), he attended the Univeisity of Texas at Austin: B.S. 1959; Ph.D., 1963. He taught at St. Edward's University (1962-63), was apost-doctoral fellow and taught in the general chemistry program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1963-66), and has been at Florida State since. In I970 he received a Standard Oil Foundation award for excellence in underera& uatetmchmy. He hdsauth~mdilnumhrr uillwck in h ~ ~ n l . . i l ed~cationand in synthetic inorgan~rehernn.~ry
New Mexico, Albuquerque 87131) then made a statement on behalf of the Southwest Inorganic Liaison describing a resolution submitted to the Subcommittee on Inorganic Chemistry in the Curriculum of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry, ACS, suggesting that the ACS-Certified B.S. program contain a t least four semester hours in inorganic chemistry, one of laboratory and three of lecture. Physical chemistry should be a prerequisite and the lecture and laboratory should be complementary. Particularly a t the senior level, it was thought, the inorganic chemistry course can serve to tie together a large amount of previously-studied chemistry. The panelists then came to agreement among the various approaches t o teaching inorganic chemistry suggested in the papers. In particular, i t was felt that students should be given a "nuts and bolts" grounding in inorganic reaction chemistry (as suggested by Fred Baso10)-best done in the freshman year-followed by advanced courses using the selective indepth approach suggested by F. A. Cotton. Glenn Crosby mentioned that much of the emphasis in physical chemistry courses is misdirected. Many experimental techniques (e.g., magnetic susceptibility) have been abandoned to the inorganic chemists. H a r r y Gray feels that, if the physical chemists would cover adequately atomic spectroscopy and group theory in their courses, it would he a simple matter to return to teaching inorganic chemistry a t the advanced undergraduate level. In light of the research advances of the last ten years, inorganic chemists should now abandon the more superficial forms of theory in favor of a true under-
standing of the ground and excited states of metal com~lexes. Bob Angelici contra$ted the status of organic and physical chemistry t e x t s with the state of flux which still characterizes the teaching of inorganic chemistry. Discussi~mthen turned to a comuarison of the tearhinn of inorganic chemistry in the U S . a n d in other developed countries. J. G. Verkade (Iowa State University, Ames, 50011) and M. E. F a r a g o (Bedford College, University of London, Regent's Park NW14NS) described how much time is customarily spent on inorganic chemistry in Kuropmn univerjities and wondered if thv amount ot time so devoted in the 11.5. could be increased. Rob Laudiwe reminded the audience that in Europe much of inorganic chemistry taught is actually solid state chemistry. C. A. Djordjevic (College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185) and C. C. Houk (Ohio University, Athens 45701) then raised the question as to how the individual inorganic chemist can influence the Committee on Professional Training of the ACS. J. G. Verkade answered that the mid-October Newsletter of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry will contain information pertinent to this question. Finallv. a substantial maioritv that - .of the audience aereed " one semester of intermediate inorganic chemistry, followed bv vear of ~ l " a " .h.v s i c a chemistrv. .. followed hv a semester of advanced inorganic chemistry, is a reasonable prescription for the modern undergraduate curriculum.
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Volume 57, Number 11. November 1980 1 769
