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ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 115 In the final analysis, the relationship between engineering and management, like that between engineering and science, should be seen as one of vitalizing tension, not destructive antagonism. Managers, like generals preparing to fight the last rather than the next war, are inclined to overstress the importance of the market. But as recent events have demonstrated, most noticeably what Simon Ramo has called America's "technological slip," good engineering frequently has its own commercial value, and its absence can be just as damaging as an emphasis on engineering values alone. Managers need not be engineers, and not all engineers have the desire and talent needed to be effective managers, but in today's world engineers and managers must work together if they are both to succeed. Educating Engineers Education is inevitably a pragmatic activity. Its ideals are quite properly set very high, but in practice it consists of a series of compromises forced upon both students and teachers by the very real limits of time and resources. But accommodations between ideals and reality are not the only compromises required in the construction of educational programs, for even within the realm of ideals there are competing claims as to what ought to be the goals of education. This is certainly the case in engineering education. Of course, there is no fixed law that says all engineering degree programs must attempt to realize the same goals, and in such a large and heterogeneous field one would expect considerable diversity. But the engineering community does exercise an unusual degree of oversight in the area of professional education and it is not inclined to allow a great number of conceptions of the purpose of engineering education to flourish simultaneously in the name of tolerance. Choices must be made, and one way of laying out those choices is to review some of the recently proposed goals for engineering education. Samuel Florman has argued with great eloquence and considerable force that if engineers truly wish to be considered professionals, then they ought to structure their professional schools accordingly. Lawyers and physicians do not begin their professional training until they have completed their undergraduate education, usually in the liberal arts. The purpose of their college educations is to make them informed and sensitive individuals and citizens, people who have studied what it means to lead "the examined life" and who can articulate what their rights and duties are as members of the communities in which they live. These lessons can, of course, be learned elsewhere as well, but by treating the bachelor's degree as the professional entry degree, engi
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 116 neers show a willingness to give less attention to the development of individual talent and culture than do members of what have traditionally been called the liberal professions. The result, Florman charges, is that most graduates of engineering programs today are ''nothing more than high school graduates who have taken a lot of technical courses,'' a view that Florman is not alone in holding. To solve this problem, the professional education of engineering students should be extended so that they can take more courses in the liberal arts. Florman realizes that making such a change would be difficult and that only a minority of engineers consider it desirable. He has, however, highlighted a real limitation in existing programs in engineering education and he has effectively articulated one set of ideals by which the performance of those programs can be evaluated. An ideal of engineering education diametrically opposed to Florman's informs the many programs in engineering technology that have been set up recently. As Melvin Kranzberg has pointed out, these new associate and bachelor degree programs in engineering technology represent both a conservative reaction to the growing emphasis on basic science and engineering design in mainline engineering programs and an innovation that increases the flexibility and hence resilience of the engineering profession. Engineering technology programs focus on mastery of engineering practices, such as surveying, shop practice, and drafting, that in the past were standard components of an engineering student's training. Students who possess these skills are capable of holding entry-level jobs as engineers, but without a more extensive grounding in mathematics, science, and design, they are ill equipped to proceed on to higher levels of engineering practice. While it is still too early to say how these new programs will be integrated into the profession as a whole, it seems likely that practitioners trained in engineering technology will serve in technical and professional support roles comparable to those filled by nurses and medical technicians in the practice of medicine. The development of this "second stream" in engineering education may thus serve the profession well, but the ideal of education it represents is not one that most educators would find appropriate for schools that seek to provide a more comprehensive introduction to engineering. It appears that for the foreseeable future the bachelor's degree will continue to serve as the professional entry degree for engineers. For the great majority of engineering schools, curricula leading to the bachelor's degree require two types of courses, the first being scientific/technical courses, which occupy roughly 85 percent of the student's credit hours, the second being social/humanistic courses, which
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 117 occupy the remainder of the student's required credits. While there is considerable pressure from both sides to change the ratio between these two types of courses, the case made for increasing the technical content at the expense of the social/humanistic seems, on balance, no more compelling than the arguments made for increasing the liberal arts content at the expense of the technical. Everyone involved in engineering education can point to at least one essential area in which graduates of existing programs are woefully ill prepared, but in the absence of a general willingness to increase the number of years of study required, it appears unlikely there will be any reduction in the number of courses required in either of the two branches of engineering education. Engineering curricula are already extremely crowded and highly constrained, and it is impossible to add new requirements to existing four-year programs. There is considerable evidence that engineering educators have been continuously adapting the content of the scientific/technical side of the engineering curricula to the needs of the profession. In recent years the number of required technical courses associated with specific engineering specialties has been reduced while the number of required courses in basic science and mathematics has been increased. One effect of these changes has been to expand the area of commonality between the specialized curricula within engineering, a move that has been facilitated by an increase in the number of cross-specialty appointments being made in engineering departments. Thus, while engineering students still enroll in specific curricula, such as civil engineering and chemical engineering, they in fact take a great many courses in common and are not nearly as specialized as it might appear. They are thus well equipped to move between specialties as the needs of industry and their own interests may require. When doing so, they of course must acquire the specialized knowledge required for the jobs they take, but this kind of training is increasingly being made available by employers, who recognize that they cannot ask the engineering schools to send them young men and women fully trained in the specialties needed by industry. In light of these trends, it seems unlikely that we will see a proliferation of new specialized curricula at the undergraduate level in schools of engineering during the coming decades, and it may be that throughout the profession of engineering the distinctions between the various branches of engineering will become less important as practicing engineers learn to take full advantage of the flexibility implicit in the content of their professional education. The purpose of the social/humanistic requirements of engineering curricula, and their adaptation to the changing character of the profes
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 118 sion, has occasioned a great deal of discussion. The original reason for requiring engineering students to study European history and English literature was to give them a taste of liberal education, the hallmark of a person of culture and of the professional. Then, as engineering became more closely tied to employment in large business enterprises, nontechnical education came to play a more immediately instrumental role in the education of engineers who would become managers. An understanding of the principles of market economics became important, as did an ability to write clear expository prose. This tension between liberal education, which can be understood as the study of the cultural classics for the purposes of self-development, and instrumental education, conceived of as the acquisition of concepts and skills that will prove useful in one's employment, has remained a source of both confusion and vitality in engineering education, as well as in American higher education more generally, throughout the present century. Given the limitations of time, should engineering students take a course in Shakespeare or one in technical writing? Only those who can afford to ignore the constraints imposed by reality are free to say they should take both. Following World War II leading engineering educators realized that the context of engineering was changing rapidly and that even from an instrumental point of view, the content of the social/humanistic side of engineering curricula needed to be reconstructed. The Engineers Council for Professional Development, the accrediting agency for engineering education, began this process by stipulating that every engineering student was to take at least one course in the social sciences or humanities during each term of study. The next step, according to Melvin Kranzberg, involved the American Society for Engineering Education which, with the aid of a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, prepared a report on general education in engineering. Attempts to implement the recommendations of this report led to rapid expansion of the humanities and social science departments at many engineering schools and the development of what Kranzberg calls the "contextual approach" to the presentation of these subjects to engineering students. This approach begins with problems and situations of immediate concern to engineers and then uses the insights and methods available in the social sciences and humanities to clarify them and make them intelligible and thus manageable. The instrumental character of this enterprise is made clear by Kranzberg's formulation of its guiding purpose: "I look forward to the day when the humanities and social sciences will serve as tools for the engineers, just as much as his computer and engineering handbook."
ENGINEERING IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX SOCIETY 119 Not all engineering educators are free to subscribe to a completely instrumentalist view of the social/humanistic requirements. Students attending engineering schools located in comprehensive colleges and universities are normally required to satisfy college or universitywide distribution requirements that cannot be met by taking courses that are primarily instrumental. But even in those schools where engineering educators have effective control over the curricular requirements set for their students, the question of what subjects students ought to study in the required social/humanities courses continues to occasion lively debate. And indeed it should, for identifying and articulating the social and cultural factors of greatest importance to contemporary engineering, and the ways in which engineers experience them and respond to them, is a challenging task. It is one thing to declare one's acceptance of the "contextual approach"; it is much more difficult to make clear just what that context is. There is good reason for believing that the context of engineering, and indeed the context of management as well, has been radically and permanently altered in the past two decades. The heroic or Lone Ranger image of the engineer has been largely replaced by the image of the engineer as a morally ambiguous actor in society. Where once we celebrated the extension of control over nature and the expansive use of natural resources, today we worry that such activities might be signs of myopic pride and may be contributing to insupportable insult to the environment. Within the industrial order, federal regulation has been extended into the processes of design, production, distribution, and utilization in ways that previously would have been considered unthinkable. Engineering and management decisions on the design and production of automobiles, the mining of coal, the use and disposal of chemicals, and in any number of other areas must now be made with constant and detailed reference to governmental specifications and regulations. The context of engineering has, in other words, become exceedingly complex. Prior to 1960 one could make sense of most engineering activities, at least in the private sector, by referring to the engineering imperative to maximize physical efficiency and utility and to the corporate imperative to maximize profits. Today, focusing on these criteria alone would result in a fatal neglect of many additional considerations that have become a central part of decision making in engineering and management. As many American industrial leaders realize, the technology-forcing and technology-limiting consequences of public policy play an increasingly important role in the nation's economy. While the importance of that role will fluctuate as the political winds shift, there seems to be little likelihood that engineers and
