I couldn’t resist a sarcastic allusion to post-modernism, whatever the hell that is. What could possibly be under such a bullshit heading? Well, all of my tramping around chemical plants from Europe, Russia, North America, and Asia as well as local mines and mills keeps leading me to an interesting question. Exactly who is being served in the current course of chemistry education? Is it reasonable that everyone coming out of a ACS certified degree program in chemistry is on a scholar track by default? Since I have been in both worlds, this issue of chemistry as a lifetime adventure is never far from my mind.
What are we doing to serve areas outside of the glamor fields of biochemistry and pharmaceuticals? There are thriving industries out there that are not biochemically or pharmaceutically oriented. There is a large and global polymer industry as well as CVD, fuels, silanes, catalysts, diverse additives industries, food chemistry, flavors & fragrances, rubber, paints & pigments, and specialty chemicals. There are highly locallized programs that serve localized demand. But what if you live away from an area with polymer plants? How do you get polymer training? How do you even know if polymer chemistry is what you have been looking for?
Colleges and universities can’t offer everything. They attract faculty who are specialists in areas of topical interest at the time of hire. They try to set up shop and gather a research group in their specialty if funding comes through. Otherwise, they teach X contact hours in one of the 4 pillars of chemistry- Physical, inorganic, organic, and analytical chemistry- and offer the odd upper level class in an area of interest.
Chances are that you’ll find more opportunities to learn polymer chemistry as an undergraduate in Akron, OH, than in Idaho or New Mexico. Local strengths may be reflected in local chemistry departments. But chances are that in most schools you’ll find faculty who joined after a post-doc or from another teaching appointment. This is how the academy gets inbred. The hiring of pure scholars is inevitable and traditional. But what happens is that the academy gets isolated from the external world and focused on enthusiasms that may serve civilization in distant ways if at all. The question of accountability is dismissed with a sniff and a wave of the hand of academic freedom. Engineering departments avoid this because they are in constant need of real problems to solve. Most importantly, though, engineers understand the concept of scarcity in economics. Chemists will dismiss it as a non-observable.
One often finds that disconnects are bridged by other disciplines because chemistry is so narrowly focused academically. It would be a good thing for industry if more degreed chemists found their way into production environments. I visited a pharmaceutical plant in Taiwan whose production operators were all chemical engineers. Management decided that they required this level of education. But, why didn’t they choose chemists? Could it be that they assumed that engineers were more mechanically oriented and economically savvy?
Gold mines will hire an analyst to do assays, but metallurgists to develop extraction and processing. Are there many inorganic chemistry programs with a mining orientation? Can inorganikkers step into raw material extraction from a BA/BS program or is that left to mining engineers?
In my exploration I am beginning to see a few patterns that stand out. One is the virtual abdication of US mining operations to foreign companies. If you look at uranium or gold, there are substantial US mining claims held by organizations from Australia, South Africa, and Canada.
So, what if? What if a few college chemistry departments offered a course wherein students learned to extract useful materials from the earth? What if students were presented with a pile of rock and debris and told to pull out some iron or zinc or copper or borax or whatever value may happen to be in the mineral?
What if?? Well, that means that chemistry department faculty would have to be competent to offer such an experience. It also means that there must be a shop and some kilo-scale equipment to handle comminution, leaching, flotation, and calcining/roasting. It’s messy and noisy and the sort of thing that the princes of the academy (Deans) hate.
What could be had from such an experience? First, some hours spent swinging a hammer in the crushing process might be a good thing for students. It would give them a chance to consider the issues associated with the extraction of value from minerals. Secondly, it would inevitably lead to more talent funneling into areas that have suffered from a lack of chemical innovation. Third, it might have the effect of igniting a bit more interest in this necessary industry by American investors. The effect of our de-industrialization of the past few generations has been the wind-down of the American metals extraction industry (coal excluded).
If you doubt the effect on future technologies of our present state of partial de-industrialization, look into the supplies of critical elements like indium, neodymium, cobalt, rhodium, platinum, and lithium. Ask yourself why China has been dumping torrents of money into the mineral rich countries of Africa.
I can say from experience that some of the most useful individuals in a chemical company can be the people who are just as much at home in a shop as in a lab. People with mechanical aptitude and the ability to use shop tools are important players. Having a chemistry degree gives them the ability to work closely with engineers to keep unique process equipment up and running efficiently.
Whatever else we do, and despite protestations from the linear thinkers in the HR department, we need to encourage tinkerers and polymaths.
This kind of experience doesn’t have to be for everyone. God knows we don’t want to inconvenience Grandfather Merck’s or Auntie Lilly’s pill factories. Biochemistry students wouldn’t have to take time away from their lovely gels and analytical students could take a pass lest their slender digits become soiled. Some students are tender shoots who will never have intimate knowledge of how to bring a 1000 gallon reactor full of reactants to reflux, or how to deal with 20 kg of BuLi contaminated filter cake. But I hasten to point out that there are many students with such a future before them and their BA/BS degree in chemistry provides a weak background for industrial life.
A good bit of the world outside the classroom is concerned with making stuff. I think we need to return to basics and examine the supply chain of elements and feedstocks that we have developed a dependence upon. American industry needs to reinvest in operations in this country and other countries, just like the Canadians, South Africans, and Australians have. And academia should rethink the mission of college chemistry in relation to the needs of the world, rather than clinging to the aesthetic of a familiar curriculum or to the groupthink promulgated by rockstar research groups. We need scholars. But we also need field chemists to solve problems in order to make things happen.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Exactly who is being served in the current course of chemistry education? Vendors of the service. Dig Madeleine Jacobs’ salary plus perqs.
When science was productive one tossed money to the able. One then closed the office door, sat down behind a desk, put one’s head in one’s hands, and sweated blood. It worked. Today a grant funding proposal is a cross among an environmental impact report, an IPO, a sworn affidavit, and an enema. If you share your IR with the guy next door you can be criminally charged with embezzlement of laboratory funds. NOBODY screws around in a lab and lives to tell about it.
That is why a disgusting number of fundamental discoveries are made by pot-smoking hippies (Kary Mullis), surfer dudes (Antony Garrett Lisi) , and undergards too stupid to exactly follow orders (supercon Tc of MgB2). Freedom is compliance.
As a PhD in chemistry with 15 years experience in industry making dyes, polymers and fine chemical (non API) I agree with most of this. The skills needed to safely scale up from lab to full scale production are lacking in current graduates. Most seem to think you just take the lab process change g to Kg and keep going up in size until it goes bang or gives no yield and then drop back to the last batch that worked. However, I would much rather have a graduate chemist than a graduate chemical engineer any day of the week.
As an academic with nearly two decades of working primarily with undergraduates I agree with the sentiments of the post. The practical application of chemistry along with may other skills that would serve young scientists have been pushed out of the curriculum for too many reasons to go into here. Having fought this battle on my own campus for much of the last ten years, I will point out that most of our chemistry majors have no intent to make chemistry a career. While fully half intend to go to pharmacy school, only about ten to fifteen percent of our majors intend to actually be chemists or biochemists. Ironically, courses that train people to be chemists don’t serve the population of chemistry majors. So, when the budget axe falls the would be chemist’s needs are ignored.
I wasn’t sure how to address this matter in my “essay”, so I left it out. There are career track chemistry students and there are medical school bound chem majors and thanks for bringing that to the table. This issue offers a policy conundrum for the administration of chemical education.
Pre-meds often want a useful degree to fall back on if admission to med school doesn’t happen. Can’t blame someone for that. But chemistry departments end up aligning the curriculum to serve the preparatory needs of medical schools a a result. This serves the needs of pre-med students, but it seems to absorb considerable resources for a chemistry department. Large lecture and lab sections in freshman and organic chemistry soak up lots of labor hours and sq ft of floor space.
On the other hand, chem majors do provide considerable workload for chemistry departments and correspondingly large budgets. Perhaps the answer is that funding pre-med programs should be spread over other budgets to a greater extent, rather than looking at it as a biology or chemistry burden. But maybe this is already done.
One option is to ignore the pleading for emphasis on medical school entry and treat every declared chemistry major as a chemist in training. Medical school preparation would have to be the student’s hobby. This approach is doomed to failure because it may not be the source of budget strain and would require university admin to ignore the needs of an important group of paying students and potential donors.
I think this issue is one that needs to see open discussion within the ACS.
Maybe things have changed in the last 25 years (I doubt it), but chemical engineering first developed as a career to support oil refineries. While there are obvious fire/explosion hazards, there are very few reactions – mostly cracking over a catalyst in a refinery. Even going to the finest ChemE school in the land, I did not learn enough to have prvented the T2 explosion. Safety was never even discussed, and certainly I would never want a never-been-in-industry Professor to talk about it.
I look at all education as an apprenticeship (or better yet, a pre-apprentiseship), with several years of journeyman experience still to come before any one is qualified to really be on their own. (And then there are those incompetent fools who never get it and never will). As such, I think undergraduate education is fine enough.
Well said. Having 20+ years as a chemist in the specialty field (doing everything from organometallic, to polymer, to inorganic and organic) I feel that my main “value” is scaleup experience. Not just the chemistry end, but the “put together” end; that is the reactors, valves, piping, etc.. needed to run a process (not just a reaction). The only way to teach younger chemists how to assemble a 100 L reactor is by doing. I would wager that there is no chemistry department in the US that has a 100 L reactor being used by students.