44 SEA GRANT COLLEGES 



THE ROLE OF SEA-GRANT COLLEGES IN FISHERY DEVELOPMENT 



Wilbert M. Chapman, Ph.D., University of Washington, 1937, He is 

 the Director, Division of Resources, Van Camp Sea Food Company, 

 San Diego, California. He has had a distinguished career in both 

 state and federal government fisheries activities, in education, and 

 in industry. 



A little less than twenty years ago I was asked to become Director of the 

 School of Fisheries, University of Washington. It was the period of post-war 

 readjustment, the beginning of the great growth period of the universities bol- 

 stered by the federal act giving educational advantages to people who had served 

 in the war. We were promised by the university administration what was to us 

 a palatial new building equipped with research facilities of which we had scarcely 

 dared dream before, and a vessel large enough with which to work Puget Sound. 

 We were given a pretty free hand to reorganize the curriculum in what ways we 

 thought to be best, and funds with which to lay on new professorial staff. 



We did all these things. We spent much more time on the design of the new 

 curriculum than we did the newbuildingor ship, as was proper. Most of us were 

 graduates of the school, or the antecedent College of Fisheries, and had been 

 out in the world working at our trade since. None of us was particularly happy 

 about what had been our educational preparation for what we had encountered in 

 the outside world. We were determined that the graduates we sent out into the 

 Brave New World would be better prepared. 



The first trouble we had was in estimating what the shape of the market 

 for graduates would be. The school had been in business then for about 25 

 years, and therefore we had some pattern of success and failure to go on. 



For the first ten years the College of Fisheries had been run by Dean John 

 Cobb as primarily a technological school aimed at training persons to go into the 

 fish business. It had been the Northwest fishing industry that had insisted on the 

 college being established at the university and this was what they had wanted, 

 and thought they needed. For the second, and longer, period the School of Fish- 

 eries had been run by Dr. Will F. Thompson on an almost diametrically different 

 basis as a scientific educational institution with substantially no technological 

 training offered at all. This was also what the Northwest fishing industry wanted 

 then, and thought it needed, because in the early 1930's it had run into a variety 

 of conservation problems and needed persons adequately trained in fishery 

 science with which the state, federal and international conservation agencies, 

 which had grown up to attend to these urgent problems, could be staffed. 



The record of graduate performance coming from these two disparate 

 sorts of training was puzzling. In the first place a quite high percentage of the 

 graduates had stayed in the fishery field (something over three-quarters) and 

 they filled quite high places in this field both in industry and government, and 

 both in the United States and in other countries. From this viewpoint it was 

 hard to tell whether one sort of training had been better than the other, and on 

 a purely pragmatic basis of graduate success both seemed to have done pretty 

 well. In the second place there was not any clear relationship between the type 

 of education the student had had and the type of work at which the graduate was 

 prospering. 



Federal, state, and international conservation agencies, and those of sev- 

 eral other countries, were staffed with our graduates from the early period of 

 primarily ir;dustry- oriented technological training who seemed to be doing about 

 as well as colleagues trained elsewhere and actually were beginning to domi- 

 nate this field as administrators. Also, some from this period had gone into 



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