8 UNIVERSITY EDUCATION IN SHIP CONSTRUCTION 
Pror. Georce F. Croucu, Member:—This paper by Professor Chapman is of great 
interest to me personally, and, I imagine, to anyone who, like myself, is engaged in the 
work of giving instruction in naval architecture and marine engineering. The solution 
which Professor Chapman has reached of the problem of presenting courses in naval 
architecture is in many respects strikingly different from and in other respects decidedly 
similar to, that which we have worked out at the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture. 
The planning and carrying on of a course in naval architecture is a good deal like 
planning and building a ship. The whole matter is more or less a compromise. No one 
can make a course which is perfect, and I believe no one will claim that any course is 
perfect. We cannot turn out practical and competent naval architects and marine 
engineers, we know that. In planning a course we must choose those items which to 
us seem to offer the best compromise. We try to modify our courses according to the 
results we get with our graduates. 
In taking up this problem a few years ago we recognized at the institute the great 
importance of the management and executive side of shipbuilding. We were originally 
devoting our time to what might be called the strictly technical side of this subject. 
The management and the executive side of the industry was brought to our attention 
by an alumnus, Mr. McAuliffe, who had some of the problems of the Emergency Fleet 
Corporation to deal with. I imagine his experience led him to believe that we could do 
something in the institute towards training our students to appreciate at least that such 
problems existed. 
That necessitated a more or less complete revision of the course as a whole. At 
the time when we were making the revision, we were taking up the subject of giving our 
graduates degrees. Unfortunately, the Webb Institute is situated in the State of New 
York, and the legislature of that state vests the control of the granting of degrees ina 
Board of Regents. The Board of Regents must follow the laws enacted by the legislature 
and is compelled by law to demand certain specified and definite requirements for a degree. 
The work we are doing at Webb Institute, in spite of the appearance of a contrary 
statement not long ago, is, I believe, equal in rank to that done in the colleges. It is not 
preparatory work in any sense, for we go quite far in mathematics, in English and applied 
mechanics. Our one weak point is the lack of shops. This lack we meet in exactly the 
same way that has been considered to be an advantage in Lehigh University, and we have 
met it in that way for over twenty years. 
We decided in making this revision, above all things, to keep the practical efficiency 
of the course unimpaired. The work in management which we have introduced is more 
or less elementary and is more to give the student an idea of the fundamentals of man- 
agement and of the executive side of the shipbuilding work than to go into the details 
of finance and economics. 
We have felt in laying out this course that the training required in finance, in busi- 
ness administration and accounting could be obtained quite satisfactorily by the men 
before going into those branches, in some of the business courses which are offered today, 
We have introduced a series of graduate lectures on many of these topics and also in- 
stituted a series of visits to plants where these points are taken up. 
A second point about the degree is that we found it impracticable in connection 
with a complete course in marine engineering and naval architecture. We could have 
dropped out the marine engineering, or made it more or less general, and retained the 
naval architecture, and given the biology and other things that the regents wanted us to 
