computer-based management systems, industrial management, and marketing. The College also
established the foundation curriculum which included the requirement that every student,
whatever his or her major, had to take at least one course in each of the University's three
Schools-engineering, management, and science-and had to pass a writing proficiency
examination prior to graduation. It also became the first college in the United States to issue a
personal computer to every incoming freshman.
Plane also was responsible for founding The Clarkson School in 1978, a program that
offers talented high school seniors who excel in mathematics and science an opportunity to
complete their senior year of high school while simultaneously earning a year of college credit
at Clarkson.
Clark's Inauguration.
Dr. Allan H. Clark was inaugurated as Clarkson's 13
th
president on
Saturday, September 14, 1985. The festivities began on Friday with a campus-wide picnic
outside the Walker Arena. Students on the food plan ate free, and the CUB paid for students not
on the food plan. Faculty and staff, including the new president, served at the picnic for half-
hour turns.
That was followed on Friday evening by a concert by Count Basie's Dance Band in the
Alumni Gymnasium open to the full campus community. Decorations for the dance included
3,000 balloons of the colors of Clarkson (gold), MIT (red), and Princeton (orange). Twenty
tables around the edges of the dance floor of the gym provided a night-club-type atmosphere;
match boxes and napkins were specially printed.
Saturday's luncheon in Graham Hall was attended by the VIPs: Trustees, campus
officials, Dr. Clark's guests, alumni leaders, presidents of the Associated Colleges, and the
symposium participants. Immediately afterward at 2 o'clock, a symposium in Snell Hall
auditorium discussed
Technology and Human Values
, a topic emerging from a speech by
President Clark before the Indiana Committee for the Humanities in Nashville, Indiana, on
April 21, 1985:
To support human values fully, technology must operate within realistic assessments of its limits and the
limits of the human personality.
Three distinguished speakers were invited to speak on this subject: Leo Marx, Professor
of Science, Technology and Society at MIT, and author of
The Machine in the Garden
; Arthur
G. Hansen, Chancellor of Texas A&M (formerly president of Purdue University); and Jerrier H.
Haddad, retired vice president of IBM, and long-time Clarkson Trustee. Prof. Bradford
Broughton, chairman of the Faculty Senate, welcomed the participants and the audience and
introduced the moderator, Prof. Milton Kerker, the Thomas S. Clarkson Professor, who
explained its scope:
Technology and Human Values is a theme that has reverberated down the ages. Whether it has
engendered optimism or pessimism has varied with culture and with individuals.
Denis Diderot was an optimist. Much of our American experience stems from his eighteenth century ideal
of progress in which technology fuels material wealth hand-in-hand with the liberal virtues.
The 18th century B.C. Greek epic poet Hesiod was a dour pessimist. He lamented that although the theft
of fire for mankind by Prometheus permitted development of the technical arts, Zeus exacted a terrible retribution
for that theft by unleashing pain and evil throughout the world.
The settings are new, but questions persist about the price in human values for technological progress.
