Measurement science and manufacturing science research

The research program of Semiconductor Research Corp. is managed as three overlapping areas: Manufacturing Sciences, Design Sciences and Microstructure Sciences. A total of 40 universities are participating in the performance of over 200 research tasks. The goals and direction of Manufacturing Sciences research became more clearly focused through the efforts of the Manufacturing Sciences Committee of the SRC Technical Advisory Board (TAB). The mission of the SRC Manufacturing Research is the quantification, control, and understanding of semiconductor manufacturing process necessary to achieve a predictable and profitable product output in the competitive environment of the next decade. The 1994 integrated circuit factory must demonstrate a three level hierarchy of control: (1) operation control, (2) process control, and (3) process design. These levels of control are briefly discussed

Accidents to Farm and Rural Nonfarm People in Ohio

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Writing and teaching national history in Africa in an era of global history

This session of the colloquium began where the preceding one had left off, with the lead-in speaker, Professor Toyin Falola of the University of Texas, arguing that if ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ were meaningful concepts for historical understanding, so too was ‘nation’. For him, national history was both meaningful and vital in the current era of globalisation, when global history was being touted as the only paradigm within which seriously to understand modern processes and events. Indeed, he believed that national history was an essential defence – even means of survival – against the dominant brand of global history in the contemporary world, which in his view amounted to ‘a narrative of western power and its expansion, …[which sought to turn] the national history of one great power [the USA] into the metanarrative of global history … by eras[ing] the experiences of so-called local identities, sweeping the dust of the ethnic under the carpet of the national, and the national itself under the table of the universal’

A Caledonian college in Cape Town and beyond: An investigation into the foundation(s) of the South African university system

Adopting a historical approach, this article traces the origins of key features of the South African university system, namely the general nature of its undergraduate degrees, its heavy reliance on lectures to convey information and its extensive use of examinations to assess levels of student achievement. This historical investigation finds the roots of these features in the unreformed Scottish university system which was enthusiastically embraced by South Africa's first two teaching universities, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Stellenbosch, in 1918, and which then was adopted by those universities which were set up in their image during the next 70 years. The article suggests that any attempt to reform the country's university system today must take account of the historical circumstances which produced it originally

100 years old and still making history: The centenary of the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town

Observing institutional birthdays is not something academic historians readily undertake nowadays – their training makes them habitually wary of the constructed nature of such events and of the self-preening which usually accompanies them. All too often such occasions become part of a celebration of an invented tradition of origins, in which founders’ days are ‘seized on with alacrity for displays of pageantry, where, with high-ranking officials ever present, the narrative inevitably extol[s] … supposed progress and virtues’.1 However, commemorating a centenary is perhaps in a different category, for doing so has long roots in Western culture, dating back to the Biblical Jubilee, the Roman Catholic Church’s first Holy Year in 1300 and the veneration of the decimal system by the European Enlightenment. This makes marking a centenary seem quite natural, so easing the discomfort of historians with such an occasion. Moreover, when, as in the case of the centenary of the foundation of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) chair of history in 2003, the original event also signalled the inception of history as a university discipline in its own right in subSaharan Africa, the inducement to commemorate this step is difficult to resist. Added to this, 100 years is a meaningful timespan for reflecting on an institution, being long enough for a degree of historical perspective but short enough to permit the voices of some of the actors to be clearly heard too, perhaps once and – thanks to the tape recorder and video camera – forever. In a centenary year, therefore, both a microscope and telescope can be employed to good effect. It was with such ideas in mind that in 2002 UCT’s Department of Historical Studies contemplated its coming centenary and decided not to let it pass unnoticed

The role of the university in writing and teaching history in Africa in the twenty-first century

On three scores this session differed from most other sessions of the colloquium. First, in Professor Robert Addo-Fening from the University of Ghana it had a nonSouth Africanist as lead-in speaker; second, half of its panel of discussants consisted of educationalists whose primary focus was history in schools rather than history at universities; and third, the session was chaired by a ‘historian manqué’ (as he termed himself), the sociologist Professor Robin Cohen, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at UCT. These features gave to discussions an unusually wide range, which helped broaden the perspectives of the South African historians who made up the bulk of those present at the colloquium