Carnegie Mellon University - Thistle Yearbook (Pittsburgh, PA)

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Robert F. Doherty, succeeding Dr. Baker, continued and reinforced the trend toward liberalized general education, further changing the identity of Tech. Deeply concerned with the methods and results of education. Dr. Doherty instituted what has become known as the Carnegie Plan for Education which attempts to balance the areas of basic science, technical and advanced science. and social relations. This program encourages parallel development of technical and analytical knowledge in all areas so as to encourage both understanding and creativity. Doherty felt that technical education had been based on development of memory span, manipulative skills, and a knowledge of past work in a given field. He sought to place emphasis on individual creative work fostered by faculty guidance, on the development after college, the continuum which should form the greatest part of one’s educational life, and on the necessity of individual responsibility. Doherty believed firmly “that professional men set a pattern of life, that this pattern is cast in the mold of their earlier intellectual experience, and that a dominant clement in that experience is their professional training. Believing that his students would be leaders as well as fully-skilled professionals, he sought to prepare them not only to face the technology of the time but to be able to develop and expand it and to understand the social implications of their work. He sought to coordinate departments and to establish the same general framework for instruction in each of the three colleges. He hoped to use this horizontal organization to develop the students abilities and attitudes so that they could advance vertically both within the school and throughout their lives. In defining the purposes and goals of education, Doherty placed great emphasis on an integrated knowledge of fundamental relationships, specifically integration of the humanistic-social and the scientific-technological. His administrative objectives were incorporated into the programs of Fine Arts and Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, as well as in the College of Engineering and Science, so that all departments sought to provide a professional, well-rounded education so that all students would be well grounded in basic principles, analytic thinking, and a desire for future development coupled with an understanding of man and his social as well as technological existence. Doherty’s movement toward liberalization of professional education has national and international impact on the development of engineering curricula. At the same time, it has altered and enhanced the quality and character of education given in the three schools of Carnegie Tech. Doherty’s plan included extensive work on development and encouragement of graduate study and research. This emphasis was culminated in the founding of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration in 1949. The philosophy of this school is a development of the Carnegie Plan which attempts to balance three areas—engineering and science, social sciences and humanities, and administrative and economic areas. The impetus given to graduate study in other areas by the development of this school and by the emphasis placed upon original research was fostered and developed by John C. Warner who expanded facilities and built the faculty strength needed for the type of graduate education considered essential to modern engineering and to the development and enrichment of the student or professional in a given area. Recognizing the solidarity and validity of the educational philosophy and orientation established by Doherty, Warner sought to consolidate past gains and bring established plans to fruition thus making them an active, defining part of the school. Arthur Acton Hamerschlag, Sc.D., L.L.D. twenty-sewn

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