Green, Don W. - The University of Kansas

And the university, I’ve been involved in a lot of committees on campus at the
university level and the school level. I generally have felt very good about the way the
university has operated. I think certainly one of the things I have seen is the increasing
importance of research on campus and certainly in engineering. When I came we were
expected to do research and we did that. In fact, Paul and I have this oil recovery project
and a lot of the research, graduate students, funded research, etc. But over the years the
emphasis on research has been so very significant and in recent years has increased
almost exponentially. The pressure for young faculty to bring in funding, that’s what
you’ve got to do. I have had some concern over the years that that could work to the
detriment of the undergraduate program. One thing I’ve liked about KU and the
engineering program is that we try to maintain this balance between research and the
undergraduate program. In fact, I remember, especially when Carl Locke was dean, he
annually would have a meeting during the year, usually between semesters. He would
have the engineering faculty and the theme would be something to do with education. I
can remember several times when the faculty would get into these discussions and we
almost all agreed that we ought to maintain the balance between the undergraduate
program emphasis and research. We wanted both to be strong. So I’ve really felt good
about that. I’ve had some concerns that we are losing that. But I generally feel very
positive about the university. So as we go forward I just hope we maintain a very strong
undergraduate program. I don’t think we ought to try to be the M.I.T. or the Berkeley in
terms of research. I think we ought to make sure that we are turning out very strong
undergraduates as well as graduate students.
Q: Did we cover everything?
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