Faculty on Tuesday discussed what some are calling a “facilitation
process” of the College's engineering program.
“This is not a review of engineering,” said President Roger Hull at
a general faculty meeting. “This is an attempt to make sure we are
marshalling our assets in the best possible way,” Hull said. “In this
day, with the competition we face, we had better be putting our resources in the
proper place.”
The College has retained a consulting group led by Tom Kosnick, principal of
GLEAN Team and a consulting professor at Stanford University School of
Engineering, to do what President Roger Hull described as a “bottom-up —
rather than top-down” process to determine “how we can best use the
asset of engineering.”
The principal, who is not an engineer, is “not simply going to tell us
what others are doing,” Hull said. “Instead, we want to have a
facilitator who can work with the engineering faculty to try to bring out the
best practices and see how we might be able to adapt them to Union.”
The College has made significant changes in engineering, Hull said, including
the revised engineering curriculum that features an internationalization of the
curriculum and sweeping changes in the first-year program, both of which were
featured in a national conference the College hosted last weekend on curricular
changes in engineering, he noted.
“We have gone a long way with engineers taking advantage of being at a
liberal arts college, said Dean of Faculty Christie Sorum. “I think we
might be able to go further. Can we, for example, have engineering with a real
global twist? Can there be more interdisciplinary work? Would we require all
engineering students to have a minor outside of engineering? There must be lots
of other ideas that could emerge in this process.”