Page 138 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

HISTORY OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION REFORM 121

frequently entered management and assumed duties outside the realm
of technical decision making, courses in the liberal arts were clearly
important to their success. Hammond coined the term “humanistic
stem” to characterize this aspect of engineering education, defining it as
parallel to a “scientific-technological stem” of undergraduate course
work (Hammond, 1940).
This conceptual scheme guided thinking about the place of non-
technical course work for several decades. During the 1950s, the Ameri-
can Society for Engineering Education received funding from the Ford
Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation to review the humanistic
stem (Hammond, 1946, 1956). And Case Institute of Technology em-
barked on a substantial reconstruction of its curriculum designed to
produce the best, most broadly educated engineers in the country (Seely,
1995; Shurter, 1952). During the 1960s, Eric Walker’s Goals Report
strongly emphasized a broad education, and occasional comments about
broad education surfaced during the next two decades. Samuel Florman,
for example, used the idea as his takeoff point for discussing social re-
sponsibility and engineering (Florman, 1976, 1987; Kent, 1978;
McCuen, 1983).
But the most telling evidence of continuing attention to nontech-
nical course work for engineering students can be found in the ABET-
sponsored EC 2000 project, which identified 12 competences engineer-
ing students need upon graduation. At least half of them, listed as items
a through k under Criterion 3. Program Outcomes and Assessment, can be
met in large part through courses in social sciences and humanities.
These competences include oral and spoken communication, teamwork,
understanding of the global and local contexts of engineering, and
knowledge of contemporary issues (Caruana, 1999). Discussions about
improving and reforming the content of nontechnical engineering edu-
cation continue, just as they do about scientific and technical educa-
tion. The discussions today, in fact, deal with the same topics that were
current more than a century ago.

SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON ENGINEERING REFORM
Many of the issues to which engineering reformers have devoted
significant attention, especially in terms of adjusting curricular content,
arose from concerns that were internal to the profession. Put another
way, the motivation for reform generally involved issues that engineers

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