ABSTRACT
The growing nineteenth-century concept of the ‘professional’ as playing a service role developed also into one of the ‘expert’. The marriage of the two produced a relationship and a tension: service, good practice, and ‘professional’ attitudes were increasingly allied to specific skills, knowledge, and ‘mastery’ (Jarvis 1983). Preparation for such professions ran parallel with that for engineering, although the problems were not the same. Engineering was perceived as being ‘merely’ about mastery, about information and skills, about techniques and manipulation. While European and American engineers came more and more to be seen as needing other attributes-personal, academic, and professional-for which preparation and training of some kind were necessary, Britain was slower in the twentieth century to recognize these extensions as possible or relating to the basic processes of higher education. The ‘liberal studies’ developments of the 1950s and 1960s were an attempt to find a new definition not so much for engineering as for the curriculum which contained engineering. They were almost an acceptance that engineering and the engineer were established, stable entities to which something needed to be added. Engineering was often ‘larded with management and liberal studies’ (National Council for Technological Awards 1964:5). Eric Robinson ridiculed attempts to liberalize courses (in technical colleges and universities) by ‘adding capsules of culture in the form of literary, artistic and social studies-almost anything will do provided it has nothing to do with science and technology’ (Robinson 1968:77).
