In This Issue:

Charting the SEAS - Reflections On Our School's History

National Academy of Engineering Selects Galil

The Engineering Curriculum: An Identity Crisis?

Pioneering Women Engineers At SEAS

October 2 Homecoming Ends 250th Celebration

New Images: Through A Lens Brightly

Alumni Briefs

Archive

COVER STORY

Charting the SEAS - Reflections On Our School's History

By Zvi Galil, Dean

This year, Columbia University celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding as “King’s College” in 1754. Since the history of our School is inextricably intertwined with that of the University at large, I would like to use this occasion to share a few reflections on the history—and the future—of engineering and applied science at Columbia.

When King’s College was founded, among its goals was a mission “to instruct and perfect the youth . . . in the arts of Number and Measuring, of Surveying and Navigation . . . the knowledge of . . . Mines and Minerals, Plants and Animals, and everything useful for the Comfort, the Convenience and Elegance of Life.” Unlike the other early American colleges of its day, King’s College recognized the natural sciences as an essential part of a liberal arts education.

Following the Revolutionary War, the newly renamed Columbia counted among its faculty professors of natural history, chemistry, agriculture, botany, mathematics and natural philosophy. The youths instructed in its halls went on to great achievements in building the great crucible that was 19th century America. John Stevens, Class of 1768, was instrumental in establishing U.S. patent law and created the first American-built steamboat engine. His son, John Cox Stevens, Class of 1803, built the world’s first steam ferry, which crossed the Hudson to Hoboken in 1810. Horatio Allen, Class of 1823, operated the first full-size steam locomotive in the U.S.

In 1864, our School was established as a separate entity within Columbia—the School of Mines. Despite its name, the School’s remit encompassed all of the sciences as well as the study of architecture. In less than 20 years, it enrolled more undergraduates than did the rest of the College. The School of Mines also spearheaded graduate education at Columbia, granting the University’s first Ph.D. diploma in 1875.

With the move to the Morningside campus in 1898, architecture and the various sciences formed separate schools. This development tracked the course of scientific advancement in the last century, which saw scientists and engineers concentrating their efforts in increasingly narrow disciplines.

In 1864, the School of Mines of Columbia College, right, began in a former broom factory and sash and blind shop on the north side of 49th Street. By 1866, the Trustees appropriated $35,000 to build the adjacent building (left). By 1883, new L-shaped Mines buildings replaced the original two buildings and extended down Park Avenue. Electrical Engineering had its own building in the interior of the quadrangle. James Kip Finch writes, “Soon it became a School of Engineering, rather than simply a School of Mines; its advent marked a new era of growth, and it constituted an important, for some years the largest, undergraduate activity of the institution.”

As the frontiers of human knowledge advanced ever faster, it was no longer feasible for an individual professor to become intimately familiar with more than one field, or even sub-field, as the School’s first dean, Charles Frederick Chandler, had successfully managed to do. Accordingly, each discipline focused on erecting its own tower of knowledge separate from the others.

The last decade has seen a spate of interdisciplinary bridge-building among the towers, as breath-taking scientific and technological advances defy attempts to confine them to one tower or another. Our School is once again in the center of the University’s endeavors.

In the past, our faculty helped usher in the communications revolution, inventing long distance telephony (Michael Pupin) and FM radio (Edwin Armstrong). They helped America vanquish disease (mass production of antibiotics, Elmer Gaden) and totalitarianism (anti-aircraft missile proximity fuse, Raymond Mindlin).

Our current faculty have initiated and won four major interdisciplinary centers—in biomedical engineering, materials, nanotechnology and genomics— cooperating with faculty from almost all science departments and several departments in the medical school.

Our School will continue to serve as a dynamic hub for the intellectual and scientific forces of Columbia University. Three main vectors have already presented themselves:

Life Sciences, comprising biomedical engineering, bioinformatics, biocomputing, genomics, medical physics, nanobiology and biomaterials,
Earth Sciences, comprising environmental disciplines and clean energy,
Computer Science, an increasingly pervasive and ubiquitous field that interacts not only with other sciences but with the humanities as well.

Yet there is another, less direct but no less important way in which our faculty have been changing the world throughout our School’s history—namely, by educating non-scientists and non-engineers in the fundamentals of the technologies that sustain our way of life.

Even in its early days, the School prepared its graduates for diverse paths and careers. As James K. Finch, dean of the School of Engineering, wrote in his history of the School in 1954, “. . . students . . . take the Mines course who, having no intention of following engineering, felt it offered the best available education for a career in business and industry.”

This is even more true today, as our School—thanks to the core curriculum—boasts what is perhaps the broadest engineering education in the country, and the world. Recently, we have added the option of minors, initially in economics and architecture and subsequently in a dozen more fields in the humanities.

The implications of a fundamental education in engineering go well beyond business and industry, however. In a society as deeply penetrated by, and dependent upon science and technology as ours, a background in engineering and applied science is necessary for the continued functioning of our participatory democracy.

More than at any other point in history, the reasoned resolution of the top issues on the agenda of everyday political discourse demands such an educational background —and this demand is intensifying. Whether the topic is genetically modified organisms, human cloning, identity theft, electronic voting booths in California or the rebuilding of road, power and water networks in Iraq, an intelligent debate must have at its foundation a basic grasp of the principles of the technology at issue, be it genomics, stem cell research, cryptography or civil engineering. Such knowledge should be expected from every educated citizen, including graduates of liberal arts institutions such as Columbia College.

This mission, of providing our University’s graduates with the wherewithal to become active and informed citizens, is a vital and weighty one, and our faculty have grappled throughout the School’s history with the questions it presents.

But the mission continues to evolve, as does our society. As Dean Finch recognized in his own time, “While it is true that modern civilization is largely an engineering creation and it would seem that some understanding of its methods, principles, and aims should, therefore, be part of a truly liberal, modern education, this . . . omission has yet to be repaired.” As long as this omission persists, our School will continue to be at the forefront of its repair.