In the spring of 1951 Churchman and I accepted appointments to (then) Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland because Case was committed to establishing an activity in Operations Research and Churchman and I had come to believe we could probably work better under this name than under the cloak of academic philosophy. By the end of 1952 we had formal approval, but not without faculty opposition, for the first doctoral program in Operations Research. From then on the Group and the program grew rapidly and flourished. Case became a mecca to which pilgrimages of operations researchers from around the world came. In 1958, Churchman, for personal reasons, migrated to the University of California at Berkeley where he established a similar activity. Academic Operations Research activities began to proliferate and flourish, many of them modeled on those at Case.
Russell L. AckoffRelated topics
academic activity approval begin believe came case churchman cloak commit end establishing faculty flourish formal group institute name opposition personal philosophy program research similar spring technology under university work world berkeley california mecca cleveland operationsRelated quotes
In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility... Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?
Neil Postman
If Christ were to walk in this world today, do you know what would happen to Him? He would be placed in a mental institution and given psycho-therapy, just as would His Saints. The world would crucify Him today just as it did 2000 years ago, for the world has not learned a thing, except more devious forms of hypocrisy. And what would happen if, in one of my classes at the university, I would one day tell my students that all the learning of this world is of no importance beside the duty of worshipping God, accepting the God-man who died for our sins, and preparing for the life of the world to come? They would probably laugh at me, and the university officials, if they found out, would fire me-for it is against the law to preach the Truth in our universities. We say that we live in a Christian society, but we do not: we live in a society.
Seraphim Rose
The enterprise engineer must be a leader, a designer, and a synthesizer. He is a doer. He understands theory as a guide to practice. He must concern himself with human organization because the pace and success of technology are becoming more dependent on interaction with the social system and less on scientific discovery. In private as well as public research and development, such men must find ways to reverse the deterioration of ethics and efficiency. They will strengthen the information links between physical design and the public so that technology can better serve society. In the public sector they must show the level of wisdom and leadership that can co-ordinate great engineering projects with politics. They will recognise that informing the public and becoming a nucleus for crystallising public opinion is even more important in many programmes than is the underlying science.
Jay Wright Forrester
According to the teaching of the Church, men and women with homosexual tendencies 'must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided'. They are called, like other Christians, to live the virtue of chastity. The homosexual inclination is however 'objectively disordered' and homosexual practices are 'sins gravely contrary to chastity'.In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.
Pope Benedict XVI
I was reminded of how much I had misjudged the potential the profession would see in the time series rational expectations models. When I, as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) around 1970 did some work on the econometrics of rational expectations time series models, I felt rather apologetic about the extreme assumptions in the models. I did not expect others to regard them as anything more than a passing gimmick. Richard Sutch had just written in his MIT doctoral dissertation (1968) an exposition of the coefficient restrictions implied for time series representations of long-term and short-term interest rates, but he never bothered to publish this work. I remember conversations with him and others about rational expectations models, and I did not come away thinking they were the wave of the future.
Robert J. Shiller
