First-Hand:History of an ASEE Fellow - Ronald S. Kane
Ronald S. Kane (as of May 17, 2018)
A brief word of Introduction
I have the good fortune of knowing about some famous ancestors, some illustrious, some not so much so, and have often thought of collecting as much information about them as possible and writing a book about the family history. This exercise at least got me started on a personal history that I hope my grandchildren may read someday. It's a bit Forrest Gump-like as a "read'.
Birthplace
Manhattan Island, New York City, February 11, 1944 making me a true native New Yorker, a rarity these days, especially from Manhattan Island. The Manhattan-located hospital where I was born no longer exists, having been torn down many years ago, as was the major portion of my Public School (P.S. 7 in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx). The Kingsbridge section of the Bronx is a lower middle class area, down the hill from the wealthy Riverdale section of the northwest Bronx. Kingsbridge was a predominantly Irish-American section with a smattering of Greek, Italian, Eastern European Jewish, Puerto Rican, and African-American people mixed in. Living in New York City, then as now, accustomed me to hearing accents and languages from all over the world. Just in our immediate family, we regularly used phrases from at least four different languages.
Family
My last name, Kane, is the one I have had for most of my life but not the only one. In fact, because my grandparents emigrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century or early 20th century through Ellis Island, mostly from areas controlled by Czarist Russia and including present-day Belarus (Vitebsk and Dvinsk) and Lithuania (then Vilna, now Vilnius) , and there was some illiteracy in the family, my father's last name and before that my paternal grandfather's last name were the subject of much confusion. I found and still have my father's old textbook for Thermodynamics from the Cooper Union with his signature using three different last names.
My father became a Mechanical Engineer through his education at Cooper Union and worked at a number of New York City engineering firms before starting his own consulting business. I only found out long after he passed away at a young age that he worked for the FBI during World War II and also worked on a number of defense projects both during the war (PT boat design) and after the war (Nike missile base installations). He invented the first mechanical pencil - plans were stolen at the Patent Office according to family lore - the family still has the drawings and the application materials. He had volunteered for military service after the war broke out but was told not to report because degreed engineers were rare at that time in the U.S. and the Manhattan District of the Army Corps of Engineers wanted engineers to be available for a special project.
My older sister and brother had different last names from mine on their birth certificates which of course confused everyone at my Elementary School and High School - we all went to the same Elementary School and my sister and I both went to the Bronx High School of Science. Some of my academic achievement awards came in with my sister's and brother's last names (and also a cousin's) instead of mine. To confuse it even further, the family name going back to Russia was of course originally in the Cyrillic alphabet with many other permutations and possible anglicized spellings - one of which matches the last name of a famous current-day brother pair of championship boxers from the Ukraine. There was talk of changing all our last names to one consistent name but I was the only one who actually followed through in my early twenties.
My mother's family also arrived here from Czarist Russia, from present-day Belarus (Vitebsk area) but had a less confusing transliteration of the old country last name, Braunshtyne is the closest. But of course that did not stay put as part of the family emigrated to Montreal, Canada and took the name Stein and the other part went to New York City and took the name Brown. My mother was both artistic and athletic (my father was also athletic) so the gene pool from them certainly gave me the best of several worlds. She interrupted her education for over 20 years, having just had the first of three children soon after admission to Hunter College. After we lost my father in the early 1960's, she took the extraordinary step of getting re-admitted to Hunter College and went on to honor in Art and English, completed a master's degree, and taught in the New York City School system. She, my brother, and I were all in college at the same time for several overlapping years. My mother could be considered a single-mother pioneer, well ahead of the times. Both of my parents and a number of our very famous ancestors were never concerned about living in areas or taking jobs or doing things that were rarely done before by people of our background and heritage.
Because of the stories about our family, told to me by aunts, uncles and grandparents, going back to the "old country", I became very interested in tracing my geneology. Our family has some well-known scientific, engineering, religious, political, and entertainment figures in its history. There are even some museums in the U.S. Mexico, and Lithuania, with descriptions of these notable people. The first time I got heavily into this research was at an ASEE Annual meeting in Salt Lake City in the mid-1980's, where it seemed everyone wanted to check the records of the Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) who had the most extensive records of all. As the years have gone by, I have gathered information on most of these figures and put together a family tree. As a gift, a DNA test was done to re-check my ethnicity, expecting no surprises but there was one small one - the test showed a small percentage of background from Scandinavia perhaps explaining the blonde hair, blue eyes, and some tallness in my immediate family among a group of otherwise, brownish-red haired, brown eyed, and short family.
Careers in my family never seemed to move toward medicine, entrepreneurial, or business ventures but always toward the educational, scientific or creative fields and that has continued to this day with my children and now likely to my grandchildren. My maternal grandmother was the closest to an entrepreneur but her choice was to operate a small chicken and egg farm in a rural area of Pennsylvania that later was converted to today's equivalent of a bed and breakfast for the summer. I was a lucky New York City kid to have the chance to live and sometimes work on a farm in the summer.
Education
As a pre-baby boomer, born during the year of the lowest birth rate during World War II, I did not realize how my (unfortunately) accelerated progression into kindergarten, all the way through junior high school, high school, and eventually into college was driven by the education structure's response toward handling the following flood of baby-boomer students. By just making the cut-off year for kindergarten entry, being hustled through special progress years in junior high, completing three years at a very advanced high school, I entered a public college at a youngish 16 years of age and might have graduated college at age 20.
Educators in those days only thought of what a talented student could handle academically and never looked at childhood education and growth in a holistic way. This experience helped frame my approach to all future educational activities and any impact I could have on students and young people. Forgotten in the rush to be sure talented students are moved along rapidly were social education and in my case, athletic interest and talent (I was still not full grown in high school). This philosophy also impacted my administrative approach - if ever that opportunity arose - to avoid continuing this narrow model of education.
The one fortunate aspect of my childhood education was being in an challenging - academically that is - peer group and attending, arguably the most famous public high school and college (Bronx High School of Science and City College of New York) in the United States with an unmatched record of graduates going on to receive Nobel Prizes and numerous other awards. This was all part of the immigrant family experience in New York City.
In New York City at the time, it was difficult to get admitted to and to stay in the engineering programs at CCNY. The grading systems in both high school and college were not what they are now - B's and even sometimes C's were difficult to come by. A's were rare, especially in engineering classes. Going to a private college was out of the question because of the costs (and quotas in this pre-civil-rights era). My own progress was interrupted by the loss of my father early in my sophomore year and the impact on the family over the next year and a half. I dropped out of college for a while and took a full-time job working on the national Fallout Shelter program. It was not until my senior year that I was able to "reboot" my academic work to earlier levels. I was still barely 21 when I graduated with a Mechanical Engineering degree (with some Chemical Engineering study early on).
As I soon learned and reported to my own students during my later career, one's grades no longer mattered from the first day in a full-time job. It was one's knowledge, work ethic, and professionalism that really counted. But I did decide to continue my education in my first year working at Pratt and Whitney Aircraft , by attending evening classes toward a master's degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic University's graduate extension in East Hartford, Connecticut. Because of the incredible challenges and competition at both Bronx Science and at CCNY, and perhaps the after-work nature of the courses, these proved to be quite easy to take. When I moved on to another position at (then) Esso Research and Engineering, I picked up my Master's study again and completed it at night by commuting after work from suburban New Jersey to City College of New York in Harlem. I actually completed my last two courses at a distance by mailing final exams from a refinery start-up location in northern California. I was married by then (to the beautiful Susan) - completing the degree only three months later. So actual calendar time for my Bachelor's and Master's degree was eight and a half years. I assumed I would never sit in a classroom or take another course ever again.
But life can change all assumptions.
The PhD Experience
Working for a major oil company, it became apparent (from hearing the tales of the other engineers) that one start-up assignment would be followed by overseas assignments for years into the future with no end in sight. There would be no opportunity for me or my new bride to have choices or for her to have her own career. In those days, it was company first and family second. So I contacted a favorite Mechanical Engineering professor at CCNY about pursuing a PhD in engineering under a new program in Thermal/Fluid Sciences at the now CCNY campus (for PhD study) of the City University of New York. It seemed that the PhD path (if completed successfully) would provide options for both me and my wife - who had to give up a Fellowship for graduate study in speech pathology in order to move away from home on the first of what would likely become the first of multiple start-up assignments in overseas locations. The plan was to work with that particular professor but he was going to be on sabbatical and he directed me to another professor (in Chemical Engineering), who I knew from one Master's level course and who also had a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This turned out to be a good fit, as the research was in a fluid mechanics-related area, at the intersection of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering; coincidentally mirroring the mixture of my undergraduate study partially in one discipline and partially in the other. Professors Latif Jiji, Robert Pfeffer - my new research advisor, and Sheldon Weinbaum - coadvisor became lifelong friends and colleagues. I found out many years later that I was just Dr. Pfeffer's third PhD student - he went on to an honored career, creating his own "family" of over 40 PhD's. Dr. Jiji and Dr. Weinbaum also had illustrious careers with many honors - they both retired after I did.
Except for the times around exams, especially the oral qualifying exams and the oral dissertation defense - which were barely survivable and traumatic events (Susan was my source of strength) , the three years I spent completing the PhD were some of the best years. I enjoyed doing the research, being part of the university, learning how to teach, developing the scholarly and other discipline I had lacked before, as my graduate record was far better than my undergraduate record. I also realized how little I knew when I prepared the courses I was to teach - the two undergraduate years when I stopped applying myself and stopped learning came back to burn me on the qualifying exams and at other times. The experience of being a "just get by" student for those lost two years served me well when I became a professor myself at Manhattan College. I more than understood the difficulties of my own students and reflected that understanding in my approach to teaching. I learned more from teaching new courses that I ever could just by sitting in a classroom and taking courses with a grade goal in sight.
Having a Master's degree in hand and industry experience (I could quickly write a coherent technical report) helped to shorten my actual PhD time to degree to just six semesters -perhaps too short. When I first discussed doing the PhD with Dr Jiji (Latif), he told me that "If you decide to do this, be sure you finish before you have children". Following this advice, I was proud to have finished the degree in June 1973 with three weeks to spare - Darren was born on July 1st 1973. In those days, there were no word-processors and no on-line computers so Susan typed my dissertation initially and one of the very nice Chemical Engineering Department secretaries retyped it on mats. The title of my dissertation was Drag Reduction in Dilute Flowing Gas-Solid Suspensions - somehow related to NASA's program concepts for nuclear rockets.
There were other aspects of those three years that impacted my future career and life. I was lucky enough to have a talented undergraduate student and a staff technician to help work with me in the lab - I did then but more so now appreciate their particular skills. I learned how important it was to stay healthy and took myself out of the lab and the classroom every Thursday afternoon, even in the winter, to my old neighborhood in the Bronx, to play one-wall handball outdoors with mostly police officers, firefighters, bus drivers,and other working New York City people. I also came to really appreciate Susan's parents who were very supportive.
There were also some negative aspects, related to the administration of the program, how some professors taught their courses, how pass/fail decisions were made on key exams, how exams were conducted, and unrealistic expectations of some doctoral advisors (mine were terrific and protective of their students), and the stresses on students. Although not knowing where my future career would go, I decided that if I ever had an opportunity to correct some of these faults, errors, and abuses on behalf of later students, I would be sure to do so. Some 17 years later, I came into a situation as a Graduate School head where I could make good on this promise.
Career and Employment
My career, like many, was multi-faceted by time and by employer. There was the pre-PhD career path and the post-PhD path, industrial and academic. consulting and teaching, public and private, theoretical and practical, high periods and low periods. Before the PhD, there was the already-mentioned work for Pratt and Whitney Aircraft in East Hartford, Connecticut, as part of the Apollo program and the oil industry work for (then) Esso Research and Engineering with home offices in Florham Park, New Jersey. After completing the PhD, and having proved to myself that I had the capability of taking a project from conception to completion, I initially decided that I still preferred to work in industry as a general problem solver - with no real interest in being in an academic "publish or perish" environment working on narrowly defined areas of research. But I did enjoy being in the classroom. For a while, my only employment was as a contract engineer working on challenging projects in the nuclear industry at Curtiss-Wright and Foster-Wheeler.
The opportunity arose to combine both teaching and contract engineering work by becoming a faculty member at Manhattan College, where teaching was emphasized and professional activity could be combined with industry-derived scholarly activity. This was an ideal situation for me as long as the contract or consulting activity was steady and provided the supplemental income to support a growing family (my daughter Deborah was born four years after I joined Manhattan College). I moved along from Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering to Associate Professor with tenure to Department Chair in my eleven happy years at Manhattan. We had an outstanding department of young faculty members along with a few veterans. We seemed to draw a large number of undergraduates to our programs through the excellent teaching and some very popular social activities - from our annual faculty student volleyball competition to the ASME student design competition through the annual Engineer's Ball. ( We had some volleyball ringers in the faculty and therefore never lost a game).
I became very involved with academic committees and professional organizations while there and became a member of ASEE there. The Dean of Engineering and many Manhattan College Engineering School faculty were quite active in ASEE at both the regional and national levels. I also became involved with ASME as well. The School of Engineering had a very unusual facility - a very small but working nuclear reactor intended only for instructional purposes - but the only one in New York City and later in my time at Manhattan a quasi-political source of concern. The facility was assigned to the Mechanical Engineering Department, but for many years was under the direction of a member of the Physics faculty and later by a very capable member of the Mechanical Engineering Department. Because of the wide scope and range of courses, and a large enrollment, and heavier teaching loads (than one would ever see in a research university), there was an opportunity for a young professor to learn to teach a very wide range of course - which I did. It was humbling to learn how much one needed to learn.
Because of the type of institution it was, not only were engineering faculty members encouraged to work with industry, there were also encouraged to be active in professional societies and to obtain a Professional Engineering license, which I did while at Manhattan. During the 1970's, there was a lot of work to be had for those interested in high-tech and alternative energy projects (breeder reactors, coal gasification, solar energy, geothermal energy) , however, an economic downturn and changes in federal funding slowly but surely dried up. I had to look more closely at my base salary at a primarily undergraduate teaching institution. I was heavily involved in the development of the new Master's program and some supplemental income from activities there helped but not enough. By the early 1980's, I had to think more about family support than about my enjoyment of the environment and colleagues at Manhattan College. Through the ASME Regional Department Heads Committee,which I chaired, I made the acquaintance of the chair at Stevens Institute of Technology who encouraged me to apply to be the Graduate Dean at Stevens. Through a long interview process, I was made an offer to be the new Dean of Graduate Studies - at almost twice my old salary - and effectively (but not quite directly) offered tenure in my appointment letter from the President of Stevens. With not a small tinge of sadness and some trepidation I left Manhattan College. I will always recall the gracious letter of congratulations from the President of Manhattan College (he was very proud to have one of the Manhattan College faculty move on to be a Dean at a prestigious private university) . I also will remember the kind send-off from my old department.
My office at Stevens was located in a suite high up in the Stevens Center with a most dramatic view of the Hudson River and New York City skyline. By comparison, my office at Manhattan College was in a smallish room of the former Fanny Farmer Candy Factory in the Bronx with a view of another building across the street. While Manhattan College was operated by the Christian Brothers with an emphasis on education; Stevens had a long history stemming from the family of the founder - ASME was founded at Stevens. The eleven years at Manhattan were challenging but never uncomfortable. The five years were more difficult because of administrative changes at the Provost and Presidential level within months of my arrival, some aspects of these changes were front page news in New York area newspapers. I had to learn the craft of being a graduate dean and became very active in the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS) and the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). I founded a state-wide organization - The Association of New Jersey Graduate Schools. And finally I became active as a leader in the Graduate Studies Division of ASEE. With increased knowledge of graduate education practices and Issues and a wider support group, I managed to survive - often the only one to survive sweeping administrative shake-ups both at Stevens and later at NJIT. Circumstances became so difficult in my last year that I chose to return to the Mechanical Engineering faculty for my last year at Stevens rather than to work directly with a notorious (in educational circles that is) convicted felon. My memories of that year was of excellent students who gave me high marks and the support of very understanding faculty members.
After some good interviews and some disasters, I landed on my feet in a newly re-defined (and upgraded) position at New Jersey Institute of Technology as Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs - Graduate Studies, later retitled to Dean of Graduate Studies. The Provost at NJIT gave me a mission to completely overhaul the graduate education structure at NJIT. I added my own mission to make NJIT a major player in graduate education at the doctoral level and increase its standing among its peer group of Public Technological Research Universities with the Carnegie Classification System as a useful guide. Only a few days after my arrival, I was made privy to an ongoing (but not yet public) investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General's Office about admission and financial aid practices by my predecessor. In some ways this made my task and approach more difficult and in some ways made it easier because of the complete support from the President and Provost. For about two years, I had to deal with resistance of other administrators - mostly the non-academic ones and some faculty who were used to the practices of my predecessor that treated graduate students as labor for non-academic support work. (They were unaware of the Attorney-General's investigation). I was redirecting a sizable amount of financial support for graduate students away from non-academic service toward academic research and academic goals in the regular academic departments and emphasizing doctoral study.
Every facet of graduate admissions (Master's and doctoral) , retention, academic progress, eligibility for financial support, distribution of funds among the colleges and schools, and among departments, graduate student governance, use of fees, was reviewed in detail and often codified using best practices chosen from member institutions of CGS and NAGS. The faculty Graduate Council, with membership from each graduate department, was re-energized to look at all of these issues. While support from faculty began early on, the public announcement of the felony conviction (and the nature of the crimes) of my predecessor (title was the Director of the Graduate Division) some two years later brought almost full support from the academic departments and new understanding from the non-academic areas about all the changes being made. There was also an episode - that became an ugly story in the newspapers - involving the dismissal of an international student from NJIT for academic dishonesty, which was unfortunately linked by an overzealous reporter to political issues involving an important ethnic community. That was handled by reaching out to the community leadership and creation of much good-will by open discussion of what really triggered the newspaper reports.
The changes made in the use of internal funding, strengthened admission criteria, and research funding increases allowed steady progress toward doctoral graduate numbers, a first goal was to reach 20 PhD's per year - starting from just about 10 initially. With that progress and activity in the Minorities in Engineering Division (MIND) of ASEE, NJIT's application to become a member of GEM (National Consortium for Graduate Degrees in Engineering and Science, Inc), was successful, being only the second member from New Jersey (Princeton being the other). Our office made a point of reviewing every dissertation for format and syntax to assure the best possible product for each hard-working doctoral student - many from overseas, who we had to respect for their overcoming language and cultural challenges in a very difficult academic field. Many have become the most highly educated and successful immigrants in our history.
The big goal of 50 or more PhDs per year was achieved a number of years later and continued upward from there during my tenure. These were goals that were never set or thought about initially but became my personal goals for achievement on behalf of NJIT. Because I was so involved with the heavy work as a Graduate Dean and having a very small (but hardworking staff), professorial activity became very difficult to fit in but I was able to do some occasional consulting, occasional research papers, some teaching. However almost every year, I was able to publish and present multiple papers at ASEE, CGS, and NAGS conferences. I also did Fellowship review work for the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council.
Susan and I made a decision to stay at NJIT and not move on to other higher level positions elsewhere. This made it much easier to raise our family in a stable environment and allowed Susan to pursue a successful career as a Speech Therapist working with classified students in two Public School systems. I once did the exercise of counting how many Provosts, Vice Presidents, and Presidents came and went during my time as a Graduate Dean - it was around 20 or so. We both retired in 2011 and have no regrets about our paths to where we are now. We have many interests and hobbies and have certainly not "flunked" retirement - now having traveled to all 50 states, most of Canada and to over 100 countries in all the continents (but one, which we will visit in 2019). Most of all, we are enjoying our two grand-sons (Liam and Adam) who we see often.
ASEE Activities
Manhattan College engineering faculty and the Dean of Engineering were active in ASEE and I joined after only a few years at Manhattan. My main interests were Mechanical Engineering at first and then more importantly the Graduate Studies Division, where I held various offices for a number of years, eventually becoming the chair of the Division. My activities included a long-running series of papers in the ASEE Proceedings, an overhaul of the of the Division by-laws, and connections to other divisions including the Engineering Research Council. I was elected chair of Professional Interest Council (PIC) IV and later became Vice President for all the PICs, serving on the ASEE Board of Directors. I was asked to be a candidate for other Vice Presidential positions and twice for President of ASEE but declined that honor. I was honored by receiving an ASEE Centennial Certificate and by being elected a Fellow of ASEE. My unbroken string of attendance at ASEE Annual Conferences from 1985 on was only broken the year I retired in 2011. The years of activity in ASEE will always be fondly remembered - so many people willing to dedicate their careers to students and to education. The Annual Conference and seeing old friends each year was something Susan and I (when it was late enough in June for her to join me) looked forward to every summer. We saw so much of America and met so many interesting people outside our familiar surroundings in the Northeast.
Other Professional Activities
Early in my career, as a Mechanical Engineering Educator, I was quite active in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, mostly within the region that included New York, New Jersey. and Puerto Rico. As my career shifted so did my focus as I moved into activity for the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS) which covered all of the New England, the Middle Atlantic, and most of Eastern Canada. eventually serving in every officer position including President. Just as with ASEE and in parallel, there was a continuing presence at conferences: paper presentations, moderating sessions, and panel membership. As President of NAGS, I also became a member of the Board of Directors for the Council of Graduate Schools whose university members were from all over the United States, Canada, and overseas. Just as with ASEE, I had a long unbroken string of attendance at CGS meetings, from 1986 through 2011. Eventually CGS asked me to serve on the Board for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) and also for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) , both enjoyable activities, except for the occasional professional disagreements over standards and procedures for both - as would be expected.
While I was still mostly focused on Mechanical Engineering as a department chair, I was asked to become an accreditation visitor for ABET (and ASME) and did 8 visits as the Mechanical Engineering program evaluater. These visits were interesting as the visits took me to some schools far afield from my educational roots and to some places where politics and profit seemed to have too heavy an influence on educational standards and, on occasion, made our ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) visits unpopular. On the other hand, it was interesting to see the pleasant surprise to the observers from at least one State education department about interests of our team members, outside their engineering careers (counter to the perpetuated image by some of engineers as nerds). Our team had world-class athletes, fiction writers, entrepreneurs, vineyard owners, and a variety of unexpected interests. Since, I have worked with engineers in multiple careers, I could have attested to the state observer, how interested engineers are in almost every area of human endeavor.
My years of working with GEM and several other minority education endeavors were always enjoyable and inspiring. it allowed me to have a family of scholars and successes that I might not have known.
I am pleased to be able provide this personal history as part of ASEE's 125th year celebration.
