Fourth Edition | Marquis Who’s Who Insight 9 I had a certain advantage in attracting an industrial following as an academic. I was a little more engaged; I wasn’t a typical academic, which was an advantage. being in the New York area, I was thrown in a lot with Bell Labs people, IBM people, General Electric people, and any sea labs in Princeton. What is the most important issue/challenge you are dealing with in your industry? I feel as though the student activism of our time on campus has gone too far. Students don’t know as much as they think they do about things that should be done. Sometimes, the faculty doesn’t either because some of them have never had real-world careers, so they don’t have the perspective they would if they had worked at an engineering firm or an economics company, or a bank. I think that the big problem on campus is ensuring free speech. I feel very strongly about that because without free speech, regardless of political party, there is an essential breakdown. I see political problems in departments across many universities and I think that institutions really have a problem with tensions between academic freedomand freedomof speech. There is a need for faculty to cooperate in order to advance an institution. I am proud to say that Carnegie Mellon is an exception to that. As far as Spectral goes, we survived 2020, but we didn’t get any new orders; however, 2021 was very different. Fortunately, we had a large cash reserve, so we didn’t need to lay off staff, and the paycheck protection program from the government provided a forgivable loan if we kept everyone employed. I worked for a mainframe company in the ‘70s and their problem was that they didn’t innovate enough like IBM; they always waited for IBM to do something that was innovative and then they would copy it. In the electronics industry, the big profits and growth go to the companies that do something first when it really works. For our company, we need to step out and move closer to the edge of what is possible in chip technology rather than be a follower. We have a good business, particularly with defense contractors, but I would like to see us get closer to the leading edge. What excites you the most about your industry? I think that sometimes, education excited me the wrong way. I had the great fortune to attend two really outstanding universities. Sometimes, I would get excited in the wrong way with the state university students who were just being mediocre and not doing anything more than trying to get by. What does excite me about the students is that you can’t predict where the top students are going to come from. They come from everywhere — all sorts of institutions around the world and country. I do think that ingrown elitism is very detrimental in the United States and the United Kingdom. I keep seeing this among the professors that I know and their students. You can almost predict where the great people are going to come from. Regarding Spectral, I would like to see it transform into an R&D-based model. Given our limited financial ability, the research aspect would need to be government contracted.
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