102 SEA GRANT COLLEGES 



SCHAEFER 



I might say one of the most encouraging things to me at least is the very 

 great interest Congress is taking in this whole matter of how we utilize the re- 

 sources of the ocean. Mr. Eckles referred a few moments ago to difficulties of 

 a unified program from the appropriations standpoint. Very recently the Appro- 

 priations Committee of the House of Representatives has become sufficiently 

 interested in this whole problenn of having pieces of the program going to vari- 

 ous subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee, that they have established 

 an investigation of this whole matter on their own. They have a group of seven 

 or eight extremely able investigators that are delving into this whole matter on 

 a full-time basis. I think this is likely to be an extremely useful review by the 

 Congress of problems of implementation of the entire national oceanographic 

 problem.. 



One point on which I would like to hear some further discussion is this 

 matter of the bringing knowledge to the users for practical development. The 

 Senator referred to this in his remarks, and others touched upon it. I think Mr. 

 Abel and Dr. Ashton were talking very largely about the accumulation of new 

 knowledge. Mr. Ashton said that one of the differences between 1865 and the 

 present is that the land-grant colleges were'set up because the kinds of things 

 they wanted to do weren't respectable in the existing large universities. These 

 land-grant colleges have now also become respectable. Whereas the original 

 land- grant colleges worked with the county agents and that sort of thing (and 

 some of them still do), the general attitude of faculties in most universities, even 

 those who started land-grant colleges, is that this really isn't an appropriate 

 function for a university. The university has a part, in educating the people who 

 perform this function, but the actual county agent function bringing this know- 

 ledge to the users is not considered "respectable" now. So the question arises, 

 as I stated earlier, can this be handled within the university system, or do we 

 have to think of some ancillary mechanism for taking care of it? I think, al- 

 though our knowledge is fragmentary and imperfect, we do know a great deal 

 more about these things than many of the users do. For instance, in the area of 

 fisheries, we know a lot more about catching fish, and the information a fisher- 

 man can use to catch fish, than the fisherman does. So how do you get this in- 

 formation into his hands ? 



ASHTON 



I'm told by some of my engineering friends, Mr. Chairman, that even the 

 engineering schools now are doing a quite different kind of thing for their bac- 

 calaureate degrees from what they were doing 35 or 40 years ago. They recog- 

 nize this as a very real problem, and are beginning to develop what are some- 

 times called technical institutes or other types of organized programs, not 

 necessarily of full baccalaureate caliber, which are doing what used to be done 

 for an engineering degree a generation or two ago. It seems to me that this 

 offers a perfectly good parallel to the situation here. My hope, indeed my ex- 

 pectation, is that at least the larger universities and perhaps many of the small 

 ones, can broaden their scope enough so that they see this need for a kind of 

 special technical training which is not of the same sort, exactly, as wliat we 

 thought of as the usual baccalaureate program; and will open their doors, in 

 effect, to this kind of development, so that it will have the advantages of being 

 associated with a university or college, even though it may be outside the pat- 

 terns usually associated with the regular degree programs. I speak with pre- 

 judice, of course, but I think this is a much better way than the development of 

 separate and isolated trade schools, technical schools of one sort or another, 



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