Feedback on the Winter 2025 issue

Really enjoyed the Winter 2025 issue with the articles about the aerospace engineering and physics departments. I’m sure I had some classes with Duane Carey and Paul Dye back in the 1980s. Duane looked like an astronaut even then! I put Paul’s book on my Christmas list and am reading it now.

Thanks for the great issue.

Steven J. Smith
(B.A.E.M. ’81)
Chaska, Minnesota

Thank you for another engaging issue of Minnesota Alumni. I did want to add a couple important parts to the story “The U of M and Oppenheimer.”

First, Frank Oppenheimer, Robert’s brother, was an associate professor of physics at the University of Minnesota from 1947-1949, not 1948.

Second, Frank, although not being truthful about his past Communist Party membership, was really a victim of the Red Scare. According to the Star Tribune, “Knowing he was about to be exposed at the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] hearing, Oppenheimer had drafted a letter of resignation to University President Morrill before leaving for Washington, hoping it would never be used. But Morrill wasted no time announcing to the press that Oppenheimer’s resignation had been accepted, once word reached Minnesota about the HUAC hearing.”

After leaving the U of M, Frank Oppenheimer was blacklisted nationally and worked as a rancher and a high school science teacher in rural Colorado. He was finally able to return to higher education in 1959 at the University of Colorado, thanks to the tremendous courage shown by Wesley Brittin, chair at the time of the CU Boulder Department of Physics. At CU Oppenheimer advanced from research associate to associate professor and then full professor. He also founded the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco. Quite a journey for someone who worked on the atomic bomb and then was asked to leave the U of M in the late 1940s by a UMN president.

Bob Rubinyi
Minneapolis

On University protests

President Cunningham’ statement [“What the Future Holds], about “Balancing free speech and safety” offers a compromise position on protests that included her own inauguration. I suggest that her, as well other university presidents’, positions misunderstand the issue. Protesters, some of whose concerns I share, understand the conventions of academia. They flout them because they gain attention they would not get otherwise. Facing student outbursts in the 1960s, Notre Dame President Father Theodore Hesburgh had a better answer than “limiting protests to one bullhorn.” In his letter to the University on February 17, 1969, he wrote: “Anyone or any group that substitutes force for rational persuasion, be it violent or nonviolent, will be given 15 minutes of meditation to cease and desist.”

Frank T. Manheim (M.S.’53)
Kansas City, Missouri

On the moon

The Winter 2025 issue [“Safe Storage”] mentions using “a permanently shaded and therefore naturally cold crater on the far side of the moon, where temperatures consistently hover near or below 196 degrees Celsius.” I should probably remove Ed Ney’s name from my thesis if I didn’t point out that the far side of the moon isn’t any shadier or colder than the near side. The original article referred to craters at the south pole of the moon at minus 196C.

That is in part why the current multinational push to return to the moon is focused on the south pole.

Bill Golisch (M.S. ’83)
Oceanside, California

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