of them, the sessions provide invaluable moral support: seeing others in the same situation and talking openly about it helps their battered egos.

But there's not much the A.I.A.A. or anyone else can do about employers' attitudes. Some companies reject former aerospace and defense-contract engineers on the grounds that they are "gold-plated," meaning that because of working on government contracts, they tend to overdesign and have never learned to hold costs down. (Some help-wanted ads state flatly: "No aerospace experience considered.") Another common turndown heard by older engineers is, "We'd like to have you, but you're overqualified." Translated, this usually means the applicant is in too high a pay category, or is simply too old. Some employers tell a $20,000a-year man they have a $12,000 job, but don't want to offer it because the pay is so far below his former salary. This can be anguishing news to a man who has been out of work for months and may have to sell his house or drive a cab if he can't land something quickly.

REVERSING A DOWNHILL TREND

In the long run, however, the most lasting effect of the layoffs may be the dramatic impact they have had in drawing attention to engineering's more fundamental problems. The job crisis will eventually cure itself, while the basic problems remain. They can all be summed up under the heading of a gradual, long-term erosion of true professional status-a trend that has worried some leading members of the profession for years. Dr. Simon Ramo, the vice chairman of TRW Inc., as long ago as 1955 called for "greater engineering," by which he meant a professional approach that takes into account the broad spectrum of society's needs, not just the technical problem at hand. Jay Forrester, the versatile professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who developed the ferrite memory core for computers and wrote Urban Dynamics, has publicly criticized his profession for subordinating its ethics and integrity to the short-term pressures of large organizations. Now. after the shock of the layoffs, the reform wave is gathering real force, beginning with the universities.

Practically every engineering school in the country has made extensive changes in its curriculum and in its course content. The general intention has been to correct an overemphasis on scientific theory that had left little room for either the humanities or for a proper consideration of the engineer's role in society. At M.I.T., courses relating to public policy or to the function of science and technology in society took up five pages in the catalogue five years ago and now fills a thirty-seven page compendium. The listing includes courses such as The Recycling of Materials, Slums, and Private Industry and Environmental Problems.

The change can be seen in small schools as well as large. At Oakland University's engineering school in Rochester, Michigan, which was started in 1955 and now has 500 students, Dean John E. Gibson seeks to increase involvement by having students help set their own goals for courses and organize their own laboratory work. The school proposes to conduct interdisciplinary research linking engineering with medicine, ecology, and urban life. In a new program aimed at correcting the severe racial imbalance in the engineering profession, Gibson has brought black high-school boys and girls to the campus for introductory summer courses.

The schools are well aware that many engineers spend much of their time doing mere scutwork, rather than truly professional tasks. A main reason for this is a severe shortage of technicians, men who are trained to handle routine detail. The ratio of technicians to engineers in the U.S. is less than one to one, while in Europe, where engineers are fewer and have far more prestige, the ratio runs more than two to one. Many of the schools have responded to the problem by offering new courses leading to technical degrees, such as the two-year associate degree for technicians and the new four-year degree for technologists.

With a more abundant supply of technicians, engineers will be freer to work to the limits of their capacity, dealing with ideas rather than details. In fact, the shortage of engineers expected later in the 1970's could be significantly eased if engineers now being underutilized were enabled to perform at their full

power.

Computers have already helped ease the shortage of technicians by eliminating much tedious drudgery. Special computer languages have been developed for civil engineering, structural engineering, and other specialties, multiplying the capabilities of men at middle and upper levels. Rather than requesting data from junior engineers, and then waiting while it is prepared, they can deal directly

with the computer and get instant answers. Professor Charles L. Miller, who has led M.I.T.'s effort to apply computers to engineering, says the computer is not just a new tool, but offers "a new perspective on new ways of engineering.” It allows engineers to take more and diverse factors into consideration when planning-factors such as public opinion--and to offer alternatives rather than presenting a single solution. Giving people a choice in this way will help improve the public image of engineers, who have sometimes appeared to be inflexible dictators of technology.

INVITATIONS TO INDUSTRY

For years now, there has been a surprising and serious lack of rapport between engineering schools and industry, even though industry is the customer for most engineering graduates. Company executives have claimed that because of the heavy emphasis placed on pure science in schools, new engineers knew an abundance of theory but couldn't perform any practical engineering work. A partial solution has been the so-called co-op approach, in use at 104 of the 275 engineering schools in the U.S., under which students alternate correlated periods of study and industrial work. At Southern Methodist University in Dallas, other links with industry have been forged. Faculty members from S.M.U.'s Institute of Technology are encouraged to serve as consultants to industry. Engineers are invited, in turn, to serve at S.M.U. as visting professors. The result has been to expose the faculty to practical problems that graduates will face, and to bring greater realism to classroom discussions. "We refuse to stay in an ivory tower," says Dean Thomas L. Martin Jr. "We feel our mission is to interact and cooperate with our industrial counterparts. We don't sit back waiting for them to come to us, we go out after them."

A major preoccupation at almost every engineering school is the need to instill in students a capacity for self-renewal. Engineering_graduates have what is grimly known as a "half-life" of only five to ten years, depending on their branch of engineering. If they are not taught how to instruct themselves on a continuing and regular basis, they risk becoming obsolete and useless both to their employers and to themselves.

S.M.U. attacked this problem, beginning in 1967, with its "talk-back" television courses for graduate engineers in the Dallas area. The broadcasts, over a network formed by seven North Texas colleges and universities, allow engineers working at participating firms to take any of an array of courses leading to an advanced degree. Most of the classes take place during working hours, and the engineers can obtain their degrees without ever setting foot on campus. Examinations and papers are distributed and picked up by a daily courier service. Texas Instruments, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the system, pays almost all the tuition for employees who get passing grades. T.I.'s vice president for research, Dr. J. Ross Macdonald, says the TV classes have "allowed us to attract a lot of people, and have reduced turnover. The general reaction has been extremely favorable, and it seems to be one of the best ways we have at hand now of cutting obsolescence."

TWO LADDERS AT HONEYWELL

Like Texas Instruments, Honeywell Inc., of Minneapolis, depends on innovation from its engineering staff for continued success in the marketplace. The company is helping work out a closed-circuit TV network with the University of Minnesota Institute of Tcehnology, and it finances advanced university courses taken by its engineers, who are also encouraged to prepare professional papers and join professional societies. Dr. John N. Dempsey, Honeywell's vice president for science and engineering, says the company actively works at avoiding overspecialization, which leads to obsolescence and is limiting both for the company and for its employees. To this end, Honeywell encourages the colleges from which it recruits to provide a broader education, including more courses in the humanities. New engineers are no longer put through a formal training program, but "start engineering immediately," Dempsey says. "We find that a new man who has not specialized will often have new ideas for solving the problems we encounter."

The company urges involvement in public issues, even the hottest ones. Robert P. Henderson, a vice president, set an example earlier this year at hearings in Washington. He delivered some blunt testimony on the threat to privacy posed by computer data banks-although Honeywell is a major manufacturer of computers. Honeywell also emphasizes "dual ladder" promotion for engineers who

choose to remain in research or design rather than going over into management. This practice provides pay and title grades for staff men comparable to those for line men. Engineers with a bent for research can feel that they are making definite progress up a career ladder and are not being overlooked by the managers. In an attempt to make professional development a continuing concern of engineering companies, the National Society of Professional Engineers gives an annual award to the organization that it judges has accomplished the most in this field. Recent winners have included entities as diverse as Coca-Cola Co. and the Battelle Memorial Institute. Criteria for the awards are continuing education programs, effective use of engineering manpower, support of technical and professional societies, attention to engineering job titles, and maintenance of competitive salaries.

The N.S.P.E. has sponsored a series of public-affairs workshops through its chapters around the country to show engineers how they can get involved in solving social and community problems. At one regional session held last fall in St. Louis, engineers gathered from five states to hear engineering students describe their work on rehabilitating housing and parks in the central city. Other speakers told how to organize engineering teams from local chapters to attack environmental and urban problems.

Engineers have difficulty making their collective views known and their influence felt because they are dispersed among more than 300 autonomous societies across the country. Most of these exist primarily to keep their members up to date on particular disciplines. While they generally perform this function well, they are ineffective in representing engineering as a whole because of their fragmentation. The N.S.P.E., which has a membership of 65,000 and maintains stiff membership requirements, is the most influential interdisciplinary society. The Engineers Joint Council represents a different approach. Made up of thirtyeight societies, it serves as a clearinghouse and service center for these groups and gives them a degree of collective force they would lack as individual organizations. It conducts forums, maintains liaisons with engineering schools, and distributes information about engineering to member societies and the public. Its Engineering Manpower Commission produces authoritative studies on the need for and the supply of engineers.

PROFESSIONALISM VERSUS UNIONISM

The increasing disillusion among engineers with their careers would seem to offer a superb opportunity to union organizers. But as a group, engineers have in the past shown little interest in unions, and there has been no significant recent increase in membership (which remains at about 5 percent, where it has been for years). There are several dozen engineering unions around the country, most, like the Seattle Professional Engineering Employees Association, avoiding the term "union" and stressing the professional focus of the organization. An independent national federation called the Council of Engineers and Scientists Organizations (CESO) claims to represent more than 100,000 engineers, scientists, and technicians in the U.S. and Canada, and its program sums up what many of the unions want. It advocates portable pensions, better compension for patentable inventions, and stiffer requirements plus nationwide licensing for practicing engineers. The announced aims of CESO also include reducing the enrollment in engineering schools by 50 percent over the next five years, and limiting the number of alien engineers allowed to enter the U.S. By holding down the supply of engineers, CESO evidently hopes to improve its members' bargaining position, somewhat as construction unions have been able to do for their members.

A lot of engineers oppose union membership because they feel, or want to feel, that they are part of management. Many have moved up into engineering from blue-collar union families, and don't want to slip back. They dislike the leveling effect of unions, and fear losing their voices among the technicians and subprofessionals who tend to dominate the engineering unions. Dr. Myron Tribus, a senior vice president for research at Xerox Corp. and former dean of Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, summarizes the feeling: "There is a mutually exclusive quality between professionalism and unionism."

WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK

In their pursuit of greater professionalism, more engineers are beginning to speak out on public issues and to show a new concern for the social consequences of their work. Ralph Nader, who would seem fully occupied on other fronts, has

publicly attacked engineers for their previous lack of concern, and for being too preoccupied with means, too indifferent to ends. He has called for a new concept of "remedial engineering" to minimize the social cost of engineering projects and has urged professionals to "blow the whistle' 'on their employers if the companies' activities harm the public interest.

Just recently, some of the activist tactics used on campuses and by peace groups have been extended, rather tentatively, to engineering. At the annual convention in New York this year of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (160,000 members), a dissident group called the Committee for Social Responsibility in Engineering picketed the main meeting and invited delegates to attend its own separate session. In spirited debate at the commttee's "New Engineering Conference," there were discussions of individual responsibility in engineering, the shortcomings of engineerng organzations, and the effects of government policies on engineers. Attendance at the sessions was small and the fervor of protest was mild by some standards, but the rebels made their point.

Students in engineering schools have begun to demand that engineers scrutinize their assignments and refuse those not in keeping with ecological and social imperatives. At M.I.T. there is a new group called ECIS (for Effective Communication through Interpersonal Seminars), whose members disagree with many of the goals and methods of business, government, and the universities. ECIS holds "participative action" seminars at which its members take on business executives. They point out that this kind of communication is preferable to violent demonstrations and can help prevent such violence from occurring.

A POLICY CHECK ON ERRATIC SWINGS

If engineers wish to regain the professional power they have lost, they will have to adopt a grander vision of their job. They must consider the over-all interest of the country and its people, as well as the technological aspects of their work. They must view each project as part of a system. Dr. Jerome B. Wiesner, provost and president-designate of M.I.T. and former presidential science adviser, says, "The need is for a broader approach, which will ensure that engineers consider the side effects of new developments and persuade people that these side effects are important and must be considered." This will mean acquiring a new perspective on engineering, as simultaneously serving and leading society, offering alternatives, and recommending what seems to be the best solution. Government, as the biggest single customer for engineering, must attempt to plan more carefully and more farsightedly to avoid wasteful crash programs that lead to overhiring and painful subsequent mass firings. It should try to define national priorities and then attempt to estimate manpower needs, so that schools and students, can make rational plans. The professional societies, for their part, should take a more active role in debating the nation's goals, as the N.S.P.E. is doing. If they mean to be true professionals, engineers themselves will have to take moral responsibility for their work rather than unquestioningly accepting whatever orders come down to them from government or employers.

Despite the present grievous problem of unemployment, the nation in the years ahead will need an ever increasing supply of engineers, with better training and broader perspectives on their responsibilities. It is only intelligent selfinterest, then, for the nation and its corporations to explore means of utilizing jobless engineers who will otherwise be wasted for the present and lost to the future. In the same framework of discerning self-interest, it is essential for engineers themselves to work on the rehabilitation of their profession with all the skill and imagination they bring to their more concrete projects.

[From the Washington Post, June 6, 1971]

A LACK OF USEFUL WORK IS OUR REAL CRISIS

(By Keith W. Bose)

Bose, author of the book "Aviation Electronics," was dismissed from his job as a technical writer a year ago. At 49, he has been unemployed for eight of the past 12 months. This article was written for the Long Island Daily Newsday and was distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.

I am unemployed. I am not part of an ethnic minority. My great-grandfather voted for Abraham Lincoln and wore Union blue. I am part of an increasing number of so-called "middle-class" unemployed, who are now viewing the splendor of the nation's economy from its soft underbelly. Our numbers will increase in this new decade. We are only the vanguard of future legions as 20 million more workers come of age in the next 10 years.

Many of Richard Nixon's Silent Majority are discovering that only the thickness of a regular paycheck separates Middle America from the slum. In our preoccupation with the superfluous glitter of the affluent society, we have failed to discover that true affluence must be backed by ownership. Middle America does not hold title to its affluence.

We are not true bourgeois, for we are unpropertied. We buy precarious status on time payments. Our chattels become worn-out and obsolete when title passes to us. Our "affluent" consumer economy is a vast parasite feeding on our earnings, and neither frugality nor industry will help us escape.

There is a creeping sensation of futility which follows the white-collar worker to his job these days . . . a feeling of being an expendable pawn in an economic system which does not, in fact, include human service in the tenious fiection of the Gross National Product. The white-collar worker suffers from a pitiful lack of bargaining power. If Black America is crying for recognition, White Middle America is praying that the myth of indispensability will endure.

HUMAN SURPLUS

Behind the facade of white stability lurks the haunting realization that the economy as presently constituted has a tragic surplus of white-collar workers. It is finally becoming possible to garner bland statistics to support facts which the Middle American has felt in his bones for a long while that more and more workers are becoming surplus and therefore fall under the control of Parkinson's Law: Trivial, superfluous work expands as more and more people become available to do it.

Those who want to understand Middle America must understand that the maintenance of uninterrupted regular wages is mandatory to our very existence. If we appear uninterested in the politics of government, it is because we are consumed by the politics of keeping our job. Without our regular paycheck, we become indigent wards. We know that the constitutional guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has a hollow sound when our income may be unaccountably destroyed without the intercession of judge or jury. Lawyers are not willing to defend WASPs who have been fired.

An unemployed middle-aged former department head of an electronics firm tells it this way:

"At 4:30 on Friday I was called into the conference room. Charlie and Phil were sitting there with a small pile of papers. I sat down. My hands were sweaty. "Charlie began the conversation. 'As you know, business is off. We are going to have to terminate you effective today. . .

"I didn't have any witnesses with me, and they had each other covered. They gave me papers to sign, I asked to be allowed to take them home first to look them over.

"Phil said, 'You will have to sign them now so we can clear you by 5 o'clock.' "And that's how it was. After 25 years-the bastards terminated me in 15 minutes."

"MIDDLE-CLASS WELFARE"

The psychological pressure on us is soul-destroying. Soon in our careers we trade ethical and professional judgment for a regular salary. We were compromised. Buried in the trivia of our "career," we drifted without protection along a debt-ridden path to nowhere. For many of us, outstanding skill and moral judgment were a hindrance.

There is a satisfying notion that employment is related to education. We have been told that any number of jobs are available if only people with education and experience could be found to fill them. For many of the unemployed and underemployed, these assumptions have become a cruel hoax. The honest need for mechanical, electronic and other specialists was met long ago.

Some sections of the United States have been shocked by unemployment in the aerospace industry. We had forgotten that government-sponsored industry sparked earlier growth.