It is difficult to reminisce over my own formative years without sensing
the sharp contrast with the far more difficult situation faced by the
young generation today. My generation, and especially my own narrow age
range within that generation, had things easier, I think, than any group
before or after. I entered Lehigh for undergraduate studies one year
after Sputnik. It was a time when support for science and engineering
was enlarging fast, when opportunities were abundant. There were plenty
of graduate fellowships. There were also generous loan programs, fully
forgivable for those who went into teaching. I had both at Lehigh, where
I also stayed for graduate studies. Getting a postdoc position could be
accomplished mainly by a few telephone calls. My first faculty
appointment came when, in the midst of a first postdoc year at Brown,
our chairperson knocked on the office door and asked if I would like to
stay the next year as an Assistant Professor. I said yes and that was
that. Promotion and tenure processes were not much more complicated.
But that was then, not now. To quote David Goodstein of Caltech, "We are
at the beginnings of the end of the exponential expansion era of science
[but we are] still trying to maintain a social structure of science
(research, education, funding, institutions, and so on) that is based on
the unexamined assumption that the future will be just like the past."
I need hardly add that the signs of that exponential expansion of
people, not matched by the same growth of resources and opportunities,
are everywhere. That makes it incredibly more difficult today for young
people, and also for many members of older generations who have had to
face job loss or sharply reduced prospects.
I would like to give you some predictions of what more specific
difficulties the future will bring, and of how our community should
contend with them, but that inclination has to be tempered by another
quote, one that I've heard attributed to Neils Bohr: "Prediction is
very difficult, especially of the future." So instead I'll return to
some reminiscences, although maybe the difficulty of prediction of
things other than the future, to which Bohr alluded, makes that an
uncertain venture too.