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Those Happy Days Are Gone Forever. Once upon a time, during the reign of good King Steady-State, when the technical world was young, our engineering campuses were happy places. The ivy grew undisturbed on those classrooms and shops down by the power plant, and in their offices the faculty maintained a serenity engendered by their certainty of what they would teach next year — and the next, and the next. A summer vacation was to be enjoyed at the cottage on the lake, not sandwiched between summer institutes, research conferences, and a graduate class. In that day the curricula were planned to graduate engineers, and the faculty were very sure of that. The technical world was bounded and almost complete; had not Newton, Bernoulli, Carnot, Faraday, and their kind established all the rules?