Mr. Stan Bumble

 

My professional development seminar described CCP as “The Road to Enrichment and Self-Actualization.” The method of delivery was a power point set of 42 slides combined with spontaneity. I used my own life story as an example and disavowed expressed views and opinions as belonging to any other college staff. I stated that I was a theoretical physicist who had spent most of his life in industry and with the government. My aim had been to practice and create in theoretical science, and engineering to which I had been attracted because of the beauty of these fields when combined with mathematics. Although I worked in the cold war to perfect weapons for destruction I was attracted in later life to improve life rather than destroy it, chiefly by my first wife’s medical work with children. So I performed much volunteer work in the “helping” fields, much of which was aided by my scientific and mathematical background. This all contrasts with the dream of others to increase their income through education. I particularly like to help minority students as a teacher and a mentor. I feel that we should concentrate on achievement for our students and not just emphasize enrollment quotas alone. My own chief mentors were my high school English teacher, my brother, my college teachers and Robert Kennedy. I grew up on the streets of Brooklyn and English was my parent’s second language. My undergraduate education was similar to that instituted by Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago, which enabled me to take many inter disciplinary courses in different physical science departments as well as humanitarian courses in a neat core of independent design. Original sources were used instead of textbooks and lectures were given in a Socratic environment among groups of teachers. I discussed many glowing evaluations by prominent persons such as Carl Sagan who were students at the University of Chicago under Hutchins.

 

I stressed that our college should emphasize training for industrial jobs; producing objects for profits and not only the generation of ideas. One of the training programs would be the Capstone program at Penn State University for the growing field of manufacturing in Nanotechnology. I summarized some of my past jobs that were valuable, such as the rocket fuel and oxidizer for the moon walking of 1959, the predicted best products for DuPont and Dow to synthesize and manufacture to achieve the best properties, the optimum recovery from great disasters for the U. S. Government to institute. I also mentioned the books and papers I have written and published in systems biology, in which I had educated myself. I projected to the audience ideas that our students will be working new things in the future, such as cars that have no emissions whatsoever and run on environmental energy, new hydrocarbon fuels that are produced by metabolic reactions of microbes, etc. I mentioned my ideas on other universes that exist besides our own. I stated that I would like to see our staff, as well as our students use our wonderful library more often. I am encouraged by some recent steps at our school to lower barriers between departments and encourage more interdisciplinary projects.

 

The audience was very warm and friendly and there were many discussions and comments. I would wish that there be less other talks scheduled at the same time. I thought that those that came in the middle and left early (because they had other obligations) missed much including trains of thought.

Achieving the Dream in Science, Engineering and Mathematics

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