The Compleat Engineer

How to educate people technically without making them into technocrats.

The Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College is a unique institution that verges on being a national treasure. I say this because Thayer embodies an ideal of engineering education that is widely esteemed but nowhere else practiced, and further, because the well-being of our society increasingly depends upon the quality of our engineering education. I am constantly amazed to. find that so few people including Dartmouth people and even Thayer alumni—understand how Thayer differs from every other engineering school in the United States, and why this difference is so important.

Although engineering is generally perceived to be one of the great professions, engineering education in America has traditionally been undergraduate education. Whereas law- yers, doctors, architects, ministers, scientists, M.B.A.'s, at al., typically enter graduate school after earning a four-year college degree, most engineers earn their accredited professional degree within a four-year undergraduate course. There are many reasons for this—historical, social, and economic—and the tradition, now more than a century old, is firmly established. Thayer School, to repeat, is an exception. But before considering how and why, let us see what has happened where the traditional curriculum prevails.

In order to fashion a four-year engineering program with significant technical content, the liberal arts have to be largely ignored. After all, something has to give. In order to prevent curricula from becoming totally vocational, the national accrediting board for engineering schools requires that there be a liberal arts component of at least 12 1/2 percent. In practice the minimum usually becomes the maximum, which means that in four years the average engineering student takes a grand total of six liberal arts courses. And since prospective engineers tend to select social sciences over the humanities (viewing them as more "useful"), the typical engineering graduate will have taken only one or two courses in literature or history.

Thus it is not an exaggeration to say that most engineers do A not get a "college education" in the usual sense. (About a quarter of American engineers earn graduate degrees, but of course these are totally technical in nature.) Several schools notably some of the more select private institutions try to enrich their programs with liberal arts to the extent of 20 percent or even a little more, but they constantly have to deal with complaints about omitted technical courses, and sometimes have to fight to keep their accreditation.

This dilemma has been with us for a long time. In 1902 the president of Stanford complained, "We cannot make an engineer in four years if we do anything else with him, and there are very many things besides engineering which go to the making of a real engineer." With each passing year the situation has become more painful. Technical material becomes ever more voluminous. On the other hand, industry and government ask with increasing fervor for engiheers who can write and speak who can communicate with colleagues and with the public, who have a measure of political sophistication and entrepreneurial spirit, and who have some feeling for foreign cultures—in other words, for liberally educated engineers. Also, most everybody agrees that in an age of environmental concern, and widespread misgivings about technology, it would be a good thing if engineers, as well as other citizens, had a better idea of how technology fits in with the general culture and relates to our aspirations for a better world.

But the economic and political realities are such that for the foreseeable future the present four-year undergraduate engineering course will remain in place. There is simply no constituency for change. The blunt truth is that most engineering students, and their families, do not want to delay the beginning of a paying career by so much as a single day. Industry, for all its fine talk, is generally satisfied with the current crop of graduates, many of whom are relegated to sub-professional work. The engineering schools, making ends meet, are not about to crusade for change in the status quo. But disquiet and frustration remain. And as American technology appears to suffer in the face of international competition, concern finally begins to turn to alarm.

Enter Dartmouth. When General Sylvanus Thayer in 1867 gave $40,000 to the College for the purpose of founding an engineering school,' he was from the beginning thinking of a graduate professional curriculum. He assumed that before one embarked on professional training one was necessarily an individual of a "high standard of attainment. . . equalling, perhaps . . . that of a Dartmouth graduate." He took it for granted that every prospective engineer would have a solid foundation both in science and the classics. He proposed a two-year course of graduate study, and resisted a suggestion that it be longer (because he recognized that a youth "would like to be out of school" by the time he reached the age of 23 or 24). And a two-year graduate course it was when the Thayer School opened its doors in 1871. This in spite of the fact that all over the nation engineering schools were being established as undergraduate institutions.

In 1893 the Dartmouth-Thayer curriculum was changed to a format that has remained substantially the same ever since. Qualified students were permitted to combine their senior college year with the first year of engineering school, making for what came to be called the three-two program. At the end of the fourth year the student receives a bachelor of arts degree with a major in engineering science. After a fifth year, one qualifies for an accredited bachelor of engineering degree.

The important fact to note is that Dartmouth engineers must qualify for a regular, undergraduate college degree. They must conform to all distribution requirements and meet all other standards just like any other student in the College. In other words, Dartmouth engineers are liberally educated engineers. This requires that they spend five years rather than four getting an entrylevel engineering degree. Incredible as it may seem, no other American engineering school makes this demand. A few schools have in the past experimented with a mandatory fiveyear plan; but when faced with resistance because of the extra tuition costs, they all retreated. Many engineering schools offer a three-two program as an option; but no more than five percent of American engineers obtain a B.A. en route to their B.E., and most of these are transfer students from liberal arts colleges.

Every few years the American Society of Engineering Education, the National Academy of Engineering, or some other organization conducts a study of American engineering education. The report that comes out of each study invariably notes the desirability of liberalizing this education. Occasionally some group (most recently the American Society of Civil Engineers) will proclaim that a liberalized fiveyear curriculum should at long last be established as a basic requirement.

What this means is that the Thayer School continues to be the prototype of what many thoughtful people, within the profession and without, consider the ideal way to educate engineers. And as more and more people come to realize how important it is for our engineers to broaden their horizons, the significance of this pioneering role will grow. At the very least, one would hope that promising students in other schools encouraged by discerning advisors will see the benefits to be gained in studying the liberal arts, and will adjust their programs accordingly. Eventually a few intrepid engineering schools will experiment anew with a mandatory program similar to Thayer's. And one can only hope that industry, government, and the foundations, seeing the need and the potential benefits, will provide the financial climate in which the ideal can begin to be made practicable on a larger scale. (Industry must reward that fifth year with appropriately higher salaries, and government and the foundations can help by funding enriched programs.)

Whercver we look in the world we see engineers stepping forward in leadership roles. In Japan, Taiwan, the Soviet Union and many third world nations, leaders with technical training are the norm, in government as well as industry. In France an engineering education has always been valued in the higher echelons (as opposed to England where a pure classical education was the ticket to leadership, and look at the consequences of that tradition). We can no longer afford to leave our affairs in the hands of people who do not know anything about technology. Nor can we leave our technology in the hands of technicians who have an impoverished idea of what life is all about.

So we' see that engineering education at a liberal arts college takes on a greater importance with each passing day. I have been stressing the need to liberalize engineering education, but of course the benefits flow both ways. Liberal arts students are beginning to realize that engineering truly counts in the scheme of things, that the world might not after all be inherited by a classically educated elite, or even by lawyers and investment bankers. To put the case more positively, pragmatists have come to see how technology underlies the "real world" of power and wealth, while all citizens perceive the need for technology to be imbued with intelligence, sensitivity, and virtue.

Aside from the importance of Thayer as an effective institution and as a model for others, it seems to me that in a very special way Dartmouth and engineering are good for each other. Dartmouth, for all its academic excellence, has had the continuing problem of proving that it is intellectually serious. Well, engineering is serious, and the study of engineering is a demanding discipline, today more than ever a vital part of the human intellectual enterprise. An engineering school is an important resource, it helps confirm Dartmouth as one of the best institutions of learning.

Engineering, on the other hand, has had the continuing problem of being perceived as stodgy, uninspired, and insensitive. The caricature, as in most cases, has some basis in fact. Dartmouth College, being lively, animated even disputatious vitally engaged with the world in all its complexityis just what engineering needs.

Sylvanus Thayer had an idea of what engineering education ought to be. He would be saddened if he knew that it developed along different lines. But he would be pleased and proud to see his ideal kept alive at Dartmouth, a testimonial to his vision and a beacon for the future.

Sylvanus Thayer's charges, in 1876.

Armed with a liberal arts background, Bill Ruhl '86 worked with professors like Stuart Tremblay for his master's.

Engineer as Author Sam Florman is a civil engineer in every sense of the term. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth's five-year program in liberal arts and engineering, he also holds an English master's from Columbia and honorary degrees from Manhattan College and Clarkson. He is a former overseer of the Thayer School and a principal in the New York construction firm of Kreisler, Borg Florman. But Florman is best known to the reading public for his monthly column in MI I s magazine Technology Review, his articles in Harper's (of which he was a contributing editor) and his numerous books ranging from The Existential Pleasures of Enghieering to Blaming Technology. His latest book, The Civilized Engineer, is published by St. Martin's Press.

"We can no longerafford to leave ouraffairs in the handsof people who do notknow anything abouttechnology. Nor canwe leave ourtechnology in thehands of technicianswho have animpoverished idea ofwhat life is allabout."