Engineering education and the identities of engineers in Colombia, 1887-1972

Technology and Culture

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 811-838

  Valderrama, Andrés ^a   Camargo, Juan ^b   Mejía, Idelman ^b   Mejía, Antonio ^c   Lleras, Ernesto ^d   Ogarcía, Antoni ^b  

^a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF DENMARK   (Denmark)

^b UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES   (Colombia)

^c UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA   (Colombia)

^d Department of Systems Engineering ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 73649111016     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0341     Document Type: Review

References (108)

1. Juan Lucena, "De Criollos a Mexicanos: Engineers' Identity and the Construction of Mexico," History and Technology 23 (2007): 275-88;
2. Gary Lee Downey, "Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress," History and Technology 23 (2007): 289-308;
3. Gary Lee Downey and Juan Carlos Lucena, "Knowledge and Professional Identity in Engineering: Code-Switching and the Metrics of Progress, "History and Technology 20 (2004): 393-420.
4. See, for example, Lucena; Downey; Yiannis Antoniou, Michalis Assimakopoulos, and Konstantinos Chatzis, "The National Identity of Interwar Greek Engineers: Elitism, Rationalization, Technocracy, and Reactionary Modernism," History and Technology 23 (2007): 241-61;
5. Irina Gouzevitch and Ian Inkster, "Introduction: Identifying Engineers in History," History of Technology 27 (2007): 101-6;
6. André Grelon, "French Engineers: Between Unity and Heterogeneity,"History of Technology 27 (2007): 107-23;
7. Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Cardoso deMatos, "Being an Engineer in the European Periphery: Three Case Studies of Portuguese Engineering," History of Technology 27 (2007): 125-46;
8. Antoni Roca-Rosell, Guillermo Lusa-Monforte, Francesc Barca-Salom, and Carles Puig-Pla, "Industrial Engineering in Spain in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: From Renewal to Crisis," History of Technology 27 (2007): 147-61;
9. A-Imam Al-Sammak and Hisham Al-Shehabi, "Development of Engineering Education in Bahrain," IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 25 (2006): 12-17;
10. Osman Lotfy El-Sayed, Juan Lucena, and Gary Downey, "Engineering and Engineering Education in Egypt," IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 25 (2006): 18-25;
11. S. Birgül Tantekin-Ersolmaz, Ekrem Ekinci, and Gülsün Saǧ lamer, "Engineering Education and Practice in Turkey," IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 25 (2006): 26-35.
12. Downey and Lucena, 395.
13. Ibid., 399.
14. Fabio Zambrano, "Región, nación e identidad cultural," in Imágenes y reflexiones de la cultura en Colombia (Bogotá, 1991).
15. Downey and Lucena (n. 1 above), 402.
16. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J., 1995);
17. see also Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London, 1997).
18. For the sake of readability, we chose to abbreviate the names of the selected institutions. Escuela deMinas stands for Escuela Nacional deMinas, located in Medellín, Antioquia. Facultad de Ingeniería stands for the institution that is now known as Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia; throughout its history it has had various other names, including Colegio Militar y Escuela Politécnica, Escuela de Ingeniería, and Facultad de Matemáticas e Ingeniería. Universidad de los Andes stands for the Engineering School of Universidad de los Andes. Both Facultad de Ingeniería and Universidad de los Andes are located in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia.
19. The primary and secondary sources available to us in Bogotá have also limited our work.
20. The historiography on Colombia published in Spanish is, of course, huge. There are very few works on the history of Colombia available in English; the most recent are David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley, Calif., 1993);
21. Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (New York, 2002);
22. Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875-2002 (Durham, N.C., 2006).
23. There are only two works available in English regarding the history of engineering education in Colombia: Frank Safford, The Ideal of the Practical: Colombia's Struggle to Form a Technical Elite (Austin, Tex., 1976);
24. Pamela Murray, Dreams of Development: Colombia's National School of Mines and Its Engineers, 1887-1970 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1997). The main works on the history of engineering and engineering education in Colombia available in Spanish focus mainly on the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.
25. The short list includes: Alfredo Bateman, Páginas para la historia de la ingeniería en Colombia (Bogotá, 1972);
26. Gabriel Poveda Ramos, Ingeniería e historia de las técnicas (Bogotá, 1993);
27. Diana Obregón Torres, Sociedades científicas en Colombia: La invención de una tradición 1859-1936 (Bogotá, 1992);
28. and a journal initiated in 2005 by engineers from the Sociedad Colombiana de Ingenieros called Apuntes para la historia de la ingeniería.
29. Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, letter quoted in Alberto Mayor Mora, "La Escuela Nacional deMinas deMedellín y la educación de la burguesía industrial antioqueña,"Revista Colombiana de Sociología 2 (1982): 23-67.
30. In fact, the Facultad de Matemáticas e Ingeniería was the country's most prestigious mathematics school for many years. For the history of mathematics in Colombia, see Clara Helena Sánchez, "Las matemáticas en los Anales de Ingeniería," Mathesis 9 (1993): 105-24;
31. Clara Helena Sánchez, "Cien años de historia de la matemática en Colombia, 1848-1948,"Revista de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Física y Naturales 26 (2002): 239-60;
32. Victor Albis y LuisMoreno Armella, "Una hipótesis equivalente al postulado euclideo de las paralelas," Boletín de Matemáticas 10 (1976): 78-85;
33. Víctor Albis e Ignacio Soriano Lleras, "The Work of Indalecio Liévano on the Foundations of Real Numbers," Historia Mathematica 3 (1976).
34. Except for a small faction of recalcitrant conservatives for whom progress was not at all desirable.
35. Marco Palacios and Frank Safford, Colombia: País Fragmentado, Sociedad Dividida (Bogotá, 2002), 388.
36. Murray, 6.
37. Gustavo Perez, "Historia de la construcción del Ferrocarril Girardot-Bogotá," in Apuntes para la historia de la ingeniería (n. 11 above).
38. Jorge Arias de Greiff, Historia de la astronomía en Colombia (Bogotá, 1993).
39. There exists a wide range of works regarding the separation of Panama and Colombia and the construction of the Panama Canal. However, much of this literature is based only on primary and secondary sources in English from archives and libraries in the United States, which limits the analytical scope of this historical period. No one has ever approached this period by taking into account sources in both English and Spanish from the United States, Panama, and Colombia. A notable exception that incorporates the story from Panama is Peter M. Sánchez, Panama Lost? U.S.Hegemony, Democracy, and the Canal (Gainesville, Fla., 2007);
40. and a valuable recent contribution from scholars of the three countries is Heraclio Bonilla and Gustavo Montañez, eds., Colombia y Panamá (Bogotá, 2004).
41. The main work in Spanish published in Colombia is Eduardo Lemaitre, Panamá y su separación de Colombia (Bogotá, 1972);
42. the main works in English, with the analytical limitations mentioned above, are David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (New York, 1977),
43. and Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). There is some literature in French, of course, in relation to Ferdinand de Lesseps's first attempts to build a canal during the nineteenth century.
44. Obregón, Sociedades científicas en Colombia (n. 11 above), 124-25.
45. In Spanish-speaking countries, the father's surname is used after the first name(s) of a person, and the mother's surname is given last (or is sometimes omitted). When using only one surname to refer to a person, the father's is used. Thus, for example, Julio Garavito Armero would be shortened to Garavito, but Pedro Nel Ospina to Ospina.
46. Jorge Álvarez Lleras, Official Note, 13 November 1914, Archives of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
47. Pedro Uribe, Official Note, 19 November 1914, Archives of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
48. Alberto Mayor Mora,"Matemáticas y subdesarrollo: La disputa sobre la enseñanza en la ingeniería colombiana de principios del siglo XX," Revista de Extensión Cultural 19 (1986): 14-24.
49. Alberto Mayor Mora,"Matemáticas y subdesarrollo: La disputa sobre la enseñanza en la ingeniería colombiana de principios del siglo XX," Revista de Extensión Cultural 19 (1986): 14-24. Ibid.
50. Jorge Álvarez Lleras, "Refornas en la Escuela de Ingeniería," Anales de Ingeniería, nos. 285-286 (1916): 209-22.
51. Safford (n. 11 above); Poveda Ramos (n. 11 above); Eda Kranakis, "Social Determinants of Engineering Practice: A Comparative View of France and America in the Nineteenth Century," Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 5-70.
52. Alberto Mayor Mora, Técnica y utopía: Biografía intelectual y política de Alejandro López, 1876-1940 (Medellín, 2001).
53. This fact proves that Garavito and also Álvarez Lleras and others at Facultad de Ingeniería were involved in the solution of practical problems for the state, which shows that their defense of the value of theory in training engineers was not a dismissal of the value of practical engineering in the exercise of the profession, as has been suggested by Mayor Mora in "Matemáticas y subdesarrollo." See also Arias de Greiff (n. 18 above); Ericka Herazo, Recepción del Electromagnetismo en Bogotá 1868-1919 (Bogotá, 2004);
54. Diana Obregón, "Julio Garavito Armero: A propósito de una biografía," Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico 58 (2001): 29-36.
55. José María Bravo, Monografía sobre el Ferrocarril de Antioquia (Medellín, 1974).
56. Murray (n. 11 above), 28.
57. Palacios (n. 10 above), 66-71.
58. Jorge Orlando Melo, "La República Conservadora," in Colombia Hoy, ed. Mario Arrubla et al. (Bogotá, 1982), 80.
59. Pedro Nel Ospina was one of the founders of Escuela de Minas, as previously mentioned. Unlike his brother Tulio, who remained closely related to the school, Pedro Nel embarked on a political career. However, there is no evidence that he was any different from other presidents just because he was educated as an engineer. Perhaps it was more important for his successful political career that he was the son of former president Mariano Ospina Rodríguez.
60. Palacios, 52; Bushnell (n. 10 above), 166.
61. Joaquín Emilio Cardoso, "El Ingeniero Colombiano y el ingeniero extranjero," Anales de Ingeniería 33 (1925): 350.
62. Alejandro López Mejía, "Realizaciones, limitaciones y tensiones internas de la misión Kemmerer en Colombia," in El Banco de la República, Antecedentes, Evolución y Estructura (Bogotá, 1990).
63. Palacios and Safford (n. 15 above), 525.
64. Palacios (n. 10 above), 53; Jorge Álvarez Lleras, "Las obras públicas y nuestros ingenieros," Anales de Ingeniería 35 (1927): 575-80.
65. Historical texts often refer to the period lasting from 1904 to 1930, when all of Colombia's presidents were conservative, as the "Conservative Hegemony." Likewise, the period from 1930 to 1946, when all of the country's presidents were liberals, is known as the "Liberal Republic." However, this periodization based on the party affiliation of the country's heads of state has become a topic of much debate in recent Colombian historiography.
66. Murray (n. 11 above), 42.
67. Ibid., 43.
68. Alberto Villegas, Official Note, 25 September 1946, Archives of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
69. José María Obando, Official Note to the General Secretary of the Universidad Nacional, October 1940, Archives of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
70. The ITC graduated technicians with the titles of "Ingeniero en Electricidad y Artes Mecánicas"; "Ingeniero en Electricidad e Industrias Textiles"; and "Ingeniero en Electricidad y Arte Industrial Decorativo." See Equipo de Trabajo para la Modernización del Instituto Técnico Central, Instituto Técnico Central: Establecimiento Público de Educación Superior (Bogotá, 2003).
71. Pedro Uribe, Ricardo Perez, and Jorge Alvarez Lleras, "Reforma de la Enseñanza Técnica en el País," Anales de Ingeniería 33 (1925): 152-58.
72. ANDI and FENALCO became the two main competing trade associations in the country. The first comprised the emerging group of industrialists with a core of textilecompany owners, managers, and leaders; the second, the traditional coffee exporters. The members of these associations not only lobbied the government to pursue advantageous laws and policies, but also very quickly became involved in the government itself. See Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, La Ofensiva Empresarial (Bogotá, 1992),
73. and Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, Industriales, Política y Diplomacia (Bogotá, 2002).
74. Palacios (n. 10 above), 114-34.
75. John C. Shearer, Asesor de la O.E.A., "Informe sobre el proyecto de la creación de un Instituto de Relaciones Industriales y del Trabajo," 22/07/1961, Archives of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Fls: 137.
76. Murray (n. 11 above), 48.
77. Anuario de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá, 1939);
78. Regino Martínez-Chavanz, Germán Cubillos, Flor Marina Poveda, and José Luis Villaveces, Física y Química: Historia Social de la Ciencia en Colombia (Bogotá, 1993), 246.
79. Before then, many public institutions in Latin America were organized in selfcontained separate schools (see n. 61 below).
80. Informe de la Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad de los Andes, 1958, Archives of the Universidad de los Andes.
81. Escobar (n. 7 above), 4.
82. Ibid., 21.
83. quot;Deliberaciones de la Convención Nacional de Ingenieros Colombianos," Anales de Ingeniería 57 (1951): 58-105.
84. Efrain Rozo Pulido, Official Note, July 1936, and Belizario Ruiz Wilches and Jorge Gómez Pinzon, Official Note, November 1936, both in the Archives of Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
85. Hernando Correal, "Nueva Facultad de Ingeniería," Anales de Ingeniería 67 (1961): 9-11.
86. Hernando Correal, "Nueva Facultad de Ingeniería," Anales de Ingeniería 67 (1961): 9-11. Ibid.
87. Charles P. Fossum to Hernando Correal, Official Note, December 1962, Archives of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
88. Until then, the Universidad Nacional, likemany other public institutions in Latin America, was organized in self-contained separate schools. For instance, Facultad de Ingeniería taught all the subjects students would take to become engineers, including basic and advanced mathematics, the basic and advanced engineering courses, and the requisite social science and humanities courses. Each school had its own administrative staff to handle everything necessary, including student registration, budgeting, operations, and personnel. There were no service courses among schools. In short, each school operated like a small, independent university.
89. José Félix Patiño, "Organización Actual de la Universidad," in Transformación Social y Transformación de la Universidad: Las Reformas Académicas de 1965 y 1989 (Bogotá, 2001).
90. Rudolph Atcon, "La Universidad Latinoamericana," ECO Revista de la Cultura de Occidente 7 (1963).
91. Operación Cacique: Tácticas de Intrusión de los Estados Unidos en la Universidad Colombiana (Bogotá, 1972);
92. Gabriel Restrepo, "La Universidad Nacional en la Encrucijada: 1964-1966," in La Reforma Patiño, ed.William Lee Magnusson (Bogotá, 2006).
93. Carlos Obando, Minister of Public Works, letter to Hernando Correal, Dean of Faculty of Engineering (1962), Archives of the Universidad Nacional;
94. Rodrigo Botero, "The Leverage of MIT Abroad," Technology Review (1965): 19-21.
95. Botero, 19-21.
96. Civil engineering at Universidad de los Andes was understood to be an engineering specialty focused on water supply and infrastructure development; this differs from the kind of civil engineering defended by Facultad de Ingeniería in previous decades, which more or less aspired to the French elite civil-engineering model.
97. Eduardo Aldana and Carlos Amaya, personal interviews with author, Bogotá, 13 March 2006. Aldana was a former dean of the engineering school and rector of Universidad de los Andes; Amaya also was a former dean of the engineering school.
98. Downey (n. 1 above).
99. Palacios (n. 10 above), 172; Murray (n. 11 above), 90; Luis Eduardo Fajardo, "From the Alliance of Progress to the Plan Colombia: A Retrospective Look at United States Aid to Colombia," Working Paper No. 28, London School of Economics, Crisis States Program (2003).
100. Botero (n. 65 above), 19-21.
101. Daniel Arango, Los Primeros Diez Años de la Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, 1998), 169-72; Magnusson (n. 64 above), 175-95.
102. Palacios, 170-78.
103. Downey and Lucena (n. 1 above), 393.
104. Anousheh Karvar, "Model Reception in the Domain of Engineering Education: Mediation and Negotiation," History and Technology 12 (1995): 81-93.
105. Grelon (n. 2 above); Bruce Seely, "The 'Imbalance' of Theory and Practice in American Engineering Education: Reforms and Changes, 1920-1980," ICON 5 (2000): 41-63.
106. Bruce Seely, "Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering Colleges: 1900-1960," Technology and Culture 34 (1993): 344-86;
107. Bruce Seely, "The Other Re-engineering of Engineering Education, 1900-1965," Journal of Engineering Education 88 (1999): 285-94.
108. Escobar (n. 7 above), 10.