Columbia University		New York, N.Y.  10027
Office of Public Information	(212) 854-5573

Fred Knubel, Director

For Use upon receipt, November 16, 1995

The president of Columbia University tonight said that great universities should resist pressure to perform applied research at the expense of pure science.

"Universities must not be construed as simply job shops for industry, just as college teams should not be considered a farm league for professional football," said George Rupp at a convocation on the Columbia campus.

"It is crucial to our very identity as a great research university that we resist pressures to become preoccupied with short-term economic payoffs at the cost of the disciplined, long-term, fundamental inquiry that is our irreplaceable contribution. A failure to resist those pressures would endanger both research and education."

Speaking at a ceremony to award Columbia College's highest honor, the Alexander Hamilton Medal, to five Nobel laureates in science who graduated from the school, Dr. Rupp said:

"Today there are potent pressures on universities to produce research that is more and more applied: that promises economic benefits in relatively short order, that will support, or even initiate, a resurgence of American capacity to capture market share." These are important national goals, he said, and Columbia's scientists and engineers play a major role in such research, maintaining "solid working relationships with industrial partners." But, he said, "we must resist pressure that deflects us from our central purpose."

The Hamilton Medal was awarded by Dr. Rupp to:

Leon N. Cooper `51, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972.

Roald Hoffmann `58, winner of the Nobel in Chemistry in 1981.

Norman F. Ramsey, Jr. `35, Nobel laureate in Physics in1989.

Melvin Schwartz `53, who won the Nobel in Physics in 1988.

Julian S. Schwinger `36, posthumously, winner of the Nobel in Physics in 1965. Clarice Schwinger, his widow, accepted the award.

Columbia College has conferred undergraduate degrees on nine Nobel laureates in science, more than any other American college. The other four Nobelists received the Hamilton Medal in a similar celebration in 1961.

Dr. Rupp noted that all of the five honorees "devoted their careers to the quest for truth, the beauty of the search, the journey of discovery" and won their Nobel Prizes for basic research "that has created whole new worlds." Among their findings from pure science that had benefits in the long-term was Dr. Ramsey's development of measuring techniques that led to the use of the cesium atomic clock as the international time standard.

11.15.95
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