Bernard Gordon (H '92) pledged $40 million this summer to the School of Engineering to improve engineering leadership programs for undergraduates. In an interview last week, he said that he hopes that Tufts will use his gift to make American engineering students more competitive by giving them more than just technical preparation for the real world. But he cautioned that his contribution, which will come in increments over a number of years, is conditional on Tufts following through on its commitment to make promised changes.
Gordon said he hopes his recent contribution to Tufts will counter an engineering-productivity decline he has watched unfold in Massachusetts and elsewhere over the years.
"Route 128 is loaded with the corpses of technology companies," Gordon said. "Engineers took a lot of money and did not produce a product."
Gordon, an inventor and engineering icon, has given over $200 million to bolster engineering leadership programs across the world. He recently sat on the university's Board of Trustees for a decade and is now a member of the School of Engineering's Board of Overseers. He is also an honorary co-chair of Tufts' ongoing capital campaign Beyond Boundaries.
On a macro level, Gordon said, the rate of inventions in the United States has been on the decline. He linked this to a fundamental flaw in the direction of engineering education at major universities.
"Over the years, many schools -- and Tufts is not alone in this -- have put increased emphasis on research and decreased emphasis on teaching engineers how to produce something," he said.
Instead, Gordon says schools must prepare students for solving real-life problems and using their ideas to create jobs, something that he thinks is lacking at Tufts and across the country.
"They don't know how to engineer," Gordon said of current engineering students.
With his gift, Gordon hopes the situation at Tufts will change. His money will primarily go toward revamping an engineering leadership minor, hiring engineering professors with extensive experience working in their respective fields, and increasing the amount of project-based learning opportunities for undergraduates studying engineering.
"The gift was given to Tufts not because I believe that I am reinforcing what Tufts is doing, but because I believe that Tufts is not doing it," he said.
The fulfillment of his pledge, he said, will come only if Tufts actually carries out its stated goals. He said press releases that came out when the university announced his donation early this month were misleading in that they implied that he had already given the entirety of his contribution.
"The plan is for Tufts to make a plan, to modify the curriculum and the experiences of engineering students and present that plan early next year and then carry out that plan," he said.
Tufts' Director of Public Relations Kim Thurler said that the university generally announces the total amount of a pledge or commitment like Gordon's, even though all the funds will not come at one time.
"Pledges often involve a commitment on the part of the university or school to fulfill the shared vision of the donor and university," Thurler said in an e-mail. "This is the case with Dr. Gordon's gift."
Tufts administrators have a good vision for improving engineering education, but the university has not yet achieved this, he said.
Gordon's relationship with Tufts goes back to World War II, during which he briefly lived on campus while participating in a Navy officers training program in 1944. He previously donated $35 million to Tufts to support the Gordon Institute, the construction of Sophia Gordon Hall and other causes. Tufts' Gordon Institute, which Gordon founded in 1984 and which moved to Tufts in 1992, has focused on providing practical engineering training for the past two decades
Gordon holds over 200 patents worldwide, and says that experience has shown him what is important to increase competitiveness and productivity.
"I have made many thousands of technical jobs, I've invented billions of dollars worth of stuff," Gordon said. "I'm not just preying in the wilderness here."
With his gift, Gordon hopes that engineering students gain some of this real-world leadership experience in the classroom, instead of later in the game.
"I learned how to box by a guy hitting me," Gordon said. "But if I teach you how to box, by exposing you only to classroom theories about boxing, then you're not going to learn to box -- you're not going become a boxer until you get hit."
