And the winner of the Nobel Prize is --- a graduate of a tech

Posted on October 12, 2009 at 12:09 AM

News that caught my eye this week was not the win by President Obama of the Nobel Prize for Peace, though I commend the Nobel Committee on their choice this year.  Rather I was most pleased about the win by Professor Charles Kao of the Nobel Prize for Physics.  Professor Kao won the prize jointly with George Smith and William Boyle for work that laid the foundations in Information Communications Technology.  Their work contributed to developments that we take for granted now, when we use the internet, hold video conferences, or take pictures with digital cameras.  In Professor Kao’s case the prize was for his work in the 1960s on sending information through optic fibre cables that are now used for sending emails, amongst other things.  What particularly attracted my attention to Professor Kao’s win was the story in the Guardian that highlighted the fact that he studied for his undergraduate degree at Woolwich Polytechnic. Woolwich Polytechnic went on to become Greenwich University. But it was as a Polytechnic that this third level college educated a Nobel Prize Winner.

I like this story because it strikes a blow for those third level institutions that focus most of their energies simply on educating their students. Such colleges educate a much broader cross section of our society than more well know universities such as Cambridge or Oxford or in Ireland’s case Trinity College, Dublin.  In Ireland our Institutes of Technology have played a similar role in our third level sector to polytechnics.  I declare an interest in the value of Institutes of Technology in that although I studied for a degree at Trinity College, Dublin, I went on to work as a Clerical Officer in  Dublin Institute of Technology.  My father was a full time lecturer in Kevin Street and later worked for the Institute of Technology in Tallaght.  My two sisters, brother and my mother (as a mature student) all studied at the Dublin Institute of Technology.  My Dad tells me that when he taught Physics in Kevin Street, he worked with another graduate of Woolwich Polytechnic.  

In contrast, with this significant achievement of a Polytechnic, is the annual fuss that is made about where Trinity and UCD come in World University Rankings. For example, a lot of publicity in Ireland is given to the World University Rankings drawn up by a University in Shanghai.  There has been wailing and gnashing of teeth in the past when our universities didn’t do well on this Shanghai list.  One of the criteria for the Shanghai rankings is the number of Nobel Prize Winners educated by a university. But Woolwich Poly, or Greenwich University as it is now known, doesn’t feature in this or other World University Rankings and yet it educated a scientist who not only won a noble prize but also revolutionised our way of communicating with each other.  Thanks to the efforts of people like Professor Kao when I hit the submit button for this post you will almost instantaneously be able to read my thoughts on Professor Kao on my blog on the Labour website.  The lecturers of Woolwich Poly should be proud.

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