Liberal studies in engineering – a design plan

Abstract

We describe a plan to research and explore opportunities to establish an undergraduate, pre-professional degree program –Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies in Engineering – meant to attract students undecided about the choice of a major but who have sufficient interest to enroll in a program that keeps open the possibility that they might pursue a career in engineering. The program's core idea is to … take exemplary, substantive content of the traditional undergraduate engineering program – the engineering sciences, the laboratory tests, the design projects – and subject this to study from the perspectives of the humanities, arts, and social sciences as well as engineering. The method is to build on the content and form of instruction in today's engineering program but dramatically transform both content and form to achieve the goals of a liberal arts program while attending to the fundamentals of the traditional engineering course of study. To do this, ‘fundamentals' must necessarily be redefined.We illustrate what we mean by teaching ‘ … exemplary engineering content from the perspectives of the Humanities and Social Sciences’ with three ‘modules' that students might engage in a liberal studies course or project work. Our work is meant as much to provoke a critical reflection, analysis, and broader discussion about engineering education – its relation to what engineers actually do after they graduate, and about what ought to be taken as fundamental in their education for the profession – as it is to meet the objectives of our proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF).