In This Issue:

FACULTY

The Engineering Curriculum: An Identity Crisis?

By Morton B. Friedman, Vice Dean

As dry and, at times impenetrable, as a curriculum may appear, it does identify the way in which an institution expresses its culture and understanding of its mission and goals. Columbia Engineering has always taken a leadership role in developing new curricular concepts.

It may be surprising to engineers who graduated before 1994 to learn that engineering, and consequently engineering education, is suffering an identity crisis. Dr. Rosalind Williams of MIT described it best when she wrote that the mission of engineering has changed because the dominant problem no longer involves the conquest of nature, but the creation and management of a self-made habitat.

She further noted that, for most of the 20th century, engineering faculty assumed that industrial practice depended upon students’ understanding of fundamental scientific principles (e.g., the laws of motion, conservation of energy, atomic structure of matter). Today, these principles have been replaced by “technoscience,” the interaction of multiple disciplines where the projects, not the disciplines, drive the investigation and research.

This is the legacy of a decade of historic change in the engineering world and in higher education, fostered by stunning developments in digital technology and the sciences. Revolutionary changes in scholarly and scientific communications, created largely by engineering achievements in computers and communications, are affecting the way industry and educational institutions conduct their missions. Both are compelled to respond to rapidly changing global environments driven by technological innovation, competition and economic necessity. The challenges are unprecedented but they reflect revolutionary changes that continue to transform business, governance and academia nation-wide.

Emerging technologies support systemic changes in educational philosophy, content and manner of delivery. Students and teachers alike now have the tools to interact with text, images, ideas and concepts in powerful new and useful ways that were difficult or impossible with chalk and blackboard or pencil and paper. These new tools offer new options to create an academic world in which economies of scale, efficiency of delivery, equity in providing access to education, and empowerment of individual learners become goals that are actively pursued.

The curricula in place in the first half of the 1990’s began to acknowledge the explosive growth of information and automation in the classical engineering disciplines; the emergence of new disciplines, such as biomedical engineering, environmental engineering, and computer engineering; and the need to adapt newly developed methods of pedagogy.

The pervasive role of the computer has dramatically altered the engineering landscape. The unprecedented synergy between engineering and science over the past decade has significantly blurred the line between the two. Nanotechnology is a perfect example.

The essence of the educational process is interaction—the sharing of knowledge, an act of communication that has historically been localized in space and time at a single institution, in the classroom, laboratory, library or office. The limitations imposed by geography, time, and resources encouraged institutions in the past to maintain this inward focus.

New technologies such as the World Wide Web and handheld computers, however, have significantly altered how students learn, where they learn, what they learn, and when they learn. These technologies have likewise altered the perceptions of the future role of the faculty in the digital age, as aptly captured by the phrase “from the sage on the stage to the guide by the side.”

These developments make it essential that educational institutions provide students with the kinds of knowledge and tools that will empower them to work in new, evolving, and yet-to-be invented interdisciplinary modes and provide an education that will serve a diverse student body while encouraging a desire for life-long learning. The new vision of engineering education emphasizes the development of students as emerging professionals and educated citizens, equally at home with societal concerns as they are with technical issues. This demands that students be immersed in engineering design and practice and societal concerns as early and as pervasively as possible. The major tool for implementing a new educational vision is the curriculum.

As one of a handful of American universities that predate the American Revolution, and one of the first to establish an engineering school in the 19th century, Columbia has had to anticipate the winds of change in order to remain a preeminent institution. Its leadership role in defining and creating the modern, comprehensive research university is well-documented. Columbia has played, and continues to play, a similar, but perhaps less well-known role in engineering education.

From its inception, the Engineering School emphasized a broad, liberal education in philosophy and the arts, and a thorough training in the body of mathematical and scientific knowledge constituting the theory of engineering. This framework is one that several prominent organizations, including ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education), recently have advocated to reshape engineering education.

Modern engineering educators also have earmarked the need to attract more women and underrepresented minorities to the field, to place more emphasis on teamwork in the engineering curriculum, and to stress the global context in which engineering is practiced today. We can now see a new pedagogy where the focus is shifting from an emphasis on courses and course content to the development of human resources and the broader experience in which parts of the curricula are interrelated.

This pedagogy emphasizes engaging our students in the engineering enterprise from the day they matriculate. Responding to this need for “engineering up front,” Columbia Engineering has enhanced the required first-year Gateway design course by using Matlab (the computational software used by almost all engineering disciplines) and emphasizing writing and oral presentation skills. It is the first and only course in the country to require all first-year students to participate in real, client-centered design experiences, working with community-based non-profit organizations on technology solutions.

At the same time we are enhancing the liberal arts component of the curriculum, offering undergraduate minors in liberal arts subjects such as philosophy, music, psychology, religion, economics, English, history, and political science. Students are especially drawn to this opportunity which adds a unique dimension to the undergraduate engineering curriculum. In addition, our non-technical requirements for all undergraduates continue to include Columbia’s famed Core Curriculum. Our School is educating leaders who will be at home in the humanities, as well as in science and engineering.

Truly, Columbia Engineering education has always been, and continues to be, ahead of its time.