On 16 Aug 1997, C. Boake wrote:
> Now we are in a stage with relatively few college-age students, and less
> need for large faculties. But was anyone thinking about that for the past
> 15 or 20 years? If so, it was nobody with any influence.
Right, I was one of those non-influential ones. I proposed a symposium
to AAAS for their annual meeting in 87, I think it was, which I titled
"Too Many Scientists?" I had put together a panel of speakers, including
an anthropologist who had studied unemployed physicists in the 70's,
someone from the field of higher ed, who had studied underemployed PhD's
in other fields, and 2 or 3 others. I wrote a blurb describing how
there are increasing numbers of PhD's unable to find real jobs.
I called AAAS to ask why they rejected the proposal. The answer I got
was that my proposal was simply "anecdotal", and, sure, there might be
here and there a few unemployed scientists, but we have REAL DATA, and
MATHEMATICAL MODELS that clearly show that the pipeline is empty and
we want to get out the message that MORE students should become
scientists.
