Our project reviews the origins of and shifts within engineering, from its prominence in military history, to mass production, the technological change that occurred in the 1960s, and moves towards a focus on sustainability. We explore engineering education in schools and universities, focusing on the history of engineering and the Engineering Studies program at Lafayette. With that, we analyze efforts of engineering education reform over time. Our research then focuses on the problems within the world of engineering, asking the essential questions: Who has access to engineering? What is its purpose in this world? How do we use it? We describe the current engineering culture, delving into a prominent issue of engineers designing for industry and not community when involved in engineering development projects. We also consider the demographics of engineering and engineers as well, exploring differences in race, gender, age, etc.
The emergence of engineers, engineering practice, and engineering education has a deep connection to the development of countries. When countries developed as empires and colonies during the 18th and 19th centuries, engineers worked both for the internal organization and its expansion of empires and in the colonies themselves as agents of imperial development (Lucena et al., 13). Within these colonies, engineers and their imperial government profited off of communities’ forced labor to extract natural resources necessary to construct imperial projects. They would take advantage by taxing them, converting them to Christianity, and politically re-organizing their communities to facilitate the transport of wealth from colony to empire. This resulted in exploitative relationships between engineers and communities (Lucena et al. 14).
In the 18th and 19th centuries, craftsmanship and being an expert in a certain trade was the image of an engineer. It was not until after the Civil War, when land-grant schools were established, that the dominant pattern of engineering education shifted from shops to classrooms (Seely, 115). Engineering, as well as professions in medicine, law, and economics, held the belief that scientific knowledge was essential to the improvement of the nation; that people with scientific expertise should be given political and moral authority, as well as the social status that comes with that authority; and finally that the best way to gain expertise was through a university education (Seely, 116). Engineers also gained economic and cultural status as they viewed themselves equal to doctors and lawyers. New technical and elite schools such as RPI and MIT were established to consolidate this status and transfer such knowledge to train others and fuel an increase in educated men (Wisnioski).
We have seen these patterns of engineering education through Lafayette’s own engineering program. The first engineering courses were offered in 1841, where the college catalog lists a course for seniors focusing on engineering along with architecture, astronomy, natural philosophy, and chemistry. In 1866, B.S. programs in Mining and Civil Engineering were created, officially establishing the beginning of an engineering education at the college. The first Bachelor of Science degrees were conferred in 1871, with five students graduating with degrees in Civil Engineering and Engineering Mining. In 1899, mechanical engineering courses began as interest in this field rose sharply after the Civil War. Following the trends within the realm of engineering and society’s needs during post-war eras, Lafayette added a B.S. degree in Administrative/Industrial Engineering in 1922. After World War I, there was an increased demand for engineer-oriented executives with expertise in certain fields like law, economics, and finance. Therefore, the goal of the program was to prepare trained engineers for managerial positions. Lafayette continued to adapt around the climate of World War II. A war department training center on campus was formed in 1942 to train engineering and aviation cadets. Spearheaded by the Army, the training program provided hundreds of soldiers advanced instruction in electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering. (https://engineering.lafayette.edu/150th/).
Many engineers participated in the building and expansion of their nation-states after World War II. International development emerged, with engineers in more powerful countries motivated by the ideology of modernization. During this period, many American engineers believed that it was possible to develop and modernize the world through science and technology. The hope was to lead the country to a “modern” stage of consumer capitalism (Lucena et al., 19). They sought to move “traditional” societies from their current stage of backwardness and launch them through a stage of “take-off” instead, implementing large development projects (Lucena et al., 45). For example, in the United States, engineers predominantly worked for mass production sectors in the biggest corporations of American capitalism, such as General Electric, General Motors, and Ford to fuel urbanization.
The years of the 1960s were an important time in engineering history, as there was a call for a huge technological change in different aspects of the development world. It was characterized by a variety of specialized knowledge and an emphasis on social position. People believed that technology was the key to social progress and the engineer would act as the agent of such social progress, making engineering the most common occupation at this time. However, the ideology of engineering started to be seen as contradictory as elites increasingly sought corporate leadership while others tried to make engineering an autonomous profession. There was a desire to unlock an engineer’s collective potential as they were seen as the true masters of technology (Wisnioski).
In the mid-1960s and during the transformations of the Cold War, society began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers were seen as a conformist organization of men reinforcing the military-industrial complex. A radical minority incited the professional elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that our institutions are unable to handle. Later in this decade, an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in working for such change. There was increasing anxiety about the status of the profession as there started to be a decline in engineering. This was caused by insecurity and defensiveness about their relationship to science and their role in it, and a desire for autonomy from a “soulless” work environment. Engineers were fighting to redefine their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology.. Critics also brought attention to the increasing presence of destructive technologies that seemed out of control. Such technologies were deemed harmful to society and needed to be kept track of by society, calling for a drastic change (Wisnioski). The social and intellectual unrest of the 1960s forced engineers, usually the masters of the how, to confront the why.
Following society’s call for an interdisciplinary engineering education and the question of the role of technology in the 1960s, Lafayette offered an A.B. degree in engineering for the first time in 1969. It was intended to be a flexible program, incorporating the recommended liberal education course of the AB degree program and the technical studies of the engineering program ( https://engineering.lafayette.edu/150th/). The program was designed to “educate sociotechnical, integrated, technological citizens” (Sanford Bernhardt & Stroud Rossmann, 2019, 4). It was especially helpful for professionals who will work with engineers and who needed a social-political background to deal effectively with technological projects. This need for a new major separate from all the other engineering disciplines followed the same path as many other universities at the time, who observed that the work and mindsets of the typical engineering courses weren’t enough.
Due to the failures of development strategies in the 1970s and early 1980s, the trend of sustainable development arose in the 1990s and have been continually increasing to this present day. The call for sustainability was quite weak in the earlier decades as corporations and engineers believed this sector lacked economic competitiveness (Lucena et al., 35). Only a few began to consider sustainable development through a systems approach, but mainly in its “weak” form (Lucena et al., 46). However, engineering organizations in the early 21st century heeded the call to sustainable development and began to take action. This ranged from revising their codes of ethics and challenging professional alliances to address sustainable development principles in their work, hosting regional and international conferences to declare their position in sustainability, and creating international partnerships (Lucena et al., 36).
From then on, there has been an explosion of “engineering to help” activities that is still present in today’s society. Projects dealing with humanitarian and community development activities surged, with three crucial events defining this period: the globalization of US engineering education, the transformation of long-term corporate loyalty to engineering employees, and the unprecedented media coverage of humanitarian crises of poverty, violence, and the deterioration of the environment all over the world (Lucena et al., 40). However, the ways that some engineers committed to help the poor were problematic. This led to the recognition of the need to engage communities in a more inclusive approach.
These events that shaped the path of engineering caused a shift in engineering education that focused on certain aspects to best enhance an engineer’s development of knowledge. Written communication skills were considered especially important which is why engineering schools encouraged the teaching of technical writing (courses in this area were required for most engineering students). Engineers also needed to understand economics to be better designers and to understand the mathematics of profit and loss. Educators essentially wanted engineers to fit easily into the large corporations that dominate our capitalist society. Another aspect is history, especially the history of science and engineering. Bridge designer J.A.L. Waddell argued, for example, that engineers needed role models to assume the positions in society they deserved and that historical examples were ideally suited to advancing their professional education. Moreover, the history of past and present accomplishments in technology could teach the general public why engineers deserved to be leaders in society (Seely, 120).
However, no curriculum is perfect. According to historian Edwin Layton, one of the challenges of engineering has been the close relationship between engineering and large corporations. He further argued that engineers placed greater emphasis on loyalty and service to employers, which is how they could best serve society (Seely, 122). However, we would like to argue that the emphasis should not be on the employer, but the communities they are serving. An interdisciplinary approach to engineering education would help engineers to develop the skills to best serve these communities. According to “A comparative study on different pedagogy strategies in engineering interdisciplinary” (2014), there have been numerous developments in engineering education methods to learn in an interdisciplinary way. Some examples are Project-Based Learning, Life-Cycle Analysis, Science and Engineering Ethics, and Service Learning. In an ideal engineering interdisciplinary, an individual brings technical knowledge and skills from two or more engineering subjects together to form new visions and insights regarding existing problems in our society (413). A multidisciplinary individual is able to shift roles to follow each discipline, resulting in engineering programs who graduate engineers that can propose functioning solutions to meet social requirements (414).
The B.A. Engineering program at Lafayette has transformed throughout the years after recognizing changes that were necessary to encompass an interdisciplinary approach to engineering education. One challenge for this program has been that the limited human resources dedicated to the program constrained its mission and scope (Sanford & Rossmann, 5). In its initial years, there were not many faculty members specifically assigned and dedicated to the program. Rather, professors from other departments who were already focusing on their own programs would teach certain classes where they had expertise in. This instability continued for quite a few years and, after many significant changes, there was a huge overhaul of the program in 2007 that is now known as the current form of Engineering Studies.
A strategic plan developed for the program in 2007 stated that “the degree is designed to provide students with an interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum that prepares them to successfully address the challenges of an increasingly complex, technical world” (Sanford & Rossmann, 6). A critical change was the renaming of the program as Engineering Studies. This made the program’s resemblance to the “area studies” fields of social sciences clearer and enhanced the ability to contextualize and critique its technical and engineering coursework. It also served as a way to distinguish the program more clearly from Lafayette’s BS engineering degrees, broadcasting the way its graduates would possess various knowledge, skills, and methods from their BS peers. (Sanford & Rossmann, 6-7). The identity of the Engineering Studies program as a bridge between engineering and traditional liberal arts became more clear after adapting its new name.
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