This document contains the Conference Program, a list of participants with contact information, abstracts of the presentations, and links to materials provided by the presenters. Bernard V. Khoury, AAPT Executive Officer, prepared the following summary of the conference.

"Undergraduate Physics in the New Century" was the grand title of AAPT's recent conference of chairs of physics departments. The conference was attended by 130 chairs from across the country and was held in the American Center for Physics in College Park.

This year's conference was the tenth in a series of department chairs conferences that began about 20 years ago. This conference, like the previous ones in the series, was jointly sponsored by AAPT and by the American Physical Society. The Steering Committee for the conference was co-chaired by Peter Collings of Swarthmore College and Howard Voss of Arizona State University.

The conference began with a reception, dinner and opening session on the evening of Friday, April 14, and closed just before lunch on Sunday, April 16. While the conference focused on undergraduate education issues, sessions and discussions were also held about prospects for federal funding of research in physics and the general Congressional environment surrounding support for science and science education.

The opening sessions provided a budgetary and policy overview of two of the major federal agencies in the federal government. Bob Eisenstein, the National Science Foundation's Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, reported on the significant NSF budget increase proposed by the President to the Congress. Eisenstein emphasized the difficulty of sustaining and justifying such a request in the face of very limited discretionary funds for which many agencies will be competing. Pat Dehmer, Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Science in the Department of Energy, pointed out that DOE provides the largest amount of funding for research in physical sciences among federal agencies. Both Eisenstein and Dehmer mentioned the recent selection of Albert Einstein as "man of the century" as symbolic of the great progress made by physics in the understanding of nature and in providing the technological bases for our remarkably strong economy.

Among a series of sessions on issues facing undergraduate departments, Alan Van Heuvelen and Kathy Andre of The Ohio State University spoke about the impact on physics departments of the new criteria by which schools of engineering are now being accredited. They cited evidence that most recipients of bachelors degrees in physics report that they seldom use specific physics knowledge, but that they rely heavily on the skills refined in their physics programs. The tentative conclusion is that we should see the teaching of physics content not as an end in itself but as a means to inculcate valuable skills such as problem solving, communications, and group efforts. In the same session, Ken Heller of the University of Minnesota reported on his own institution's survey in which the physics department asked the engineering faculty for judgements about the efficacy of the physics program. Again, the engineering faculty expressed only moderate interest in physics content and much more interest in skills that are developed in physics courses. The lessons from this session were that we physicists should rethink our own focus on physics content; we should give additional consideration to the kinds of skills needed by students and less consideration to being sure to teach all of the content that we embed in many of our courses.

In a number of parallel "break out" sessions the conference participants heard reports and discussed program and teaching adaptations from several physics departments. These kinds of small group sessions typically provide the most immediate benefits to the participants since they reflect real experiences and information from a variety of departments.

Three members of the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics, Bob Hilborn, Laurie McNeil, and Jose Mestre, reported on the work of that task force. Bob Hilborn summarized some of the forces affecting physics departments; some of the adaptive responses, and the department site visits being planned by the task force. Laurie McNeil administered parts of a "cosmo quiz" which sought responses about the readiness of departments to rethink their undergraduate programs; the quiz evoked lots of laughs but it also highlighted the difficulties in initiating programmatic changes at the departmental level. Jose Mestre invited the department chairs to list the most significant problems seen by departments; these ranged from the simple symptom of not having enough enrolled students to the more insightful acknowledgment that most faculty are resistant to change a system that has rewarded them so well. Mestre also asked the group to list criteria that might be used if someone were to initiate an accreditation or review process for physics departments. Here there were many responses which can be divided into two categories: internal measures within the department, such as enrollments, available equipment, quality of faculty and students, numbers of research grants and papers; external measures, such as views of alumni, breadth of careers chosen by graduates, reputation across the campus, converts from other majors into physics majors.

Corinne Manogue reported on a new series of courses developed at Oregon State University that sought to respond more flexibly to the expressed interests of students and other faculty. She joined a number of the other speakers in urging that departments seek and heed input from students. This "marketing" approach was one of the themes that could be discerned throughout the conference. If students are not enrolling in our courses in adequate numbers maybe we should reexamine our practices rather than expecting others to change so as to relieve our problems.

In a session on the preparation of teachers, John Layman provided video examples of effective interactions with students so as to induce the students to answer their own questions. While some of the student comments evoked laughter, it was clear that much of the evident student confusion could be attributed to imprecise use of language for which we scientists have very precise meanings that are not shared within the general population. For example, the aphorism "energy is more that just force, it is power," can have a clear (social and political) meaning to most people while it meets with mockery from physicists.

Roman Czujko provided many data and graphs on enrollments and employment in physics. He noted that the majority of Ph.D. degrees earned in the US were earned by non-citizens; he projected that the number of US citizen Ph.D.'s in physics would soon fall below 500 per year. At the undergraduate level, the number of bachelor's degrees earned in physics has fallen dramatically at the same time as the number of bachelor's degrees earned across all fields has increased significantly. Among those who earn a bachelor's degree in physics, more than one-third obtain no further formal schooling, while one-quarter will obtain a masters degree in another field. Only about one-sixth of physics bachelor's degree recipients will earn a Ph.D. in physics.

Diandra Leslie-Pelecky reported on an APS effort to encourage each physics department to identify a "career and professional development liaison" who would help to focus attention on some of the broad educational interests and needs of students. Mike Lubell, Director of the APS Office of Public Affairs, provided an overview of the politics of physics funding. He encouraged all departments to work actively to support federal appropriations for the funding of physics and physics education.

Two themes emerged from the conference. First, we should recognize that we are providing services to our students, to other departments, and to other faculty. We should be more willing to see these groups as "customers" whose views and opinions, while not controlling our undergraduate programs, can provide useful insights on how we might improve those programs.

We should recognize that many of our graduates make very little use of the contents of our physics courses. We should see the physics content, not as an end in itself, but as a means of instilling valuable and transferable skills.

Of course, both of these themes, the importance of customers and the relative unimportance of content, are closely related. We need to listen to many voices so as to best determine how to respond to the rapidly changing educational, political and economic environment in which all of our physics departments are embedded.