EDITOR’S PAGE

IT WASN’T prominently played in either Dallas newspaper, but the story may have foretold the most significant action that Starke Taylor will take during his tenure as mayor. It was the formation of a task force chaired by Bill Moore, president of Recognition Equipment Inc. and chairman of the Chamber of Commerce’s hi-tech committee, to plan for Dallas’ future in high technology.

The first question: What does hi-tech mean? Mainly, it involves a high concentration of scientists and engineers as well as substantial sums of money devoted to research and development.

At its most esoteric levels, hi-tech deals with projects as seemingly farfetched as commercializing the space shuttle. The time will come, experts say, when the shuttle will fly every two weeks, and corporations will lease time in the federal government’s space station to work on products that can only be made in an environment with no gravity. Certain metals, for example, will mix together in weightless space but are forever at war with each other in the ordinary world. The same is true of some pharmaceuticals. It’s also believed that in space one can produce purer crystals with which to make electronic chips.

Closer to home, high technology will be called upon during the next decade to generate new energy resources, deepen our ports and rebuild our dams, bridges, highways and railroads. Mass transit systems are another job for high technology.

And we haven’t even mentioned the computer, that amazing guru of the post-modern age and the object of the new East-West technology war in which scientists and engineers ramrod our battalions. It’s clear that Japan has the jump on us, especially in its national push to develop a Fifth Generation computer with artificial intelligence. (The Fifth Generation is a computer so well-supplied with the thought processes and information bases of human experts that it can draw logical inferences from pre-programmed sets of statements. Hence, it can plot corporate strategies, diagnose disease or design huge construction projects without talcing time out to eat, sleep or alleviate ennui.)

The United States has responded to the Japanese challenge with the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. (MCC), an Austin-based research laboratory of 60 scientists that will grow to almost 400 by 1985. Financed by 14 American companies, the lab’s mission is fourfold: software development, large-scale integrated designs, advanced computer architectures and semiconductor packaging.

It all adds up to artificial intelligence, to languages used in dealing with computers, to new ways of processing information-in short, to the new world where we must live if we want to survive.

Dallas is already well-established in high technology. Our own Silicon Valley stretches north to Piano and west almost to D/FW airport. Although Texas Instruments is the venerable giant of the field, most hi-tech firms are young (they’ve been around less than 20 years) and small (employing fewer than 100 people). Miraculously, Dallas, along with Boston and San Francisco, has been able to grow as a hi-tech center without an MIT or Stanford to galvanize our efforts. But we can’t count on the miracle to last forever. Not when engineers need retraining every 10 years.

If we want our cash registers to jingle in the future, we must invest in a top-quality school of computer science and engineering. But where? SMU wants to move in this direction, but it can go only as far as private dollars will take it. And SMU’s true chances for excellence appear to lie elsewhere: in the arts, business, law and theology. Indeed, SMU has the opportunity to be an antidote to hi-tech culture, and we’ll need one if we’re going to preserve our humanity while we court long-term prosperity.

The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), located in the heart of hi-tech country, seems to some observers to be the logical choice, and UTD President Bob Rutford favors a school with two specialties: electrical engineering and computer science. He says that there’s no need to assemble a full-blown engineering curriculum and duplicate courses that are already available, such as the electrical power generation program at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA).

The Rutford proposal cleared an important hurdle when it was approved by the University of Texas Board of Regents. Now the issue will go to the state Coordinating Board, and that will be a tough briar patch to get out of in one piece.

Herb Schiff, former vice chairman of the Coordinating Board, strongly opposes the idea; he stresses that we should build on what we’ve got. For Dallas, that means UTA, as far as the state system is concerned. (This assumes that Texas voters will pass a constitutional amendment next fall that permits the Permanent University Fund to be used for facilities other than UT-Austin and Texas A&M. If this amendment fails, both UTD and UTA probably will continue to be stepchildren.)

As for other Coordinating Board members from Dallas, Chandler Lindsley is reserving judgment. But she points out that the costs of starting a new engineering school are “phenomenal,” and, because of a national shortage of competent people, faculty is hard to recruit. Harlan Crow is said to favor an engineering school at UTD, but he also warns that the project will have “a heavy burden of proof to make its case.” Eleanor Conrad and George Bramblett are both newcomers who were appointed by Gov. Mark White. “The White appointees bring a different perspective from those named by [former Gov. Bill] Clements,” says Bramblett. Clements believes that state funds should be concentrated on the engineering program at UTA. (A special report prepared for the Coordinating Board two years ago made the same argument.) Bramblett says that the view of the White appointees and of newly named chairman Larry Temple of Austin will be very important.

The hi-tech story has been a low-voltageissue in Dallas during the past severalmonths. But that will surely change, sincethe stakes could hardly be higher.