In 2015, in an effort to expand income for collegiate design programs, research labs renovation, and new lab equipment TN Tech professors devised a program where they would provide expertise to TN automotive companies. The leader of the concept reached out to several other universities to establish a manufacturing cartel; each business would have access to the universities professors to solve their issues at hand. To belong to the cartel businesses would join @ $75,000 per year. At the time Tom Brewer and I had the only direct contact to the growing TN auto manufacturing crowd. As many times university programs fish out of the same pond for funding. Administrators look at industry as an endless source of funding. The FSAE program was involved with several businesses, that committed $5,000 to $10,000 per year sponsorships. The cartel vision would eliminate this relationship with collegiate design teams. Collegiate design program sponsors create and mature a dedicated worker network of future talent. The biggest misconception in any sponsorship agreement is that it’s just a right off, the truth is there always a “return on investment“ in good sponsorship programs. The professors involved in this program challenged the TN automotive industries resolve as troublesome, value to the industry was never part of their vision. The collective associated gross profits with the ability to donate and/or sponsor. Their proposal for the cartel was centered on the flawed concept that university professors where the answer to the automotive industries expertise issues. VW quickly challenged the program with the simple observation that if the cartel members had value added expertise, they would be employed by VW. They surmised at best the TN Tech Ph.D.’s were just engineers in training. As members of GM’s Tech Center and/or associated programs, Tom and I worked hard to explain the internal working of automotive design, prototype development and the manufacturing process, that included a unique concept to colligate professors called solution base engineering. The chilly nonchalant acceptance of the Ph.D. level knowledge was insulting at best to the professors. To mature the overall fundraising effort to expand college of engineering income for, collegiate design programs, research labs renovation, and new lab equipment, our team submitted a proposal that would abandon the expertise cartel and chase a short-term personal development hours program for engineers. Every one of the 10,000 licensed engineers in TN has an obligation to get 24 professional development hours per year. Professional Development Hours average about $50 per hour. About $12 million per year in potential income yearly. The professor’s abandoned the whole effort based on the elevated level of their personal hands-on involvement. The concept that collegiate level educators being involved in short term training was beneath the collective, no matter how profitable.
From Henry Ford’s memoir:
An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history—he is one who can accomplish things. A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired. Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do—which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers.There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity. You cannot learn in any school what the world is going to do next year, but you can learn some of the things which the world has tried to do in former years, and where it failed and where it succeeded. If education consisted in warning the young student away from some of the false theories on which men have tried to build, so that he may be saved the loss of the time in finding out by bitter experience, its good would be unquestioned.
An education which consists of signposts indicating the failure and the fallacies of the past doubtless would be very useful. It is not education just to possess the theories of a lot of professors. Speculation is very interesting, and sometimes profitable, but it is not education. To be learned in science today is merely to be aware of a hundred theories that have not been proved. And not to know what those theories are is to be “uneducated,” “ignorant,” and so forth. If knowledge of guesses is learning, then one may become learned by the simple expedient of making his own guesses. And by the same token he can dub the rest of the world “ignorant” because it does not know what his guesses are.
But the best that education can do for a man is to put him in possession of his powers, give him control of the tools with which destiny has endowed him, and teach him how to think. The college renders its best service as an intellectual gymnasium, in which mental muscle is developed and the student strengthened to do what he can. To say, however, that mental gymnastics can be had only in college is not true, as every educator knows. A man’s real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.
Men satisfy their minds more by finding out things for themselves than by heaping together the things which somebody else has found out. You can go out and gather knowledge all your life, and with all your gathering you will not catch up even with your own times. You may fill your head with all the “facts” of all the ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact−box when you get through. The point is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity. A man may be very learned and very useless. And then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful.