The Lords of Silicon Valley

View 722 Monday, April 30, 2012

This is from a Huffington Post article:

A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is De Anza College, a community college that Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to 1974. Because of California’s state budget crisis, De Anza has cut more than a thousand courses and 8 percent of its faculty since 2008.
Now, De Anza faces a budget gap so large that it is confronting a "death spiral," the school’s president, Brian Murphy, wrote to the faculty in January. Apple, of course, is not responsible for the state’s financial shortfall, which has numerous causes. But the company’s tax policies are seen by officials like Mr. Murphy as symptomatic of why the crisis exists.
"I just don’t understand it," he said in an interview. "I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake.
"But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jared-bernstein/apples-and-health-spendin_b_1464262.html

It took me a while to remember where I had heard of De Anza College before. I was sure I had been there. Then I recalled: sometime in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s when I wrote The User’s Column for BYTE – then owned by McGraw Hill and the leading computing magazine in the world – I was invited to come up to De Anza College and take part in a weekend Faculty Symposium. I don’t recall much of the visit. I was invited by the college administration, probably by its President, and the subject was what the college ought to do given the coming computer age. The faculty were given a day of class suspension so that they could attend; I don’t think most of them wanted to come. I had been invited in part because of my computer articles, and partly because of my former professorial status. I think John McCarthy had something to do with the invitation.

They didn’t offer much besides expenses, and I told them I wouldn’t have time for much preparation, but they were more interested in my taking part in a symposium on what community colleges ought to do to prepare for this coming computer revolution. This was in the days of the S-100 buss and the Apple ][ which was invading the business world because of VisiCalc, the first spread sheet. I had personally witnessed thoroughly naïve business people going into a computer store and asking for “A VisiCalc”, only to be told that was a computer program and they would have to have an Apple ][ computer to run it on. “Yeah, yeah, whatever it takes, I got to have one of those.” Computers were not well known in the general public but they were beginning to penetrate business offices. In those days the big computer show was the West Coast Computer Faire, and Apple and Microsoft were in competition for leadership. An entrepreneur named Sheldon Adelson was starting an annual convention called COMDEX in Las Vegas.

I don’t remember the details of my weekend in Cupertino. It involved several presentations, most of which I found dull because in those days BYTE had more expertise on matters computerish than any academic institutions other than Stanford and MIT and ETH in Zurich, and the De Anza budget couldn’t afford the fees charged by major figures in those institutions. I believe one speaker was one of John McCarthy’s graduate students. I don’t recall what I told the faculty of De Anza, but I vividly recall an interchange with one of the professors. After I outlined where I thought the computer revolution was going – using, I expect, ny usual theme of the early 1980’s that “Before the end of this century, everyone in the Free World will be able to get the answer to any question that has an answer, certainly within days and probably within hours.” I thought that a fairly profound observation, and coupling that with Arthur Koestler’s observation that a sufficient condition for the destruction of any totalitarian ideology would be the free exchange of ideas within that ideological society made for some interesting predictions about the future of the Soviet Union.

After my presentation there was a general discussion. One of the professors, I think of social science, asked “but what should we do, then? Prepare our students to serve the Lords of Silicon Valley?”

As I understand it, this symposium was a required event for the faculty, and they were all present. Many to most of them indicated high approval of the question and its implications. My reply to that was to ask what else a community college in Cupertino ought to be doing. It seemed to me they were in a golden place at a golden time, and my only real question was why the Lords of Silicon Valley weren’t at the symposium. I fear that didn’t get much enthusiastic approval from the majority of the faculty, although in the reception afterwards I found that this was an ongoing question at the college. As it ought to have been.

I gave my talk and participated in the symposium and went home, and I don’t think I have thought about community colleges in Silicon Valley since; but I did find that attitude fairly common when I visited other University of California and California State University campuses over the years, and I suspect that may have something to do with the current crisis in higher education. It may even be more important than a lack of funding. It may also have a bit to do with Apple’s tax strategy.

If the local community college can’t prepare its students to serve the lords of silicon valley, you may be sure that someone else will.

Roland had this comment

The Lords of Silicon Valley.

It seems to me that the faculty of De Anza College should’ve been preparing their students to *become* the Lords of Silicon Valley.

Which is exactly correct. Instead, apparently they are unhappy because the Lords aren’t paying enough taxes and aren’t appreciative enough.