IN THE TWILIGHT OF MY CAREER AS AN EDUCATOR
Nguyen Xuan Vinh, Ph.D., D.Sc.
Although at the University of Michigan we do not have mandatory retirement at a certain age for tenured professors, after thirty years as a research scientist and educator, I decided to take that step in the spring of 1999. By giving me the title of professor emeritus of aerospace engineering, the Regents of the University also presented me with a citation signed, on their behalf, by President Lee C. Bollinger, a distinguished authority on Constitutional Law. In the framed citation adorned with the seal of the University of Michigan, the last paragraph reads:
“Besides his outstanding career as a researcher and educator, Professor Vinh is widely recognized for his leadership and mentorship to the Vietnamese community. A widely-read novelist and poet, he was awarded the prestigious Vietnam National Literature Prize in 1961. He has been much in demand as a speaker for Vietnamese organizations on such topics as education, culture, society, and the future of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people. He is widely recognized as a role model within the Vietnamese community in North America and elsewhere”.
Looking back at my long career, nothing can make me more proud of my accomplishments than this statement. It is primarily as a space scientist and university professor that I am known through my research publications, my editorial service to several international scientific journals, and, above all, by my contribution to the teaching of thousands of aerospace engineering students and through my guidance of doctoral candidates. I am deeply honored, however, that the University of Michigan has also acknowledged my extra-curricular activities such as writing essays and giving speeches for the extensive Vietnamese overseas community in my native Vietnamese language.
For the past twenty years, I have had the opportunity to visit several parts of this country in attending technical conferences, giving lectures at various universities. During those trips I have been in contact with the Vietnamese communities thriving in large metropolitan areas and talked to our younger generation and observed a steady progress in our resettlement as new refugees in the United States.
In 1992, at a conference on the shortage of professionals in Canada, Mr. William Winegard, the then Canadian minister for science and technology, said: “We won’t have a competitive society if we don’t have the people to make it competitive.” Statistics from the recent U.S. Census show that Vietnamese immigrants help to make this society more competitive. If we take a look at the achievements of the United States in any field of endeavor in recent years, we will see some Vietnamese contributions. For instance, there are more than 300 Vietnamese-American inventors with three or more U.S. patents. One of them, Mr. Doan Trung, a young engineer and vice president at Micron Corporation, in Boise, Idaho, has 132 patents. Medicine is another area where young Vietnamese-Americans excel. Across the United States, from Harvard University to the University of Chicago and to the University of California at San Francisco where some of the top medical schools are located, we see Vietnamese-American students donning white uniforms and graduating with honors from medical schools. A conservative estimate places the number of Vietnamese physicians practicing in this country at close to 4200. This means that we have on the average nearly 4 doctors for every 1000 Vietnamese-Americans, a ratio otherwise attained only in some wealthy localities. Some students go on to teach medicine. We now have several prominent Vietnamese professors in American medical schools. One of them, Dr. Nghiem Dao Dai, who initiated an innovative procedure for pancreatic transplantation in patients with Type I diabetes is a frequent contributor to leading medical journals in the U.S. and Canada . In the Washington D.C. area, there is an annual listing of the top physicians as voted by their colleagues. They are the people fellow doctors would send their relatives to if they were to become sick. You can see a Vietnamese name, Dr. Trinh Duc Phuong, in the sub-specialty of infectious diseases. He has made the list four years running. His brother is on the faculty of Johns Hopkins Medical School. In Long Beach, California, the medical clinic and laboratory of Dr. Truong Dung, a world renown specialist in Parkinson disease has a long list of patients coming from foreign countries to seek treatment.
We came from a country where half a century ago the standard means of locomotion was the bicycle. And yet, our youngsters have accepted the challenge of learning to fly supersonic aircraft. One of them, Lieutenant Tran Nhu Hoang graduated at the top of his class at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He went on to Harvard Medical School after a stage as a Rhodes scholar in England. He is now an Air Force surgeon in San Antonio, Texas. His wife is also a Vietnamese medical doctor. At a time, we saw on national television the graduation ceremonies at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Out of the Class 1999 consisting of 737 midshipmen, a Vietnamese girl , Nguyen Thi Cam Van ranked second in the graduating class. I have met several senior officers among our second generation Vietnamese-Americans serving in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. An example is Major Pham Hoang Thu USAF; the last time I saw him, he is an instructor pilot for the F-16, an advanced jet fighter. The Vietnamese community has at least one person in the distinguished corps of astronauts, Dr. Eugene Trinh, who flew on a space shuttle mission and is also an astrophysicist with an outstanding research record. As other examples of significant contributions in science and technology, I can mention Mr. Nguyen Thanh Tien who received the NASA Exceptional Medal Award for his unusual contribution to the Galileo mission, and also Dr. Nguyen Manh Tien, the recipient of several honor awards and member of the NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory delegation to the International Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS). They are among several hundred young Vietnamese men and women working in the space program of the US. With our devotion to our professions, we are steadily climbing the ladder in the industrial hierarchy and, at the same time, earning the respect of our American colleagues. Dr. Cai Van Khiem is a shining example. With many patents for his inventions, he became the youngest engineer to hold the position of “Chief Division Technologist” at Hughes Aircraft Company.
Many of us have opted to teach at universities and professional schools as a way of propagating knowledge and, at the same time, in accordance with Asian tradition, giving back what we have received with our education. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, at the University of Paris for example, and at Harvard University, and down under at several outstanding universities in Australia, Vietnamese scholars are listed on the faculty rosters. Those of us who subscribe to the ideal of scholarship also believe in the service to humanity.
Some of the achievements by the new immigrants were extraordinary enough to warrant reporting by the news media. Professor Nguyen Huu Xuong’s laboratory at the University of California in San Diego was officially recognized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a National Research Resource. His invention, the famous Xuong’s machine, greatly contributed to the study of protein structure in cancer research. In Canada, Mrs. Hoang Thieu Quan became the first woman to serve as Director of Finance for the city of Montreal. In 1991 the budget she oversaw was nearly two billion dollars. At the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, Dr. Le Trai was the first female professor to receive tenure in the Law School. For twenty years before her retirement in 1997, she had the sole responsibility for teaching Commercial Law besides several other courses in her own area of expertise. She has taught every law student attending the institution during that time. These facts were reported by Dr. Carol Ann Mooney, a colleague of Professor Le in the Law school, and a Vice President and Associate Provost at the University of Notre Dame.
Some of our younger professionals were also in the national news. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Nguyen Tue holds the record of receiving five bachelor degrees ranging from Physics and Mathematics to Electrical Engineering before settling in a Master’s degree and then a Ph.D. degree in Nuclear Engineering. These gave him a total of seven degrees from MIT in seven years. In May 1996, we saw on national television the selection of a young medical graduate, Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Quang, as ABC’s Person of the Week. He overcame critical brain damage after an automobile accident to graduate with distinction from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. Using his own experience, he is now a devoted physician in medical rehabilitation. In sports , we can mention the extraordinary achievement of Nguyen Dat at Texas A & M University, winner of the 1998 Lombardi trophy as the best defensive lineman in football in the nation. He is now playing for the Dallas cowboys. In the Arts, Vietnamese living abroad and at home, we all feel proud of the success of Tony Bui, the young Director of the movie “Three Seasons”, winner of the Grand Jury Prize, the Audience Award and Cinematography Award at the Sundance Film Festival. On July 21, 1999, the National Public Radio in Washington D.C. had a special program on their “Talk of the Nation” to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Ernest Hemingway. If you are one of the millions American devotees who listen to the program, you wouldn’t believe that a young Vietnamese scholar had a hand in the writing of the script, and that he was also the one who provided the voice-over for Papa Hemingway in the studio rendition of the few passages relating to the famous writer and journalist’s stay in Paris in the late twenties .
The few examples I have mentioned were among those abounding within Vietnamese communities I have visited. The success of our resettlement, especially in encouraging our children to receive an education and be trained as professionals is in part due to an excellent family tradition of togetherness. In a paper published in the February 1992 issue of Scientific American by Drs. Caplan, Choy and Whitmore from the University of Michigan, the scholastic success of the Indo-Chinese children is credited to the support from their parents. I know this through my own experience. My wife and I are the parents of four children , and, in providing them with our moral and financial support so that they can achieve their common goal of becoming contributing citizens in their new country, we too have had to face and endure hardships. Our family came to the USA, not in 1975 like most of our compatriots, but in 1962 on a scholarship provided by the USAF, so that I had a head start of slightly more than a decade. But in reality, it was not entirely all to my advantage.
Let me recall my story from the beginning. In a recent issue of the US News and World Report, there is the annual ranking of American colleges and universities, broken down by regions, size, and specialties . In the technical area, The College of Engineering at the University of Michigan ranks third in the nation after MIT and Stanford University. In the sub-specialty of Aerospace Engineering, its Department of Aerospace Engineering stands at number 4, following MIT, Caltech and Stanford University. Since I being associated with that Department for thirty years, having been a full professor since 1972, I can rightfully claim that I have a fair share in contributing to that high ranking. But that professorship was not presented to me on a silver tray . I had to earn it in a very hard way because I wasn’t even a graduate from the same highly ranked universities in that recent U.S. News and World Report survey. Back in 1962, when I prepared my application for admission to graduate school in the US, I put my preference as MIT first and Stanford second. I also mentioned that in case I was required to attend a state-supported university, my first preference was the University of California at Berkeley and my second choice was the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Those were the schools which enjoyed outstanding academic reputation in Asia. But before sending off my application, I was told by my sponsor, in a very diplomatic way, that I would be more comfortable in one of the schools they had selected for me, which were either the University of Arizona in Tucson or the University of Colorado in Boulder. They were good schools at that time, but they were not in the top 25, except in their football rankings. I chose Boulder, Colorado because I like mountains. In my first week of orientation as a new graduate student, I quickly found out that the University of Colorado, indeed, the entire state of Colorado had never before conferred a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering. Two and a half years after I registered as a new graduate student, in December of 1964, I made history at the University of Colorado by becoming its first doctoral recipient in aerospace engineering. The following year, I received an offer for a lectureship from UC Berkeley, an offer which I declined in order to stay on as a faculty member in Boulder. But later on, I did come to Berkeley as a visiting professor for one semester. And exactly ten years after I was given the hint that my aspiration to come to Michigan as a graduate student may have been somewhat too ambitious, I achieved the rank of full professor at that great institution.
Over the years, in my contact with young Vietnamese refugees, I was frequently asked questions about my work with NASA and what was my most significant contribution to the U.S. space program. My primary vocation is education and over the years, first at the University of Colorado and then later at the University of Michigan, I have contributed to the training of several thousand aerospace engineers for our national space program. In addition, I have served as thesis advisor and chairman of doctoral committee for about thirty successful candidates. Several of those graduate students were supported by research grants which I received from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and from the US Air Force . You may have heard of the expression “Publish or Perish”-- meaning that at a research university, if you cannot get outside funding for your research, you have no budget for hiring research assistants and therefore you cannot publish, and it is thus better for you to find another place where there is less pressure to acquire research grants. I survived that competitive culture at the University of Michigan and over the years did provide financial support for some of my teaching and research assistants. Results of my research were published as scientific papers in international journals, or as technical reports by the NASA and the USAF. Some of my papers were translated into French and Russian and reedited in the corresponding countries. As an example, I joined two colleagues, in writing a research monograph in which we presented our collective research efforts supported by several grants from NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The book was titled “Hypersonic and Planetary Entry Flight Mechanics” and although on the cover there is an artist painting of a space shuttle during atmospheric reentry, the book was published in 1980, one year before the maiden flight of the vehicle. The theories we developed have stood the test of time and now, although this book is long out-of-print, its contents are still referenced in current scientific research literature.
The professional society for aerospace engineers and scientists, with a membership of nearly 200,000, is the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. It has instituted several annual awards. In my area of expertise since 1967 we have the coveted “Mechanics and Control of Flight Award” presented each year to one individual selected by the Honors and Awards committee based on nominations by the peers. I was the winner in 1994. On one side of the medal there is an engraving of the Wright brothers’ biplane and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon. The picture represents America’s formidable aerospace progress in the 20th century. My full name is engraved on the other side with the citation “For outstanding contributions to the mathematical theory of optimal control, applied to the flight mechanics of aerospace vehicles in the atmosphere and in space”. Usually, when you receive a distinguished medal, you wear it the first time on the podium. The second time you wear it, if your award is popular and is marketable, is to take your picture for box of cereals or for selling to magazines. Someday I would like to put it on, for a second time, when I think that the time is right for celebration, when the contributions of all Vietnamese Americans are officially recognized by the US Government. Only then when our voices will be heard by our representatives in the U.S. Congress over our concern for human rights violation in Vietnam, our ancestral country.
In the twilight of my career, with less pressure on scientific research, I will spend more time to write about my experiences, in order to share with you, my fellow compatriots, the difficulties I have encountered in the past, in this new land. Our journey across life can be compared to the flight of an aircraft across a vast ocean. Sometimes we are favored by a tail wind which gives us a faster ground speed. But sometimes on other occasions, we may face a head wind with adverse effects. As the first generation of immigrants, we are the pioneers, and we may run into obstacles. Just as the aircraft has to get to the other side of the ocean because it has passed the point of no return, when facing the head wind in our life, such as in the case of social injustice, we should keep our heads high, our chins up, and then with physical endurance, technical expertise, and with spiritual strength, by dedication and dignity, we shall join force together to overcome adversity and fulfill our dream of equal opportunity, equal rights and equal responsibility, and in so doing, make it a reality. Let us continue then to work harder and harder, but always in harmony, and then through mutual assistance, helping each other. Through training, tutoring and educating, we shall expand our group and ultimately give the Vietnamese-American minority a stronger voice and a dignified place in the United States. Then in time, together with all the citizens of this country, hand in hand, we will be well prepared, technically and spiritually, to move forward in this twenty--first century. This past century has seen the collapse of the world communism in Eastern European countries. At the beginning of a new century, with the spread of democracy in Asia, the remnants of communism in Vietnam, our native country, will certainly fall into oblivion. Be prepared to assist the reconstruction of that emerging and democratic country, the place where your parents were born.