A Human Rights Challenge To The Engineering Profession

In the American system we have insisted on a careful positioning of engineering education. The first professional degree occurs after 4 years of college (anomalously 5 at Dartmouth) and there is widespread commitment to university-style affiliation with non-professional students, curricula, and norms of scholarly development. We as custodians of the Engineering disciplines must understand this important achievement and what it entails vis-à-vis what should and shouldn’t be taught. We must perform against recognizable scholarly criteria – we must create, conserve, and convey the central animating ideas, the important facts, the useful analyses, and initiate careers that are authentically productive. And we must look to the intellectual nourishment of a whole professional cadre, which populates numerous external institutions and creates very specific demands on the time of our students and faculty. To fail on either of these dimensions is to lose our preferred place in American higher education. So there is much at stake in contemplating our roles in the large.