In a letter to APS News , Dan Kleppner pointed out that a recent article on MRI rare gas imaging had failed to mention that this new and valuable technique was conceived and developed by William Happer of Yale University. But professors can do a lot, because declining interest in physics stems largely from faculty disinterest in teaching. The hiring, pay, promotions and tenure of essentially every faculty member at PhD-granting departments is based nearly exclusively on research.
Most departments are eager to hire promising researchers, regardless of teaching skills.
Here at the University of Arkansas, we have demonstrated that attention to students can have big payoffs. When APS was founded at the turn of the last century, Europe was the world center of physics. Americans went to Europe to learn physics, and the shift to America was the result at least in part of mass immigration of European physicists to the US in the 1930s. Thus the internationalism of physics has been one of its characteristic, proud features and great strengths, and Americans have learned more than they have taught. Today, America is a magnet for foreign physics students in part because of the wealth of federal funding available for physics.