Page 4 - CEMS News Winter 2023

DEPARTMENT NEWS
Quality and Community is published!
Kenneth H. Keller, CEMS Professor Emeritus and UMN President Emeritus, wrote a book on the history of the department.
With Quality and Community, The Story of Minnesota’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, in print form, it seemed like the perfect time to interview the author, Kenneth H. Keller, CEMS Professor Emeritus and UMN President Emeritus.
Labor of Love
This effort could truly be described as a labor of love, since it took a few years to complete. What did you enjoy most about the process of writing the book? Did you ever think that you’d author a book (textbook or otherwise)?
In fact, no—for several reasons. A good book needs
a reason for being—an overarching theme that is
more than an exposition or the summary of a topic. It should introduce a narrative, a framework. I’ve been surrounded by colleagues who have done that extremely well. Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot, the Wisconsin trio, published Transport Phenomena, which I still have in a mimeographed copy. It was a revelation, a whole new approach to understanding our field. The books written by our own Minnesota faculty—Amundson, Aris, Davis, Schmidt, Fredrickson, and others—defined the frontiers of many sub-fields, particularly those that depend on mathematical modeling. Ed Cussler gave form to a process of product design that links fundamental insights to application. Our own alumnus, Stan Sandler, produced a classic and comprehensive text on thermodynamics which continues to be influential.
My own interests—in exploring the new field of biomedical engineering, on the one hand, and plunging into the administration of higher education, on the other hand— were exciting to me, but not ready to formalize into a single book. The alternative—to write a great novel—was attractive only after the consumption of a great deal of alcohol. The 100th anniversary of the establishment of the original department provided a natural theme that allowed me to link my two fields of interest by telling the story
of a tremendously successful department through both technical and administrative lenses. Ultimately, the writing
Kenneth H. Keller is the author of a new book on the history of CEMS. Photo credit: Rebecca Slater, By Rebecca Studios.
allowed me to recall and relive years which I have come to think of as more than satisfying, in a department and community worthy of Camelot.
Unique Perspectives
As an emeritus faculty member in CEMS and former president of the university, you are in a unique position to share your perspective on the history of the department from several angles. How did your experiences as a faculty member and former administrator guide the “voice” of this book?
The essential challenge for any institution is to define its mission and goals clearly and to develop an institutional structure that advances those ends effectively and doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Generally, to meet the challenge, you have to understand at the micro-level what the problems are—what it takes to teach, to do research; what it takes to learn; what it
takes to use your talents to help society—and what
4 www.cems.umn.edu
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