Looking back over 11 years as dean


As I look back on 11 years as your dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), there are indeed many people and events we can all be very proud of. Since they came and performed brilliantly during my watch at the helm, I also take pleasure in the reflected glory of the achievements of our faculty, students, and alumni.

When I took the position in 1991, I thought that there were three main functions for the dean of Engineering and Applied Science:

1) Recruit the best students and faculty.
2) Find resources to support their hopes and aspirations.
3) Tell the University and the world how great they are.

About half of our current faculty of 120 were brought to Princeton during my watch. Faculty recruiting mainly involves the departmental faculty and chair, but the dean often provides counsel and comments, and always provides for start-up resources.

The number of female faculty has increased from three to 13, and the number of black faculty has increased from zero to two. These new faculty brought with them their fresh views about future directions for engineering at Princeton, and built new and exciting programs in fields such as: theory and synthesis of advanced materials, environmental engineering and water resources, preservation of public monuments, computer programming languages, computers in music and art, biotechnology, nanotechnology, optical engineering, control and guidance, and financial engineering.

While the admission of undergraduates is mainly the responsibility of the dean of admission, the SEAS is in charge of the process of recruiting graduate students. We have been very successful in the last 11 years. We were aided by a number of new graduate fellowships, including the new Wu and Upton Fellowships, and starting last fall, a University graduate fellowship for all first-year students in science and engineering. The Department of Electrical Engineering currently has the largest group of doctoral students among all departments at Princeton.

Engineering at Princeton plays in a league of giants, and we are only one quarter the size of engineering schools such as MIT and Berkeley. We do compete on quality, which is reflected in the rankings by the National Research Council (NRC); but we cannot compete on quantity, such as reflected in the rankings of US News and World Report. In the last report of the NRC in 1995, all five of the departments in the SEAS ranked among the top 10 in the nation. We need to concentrate our resources on only a few programs, and do them exceptionally well. We need to lean on the strength of the outstanding Princeton departments of physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We also seek alliances with nearby industries such as telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, and finance.

Our faculty and students often come to my office to tell me about their dazzling hopes and aspirations, and their needs for resources: seed money for new programs, new space and renovation of existing space, outside proposals that require matching funds, travel to scholarly meetings, and funds to operate student groups and events.

It is no surprise that the requests far exceed the resources available, and a dean needs to budget for the most worthy causes and to go out and raise more money. We have raised about $160 million since 1991, which is mainly endowed for new professorships, new graduate fellowships, new buildings, and the Dean’s Educational Fund.

The most inflexible resource is space and acquiring new resources is not simple. It requires generating a vision and justifying why new space is needed, making comparisons with other units at Princeton and other engineering programs in the United States, making presentations to persuade the University administration and trustees, cultivating potential donors for the funds, searching for an architect worthy of the project, obtaining consent from a reluctant borough planning board, and sending out bids to construction companies. This is followed by the construction phase, before the smiles and the ribbon cutting at the dedication ceremony. The wonderful new Friend Center for Engineering Education, with 70,000 square feet of space, took at least six years from start to finish.

There was a time when engineering hung on the eastern fringes of the Princeton campus, seldom known and visited by the central administration and the liberal arts faculty and students. Part of our strategy has been to form teaching and research alliances with faculty from humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. We also made tremendous advances toward the goal of offering introductory courses and teaching all A.B. students at Princeton.

The new Friend Center is a giant welcoming arm to the rest of campus, saying “come join us, and we will learn together.” This has made an impact. Let me quote former President Harold Shapiro, who said in the April 18, 2001, issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly: “Its relatively small size and its unusually successful integration into the overall intellectual life of the University have always given Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science special distinction. In recent years, engineering as a discipline has experienced dramatic changes, in part through rapid technological innovations, in part because of our new awareness that an understanding of engineering concepts has become a distinct advantage for careers in fields such as finance and management, biology and geology…the ties engineering is forging to other disciplines every day through teaching, research, and scholarship—ties that demonstrate in intellectual terms the central role that engineering plays in the Princeton experience.”

Now for bragging rights about the achievements of our students, faculty, and alumni, and who would not go into ecstasy over what they have done. The SEAS has about 18 percent of Princeton’s undergraduates, or roughly one out of five. However, we have four of Princeton’s valedictorians in the last decade, including the last three years: Niles Pierce ’93, Chan Vee Chong ’99, Andrew Houck ’00, and Jared Kramer ’01. We also have a disproportionate share of the winners of the Pyne Prize for the best seniors, and the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowships for the highest honor of the Graduate School.

Our students take leadership positions, such as Joe Kochan ’02, who was president of the Undergraduate Student Government; Scott Miller, who is president of the Graduate Student Government; Marc Washington ’97, who was captain of the Princeton football team, and Ben Chen ’96, who was concertmaster of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra.

We have a very distinguished faculty, and one measure is the Nobel Prize in Physics bestowed on Daniel Tsui in 1998. We also have many faculty as members of distinguished academies.

• National Academy of Sciences: Robert Tarjan, Daniel Tsui, and Andrew Yao.
• National Academy of Engineering: David Billington, Seymour Bogdonoff, Pablo Debenedetti, Irvin Glassman, William Grassley, Brian Kernighan, Ed Law, Bede Liu, Vince Poor, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, William Russel, George Scherer, Robert Tarjan, and myself.
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences: David Billington, Philip Holmes, William Russel, Robert Tarjan, Daniel Tsui, Andrew Yao, and myself.
• Royal Society of London: Anthony Evans, Roy Jackson, and Anthony Jameson.

This list does not begin to detail all of their achievements.

Our alumni are movers and shakers, and they serve all nations. A short list of outstanding alumni is the past Gordon Wu Lecturers:

• Sir Gordon Y. S. Wu ’58, developer and entrepreneur.
• Norman Augustine ’57 *59, former CEO, Lockheed Martin.
• Chang-lin Tien *59, former chancellor, University of California at Berkeley.
• Philip Condit *65, CEO, Boeing.
• Eric Schmidt ’76, former CEO, Novell.
• Jeff Bezos ’86, founder and CEO, Amazon.com.
• Tom Leighton ’78, founder and chief scientist, Akamai.

Eleven years of glory have gone by very fast, and I have a parting word for our students, faculty, and alumni:

Well done, but the past is only a prelude. Princeton expects even greater things from you in the future. Go forward and astonish the world by your achievements, especially in fields that cannot possibly