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JULY, 1930                                 465
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DR. COMPTON'S ADDRESS
(Continued from page 438)

Every application of science presupposed a discovery of science to be applied, so that the useful applications of science are in the last analysis limited by the extent to which scientific research has been successful in uncovering the hidden forces of Nature. Then, when these scientific discoveries are put to the service of man, there is always a limit to the available extent of this service, a limit set by some such thing as a defect of material, inability to solve an equation, or some disturbing factor. So here again it is the province of research to push back or remove these limitations While, therefore, in its humble beginning, the greatest service of an Institutional Technology might very well have been to acquaint men with the laws of science and the technique of their application, an Institute of Technology today, to perform its greatest service, must take the lead in actually developing science and its applications as well as in technological instruction...
   I hope, therefore, that increasing attention in the Institute may be given to the fundamental sciences; that they may achieve as never before the spirit and results of research; that all courses of instruction may be examined carefully to see where training in details has been unduly emphasized at the expense of the more powerful training in all-embracing fundamental principles. Without any change of purpose or any radical change in operation, I feel that significant progress can thus be made. 
Second let me emphasize the supreme necessity of maintaining a faculty of absolutely first grade men, despite the increasing difficulty of doing so. Here, as in every organizations, an educational institution ca make a perfectly logical and unanswerable argument that its need of the best men should supersede the claims of any other organization. For it is these men in the educational institutions who train and inspire all the others; their abilities are renewed and made available to the world in every graduating class. The folly of sending our youth to second rate teachers in the hope of obtaining a first-class training is too absurd to discuss. And yes this is a very real danger, for industry is competing with universities for the best men, often taking them and then perhaps later finding fault with the institution for not giving its students a first-class training! I could go on at great length on this topic, which is one so easy to argue, yet so difficult practically to solve.
Several things, I believe, conspire to make this situation so serious. Industry can outbid an educational institution for a man if it wishes to do so. An industry may be short-sighted, looking only to its profits for the next few years. Or it may realize the situation and, if left to itself, would not try to take a certain man from an educational institution,- but realizing that if it does not some competing concern will, it proceeds to invite the man to join its staff. There are instances in this Institute in which an industry has taken man after man from key positions, leaving a department seriously embarrassed, crippled and criticized. . . .
How, then, is this complicated situation to be handled? I doubt whether any rules, agreements or other artifices can hope to solve it. The solution ( Concluded on page 466) 
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