2000s: Intro CS course relevant only to future cubicle-dwellers"
This is a serious problem. When I speak to students from programs other than Computer Science, even from other scientific disciplines, they question why they should ever have to take a Computer Science class. But if you tell a Chemistry major he needs a Physics course, or tell a Biology major that he needs a Chemistry course, it is likely to be accepted as perfectly reasonable. To many, CS == Computer Programming.
But this is a tough problem. To get non-CS students interested, we probably need to stress the applicability and practicality of being able to understand fundamentals and concepts of Computer Science as applied to other scientific disciplines. "Putting the science back into Computer Science" may be the only way to do so, while also dispelling the notion that you only need Computer Science education if you wish to program computers for a living.
It seems like most computer scientists, when observing the general lack of mainstream interest in computer science, assume that there's actually a problem with having a low number of computer science students. I disagree. Why do we ("we" being the computer science community, of which I casually consider myself a member) need more people? Is there reason to assume that there are many people who would be interested in and excel in computer science that never gave it a try? A decent portion of the supposedly interested computer science students I've interacted with don't even seem like they're a good fit for studying CS. If anything, I think we should have fewer CS students (perhaps this could be accomplished by requiring earlier or more difficult weed-out courses like Discrete Math, Algorithms, or Theory of Computation).
Especially with today's ubiquity of personal computing, certainly anyone who's interested in computers or computation can seek it out themselves—I don't think they need CS departments to cater or market themselves to them.
Oh, and about the "CS == programming" debate: If you don't like the act of programming, I really don't see how you're a good fit for studying computer science. This isn't to say that computer science and programming are one and the same. Consider this: biology != dissection, but if you can't stand dissection, I doubt you're a good fit for studying biology.
2000s: Intro CS course relevant only to future cubicle-dwellers"
This is a serious problem. When I speak to students from programs other than Computer Science, even from other scientific disciplines, they question why they should ever have to take a Computer Science class. But if you tell a Chemistry major he needs a Physics course, or tell a Biology major that he needs a Chemistry course, it is likely to be accepted as perfectly reasonable. To many, CS == Computer Programming.
But this is a tough problem. To get non-CS students interested, we probably need to stress the applicability and practicality of being able to understand fundamentals and concepts of Computer Science as applied to other scientific disciplines. "Putting the science back into Computer Science" may be the only way to do so, while also dispelling the notion that you only need Computer Science education if you wish to program computers for a living.