SEA GRANT COLLEGES 45 



the fish business, as they had been trained to do, and were prospering. A few 

 were even university professors. But from the second period, when the training 

 was scientific, and practical preparation had been almost totally ignored, sev- 

 eral graduates had gone into industry, and they were prospering at least as well 

 as had their practically trained predecessors. The few female graduates from 

 both periods had mostly married fishery fellows and seemed to be raising fami- 

 lies with about equal degrees of felicity and domestic tranquility. 



There did not appear to be much rhyme or reason to all of this. One dedi- 

 cated young fellow who had had no other aspirations than science, and gave every 

 promise of being a good scientist, was in the fresh and frozen fish business mak- 

 ing money hand-over fist (and still is). Another, trained as a hatchery biologist 

 and technologist, was then head of the fishery function in the United States govern- 

 ment. Another trained as a fresh water fishery biologist, with much emphasis 

 on hatchery techniques, after some successful years at that had joined a large 

 corporation in the salmon industry and was doing very well, with his primary 

 responsibilities being in the labor relations field. Another from the early tech- 

 nology period was on the verge of becoming, as he since has, the director of one 

 of the international fishery commissions having as the core of its work conser- 

 vation research and regulations requiring the most exquisite and varied science. 

 He had little pretense at scientific training or capabilities. His prime qualifica- 

 tion was that he was bright, and he had been before he came to us for training. 

 There are none of the international fisheries commissions that have done their 

 work more satisfactorily than his has done since. Perhaps the most bizarre, 

 almost humorous, case was my own. I was trained as a comparative osteologist 

 specializing in icthyological systematics, had recently returned from establish- 

 ing subsistence fisheries on the most practical basis for the troops at advanced 

 bases in the South Pacific, was now director of the school, and was slated to go 

 to the Department of State soon to try and straighten out for the Undersecretary 

 the diplomatic snarls into which our international fisheries had enmeshed us. 



The demands upon us from prospective employers were highly varied and 

 each seemed to know precisely what he wanted. There was a flood of students 

 from countries in what is now called the developing world. Many of them were 

 poorly prepared academically for the sophistication of education we were pre- 

 pared to give. They were coming our way chiefly because the word "fisheries" 

 was in our name, our graduates had made good reputations where they had gone, 

 and their countries wanted their fisheries to be developed. 



Hatchery techniques had become more sophisticated and state and federal 

 agencies wanted graduates who could become hatchery superintendents. Fish 

 processing techniques had become more sophisticated and the fishing industry 

 wanted better trained graduates to run their establishments. Conservation 

 science had become ever so much more sophisticated and the conservation 

 agencies wanted graduates with a much broader and more competent scientific 

 training than we had been giving, which to that point had been pretty good for 

 the times. 



Each of us faculty members made up a curriculum which students in his 

 persuasion should follow to be reasonably well trained in that field. The net 

 result of the first examination of these curricula suggestions by us all was that 

 a student would require about five years of undergraduate preparation before 

 he was academically equipped to approach the fishery field, and another five 

 years of graduate courses in fisheries and oceanography before he was fit to 

 get out professionally stamped by us as ready for duty, and we were then pri- 

 marily considered to be an undergraduate department of the university. 



All this seemed, of course, a little rediculous even to us. We did rework 

 the curriculum fully, but not according to the previous ideas of any of us. On 

 the basis of what our graduates had done after graduation we decided to slip 

 back about half way between the technological training of the old College of 



19 



