Welcome address
(June 1967)

JOHN S. TOLL
President, State University of New York at Stony Brook

We are very grateful to this group of experts for meeting on our campus to discuss the academic role of the computing sciences. We view this Conference as being particularly important for this campus, but we hope it will be equally valuable for other universities. Each year we have received a special grant from the New York State Science and Technology Foundation to help our campus. We decided that in 1967-1968, by far the most important use of this Foundation support would be for a comprehensive study of the role of the computing sciences as an academic program. We are pleased that this international conference, and certain other activities in the computing sciences, are the result of that support, for which we are very grateful.

Every university must study carefully how best to teach all aspects of the computing sciences. This subject does not concentrate in any single department or single discipline at the university; it pervades, with rapidly increasing extent, the work in nearly every field. We are all accustomed to having the physical scientists use computers extensively, but now some of our people in the humanities, in the social sciences, and in other fields are using the computer in their research programs as much as the natural scientists and engineers.

We have come to no fixed point of view on how to distribute courses or degree programs in the computing sciences at this institution. We are aware of the hazards in trying to delimit the field too rigidly. The fate of another field of information science, that of "library science," has demonstrated vividly for us the dangers in a program that becomes too narrowly professional. Now schools of library science throughout the country are endeavoring to broaden their curricula. I hope that we can maintain the computing sciences within many of our academic disciplines in the university, and that we can also devise types of interdepartmental programs which recognize the role of the computing sciences as a link among different disciplines. We know that there is no unique answer as to the best way to organize computing sciences as a graduate degree program, but we hope that your deliberations will serve as a starting point for the planning in many universities.

We are very fortunate in this Conference to have collected from all over the world experts in teaching research, and practice of the computing sciences. I appreciate the help that many of you have given to this institution and to other institutions in the past. Here at Stony Brook we are in the initial stages of building an academic program in the computer sciences, under the stimulating leadership of Professors Finerman, Gelernter, Rosen, and others. We know that we will benefit a great deal from your deliberations at this Conference. However, we view the Conference as being essentially intended for other universities, and not just for Stony Brook. We hope therefore that you will have a productive four days of work on this timely subject. My thanks go to all of you for your efforts in this important task.