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ERIC A
. -
1910-1995
WALKER
BY CHARLES L. HOSLER
ERIC A. WALKER electrical engineer, educator, patriot, former
president of the Pennsylvania State University, and founding
member of the National Academy of Engineering, died on
1
February 17, 1995, at the age of eighty-four.
As an engineer and researcher, Dr. Walker earned distinc-
tion for his work in undersea acoustics and weaponry during
and shortly after World War IT, and in commercial power trans-
mission and insulation, an area in which he held several
patents for high-voltage devices.
As an educator, he served on the engineering faculty at
three universities and, as a longtime force in the American
Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), he had an impor-
tant impact on shaping American technical training over a
period of more than four decades.
As president of Penn State (1956 to 1970), he led that
institution to become an internationally recognized academic
center for scientific and engineering research. Its admission
in 1958 to the Association of American Universities reflected
his dynamic, visionary leadership. He provided the same
caliber of leadership as a member (195S to 1962) of the
executive committee of the American Association of Land-
Grant Colleges and State Universities.
281
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282
MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
The life of Eric Arthur Walker was that of a self-made man.
He was born in humble circumstances on Aori! 29. 1910. in
Long Eaton, England. His family sent him to Canada at age
eleven and then to Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, where he settled
with an aunt in 1923. He attended Harvard University, sup-
ported by an academic scholarship and many part-time jobs.
He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in
1932 and continued at Harvard for graduate work, receiving a
master of science degree in business administration in 1933.
By the time he received his doctorate in general science and
engineering in 1935, he had been teaching mathematics at
Tufts University for two years. Tufts namer! him head of its
Department of Electrical Engineering in 193S, and in 1940 he
accepted a similar headship at the University of Connecticut,
Storrs.
In 1942 Dr. Walker was appointed associate director of Har-
vard's Underwater Sound Laboratory, where he helped to
develop the acoustic homing torpedo for the U.S. Navy, an
achievement for which he won a presidential certificate of mer-
it. When Harvard closet] the laboratory in 1945, Dr. Walker
supervised the transfer of a portion of its Navy-supported work
to Penn State, where it was re-created as the Ordnance Re-
search Laboratory. Investigations there continued in such
fields as cavitation and underwater shapes for torpedoes, sub-
marine hulls, and guided missiles.
Dr. Walker was also named head of Penn State's Depart-
ment of Electrical Engineering. In 1950 he took a leave of
absence to serve as executive secretary of the Research and
Development Board in the Defense Department. In 1951, how-
ever, he returned to Penn State as dean of the College of
Engineering and Architecture. Two years later, he introduced
the nation's first associate in engineering degree program. It
came in response to the demand for skilled practitioners in
fast-growing technologies and served as a model for similar
programs at other colleges and universities nationwide. At the
other end of the academic spectrum, he inaugurated one of
the nation's first baccalaureate programs in engineering sci-
ence. It gave students of exceptional abilities the opportunity
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ERIC A.WALKER
283
to participate in a more rigorous curriculum designed to pre-
pare them for research, development, and other creative
aspects of engineering. Finally, as dean, he oversaw the con-
struction of a nuclear reactor to study the peaceful applications
of atomic energy. In 1956 Penn State thus became the first
university to operate a reactor under license from the Atomic
Energy Commission.
That same year Dr. Walker was named Penn State's first vice-
president for research. Within weeks, however, Milton
Eisenhower, president of the university, suddenly resigned so
that he could spend more time as adviser to his brother, Presi-
clent Dwight Eisenhower. Milton and Eric were close friends,
en c! Milton persuaded the university's board of trustees to
name Dr. Walker as his successor.
The next fourteen years witnesses! significant advances in
Penn State's influence and reputation as one of the nation's
front-rank public universities. Dr. Walker listed his four
greatest accomplishments as expanding the university's
physical plant (which tripled in value) through nonpartisan
support of Pennsylvania's governors and legislators; the
creation of a College of Medicine and teaching hospital with a
$50 million gift from the charitable trusts created by chocolate
magnate Milton S. Hershey; recruitment of an internationally
distinguished faculty; and the establishment of a series of
seventeen "Commonwealth Campuses" that enabled many
Pennsylvanians to receive the first two years of a Penn State
education while living at home. The Commonwealth Campuses
fulfilled much the same role as community colleges and were
controversial in some political quarters of the state. But Dr.
Walker rightly pointed out that the campuses enabled students
to keep costs down en cl filled a void in Pennsylvania, which was
slow to enter the community college arena. By 1970 nearly half
of all Penn State freshman began their college careers at a
Commonwealth Campus. The university's total enrollment at
that time was 40,000, three times the number of 1956.
Leading Penn State cluring the period of student unrest in
the 1960s, Dr. Walker in typical wry fashion commented that
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
he found himself in the ironic position of counseling modera-
tion for student activities, while in the 1950s he had counseled
activism for that generation of "apathetic" students.
While serving as dean of engineering and as university pres-
ident, Dr. Walker continued to provide national leadership for
engineering education. In addition to serving on many com-
mittees of the ASEE, he chaired the Engineering College
Research Council (1952 to 1954), was vice-president (1952 to
1954), and president (1961 to 1962) of the ASEE, and chaired
the society's task force on Goals of Engineering Education
(1963 to 1968~. He also chaired the National Science Board
(1964 to 1966), was president of the Engineers Joint Council
(1962 to 1963), and headed the Department of Defense's Na-
val Research Advisory Committee (1963 to 1965~. He was a
member of a special pane! (1961 to 1963) of President John F.
Kennedy's science advisory committee that provided the blue-
print for federal support of technical manpower training
programs well into the l9S0s.
Serving in these prominent leadership posts convinced Dr.
Walker that engineers needed a voice in national policy along-
side that of their scientist brethren if the nation were to
establish effective, comprehensive policies in such matters as
weapons systems and space technologies. To that end, in 1964
he helped to found and became vice-president of the National
Academy of Engineering (NAE). He became president of the
Academy in 1966, serving in that position for four years, and
served on seven NAE committees. He also worked as a consult
ant over a span of three decades to various units of the
Department of Defense and was a long-term member of the
National Research Council's Division of Physical Sciences Com-
mittee on Undersea Warfare.
After retiring from Penn State as president emeritus in 1970,
Dr. Walker became vice-president for science and technology
at the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). Private
industry was not unfamiliar territory for him. He had worked
as a consultant to such firms as Colts Fire Arms Company and
the Koppers Company and served on the board of directors of
a half-dozen industrial and commercial firms. He retired from
ALCOA in 1975 but remained a force in engineering
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ERIC A. WALKER
285
education, chairing the National Science Founciation's
Committee on Centers of Engineering Excellence, and
consulting in industry and higher education.
He authored or coauthored more than 300 publications and
in 1989 published an autobiography, Now It's My Turn:
Engineering My Way. The ASEE honored him with its Benjamin
Garver Lamme Award in 1965. The National Science
Founclation, through the U.S. Geological Survey, named a
glacial ridge for him in Antarctica, and he received a multitude
of other honors from groups as diverse as the Royal Society of
the Arts, the American Society of Military Engineers, the
Institute of Radio Engineers, and the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences. In 1970 President Richard Nixon awarcled
him a White House Citation in recognition of his many career
achievements, and the Department of Defense presented him
with its Distinguished Public Service Mecial. He received
honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Hofstra
University, the University of Notre Dame, en c! nearly a clozen
other institutions. But of all his honors, Dr. Walker was
especially proud of the Horatio Alger Award, accordecl him by
the American Schools and Colleges Association in 1959 for
"enhancing the American tradition of overcoming obstacles to
achieve success through diligence, industry, en cl perseverance."
Representative terms from entire chapter:
electrical engineering
