Reflections on Teaching with Engineers

For a historian accustomed to the disci­pline’s usual methods of instruction, joint teaching of any kind is an adven­ture. Teaching with engineering professors in a course on The Engineer in Society, has been a great adventure for me. I have found the experience stimu­lating and profitable, gaining new in­ sight into the nature of history and the role of the historian, as well as gaining the enjoyment of working with strongly motivated engineering students.

The Engineer in Society took shape five years ago as part of the University of Lowell’s program in Technology, Values, and Society, which was devel­oped with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Human­ities. The faculty members involved sought to take advantage of the strengths of a university that had just been created by the merger of a state liberal arts college and a technological institute, while meeting the needs of our students, particularly those in engineer­ing. Our first course, Technology and Human Values, established a pattern of scientists and engineers teaching on a team with liberal arts professors that has been followed in many of our other courses.

The Engineer in Society, offered as part of the Technology, Values, and Society minor, has continued the team pattern, always being taught by an engi­neer and a historian. I have been the historian and have had two different engineering colleagues.

We have sought in The Engineer in Society to have students examine the themes of the engineer’s interactions as a professional and as a member of the broader society. Our pedagogical foci have been discussion and research pa­pers. Thus, we have kept the structure with which we began: meeting twice a week for seventy-five minutes of discus­sion interspersed with occasional lec­tures, field trips, guests, and films. Pa­pers are presented orally and in writing. We usually have twenty to thirty stu­dents enrolled, who take the course as an elective or as part of the Technology, Values, and Society minor.

At first glance it would seem difficult to put history and engineering together in a course (aside from one on the history of technology). What do the two disciplines have in common? While no one would deny the utilitarian nature of engineering, history is constantly being called upon to prove its usefulness. In The Historian’s Craft the question Marc Bloch tells us his son asked, “Tell me Daddy. What is the use of history?” is still very much with us. Even engineer­ing, of course, is not totally utilitarian, as we are reminded by the centennials of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower.

As part of their utilitarian approach, engineers see themselves as problem solvers. Thus they work to fill a perceived need and feel their goal is reached when they succeed in creating a product that fills this need. The engi­neering criterion—Does it work?—seems to be simple and not subject to controversy. As Tracy Kidder puts it in The Soul of a New Machine, “the engineer’s right environment is a highly structured one, in which only right and wrong answers exist.”

In sharp contrast to engineers, historians see the world in shades of gray and are more comfortable with complexity and uncertainty than their opposites.

Historians have a much harder time determining when an explanation is accurate or sufficient. An explanation of historical causation does not usually sat­isfy unless all potential causal factors are identified and evaluated. In sharp con­trast to engineers, historians see the world in shades of gray and are more comfortable with complexity and uncer­tainty than their opposites.

However, on deeper investigation into these differing disciplines, I came to recognize that there is something in the two spirits that unites them. They both deal with hard facts and intractable realities, rather than abstractions or general laws. David P. Billington in The Tower and the Bridge contrasts “science [which] works always to achieve general theories that unify knowledge” with “engineering [which], in contrast, works always to create specific objects within a category of type.” If historians don’t create, they too study specific objects, like the French Revolution or Civil War, within categories such as wars or revolutions in general. So the disciplines do have a similar need to remain close to the concrete.

I find the tensions between historical and engineering modes of thought stim­ulating. My interest in economic history and the history of technology predis­posed me toward teaching about engi­neering. My colleagues—with a broad range of interests and social concerns—were equally sympathetic to the goals we would seek.

Team teaching, with an engineer or whomever, provides many satisfactions. Students appreciate the chance to get two perspectives on a topic, to hear a duet instead of the usual solo. My teach­ing has benefited, I believe, from the opportunity to observe my colleagues. By comparing my own style to theirs, I’ve gotten a better sense of what I do well and how I might improve what I do less well. Another advantage of team teaching, of course, is that sometimes you can sit back and let your teammate do the talking. Some suspicious admin­istrators seem to regard the main motive for such courses as faculty laziness. While our course does give each team member a handful of occasions when the preparation of a class can be left to the other, the need for constant consul­tation means that this method of teach­ing is actually more time consuming than traditional instruction. For us and, we hope, our students, the rewards are worth it.

A benefit that I’d hoped to get from teaching with an engineer was to learn how engineers practice their trade. That is, I’ve read about the work of engineers, from Lowell’s James B. Francis to the Data General team in The Soul of a New Machine, and looked forward to getting some kind of firsthand view. This was not entirely the case, however. I suppose mainly because our course, if interdisciplinary in involving more than one social science, is not even partly an engineering course, but rather a course about the interactions between engi­neers and society. With all the exploration that these interactions require, there has been little time to let the engineer go off and be an engineer.

My colleagues might reply that they haven’t seen much history either. My attempts to encourage research projects using our library’s collection of materi­als on Lowell have not been too success­ful. Such projects demand considerable time and a set of skills beyond what we could expect of all but a handful of our students.

For the bulk of the students, we have developed a set of contemporary topics that gets them interested and ensures that their papers are completed to our satisfaction. We list a few general areas (for example, education, housing, and the life of an engineer were our subjects in 1984) and then develop questions within these areas as themes for individ­ual papers. Students choose a topic from the list. Papers are generally writ­ten individually, though sometimes team efforts are undertaken. We’ve had some good papers recently on topics such as:

“If you were dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Low­ell, what three changes would you make in the engineering curricu­lum?”

“Why don’t girls want to be engi­neers?”

“What is the impact on housing when a large plant opens in a small community?”

“Where do Wang engineers live? What difference does it make?”

“Do women engineers face greater barriers to advancement than men?”

Our procedure has worked well. By selecting categories of topics, we are able to have papers covering related areas. Students working on one subject will have something in common with their classmates researching another. We consequently narrow the problem of topic selection, which in all courses can overwhelm the actual writing of the paper.

Having our students carry out their projects in stages has been another success. They all present brief oral reports at the end of the term as well as their written final projects. Writing and speaking skills are reinforced through the project. Many of the students think the oral report is one of the course’s most valuable aspects.

Some of the best projects have been truly interdisciplinary; where students combine their engineering skills and knowledge with social issues and concerns. A student majoring in environ­mental engineering, for example, studied the pros and cons of fluoridation of water as a means of preventing tooth decay. Maybe we should try to make more use of this success in the future by including a more truly engineering ele­ment in our teaching.

In the reading/discussion part of the course, several trials were required before we found a way to introduce his­tory successfully. Neither the traditional biographies of American engineers in Carroll Pursell’s Technology in America nor David Noble’s sophisticated analysis in America by Design excited our classes. Interest in the history of any discipline is something that only comes when peo­ple feel a strong identification with their field or career. Undergraduates, concerned with matters much more im­mediate to them like career choices or ethical issues on the job, find the history of engineering distant.

We were able to make the course more immediate with David Macaulay’s Mill, part of his series on construction that includes Castle and Cathedral. Ma­caulay’s discussion of how typical mill engineers solved the problem of pro­ducing textiles in nineteenth-century New England, combined with a visit to the Lowell National Park’s turbine ex­hibit, succeeded in capturing our student’s imagination. Though written for children, this book is based on up-to-date historical research and confronts many issues that are as important today as they were then. Safety in the work­place is brought out by mention of a twelve-year-old girl losing her fingers in a carding machine, while slavery in the cotton South raises questions about how much the individual should cooperate with immoral institutions. Macaulay’s drawings illustrate superbly how mills were built and how they operated. The simplicity of the book and the relevance of the material have enabled me to introduce at least a little history.

To contrast nineteenth-century cities with present day ones, we use Barbara Ward’s The Home of Man. While this book does not deal specifically with the engineer as an individual, it does high­ light some of the problems—transporta­tion, food supply, crowding—that face engineers, as well as the rest of us, today.

Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Ma­chine returns to individual engineers, here emphasizing their personal and working lives. As Kidder describes the frequent conflicts between the demands of the two, students are led to reflect on how they might balance these demands in their own careers. Whether because of the immediacy of the subject or be­ cause the book is so well written, it is very popular with the students.

Once again in our final reading we return to general issues. Technology and Man’s Future (in its latest edition, Tech­nology and the Future), edited by Albert Teich, covers topics as varied as the limits to growth controversy, technology assessment, and the nature of techno­logical society. The differing opinions of the authors of the book’s many selec­tions provide a provocative conclusion to the course.

As the readings reveal, our overall goal is to explore in the broadest way the place of the engineer in the confron­tations between technology and society, not simply to examine the immediate environment in which the engineer works. The bulk of our students, junior and senior engineering majors, appreci­ate this goal.

Many of these upper-class engineer­ing students have been impressive. They have shown their concern for the ethical and social issues of the profes­sion they’re about to enter. They are eager to bring to bear on our class discussions and their individual proj­ects, not only the assigned reading but also their previous classroom, labora­tory, and work experience. They have been ready to reflect on their education and point out its strengths and weak­ nesses. Naturally concerned about their soon to be launched careers, personal, social, and ethical questions connected to employment have provoked lively discussions. At times these discussions have wandered off in a practical direction as students seek advice on interview behavior or how to decide between two job offers. We have gently redirected this concern to the related general is­ sues. All in all, we’ve found that our engineering students possess consider­ able maturity, seriousness of purpose, and ethical concern.

To return to where I began, how can history be useful to these students in dealing with their concerns? I’d like to think that history helps people understand how they got to be where they are now, just as engineering helps them to get from there to where they’d like to be in the future. In this sense history is psychologically necessary just as engi­neering is materially necessary.

History’s importance may not be ap­parent to young engineers. If history isn’t directly relevant to them, however, the historian still may be. Because history is concerned with the totality of social experience, the historian is uniquely suited to lead The Engineer in Society students in exploring the com­ plex variety of spheres in which technol­ogy and society interact.