Comment: Engineers and the End of Innocence

Abstract

All of us today are in favor of liberal education for engineers, just as we are in favor of motherhood and the American flag-instinctively, almost mindlessly. Convinced that we have reached a good and proper conclusion, we have allowed our thinking on the subject to become careless. Even worse, we have taken to bolstering our position with spurious arguments which end up by weakening our case. Far from being harmless, the supporting of right causes for wrong reasons can have dangerous consequences, dissipating a sense of urgency and alienating a potentially friendly audience. Since engineers today are no more liberally educated than they ever were, our arguments in support of this cause must certainly be missing the mark. It is impossible to disagree with most of what Howland has written. But running through his comments, and through the many quotations he cites, is a series of well-meaning but weak-sounding exhortations that blunt rather than sharpen his point. We all fall into this trap and begin to sound like ineffectual do-gooders. In particular, there are implicit in Howland's essay two assumptions that I consider false and deluding: (1) that engineers, as human beings, are not as good as they ought to be; and (2) that study of the liberal arts will make them better-more concerned with the welfare of their fellow citizens, hence more moral. Taken as a whole, engineers-and the technologists, craftsmen, and tinkerers from whom they spring-are, and always have been, as decent, moral, and law-abiding a group of men as one could find. Absorbed in their technical pursuits, they are singularly free of the greed, duplicity, and hostility that characterize so many of their fellows and that have caused the world so much grief. Nor are today's engineers as unaware of our civilization's problems as Howland would have us think. In this age of mass communications, every moderately educated person knows