Two Year Colleges And The Allure Of "Nano": Understanding Institutional Enthusiasms

As heavy industry and even newer service sector jobs contract in many parts of the United States, regional schemes for economic redevelopment turn increasingly toward high-tech areas, including the many scientific and engineering specialties embodied under the term “nanotechnology.” In southeastern Pennsylvania, a partnership among government agencies, industrial firms and educational institutions has emerged in the last decade to prepare a new workforce for this nanotech sector. The Pennsylvania Nanofabrication Manufacturing Technology (PaNMT) Partnership promises new jobs for unand underemployed citizens in large numbers. This paper considers the optimistic projections about nanotechnological growth that fuel this initiative. In the face of unclear promise about that sector's future, we consider the consequences of such plans for the most marginalized groups of workers; a sector disproportionately minority in make-up. To indicate the origins, consequences, and robust nature of such optimism about new technologies in American culture, we compare discourse surrounding the PaNMT Partnership to earlier positive invocations of technology as a means of economic uplift. We consider how planners in Chicago, facing decaying heavy industry and shrinking employment in the 1960s, turned to similarly upbeat depictions of emerging technologies and the post-secondary training of workers for that sector. We identify ways in which those depictions associated disadvantaged Chicagoans with technical jobs below the level of engineering, and indeed, supported such hierarchical distinctions among occupations rather than a turn to more vertically integrated sorts of labor. PaNMT’s vision of widening opportunities in nanomanufacturing and Chicago's approach to computing and other new technologies in the 1960s both have represented confident projections of corporate expansion and economic uplift for disadvantaged citizens. In both settings, economically marginalized groups have been promised employment in technician and other semi-skilled positions in emergent industries. These outlooks have in part been accurate, but in part overly optimistic. Nanotechnology remains, in Pennsylvania, an area of very slow expansion. They also help to distance certain communities from the pursuit of more desirable, engineering occupations. We ask how this optimism regarding a new industrial realm comes to be among educators and policy makers, and what ideologies regarding work, skill and opportunity in technology based industries it may reflect and promote.