NORTHRIDGE : CSUN Receives Final Check for Computer Lab
As a troupe of Rockwell aerospace officials looked on, a robot arm in the automation engineering lab at Cal State Northridge reached out Friday to grab a mock $100,000 check, go through a series of gyrations and finally hand it over to a smiling CSUN President Blenda Wilson.
Except for the robot, the scene was typical of corporate presentations. This one marked the final annual installment of a $300,000 grant by Rockwell’s Canoga Park-based Rocketdyne division, which enabled the campus to get a modern computer-aided design and manufacturing setup. Rockwell, in turn, got a school lab bearing its name.
But beneath the niceties was a hard reality, said CSUN computer science professor Larry Lichten, who directs the campus’s automation engineering program. If public universities in these tight-money days hope to stay technologically current, they must depend on corporate generosity.
“This is as good a lab as anybody among local universities has been able to put together, especially in the Cal State system, which is on a shoestring,” Lichten said. Of the corporate partnership that made it possible, he said: “All the CSUs are trying to do the same thing.”
Three years ago, before the grant from the Rockwell Trust, Lichten said he had to apologize to students for having out-of-date equipment and computer software. With the grant, CSUN upgraded its 10 older computer design and manufacturing stations by linking them to 10 new state-of-the-art ones.
Rocketdyne Vice President Byron Wood said such giving benefits the company, because it enables CSUN to turn out engineering and computer science graduates who are technologically up-to-date. Rocketdyne likes to hire local talent, he said, and otherwise would have to retrain those new hires.
Although general hiring has slowed in recent years, Wood estimated Rocketdyne has hired about 140 CSUN graduates in the past seven years and has given other financial support to the university. “We’ve been very pleased with the quality of these students who have come out of the university,” he said.
