Lecture: Cause and Effect–Education, Unknowing and Unwilling Effect
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: n.d.
Document type: lecture transcript
The United States government today is degree happy, totally degree happy; where’s a matter of fact up at “Ma Bell” the big IT&T laboratories, it’s very amusing you see somebody there and oh, he’s designing a strategy machine that is going to figure out all the strategy for the admirals in the navy, and you say, “What’s your degree?” And he says, “I have a degree I’m” – you notice everybody calling him “Doctor” you know? And he says, “I have a degree” and kind of brushes it off quickly, you know.
And you say, “No, no. What are you degreed in?”
He says, “English.”
[...]
You probably don’t realize that the government scientists, all of these people who have been – who worked on the “Manhattan Project” in Los Alamogordos1, 2and so forth, were all degreed in something, but very seldom in the subject that they were working in, which is rather fascinating. They were all Doctor “this” and Doctor “that” but they had been grabbed from scratch and they had to make up their minds about what they were doing and go ahead and get the job done.
Now, the government has insisted on only those people who have a degree in the subject, work in it, see? I think this is fascinating because there aren’t any degrees in the subject they’re working in. So you want to know what happened with – why we got whipped in Sputnik, why the foreign scientists that we hired got whipped in Sputnik, it’s because no US scientist can be hired because they don’t have degrees. That’s more or less the case, horribly enough.
Hubbard, L. R. (1957, 30 December). Cause and Effect–Education, Unknowing and Unwilling Effect. Ability Congress, (5712C30). Lecture conducted from Washington, DC.
Notes
- Wikipedia: Manhattan Project ↩
- Related: All About Radiation: The Revolt of the American Nuclear Physicists ↩