Democrat and Chronicle from Rochester, New York • Page 101

The Expanding University 1-College of Engineering And Applied Science life? 4 W' fmHhvn 1M ROCHESTER 14, N.Y., SUNDAY, FEB. 17, 1963 The University of Rochester is achieving greater national recognition almost daily. This has not come about suddenly, but only after many years of planning and development. This is the first in a series of special Sunday Democrat and Chronicle reports on a growing, vigorous and rapidly changing institution. Future reports will deal with other divisions as well as the university as a whole.

This Was Robert Frost Myth and Poet It took Robert Frost nearly 40 years to become the poet he'd always wanted to be. But at the peak of his career he was a complex man who could be sublime when he wrote of simple human things, and mixed up when he tried to think and write in "big" terms. Her is a perceptive account of the man, his life and his works. 'MAN WITH A PLAN' Dr. John W.

Graham Jr. is dean and architect of "new world of engineering and applied science" at the University of Rochester. 1 uil air ft I ff "ps -1 11 tional distinction for his research in stratif ied-charge, spark-ignition engines; Dr. Daniel W. Healy, an expert in microwaves and solid-state devices, who had been brought in only a year before to establish a new Department of Electrical Engineering and Dr.

Shelby Miller, chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering, whose special interests are in agitation, filtration, and process economics. But more of them were needed. The question was: How does a brand-new college with high aspirations, but precious little, prestige in its own right, attract topflight people in a blisteringly competitive academic job market? "Jf- GRAHAM FIGURED that the plus-factors that had lured him to Rochester would appeal to others: The opportunity to work with the university's nationally eminent faculties in such, fields as physics, chemistry, optics and medicine; the chance to teach a crack student body (four out of five River Campus freshmen come from the top fifth of their high school graduating classes); and to do research and consulting in a community known for its progressive industrial leadership. But Graham and his department chairmen did not 1 pull any punches with their prospective faculty. told them we had a good start and good potential, but we didn minimize our problems our need for better facilities, more research equipment, funds for expanding our graduate work.

We even told them about Rochester THE HUNCH paid off to the tune of 18 full-time faculty members, all with doctoral degrees. Some were well established scholar teachers, some were promising young men on the way up. From the University of Pennsylvania, for example, came Dr. Martin Lessen, head of its Division of Engineering Mechanics and a specialist in magneto-gas-dynamics. From the University of London's Imperial College of Science and Technology came MIT educated Dr.

Herbert B. Voelcker, researcher in advanced communications systems. From Germany, via the University of Maryland's Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics, Dr. Helmut D. Wey-mann, an investigator in plasma physics and gas dynamics.

PYom Penn State, Dr. John A. Fox, acting head of the Department of Aeronautical Engineering, and long time consultant to Piper Aircraft Corporation. From Johns Hopkins, Dr. Stanley Middleman, whose interest in fluid dynamics won him a $44,500 National Science Foundation grant shortly after he came to Rochester.

And from industry, aeronautics expert Dr. Robert G. Loewy of Boeing's Ver-tol Division. MEANWHILE, with the encouragement of a board of advisers from industry and government, the college reshaped the undergraduate program into a sophisticated, science rich curriculum designed to prepare students for continued professional growth in a fast-changing technological society. To some oldtime engineers the "new engineering education" with its emphasis on math, science and the a i i smacked of heresy.

But, countered Graham, "it's the only kind of engineering education that makes sense in a world where today's scientific I breakthroughs may become tomorrow's technological cliches." The result: Rochester's undergraduate engineer now spends 40 of his time on math and the physical sciences, 25 on the humanities and social sciences, and 35 on basic engineering sciences and technological studies. At the graduate level the college initiated doctoral programs in mechanical and electrical engineering. (Chemical engineering already offered the Ph.D., as did the Institute of Optics, which joined the college in 1961.) A program of engineering internships, similar to medical internships, was introduced to attract talented graduate students. To increase their services to local Industry the faculty undertook to expand programs for part-time stu- Continued On Page 2M DR. SHELBY MILLER is chairman of the Chemical Engineering department.

He is shown at work with Harold Krieger checking equipment used in spectrophotometry analysis of glass and ceramics. FACE OF A MYTH Robert Frost. New words: Laser magnetohydrodynamics molecular electronics non-Newtonian mechanics. New faculty, recruited from top engineering centers in this country and abroad. A new building.

New ideas for educating tomorrow's engineers. And, upcoming this summer, a new name: The College of Engineering and Applied Science. (See Page 2M.) These reflect the expanding horizons of one of the University of Rochester's fast- growing young professional schools. )f ACTUALLY, it's been only some four years since the University's 50-year-old Division of Engineer- ing in the College ot Arts and Science became a col-lega in its own right. In that brief period, however, engineering has become one of the fastest developing fields in Rochester.

Quantitatively speaking, the youthful college has grown dramatically. The faculty has doubled. Graduate enrollment has quadrupled. The dollar-volume of sponsored research in the three engineering departments has zoomed from $20,000 a year to $375,000, with the fourth department the university's world-famous Institute of Optics, headed by Dr. Robert Hopkinsadding another But the rise of the University of Rochester's en-gneering college is more than a story of numbers.

Its a story of growth in academic stature that has singled out the college as a real comer among the nation's engineering schools. ARCHITECT of this "new world of engineering and applied science" is the dynamic dean of the college, Dr. John W. Graham who came to the university in mid-1959 from a vice presidency at New York's Cooper Union. Despite a deceptively low-well-met manner, it soon became evident that the new dean was a pur- poseful, no-nonsense "Man with a Plan." The goal of the plan was and is "to achieve balanced programs in undergraduate education, graduate education, research and service to community and industry where each not only is significant in its own right, but contributes to the vitality of others." And the key to the plan was and is quality.

The new college, as Graham outlined it, would concentrate its efforts on design, development, research and teaching. But in these it would rank with the best in the nation. THE FIRST, most crucial job was to recruit additional faculty. Graham and his colleagues knew the' kind of men they wanted "creative, research-minded teachers interested in adding to the world's knowledge and in apply- ing the latest scientific dis- coveries for man's bene- fit." These, they argued, are the teachers who can best prepare their students "or a lifetime of profes-. "ional learning, who can educate and motivate able youngsters for leadership careers in engineering.

The college already had some men. of this type men like the gifted Dr. Gouq-Jen Su, widely known for his studies in glass technology; Dr. Lewis D. Conta, who had won na By JAMES MARLOW WASHINGTON UP) Robert Frost raised i poems on a few fertile literary acres in New England, away from the terrible rivers of his time which hardly plashed on him until he was almost 60.

By then his best work was done, although in his first 40 years he earned only $200 from his poetry. He didn't grow and he didn't change. In a letter to his very sympathetic biog-grapher, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, he said: "Anything I ever thought I still think I take nothing back. I don't even Yet, by the time he died last month at 88, he had become a kind of American folk-hero, swamped in honors and half-hidden in a cloud of sentimentality. THIS IS AN ATTEMPT to melt the myth to see the the man.

Frost was many things besides a poet: a wit, an endless and often rambling talker, even "rascally," to use his own words, because he said it stimulated him. Some times he was too cute, too trivial, even clumsy. He was called many things nice, from being the best poet in American literature to being Shakespeare's equal. One of his highly critical college professor friends, Sidney Cox, said Frost never let his head get caught in a halo. Then Cox spent a whole book jamming the halo down around Frost's ears.

There was the other, unflattering side, too. He was called an actor, a character, a spirtual drifter, overrated and dull, and, in his bad poems, a kind of cracker-barrel philospher preaching from a cloud. JN BETWEEN was a small, though small, body of work as good as any of its kind in American literature. His best poems were about a tree, a road, a pasture, snow, and people, himself and his neighbors, in man's usual predicaments, like death and dismay, but in a quiet countryside. If this isolation from a changing world was a defect in his poems, it also was their special magic.

It made them timeless. They could have been written in the 10th Century, or any other. Frost himself explained it: "The material for poetry should be common in experience, uncommon in writing." In this sense his poetry was classic. It was no accident. Two of the earliest influences on him and his poetic vision people in the country were the Greek and Roman pastorals of Theocritus and Vergil.

It a be overlooked but Frost loved the Greek and Latin writers in the original. He also was devoted to Emerson and had a "passion" for Thoreau. Unlike Emerson, he was not a mystic. He was a skeptic. Emerson wrestled with the soul and over-soul.

Frost said he didn't go to church but looked In the window. fROST LIVED on memory. Some of his best poems came from the remembered emotion of a moment, like "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening," which he i. MICROWAVE EQUIPMENT measures electrical properties of biological material. From the left, Dr.

Daniel W. Healy, chairman of the Electrical Engineering, and Dr. Edwin L. Carstensen. milk the cow at noon and at 1 in the morning.

When the 10 years were up he sold the farm for $1,100 and, with $800 from his grandfather's estate, took his wife and four children to England in 1912 to farm and write poetry. There he got his first book published in 1913, when he was 39. ()NE OF THE fascinations of Frost is how he could come through the enormous changes and conflicts in the years of his growing up and afterward and show so little awareness of them and yet, at the same time, cut through the literary stupidities of his time to emerge with his own personal, intact, realistic vision. His New England father, a Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard who sympathized with the South against the North and went to San Francisco, was an erratic and moody newspaperman and a problem to his wife. She was a Presbyterian who turned to Unitarianism and finally be-came a Swedenborgian mystic.

Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. When his father died In 1885, his mother took him and his sister back to New England to live with his grandparents until she got a job teaching at $9 a week. As a boy he had to do odd jobs to help out. But his mother not only loved poetry, she wrote it, and she read to her children: Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Her-rick, Browning, and perhaps even George Meredith whom Frost later memorized. -Jf FROST GREW UP In the "genteel" period of American poetry when common speech was rejected by the literary men in charge and reality was ignored.

Oliver Wendell Holmes called it the time of "vanil-la-flavored adjectives." Typical was Longfellow's in Yon Azure Deeps." This had some effect on Frost as his first published poem, "My Butterly," shows with lines like "airly dalliance" and "thine ominous Continued On Page 10M wrote in a hurry one June morning in 1922. You could read deep meanings into his poetry but he didn't encourage it and sometimes had a short answer for those who tried it. Once he was asked if "miles to go before I sleep" the best-remembered line in "Stopping by Woods" had an implication of death and God. "No," Frost said, according to another college professor friend, Reginald Cook. "AH that means is to get the hell out of here." FROST WAS AT his worst when he tried to think big, beyond simple experiences, as he did nearing 60 with "Build Soil" which gibed at the idea of government concern for the general welfare in the depression of the 1930's.

It wasn't a poem. It was a diatribe. It was when he tried the shift from feeling to thinking that Frost got mixed up, and not always pleasantly, although that part of his life may be forgotten now. Biographer Sergeant points out the jumble in Frost: In the depression days, while he preached self-reliance and derided government interference for people's welfare Frost was "astonishingly tolerant" toward Hitler and Mussolini. She said he looked dispassionately on them "until they prove themselves monstrous and depraved." He was a man, she said, "of strong hates and prejudices" and with a "strong, irritable anti-intellectual-ism." tn the 1930s when he was anti-New Deal and mocked at President Franklin D.

Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt some critics ignored him, some became angry. FOR THE FIRST 40 years of his life Frost was pretty much a failure as a farmer. His grandfather not only had to pay for his two years at Harvard; after he married, but, when he quit, bought him a farm for upon Frost's promise to stay on it at last 10 years. But Frost's mind was on poety, not farming.

He'd SHOCK TUBE EQUIPMENT for measuring ion and electron density profiles, is set up by Lawrence Holmes, Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering. IN OPTICS DEPARTMENT, the rapidly developing laser is center of study and research. Michael Her-scher, Ph.D. candidate, is at work on laser project..