"Liberal education has failed": Reading like an engineer in 1960s America

Technology and Culture

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 753-782

  Wisnioski, Matthew H ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 73649122440     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.0.0346     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. Lynn T.White jr., "Engineers and the Making of a New Humanism," Journal of Engineering Education 57 (1967): 375-76.
2. Bruno Latour, Aramis, or, the Love of Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
3. See also Walter G. Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (Baltimore, 1990);
4. Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind's Eye (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 153-68;
5. and Louis L. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
6. Charles Riborg Mann, A Study of Engineering Education (New York, 1918), 63-66, 88, 92-94, 106-8;
7. Frank Aydelotte, English and Engineering: A Volume of Essays for English Classes in Engineering Schools, 2nd ed. (New York, 1923).
8. Bruce Seely, "SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education," Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739-72;
9. Selected Readings in the Study of Technology and Society, 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh, 1941);
10. Lawrence P. Grayson, The Making of an Engineer: An Illustrated History of Engineering Education in the United States and Canada (New York, 1993), 138-42.
11. David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977), 32.
12. Elliot Dunlop Smith, "Can Humanistic-Social Study Be Made Engineering Education?" Journal of Engineering Education 36 (1946): 134-38.
13. The Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education became the ASEE in 1946. "Aims and Scope of Engineering Curricula," Journal of Engineering Education 30 (1940): 555-66;
14. "Report of Committee on Engineering Education After the War," Journal of Engineering Education 34 (1944): 589-614.
15. W. E. Howland, "The Argument: Engineering Education for Social Leadership," Technology and Culture 10 (1969): 6 (emphasis in original).
16. Henry Knepler, "Engineering Education and the Humanities in America," Leonardo 6 (1973): 305-9.
17. Gary Lee Downey and Juan C. Lucena, "Knowledge and Professional Identity in Engineering: Code-Switching and the Metrics of Progress," History and Technology 20, no. 4 (2004): 395.
18. Bruce Seely, "The Other Re-engineering of Engineering Education, 1900-1965," Journal of Engineering Education 88 (1999): 285-94.
19. The interim report was criticized by industry for ignoring "the inability of engineers to express themselves in clear, concise, effective, and interesting language." The final version thus emphasized the vocational aspects of the humanities. Still, it concluded that an engineering education should convey "an understanding of the evolution of society and of the impact of technology on it; and acquaintance with and appreciation of the heritage of other cultural fields; and the development of both a personal philosophy which will ensure satisfaction in the pursuit of a productive life and a sense of moral and ethical values consistent with the career of a professional engineer." "Summary of the Report on Evaluation of Engineering Education," Journal of Engineering Education 46 (1955): 25-60.
20. Goals of Engineering Education: Preliminary Report (Washington, D.C., 1965), 11, 20, 21.
21. For further background, see Jonathan Harwood, "Engineering Education between Science and Practice: Rethinking the Historiography," History and Technology 22, no. 1 (2006): 53-79;
22. Bruce Seely, "Research, Engineering, and Science in Engineering Colleges, 1900-1960," Technology and Culture 34 (1993): 344-86.
23. Jeffrey Herf, "Belated Pessimism: Technology and Twentieth-Century German Conservative Intellectuals," in Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism, ed. Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn, and Howard P. Segal (Amherst, Mass., 1995), 115-36.
24. On publishing, see Marshall Best, "In Books They Call It a Revolution,"Daedalus 92 (1963): 30-41;
25. on technology's critics, see Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 133.
26. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y., 1969), xiii.
27. My book in progress explores this spectrum of activity. For initial conclusions, see Matthew H. Wisnioski, "Engineers and the Intellectual Crisis of Technology, 1957-1973" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2005).
28. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
29. Scholarship in the history of reading has demonstrated that this practice is far from transparent. See Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 1994), 1-23;
30. Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York, 1990), 154-90;
31. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980).
32. Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison, "Conceptual Framework: Technology Debates as Appropriation Processes," in The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939, ed. Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 15.
33. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1996), 190.
34. Samuel C. Florman, "Comment: Engineers and the End of Innocence," Technology and Culture 10 (1969): 14-16.
35. quot;Evolution of the BBN Underground," Signal/Noise 1, no. 1 (1970): 1, 5.
36. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 165-76.
37. David Beers, Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America's Fall from Grace (New York, 1996), 121-24.
38. Andrew Warwick and David Kaiser, "Conclusion: Kuhn, Foucault, and the Power of Pedagogy," in Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. David Kaiser (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 393-409.
39. Humanistic-Social Research Project, General Education in Engineering (Washington, D.C., 1956), 25.
40. Noel de Nevers, Technology and Society (Reading, Mass., 1972), back cover.
41. De Nevers was dismayed by how off the mark students could be; for example, many believed that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a positive technological future. See Noel de Nevers, A General Education Course on Technology for the Non-Technological Student (Salt Lake City, 1970), 10.
42. General Education in Engineering, 3-6.
43. Ibid., 94-95. Bruce Seely examines Case Institute's curriculum at length in "SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education" (n. 4 above), 749-52.
44. Tensions were apparent as early as 1960. Earl McGrath identified engineering as "at the very center" of the problem of specialization in higher education, asserting that it was because of technology that "domestic and international social problems of unprecedented magnitude have arisen"; see Edwin J. Holstein and Earl James McGrath, Liberal Education and Engineering (New York, 1960), v.
45. Anthologies designed specifically for or by engineers included: Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization, 2 vols. (New York, 1967);
46. William Henry Davenport and Daniel M. Rosenthal, Engineering: Its Role and Function in Human Society (New York, 1967);
47. Donald P. Lauda and Robert D. Ryan, eds., Advancing Technology: Its Impact on Society (Dubuque, Ia., 1971).
48. A brief list of other anthologies includes: Charles R.Walker, Modern Technology and Civilization: An Introduction to Human Problems in the Machine Age (New York, 1962);
49. John G. Burke, ed., The New Technology and Human Values (Belmont, Calif., 1966);
50. Carroll W. Pursell, Readings in Technology and American Life (New York, 1969);
51. John P. Rasmussen, ed., The New American Revolution: The Dawning of the Technocratic Era (New York, 1972).
52. They collected surveys from 175 schools and visited 27: Cal-Berkeley, Caltech, University of Cincinnati, Colorado School of Mines, Columbia, Cooper Union, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgia Tech, HMC, Howard, IIT, University of Illinois, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Michigan, Newark College of Engineering, NC State, Northwestern, Penn State, Purdue, RPI, Rice, SLU, Stanford, Swarthmore, and the Air Force Academy; see ASEE Humanistic-Social Research Project, Liberal Learning for the Engineer (Washington, D.C., 1968).
53. Liberal Learning for the Engineer (1968) Ibid., 4-7.
54. Liberal Learning for the Engineer (1968) Ibid., 4-7. Ibid., 35-37.
55. Seely, "SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education" (n. 4 above), 741.
56. Melvin Kranzberg, "Technology and Human Values," Virginia Quarterly Review 40 (1964): 578-92.
57. Kranzberg and Pursell, "Technology's Challenge," in Technology in Western Civilization (n. 31 above), 704.
58. The book was the culmination of pedagogical experiments dating at least to 1968; see Richard C. Dorf, Technology, Society, and Man (San Francisco, 1974).
59. Richard C. Dorf, Technology, Society, and Man (1974) Ibid., 21.
60. Kerr (n. 16 above), 92.
61. L.M. K. Boelter, Education for the Profession, Department of Engineering, UCLA (1963), 2.
62. Statistics gathered from UCLA's catalogs from 1945 to 1955.
63. Carl W. Borgmann, The Ford Foundation's Role in Engineering Education, 1964. UCLA's grant was one of three awarded by Ford's new engineering-education program; MIT and Case Institute of Technology were the other recipients.
64. Allen B. Rosenstein, A Study of a Profession and Professional Education: The Final Publication and Recommendations of the UCLA Educational Development Program, School of Engineering and Applied Science, UCLA (1968), II-13 (italics in original). The EDP had an inauspicious start. The University of California System's Committee on Educational Policy challenged its necessity, suggesting that pedagogical studies detracted from scholarship, which was the mark of a "first-class university." It delayed accepting the grant and suggested using the funds to recruit faculty. Frustrated by the treatment, co-Principal Investigator Myron Tribus left to become dean of Dartmouth's Thayer School.
65. See Committee on Educational Policy, "Ford Foundation Grant," 12 February 1960,
66. and Myron Tribus, "Dear President Kerr," 27 January 1960, both in box 8, RS 401, UCLA university archives.
67. Allen B. Rosenstein, "Engineering Science in EE Education," in Proceedings of the International Conference at Syracuse and Sagamore, ed. Norman Balabanian and Wilbur R. Page (Syracuse, N.Y., 1961), 95-98.
68. D. Rosenthal, A. B. Rosenstein, and G.Wiseman, Information Theory and Curricular Synthesis, UCLA (1963).
69. The process also figured prominently in Rosenstein, A Study of a Profession and Professional Education, III-1-22.
70. D. Rosenthal, A. B. Rosenstein, and M. Tribus, "How Can the Objective of Engineering Education Be Best Achieved?" Data Link 10, no. 4 (1961): 8-15. Their argument drew on insights from Lynn White, Alfred N.Whitehead, Henri Le Chatelier, and Norbert Weiner.
71. Rosenstein, A Study of a Profession and Professional Education, II-11, II-14. Rosenstein found inspiration in an essay by Lynn White (the source of this article's epigraph) that called for an erasure of the two-cultures divide and for the aristocracy of humanism.
72. See also Lynn White jr.,"Humanismand the Education of Engineers," in Studies of Courses and Sequences in Humanities, Fine Arts and Social Sciences for Engineering Students, Department of Engineering, UCLA (1963), 39-54.
73. Bartlett was MIT's director of humanities. Bonham Campbell, ed., Proceedings of the Conference on the Humanities in the Engineering Curriculum, UCLA (1963), 3, 37.
74. William Henry Davenport and Jacob P. Frankel, The Applied Humanities, School of Engineering and Applied Science, UCLA (1968), 44, 75;
75. Gershon Weltman, "Final Exam," 1 June 1966, personal papers of Gershon Weltman.
76. Educational Development Program, "The Wright Brothers' Airplane: A Case History in Engineering Design,"UCLA (1964);
77. Educational Development Program, "The Hoover Dam: A Case History in Engineering Design," UCLA (1964).
78. Studies of Courses and Sequences, 37.
79. William Henry Davenport and Daniel M. Rosenthal, "Engineering: Its Role and Function in Human Society," UCLA (1966); a year later, their reader became a textbook in Pergamon Press's new Humanities and Social Sciences series for engineers.
80. Rosenstein, A Study of a Profession and Professional Education (n. 44 above), xii.
81. The trend toward graduate research was pronounced. In 1963, graduate students outnumbered undergraduates for the first time; by 1969, there were 168 faculty members, 135 undergraduate courses, and 163 graduate courses (statistics gathered from UCLA's catalogs from 1955 to 1969).
82. Chauncey Starr, "To the Prospective Engineering Student," in Announcement of the College of Engineering 7, no. 11 (1967): 5.
83. On technological assessment, see Starr, "Social Benefit versus Technological Risk," Science 165, 19 September 1969, 1232-38.
84. Gershon Weltman and Julia B. Kessler, "How Relevant Is the Incidental? An Experiment in Engineering Education," Engineering Education 60, no. 10 (1970): 964-66.
85. Correspondence with IIT, unprocessed papers of Allen B. Rosenstein; J. Herbert Hollomon, An Engineering Education Report: System Response to a Changing World, Center for Policy Alternatives (Washington, D.C., 1973), 51.
86. Ad Hoc Committee on Potential Campus Disruptions, box L1.2; "Drugs and the Caltech Students," box X2.6; and Committee on the Freshman Year 1964-1967, box 1.1, all in California Institute of Technology archives (hereafter Caltech archives).
87. Caltech cast the humanities as a source of imagination for technical work and as valuable knowledge in its own right: "Literature is taught as literature, history as history, and philosophy as philosophy"; see Bulletin of the California Institute of Technology 46, no. 4 (1937): 8.
88. Joseph Rhodes Jr., "Letters: Crisis at Caltech," California Tech, 16 April 1967, 2. Rhodes went on to graduate study in history at Harvard and served on President Nixon's Commission on Campus Unrest.
89. Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology, Air Pollution Project: An Educational Experiment in Self-Directed Research, California Institute of Technology (1968), 322.
90. Interdisciplinary efforts would make it "especially attractive for many individuals, corporations, and foundations to make new and generous investments in the future of Caltech"; see Lee DuBridge, "Report of the President," Bulletin of the California Institute of Technology 76, no. 4 (1967): 3-4. In preparation for the campaign, Caltech hired consultants to examine its reputation among corporate and civic leaders. Respondents were "vitally concerned" about social problems demanding solutions "in human terms," and viewed Caltech as weak in the humanities; see Fry Consultants, Inc., California Institute of Technology (An Image Study) (1967), box K4.4, Caltech archives.
91. Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Aims and Goals, Aims and Goals of the California Institute of Technology II: General Problems of Growth and Change of Caltech, California Institute of Technology (1969), 45.
92. 1969, Aims and Goals of the California Institute of Technology II: General Problems of Growth and Change of Caltech, Ibid., 41.
93. Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Aims and Goals, Aims and Goals of the California Institute of Technology III: Introducing the Social and Behavioral Sciences at Caltech, California Institute of Technology (1969), 71.
94. Lester Lees helped found the Environmental Quality Laboratory, and the Environmental Health Sciences program became the Environmental Engineering Science Program; see Report of the Caltech Art Program, 1968-1971, box J1.2, Caltech archives.
95. Aims and Goals of the California Institute of Technology II, 52.
96. Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Aims and Goals, Aims and Goals of the California Institute of Technology VI: The Humanities at Caltech, California Institute of Technology (1969), 2.
97. Harvey Mudd College, Bulletin, 1958-1959 (1958).
98. Harvey Mudd College, Curriculum Study: Harvey Mudd College, June 30-August 9, 1958 (1958), 47-50.
99. In its first ten years, HMC's faculty grew from 7 to 37, and its student body from 48 to 283; see Joseph B. Platt, Harvey Mudd College: The First Twenty Years (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1994), 194-207.
100. Projection '67: The Goals of HMC, box 1, folder 6, George McKelvey Papers, Special Collections at the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges (emphasis added).
101. While in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he met Lewis Mumford, with whom he struck up a twelve-year correspondence. He also initiated correspondences with J. Bronowski and Joseph Wood Krutch; see William H. Davenport, The One Culture (New York, 1970), xi-xiv, 87-120.
102. See also "William H. Davenport: Founding faculty, chairman of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Willard W. Keith, Jr. Fellow in Humanities, 1957-1973: Oral history interview," conducted by Enid Hart Douglass (1990), 113.
103. Joseph B. Platt and J. P Frankel, "A Proposal to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation" (9 October 1968), unprocessed papers of George McKelvey, Special Collections at the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges, appendix E. Lynn White's article had appeared in the March 1967 issue of Science.
104. Joseph B. Platt and J. P Frankel, A Proposal to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1968 Ibid.
105. Ibid. For the source of the language borrowed by Platt, see Associated Students of Harvey Mudd College, The Uses and Abuses of Technology-Choice and Change (24-27 April 1968), unprocessed papers of George McKelvey, Special Collections at the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges (emphasis added).
106. Theodore Waldman, "Quest for Commonwealth, an Applied Humanities Course," in HMC's "Applying Humanities to Engineering" (1971).
107. Harvey Mudd College, Bulletin, 1972-1973 (1972), 1.
108. Joseph Platt, Profile of Harvey Mudd College, 1952-1972: Prepared for the Ford Foundation (June 1962), unprocessed papers of George McKelvey, Special Collections at the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges.
109. Liberal Learning for the Engineer (n. 32 above), 4;
110. Daniel V. De Simone, "Education for Innovation," IEEE Spectrum 5, no. 1 (1968): 83-89
111. quoted in Davenport and Frankel, The Applied Humanities (n. 50 above), 29.
112. Daniel Rosenthal, "Can Humanities Be Applied in Engineering? How?" in "Applying Humanities to Engineering."
113. Draft copy of chapter 5, "Research in the Urban University: Engineering and the Conservative Impulse."
114. Joseph B. Platt, "Science, Society, and Student Unrest," in Science Year: The World Book Science Annual (Chicago, 1968), 27-34.
115. National Academy of Engineering, The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century (Washington, D.C., 2004).
116. See, for example, Jane Lehr, Benjamin Cohen, and Jody Roberts, "The Ethical Dilemmas of a Critical Engineering Education: On Teaching Engineers to Not Be (Like) Engineers," unpublished essay from the INESWorkshop, Virginia Tech, September 2006;
117. Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context (Århus, Denmark, 2009).
118. Howland (n. 7 above), 6.
119. Florman (n. 20 above), 14-16 (emphasis in original).
120. John G. Burke, "Comment: Let's Be Sure Technology Is for Man," Technology and Culture 10 (1969): 12-13;
121. and Burke, The New Technology and Human Values (n. 31 above).
122. Hollomon (n. 58 above), 73.
123. MIT's School of Humanities and Social Sciences, for example, which saw student enrollments climb during the 1960s, surging to 16,856 students in the 1968-1969 academic year, shrank to 11,215 students by 1974. See "MIT Department Profiles," Department of Humanities, Records, AC404, Box 4, Folder "Dean's Report," Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
124. STS, history of science, and technology programs still pursue liberal learning for engineers, but often at cross-purposes with their own academization. For a survey, see Stephen H. Cutcliffe, "The STS Curriculum: What Have We Learned in Twenty Years?" Science, Technology, & Human Values 15, no. 3 (1990): 360-72.
125. Winner (n. 13 above), 133.
126. Liberal Learning for the Engineer (n. 32 above), 28.
127. For a survey of such efforts, see Juan Lucena, Gary Lee Downey, Brent Jesiek, and Sharon Elber, "Competencies Beyond Countries: The Re-Organization of Engineering Education in the United States, Europe, and Latin America," Journal of Engineering Education 96 (2008): 1-15.