Arguing that all students need a broad-based education to compete in an increasingly technological world, President Stephen C. Ainlay said it’s time to make the case for engineering as a liberal art.
“The time has come for the Academy as a whole to regard engineering as a fully legitimate component of the liberal arts,” Ainlay said Friday in opening remarks at the national symposium, “Engineering and Liberal Education.”
Academic leaders from more than a dozen top colleges and universities participated in the symposium held on campus last weekend.
In his speech, titled “Re-imagining Liberal Education in the 21st Century,” Ainlay stressed that “some basic paradigm shifts are needed before engineering is regarded as fully integral to the liberal arts.”
It will mean more than redefining traditional academic boundaries, he said.
“The intellectual traditions and divides forged over centuries cannot be quickly re-imagined,” he said. “It is, rather, a larger project that not only involves changing the nature of a modern education and what we teach to college students, but also how we think about knowledge and its sources.
“If the integration of engineering with the sciences, social sciences and humanities does not take place at the levels of basic conceptualization and intellectual purpose, it will not be sufficiently well grounded to become broadly accepted across the Academy.”
The idea of integrating engineering into the liberal arts is attracting considerable buzz on college campuses. A white paper issued in December by James J. Duderstadt, a president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, urged universities to better prepare all undergraduates to understand and solve technical problems. Last month, Princeton University announced a $25 million gift to help integrate the two disciplines.
In 1845, Union became the first liberal arts college to offer engineering. The symposium explored different models for integrating engineering, technology and the traditional liberal arts.
Among the participants were Princeton, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Lafayette, Smith, Trinity, Villanova, U.S. Military Academy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sweet Briar College, Tufts, University of Vermont, University of Georgia and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Ainlay told participants at the symposium that they “have a remarkable opportunity to push the conversation about engineering and liberal education forward.” But he cautioned that “the integration of engineering into the liberal arts is no single institution’s innovation or mandate. It is a national and even international mandate, important to our collective future. We will be far more effective if we all work together.”
Besides Ainlay, others who spoke included President Carol Christ of Smith College; Lance Schachterle, associate provost of WPI and Domenico Grasso, dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematics, University of Vermont.
“There is real urgency to educate students who are great scientists and engineers and who can see the big picture,” says Cherrice A. Traver, dean of Engineering, citing concerns of the National Academies of Science and the National Academy of Engineering. “We understand that narrowly educated graduates are not prepared to address either the threats or the opportunities presented by the technological world.”
Noting Union’s pioneering status as the first liberal arts college to offer engineering, Traver said that participants in the conference “are in a position to help reshape higher education to produce graduates with the skills to think broadly and holistically about the challenges of our diverse, global, and technologically complex society."
The symposium was funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City.
For more information, http://www.union.edu/integration/.
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