flown to Massena and transported to Potsdam by truck. This iron lung was to be used for any
case which presented an emergency and thus was not limited to use of students at the two
colleges.
On April 11, 1948, Prof. Robert John McGill presented the Potsdam hospital with a
check for $1,500 toward the lung; the local hospital board voted to contribute the remaining
$100. More than $1,300 of this money had been raised during the few weeks of the drive by
student contributions and donations from the general public at the St. Lawrence and Alfred
football games. The remaining $200 was obtained from collections made during Ice Carnival
weekend, and individual contributions by several local civic and fraternal groups. Thanks to the
lung, Skolnick learned to walk again, and was able to spend all day outside the lung, but he still
had to spend his nights inside it.
Graduate and Research.
After 1913, when the Trustees received from the state permission to
amend Clarkson's charter to permit the granting of graduate degrees, masters' degrees were
awarded regularly from 1916 to 1937 at the rate of one to four per year by the engineering and
science departments. These required a year of course work with little or no thesis or research
work. Because World War II (1941-45) disrupted the campus, enrollments dropped drastically,
and the faculty was reduced to a small contingent which spent most of its time on military
training programs. As a result, graduate work practically disappeared from campus.
War's end changed all that; it brought a huge increase in undergraduate enrollment as
GI's returned to finish their education, and a resulting growth in the faculty, and the physical
plant. Because the demands of warfare had changed engineering and science dramatically, post-
war education had to change also, including graduate work. By 1948, the College had decided
to resume graduate work in all degree-granting departments. To support these programs, the
College made available several graduate assistantships for each department.
Not all the College welcomed this resumption of graduate work, however. Some faculty,
administration, alumni, and board members opposed it out of their concern for the diversion of
resources and faculty interest from the traditional undergraduate to the new graduate programs.
Proponents of increased graduate work argued that graduate programs not only would enhance
the reputation of the school, and thereby attract better faculty, better students, and more
financial support, but also would allow the college to update the undergraduate programs in an
era of rapid change. These supporters believed that only a faculty who were doing scholarly
research in the forefronts of knowledge and teaching at advanced levels of graduate programs
could feed changes into the undergraduate programs. Their beliefs seem to have been borne out
by the large amount of graduate-level material which moved steadily into the undergraduate
programs over the next 40 years.
All four engineering departments, chemistry, and business administration [now School
of Business] began full-time graduate programs leading to masters' degrees in 1948-49. Physics
followed in 1958, mathematics and industrial management in 1965, and accounting in 1966.
Not until 1961, however, were PhD programs begun in chemical engineering and chemistry.
These were followed by degree programs in physics (1962), in engineering science (1968), and
mathematics (1969). With their involvement in three interdisciplinary groups specializing in
systems engineering, solid mechanics, and the fluid and thermal sciences in the engineering
science program, all the engineering departments participated in PhD level work. Clarkson
awarded its first PhD degree in 1963 to Mrs. Adria Catala for her work in chemistry.
