46 SEA GRANT COLLEGES 



Fisheries and the scientific training of the newer School of Fisheries. Almost 

 none of our clients thought this to be wise. We determined to move toward being 

 totally a graduate school, which almost all the students resented. We deter- 

 mined to raise the qualifications that a student was required to have to get into 

 our institution. The university administration did not like this because we were 

 a state institution open to almost all comers. This was probably the most sen- 

 sible move we made because bright students make bright graduates and success- 

 ful careers almost no matter what their professors do to them. Lastly, we em- 

 phasized seminar- like courses where the students could range over broad cuts 

 of the fishery field with considerable independence but under the critical eye not 

 only of the professor, but of their classmates (a much more critical audience). 

 This was aimed not only at training independence of inquiry and mind, but at 

 causing cross -fertilization of ideas among the broad spectrum of fields for which 

 we were asked to train. 



I left for the Department of State about the time this new curriculum, so 

 carefully worked out, began to come into action. Accordingly, I take neither 

 blame, nor credit, for what has happened since. 



What has happened in the ensuing seventeen years is that there is still 

 high dissatisfaction with the type of training given by what is now, again, the 

 College of Fisheries of the University of Washington, and all graduates are em- 

 ployed as soon as they emerge. The technology training has now become mostly 

 microbiology as sophisticated as the biological sciences. The biologists tend to 

 take minors or majors in the more hard science oriented Department of Ocea- 

 nography. Most graduates still stay in the fishery or ocean use field. Those 

 technologically trained end up in the industry, the conservation agencies, or as 

 university professors and do pretty well. Those scientifically trained end up 

 in the industry, the conservation agencies or as university professors, and do 

 pretty well. An occasional female still shows up as a fishery major. They still 

 marry fishery fellows and settle down to raising families about as well as col- 

 leagues who have not had the benefit of a fishery education, whatever that is. 

 The faculty of the College of Fisheries is still tussling with the vital problem of 

 how to change the curriculum around so it can produce graduates better equipped 

 to do better with the problems of ocean use. 



I think this story has a bearing on the concept of the sea- grant college and 

 that is why I have told it. I will go on to relate a thesis that will seem thoroughly 

 corny to most of you, but that seems to me to be the most important concept in- 

 volved in this sea-grant college business. 



THE SEA-PEOPLE 



Forty years of kicking around this business has left me thoroughly con- 

 vinced of the following thesis: The ocean weeds out from all of the races of 

 mankind that come upon it to make a living a certain type of person. This type 

 of person stays with the ocean and the rest are cast back ashore to deal with 

 the land-people. 



I have sat on a nail- keg on the dock at Yaizu, Japan, conversing through an 

 interpreter with Japanese fishing captains who have returned from the far cor- 

 ners of the world ocean, unloaded their catches, and are ready for a cup of tea 

 and a chat with a foreigner while the crew washes down the vessel. The topics, 

 the frames of reference, the attitudes, the background of experience and the gist 

 of the conversations were so identical with those I had had with unschooled Mela- 

 nesians in the Solomons; deep-water halibut men of Norwegian descent on their 

 vessels in the Northeast Pacific; sophisticated California tuna- clipper men of 

 Portuguese, Italian, and ordinary Anglo-Saxon descent, in San Diego; Russian 

 trawl masters working off West Africa; and Arab sail dhow operators in the 

 Arabian sea. that I felt perfectly at home. In all cases the prime problems were 



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