ABSTRACT
One reason for taking a side glance at engineering education in the United States is that a series of major inquiries before and since the Second World War have made it the most visible undergraduate curriculum in the United States, and probably anywhere. As elsewhere, American engineering education has been scrutinized in terms of balance amongst science, technology, the position of engineering in contemporary world society, and the range of studies and activities necessary for the ability to synthesize required of an engineer. More perhaps than any other aspect of American undergraduate education, engineering has been the subject of persistent experiment, with colleges and universities like CarnegieMellon in Pennsylvania, Harvey Mudd in California, and Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts promoting a range of experimental engineering programmes. The American Society for Engineering Education, the journal Engineering Education, and the professional associations of specific branches of engineering have sustained throughout this century an acute interest in the content and direction of engineering education, and-particularly since the Mann Report of 1918-have regularly surveyed curricula, students, and the profession: ‘quite possibly no other professional group has studied its own curriculums in greater detail and with more enthusiastic criticism than have the engineers’ (Griffith 1981:488; Walker 1971:823). All such experiments, and all the reports on the deficiencies of engineering education, start somewhere close to Lynn White’s 1960s comment about the professional that ‘only by being more than a specialist can he remain an adequate specialist’ (White 1967:145). Not many analysts of engineering education from the inside could match the passion which White devoted from the outside to his interpretation of technology:
As [engineering schools] modify their educational structures to meet the newer professional needs of engineers, they will feel increasingly the shift towards common human concerns, and this in itself will promote humanistic attitudes. When this happens, engineers will wake up to the fact that engineering has humanistic functions of the highest order.
