Engineering and the Liberal Arts: Toward Academic Cosmopolitanism

0
308

What needs to be done to create engineers whose skills, knowledge, and intellectual appetites enable them to respond thoughtfully and innovatively to the challenges of sustainability and other pressingly complex social issues? This question invites thinking not only about how to integrate more of the liberal arts into the educational pathways for future engineers, but also, in the context of bringing such integration, about what might be done differently within liberal arts education itself. Currently the liberal arts themselves do a better job in general at introducing technology itself into the classroom than they do at focusing on technology as a subject-matter for examination and reflection. Much more could be done by way of cultivating epistemic respect for technology and its significance in shaping our world; and more emphasis could be placed on building capacity for curiosity, shaping good questions, and creative problem-framing. The development of such broad, “cosmopolitan” affordances of mind would I propose help engineering and non-engineering students alike to see themselves as part of a single academic culture of inquiry within an ever-increasingly unpredictable world. I want to begin by thanking President Ainlay and the members of the steering committee for their graciousness in extending an invitation to me to make a contribution to this year’s symposium. It is a special pleasure to be here and to be a part of these conversations. I first learned about the existence of this project last Fall by reading about it and looking through the proceedings on the Web. I thought it was a really exciting initiative and so when I was invited to come I admit to responding fairly unphilosophically; that is, I said “yes” with relatively little hesitation and consequently relatively little reflection. Afterwards, it occurred to me that it might have made some sense to first ask what my role in this symposium would be. When I did ask, the hope was expressed to me that my remarks, together with those of President Duncan, would offer complementary perspectives on the issue of integrating engineering education with a liberal education. I would make the case from the side of the liberal arts, President Duncan from the side of engineering, the result being that our remarks would effectively serve as bookends to one another and so help support and stimulate discussion. With the image, then, of bookends in mind, I thought I would begin with a book; or more precisely, with a question posed at the beginning of a book. The book is Man in the Age of Technology (English translation, Columbia University Press, 1980), by the German philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen. Gehlen’s ultraconservatism, including his harsh assessment of all forms of modernism, have quite reasonably served to deflate the value of his stock in the contemporary marketplace of ideas. Still, the questions about which he worried are ones that continue to be worrisome today. “It is not clear,” he reflected, “why in Germany we remain reluctant to concede the same rights of citizenship to technique as to other forms of culture.” Perhaps the fault lay with the usual suspects—the primacy of theory over practice, or pure over applied science— or perhaps even, as Gehlen went on to speculate, that the intellectual resources of German idealism were sufficient to solve all the problems of humanity. Over half a SYMPOSIUM ON ENGINEERING AND LIBERAL EDUCATION 14 century later from when these words were originally written, the reluctance Galen noted to extend to technique, and we might add to technology as well, the same credentials and rights of cultural citizenship long ago extended to literature, philosophy, art, history, mathematics, physics and the like, while abating somewhat, still continues to persist. Consider these words from Wybo Houkes, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands: Designing is of vital importance for every human society—from early toolusers to heavily technologicallydependent contemporary societies. The products of designing range from skyscrapers to microchips and weather satellites to wicker baskets. Yet accounts of design, particularly within analytic philosophy, are as rare as Siberian tigers—and not nearly as actively sought out. Some years ago, a cartoon appeared in the New Yorker showing a typical scenario in a Human Resource office; a person sitting in front of a desk handing a resume to the person behind it. The caption read: “Yes, I am a philosopher, but I am willing to learn.” What is there to learn from systematically considering the prospects for integrating engineering education with liberal education? From the viewpoint of the liberal arts, I believe there is a good deal to learn about how things might be done differently. The suggestion I would like to make and defend here is one that is simple and straightforward. To make a case from the standpoint of the liberal arts for taking engineering as a liberal art is not simply a matter of arguing that engineering education shares or is moving in the direction of sharing a similar set of interests or learning goals as those associated with liberal 1“Designing in the Construction of Use Plans,” in Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture(Springer, 2008). education, that it “makes the cut,” so to speak, although these reasons play a very important role in making this case. But, from the standpoint of the liberal arts, another very important part of making the case that engineering is a liberal art is to acknowledge that liberal education itself needs to adjust, needs to make change within itself and be more open to what matters to the education of engineers. And, in so changing, liberal education can renew and revitalize some of its own basic concerns and fundamental tenets. The observations by Gehlen and Houkes with which I began might serve as points of orientation for getting at the substance of what kind of change would be helpful. On the one hand, from the time that phrases first began to be used such as “the technological age” and “the technological society” until now, these and similar descriptions have become commonplace labels for the times in which we live and the horizon against which we strive to make sense of our experience and our place in the world. The products and processes of engineering increasingly shape the goods we pursue, including those goods associated with participation in a democratic society, On the other, despite the fact that one of the fundamental purposes of a liberal education is to stimulate the broad, “bigpicture” thinking essential for making sense of our experience, including thinking about the nature of the present age and the question of what the material conditions of existence ought to look like in order to promote opportunities for different individuals to pursue a variety of conceptions of the good life, there is surprisingly little attention given within liberal arts curricula to thinking about technology itself and our relations to