Abstract
This chapter will set the stage for the events described in succeeding chapters that tell the story of the start and growth over 75 years of a complex academic organization—the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It is a story of visions and actualizations.
Ophelia: ‘Tis brief, my lord. Hamlet: As woman’s love.
—William Shakespeare
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Notes
- 1.
In the late 1800s, as universities as we know them today blossomed and expanded to include technical subjects such as engineering and other practical subjects, two theories of the best way to organize the study of such subjects emerged: the academic culture and the shop culture. Today’s MIT was based on the academic culture that held that the best way to teach engineering was by studying the supporting theories of math, physics, and chemistry. The shop culture emphasized hands-on involvement in the practical aspects of engineering. Worcester Polytechnic Institute was a prime example following the shop culture view and was the primary model for the initial curriculum at Georgia Tech. There are interesting cultural and social implications of these approaches and their implementations.
- 2.
Robert M. Craig, a fellow emeritus at Georgia Tech, graciously provided the following, based on his book Campus Walks: A Guide to the Architecture of Georgia Tech. “Tech Tower is more neo-Romanesque than neo-Gothic (round arched not pointed arches). The towers on this and other like late Victorian buildings by Bruce and Morgan (Tech, Agnes Scott, Clemson, the architects’ various courthouses) were intended to landmark the buildings—give them visual prominence as symbols of what Henry Grady called the New South. For Georgia Tech this was particularly relevant as Tech Tower and the Shop Building, with their massing, solidity, and upward aspirations, symbolized the rising power of industry and technology in the state”
- 3.
“60 years. Celebrating our past, continuing our legacy”, pp. 92–97, Vol. 97 No 2, Summer 2021.
- 4.
“50 Years Ago, First African-American Student Graduated from Tech,” Georgia Tech News Center.
- 5.
I am aware that some readers, especially historians and others interested in all details of validation or elaboration, are more accustomed to footnotes. Those just interested in the narrative can easily skip over the footnotes.
- 6.
I hope that my many colleagues over the years will not be offended, and have suggested to the Communications group in the Dean’s office that it would be great to have an online picture book of all faculty over the years!
- 7.
The visual quality of the images was not entirely under my control due to a number of factors of accessibility and origin, as well as production factors.
- 8.
“Information Technology,” Wikipedia, accessed 1/31/2023.
- 9.
The Supply of Information Technology Workers in the United States, Computer Research Association, Washington D.C., 1999.
- 10.
The social dynamics of instrumental computer use, Technical Report, Rob Kling, Phillip Crabtree, Walter Scacchi, University of California, Irvine, 1977, bit.ly/3QTxFw8, accessed 11/10/2023.
- 11.
I’m unaware of the use of this term elsewhere in the way I use it here.
- 12.
Private communication, Professor John Leslie King, University of Michigan, November 22, 2020.
- 13.
See “The Supply…” above.
- 14.
For example, see “Computer Science,” Wikipedia, accessed 11/10/2023 and “Defining computer science,” James W. McGuffee, ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, June 2000.
- 15.
A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi, MIT Press, 2021; Computer: A History of the Information Machine (The Sloan Technology Series) 3rd Edition, Martin Campbell-Kelly, et al., Routledge, 2018.
- 16.
Peter J. Denning, “Computing as a discipline,” Computer, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 63–70, Feb. 1989.
- 17.
The usage of “school” to denote what on most other campuses is called a “department,” apparently dates back many years at Tech to differentiate between academic units at that time that gave an accredited degree (e.g., School of Mechanical Engineering) and ones that only provided instruction (e.g., Department of Modern Languages).
- 18.
The MIT Media Lab was founded as an effort to that end (albeit with other objectives as well) and the Cornell College of Computing and Information Science is another, more recent, instance. The latter is a good example of an effort that started with close coordination between disparate departments and is now growing into a true computing school in the sense defined above.
- 19.
“Education for Librarianship,” Wikipedia, accessed July 16, 2023, dates the establishment of library science to Melvil Dewey in 1887 at Columbia University.
- 20.
As an historical aside, in the middle 1990s I organized a meeting called the IT Deans Group and invited the dean or head of any unit that primarily focused on computing, computer science, information technology, or information in a university and fit the definition above to it. Every one of the 15 or so in attendance found it worth their time to spend a day discussing issues of common concern. We continued to meet and eventually grew to about 25 people by the time I stepped down as dean and (ad hoc head of the group) in 2002. The group then continued to meet under the auspices of the Computing Research Association and eventually became known as the I-Schools Group.
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Freeman, P.A. (2024). Prologue. In: Vision and Actualization in Academia. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43930-8_1
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