TITLE: When Dinosaurs Walked the Earth
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 06, 2022 4:13 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Chad Orzel, getting ready to begin his 22nd year as a faculty member
at Union College,
muses:
It's really hard to see myself in the "grizzled veteran" class of
faculty, though realistically, I'm very much one of the old folks
these days. I am to a new faculty member starting this year as
someone hired in 1980 would've been to me when I started, and just
typing that out makes me want to crumble into dust.
I'm not the sort who likes to one-up another blogger, but... I can
top this, and crumble into a bigger, or at least older, pile of dust.
In May, I finished my 30th year as a faculty member. I am as old to
a 2022 hire as someone hired in 1962 would have been to me.
Being in computer science, rather than physics or another of the
disciplines older than CS, this is an even bigger gap culturally than
it first appears. The first Computer Science department in the US
was created in 1962. In 1992, my colleagues who started in the 1970s
seemed pretty firmly in the old guard, and the one CS faculty member
from the 1960s had just retired, opening the line into which I was
hired.
Indeed, our Department of Computer Science only came into existence
in 1992. Prior to that, the CS faculty had been offering CS degrees
for a little over a decade as part of a combined department with
Mathematics. (Our department even has a few distinguished alums who
graduated pre-1981, with CS degrees that are actually Math degrees
with a "computation emphasis".) A new department head and I were
hired for the department's first year as a standalone entity, and
then we hired two more faculty the next year to flesh out our
offerings.
So, yeah. I know what Chad means when he says "just typing that out
makes me want to crumble into dust", and then some.
On the other hand, it's kind of cool to see how far computer science
has come as an academic discipline in the last thirty years. It's
also cool that I am still be excited to learn new things and to work
with students as they learn them, too.
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