ABSTRACT
In a lecture on ‘The place of the engineer in society’ in 1966, Lord Snow expressed his surprise that engineering had not ‘become more of a humane education’, and that engineers were not more respected and active in the decision-making processes of government, parliament, and the civil service. British social history had to explain why other countries in the nineteenth century had paid more attention to the engineer and engineering education, and England had done the reverse: ‘if we had put one tenth of the effort into engineering that we put into the Indian Empire, we should now be a very prosperous country’ (Snow 1965-6: 1,2601). There is no need here to examine in detail the particular British, not just English, historical complexities surrounding the difficulties over the vocational to which we have referred. It is important, however, to emphasize further the difficulty that nineteenthcentury spokesmen for a liberal culture and values had in adjusting to the new realities of an industrializing society. Newman’s defence of knowledge as ‘its own end’ and Mill’s defence of the universities against preparation for the particularities of professions and livelihoods were simply the most eloquent thrusts of the debate. In spite of the critically important new dimensions brought by the establishment of London University and later by the provincial university colleges, the public voice of the English universities contained strong, if varying, degrees of concern about the position of technology and professional or ‘modern’ studies in the liberal canon. Scotland, by and large, did not find it difficult to incorporate and to justify these components of a university education.
