Letter From the President
The World Is Still Flat…and Nero still plays the fiddle
By Kenneth F. Galloway
Near the end of the fall semester, my class on engineering and public policy was considering “globalization” of engineering and science. We briefly discussed Tom Friedman’s 2005 best seller The World Is Flat, which describes how advanced communications have accelerated competition. We also looked at data from around the world on growth of R&D spending, graduation numbers, commitment to engineering and science education, patents, and the numbers of Ph.D. graduates. The data show that, in 2013, the United States lost ground.
In 2007, not too long after Friedman’s book appeared, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine published the report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.”
The U.S. Congress responded in bipartisan fashion. On August 9, 2007, President Bush signed into law the America COMPETES Act with the intention to invest in innovation through research and development, and to improve the nation’s competitiveness. In 2010, the Congress reauthorized America COMPETES and President Obama signed it into law.
There was optimism in academia, reinforced by rhetoric and budgets from the Obama administration. But then reality set in. Whereas COMPETES called for funding to double over time for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, real increases stopped after FY 2009. Due to the post-2008 crash environment and federal deficits, budget sequestration, and the current partisan divide, America COMPETES has seriously failed to meet its original goals.
In October 2013, AAAS CEO Alan Leshner testified at a Senate hearing that federal R&D expenditures had declined by 16.3 percent between fiscal years 2010 and 2013. In addition, Leshner said, “Federal R&D as a share of gross domestic product has declined from 1.27 percent of GDP to roughly 0.82 percent today.” The 0.82 percent is due to sequestration — the lowest level seen in 40 years. Marcia McNutt, in a January 2014 Science editorial, wrote, “The 2014 budget will continue what has been a decades-long slide in the ratio of the federal R&D budget to the GDP. This ratio is often used as a measure of how much a nation values basic research; it has fallen 25 percent in the last decade.…In the meantime, elsewhere internationally, investment in science is rising as nations throughout the world connect investment in R&D to the development of their human capital and to their future prosperity.” U.S. total spending on R&D has dropped to 2.9 percent of GDP. For comparison, Japan spends about 3.5 percent on R&D, South Korea’s expenditures are headed for 4 percent of GDP, and China is at about 2 percent, with a rate of growth that will soon make it the world leader.
Up-to-date detailed discussion of COMPETES reauthorization can be found at the following websites, which deal with engineering and science public policy: ASEE Capitol Shorts, http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/blogs-and-newsletters/capitol-shorts-newsletter; IEEE USA, http://www.todaysengineer.org; the American Association for the Advancement of Science, http://www.aaas.org/; the AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News, http://www.aip.org/fyi/; and the NEW Science Policy, http://www.newsciencepolicy.org/, http://science.house.gov/, http://democrats.science.house.gov/, and http://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/.
The World Is Flat and “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” warned the United States of some of the consequences of under-investing in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. We are just now starting to feel the results. In 2010, the members of the 2005 “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” committee of the National Academies reviewed U.S. progress and issued the report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.” In this report they say, “In the face of so many daunting near-term challenges, U.S. government and industry are letting the crucial strategic issues of U.S. competitiveness slip below the surface.”
Will this be the story of the United States? Will our economic strength, world influence, security, and quality of life slowly slip away? Will we lose our leadership in engineering and science and in research and development and in graduate education and innovation because the Congress was preoccupied with partisan wrangling and ideological arguments – fiddling as Rome burned?
Colleagues, if this bothers you, let your congressional representatives and senators hear from you. We need them to revive the original COMPETES intent and plan. Let them know that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics need robust, bipartisan support – especially the engineering and technology part – and that such investments will have major, long-term benefits for the United States.
Kenneth F. Galloway is president of ASEE
Photo by John Russell/Vanderbilt
Board Profiles
Diversity Champions
Louis Martin-Vega
As an engineering undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, Louis Martin-Vega never thought of himself as part of a minority. He studied industrial engineering, a field with great career prospects and highly regarded by Puerto Ricans like his parents as well as by a majority of UPR’s students. It wasn’t until the New York native, currently the dean of North Carolina State University’s College of Engineering, headed home for graduate school that he noticed the need for more diversity among engineering students. “Once I left Puerto Rico and came back to the mainland, I was able to understand that this might not have been the case for many students of Hispanic background in the 50 states, where indeed they were, in many cases, a small minority,” he said.
After receiving a master’s and Ph.D. in systems and industrial engineering from the University of Florida, Martin-Vega enjoyed a distinguished career there as faculty member, winning the college of engineering’s 1986 Teacher of the Year. He joined the National Science Foundation three years later, organizing presentations and workshops on the importance of minorities and women in engineering while working his way up to become the director of NSF’s Division of Design, Manufacture, and Industrial Innovation and acting head of its Engineering Directorate. His commitment to diversity was recognized in 2000 with the Hispanic Engineering National Achievement Award – Higher Education Category from HENAAC. (He was inducted into the HENAAC Hall of Fame in 2011.)
As chair of the Engineering Deans Council’s (EDC) executive board, Martin-Vega still makes diversity a priority, though he sees himself as an engineer who happens to be Hispanic, not a Hispanic engineer. He’s promoted diversity at ASEE by pushing for the addition of a clause in the EDC’s bylaws stating that diversity and inclusiveness should be one of the council’s major objectives. In his public-policy leadership role supporting and representing U.S. engineering deans, Martin-Vega looks forward to enhancing the image of engineering on a national level. Extending well beyond the engineering community to show the importance of engineering education in modern-day society, he says, “should be a constant mission and goal for everyone at ASEE.”
Bevlee Watford
Bevlee Watford vividly recalls the moment in 1987 when she joined half a dozen young women in a Reno, Nevada, lobby to hear success tips from the redoubtable Eleanor Baum. “Make sure you bring in at least your salary [in grants] every year,” counseled America’s first female engineering dean and later ASEE president. Such blunt advice helped sell Watford on ASEE and propel a career – in academe and multiple Society leadership roles – largely devoted to advancing and mentoring women and underrepresented minorities in engineering.
Unlike girls who grow up with vague or mistaken notions of engineering, Watford knew it was right for her from age 10 after listening to the father of her best friend describe his work as a civil engineer. Pursuing mining engineering at Virginia Tech, she went on to complete a Ph.D. thesis on bulk material transportation. “I really liked being in school and the whole academic environment,” Watford says. Hired by Clemson University, she earned the South Carolina Young Engineer of the Year title in 1989. But disciplinary scholarship was “not where I wanted to be.” Instead, “for me, it was all about the students.” In 1992, she founded Virginia Tech’s Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity.
From two rooms, a computer, and a team of upper-classmen mentors, CEED has grown to include precollege bridge programs, residential communities, peer mentoring, K-12 outreach, a career fair, industry advisers, affiliation with numerous engineering groups, plus ongoing research and assessment on ways to improve recruitment and retention. An all-women living and learning community, Hypatia, shown to boost grades and retention, is a model for three others – an all-men’s LLC and two science-themed communities – grouped in one large residence hall.
Watford has done Baum proud, securing more than $6.5 million from outside sources. “I’m somewhat amazed at what we’ve created,” she says, but she’s not satisfied: “One of our challenges is to increase the numbers of underrepresented minorities within the community.” Her search for ways to strengthen diversity among undergraduate and graduate students and faculty now absorbs her second stint at the National Science Foundation, where she runs the Broadening Participation in Engineering program. One idea, she suggests, is to more widely circulate and implement research-tested, inclusive instruction methods: “If you could pick a problem for ASEE to solve, that would be it.”
Meet Your Staff
No Internet or A/C? No Problem for This Meeting Planner
ASEE hosts and organizes several events every year, from 30-person workshops to the annual conference. Because Monique Ayala and her colleagues in the Conferences department do their job so thoroughly, attendees enjoy smooth experiences with nary an indicator of the work involved to ensure things go well.
Monique grew up in Bowie, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C., and attended the nearby University of Maryland, where she studied international business. After school, she worked in customer relations at UM’s University College, the university system’s distance-learning institution, primarily handling student accounts. The varied and sometimes urgent interactions she encountered prepared her for ASEE events, where bad Internet access and temperature swings in meeting rooms are only the start of potential pitfalls. (“We had a meeting recently when the hotel lost power!” Monique notes.)
That job informally introduced her to new possibilities. “I put together all of our meetings and parties and morale boosters,” says Monique. It was then she realized that event planning was an actual career path. She came to the ASEE Conferences department as a temp in the summer of 2011 and was officially brought on board a year later.
Longtime conferences director Patti Greenawalt has helped her further that career. “My manager doesn’t bother me; she teaches me and then leaves me to figure it out, and she’s there when I need her,” says Monique, who enjoys her workplace flexibility and associated travel. Among ASEE highlights thus far was a tour of the new World Trade Center site after the Engineering Deans Institute meeting in 2013. “It was once in a lifetime,” recalls Monique. “We got to write our names in the cement on the 100th floor!”
Speaking of travel, she did a lot of it after the annual conference last year. She got married in August, and for her honeymoon she cashed in on not one but two vacations she had won in drawings, which she and her new husband, Victor, took back to back, to the Dominican Republic and Clearwater Beach, Fla.
In addition to serving ASEE members, Monique is taking classes to earn a certificate in meeting planning, which will ease the path toward getting her Certified Meeting Professional designation. She’ll take the notoriously hard CMP test next year at this time.