Stevens Institute of Technology - Link Yearbook (Hoboken, NJ)

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fn' 7 YN .:.-,liiilllllil iilill lllll A mj lfgllllllll ,gngignsqsgzanlllnli ' HHH' ' 'ili HW ii i f ' I W 'uw' nauu uu they don't know much, and of knowing what to do about it. If any of them fall into the hands of that captain of industry of whom I spoke a moment ago, no positions whatever will be closed to them, for wherever he puts them, they will carry with them an ample abundance of the black soil of ignorance in which to raise the flower of eager self-education which he so much desires. ln thus urging a single unspecialized curriculum, l am, you will notice, raising engineering education from the status of the trade school, with its multiplicity of special apprenticeship courses, to the status of the training schools of the older professions of law and medicine. There are corporation lawyers and criminal lawyers and patent lawyers and admiralty lawyers and a dozen other kinds of lawyers, but in no first-class law school that I am familiar with are there a dozen or even two separately labeled curricula. So, also, there are surgeons and obstetricians and pediatricians and psychiatrists and orthopedists and internists and specialists in the nose and throat, and even a few good old-fashioned family doctors, but every good medical school gives them all the same fundamental training. Of course, both in law selmols and in medical schools, the single curriculum has a certain flexibility through election by the student, and the same should be true of our ideal engineering curriculum. But the amount of election that is commonly found desirable in the schools of law and medicine is surprisingly small, especially when one considers the maturity of the students. And furthermore, in law and in medicine there is intense specialization, as I have indicated above, but the student begins it, in general, only after graduation, perhaps as an interne in a hospital, perhaps in the law offices where he finds his first job, perhaps, in certain cases, through highly specialized post-graduate academic study. ln engineering, also, there should be opportunities of all these kinds, but they should follow rather than permeate the fundamental four years. Every engineer specializes sooner or later, and will, if he is a first-class man, specialize more and more intensely all his life. If, during his undergraduate years, we can lay a firm general foundation for this specialization, we shall have made the most effective possible contribu- tion to his career. The single, broad curriculum which I have outlined is no new thing at Stevens. Throughout the fifty-seven years of its existence, Stevens has stood for one course and one degree. It is true that the degree selected long ago, the degree of Mechanical Engineer, looks like a specialized degree, but everyone who is familiar with what has been done during these years knows that the course has been far from correspondingly narrow, and that Stevens graduates are to be found in almost every branch of mechanical, civil, electrical, and chemical engineering, and in many less technical business and executive positions. Whether, with this ideal, and with so definite a success in realizing it, Stevens has been wise in retaining an apparently specialized and really misrepresentative name for its single degree is another question. There are many who feel that a general degree in engineering would be much less likely to mislead prospective students on the one hand, and prospec- tive employers on the other. But the weight ofa long tradition is not to be lightly cast aside, and there is many an alumnus whose regret would be deep, sincere, and vociferous, if his son, now with us or still to come to us, could not look forward to singing with his Dad the good old song, I'm a rambling wreck from Stevens Tech. a Mechanical Engineer. However we may feel about the name of the degree, the essential thing is that we do the right kind of a job, and do it as well as we know how. And to the furthering of the job, the job of giving one fundamental, unspecialized, undergraduate curriculum, affording what might be called a liberal engineering education, the job of turning out cadet engineers who, though largely untrained, are yet thoroughly prepared to train themselves through long lives of usefulness--to the furthering of that job I pledge my best endeavor. 27

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il, . 3, i t ii rw ' mlm llllillliii mms , ffiiiirhii l- - - i - ' ngsmaia r asf t!iEMiiEl tt'lllu ttna uai.H,Zg to every success, the chiefof which are usually such elements of character as industry, loyalty, and common sense. But, insofar as the appropriateness or inappropriateness of their academic training affected the result at all, I am inclined to assert that these gentlemen, and their hundreds of thoroughly admirable fellow misfits in the engineering world, have succeeded not at all in spite of, but, in part at least, actually because of the apparent contrast between type of training and type ofjob that I have been emphasizing. In making this statement, I am not trying to phrase a spectacular paradox. l' am trying to formulate a fundamental principle of professional education that is so inherent in the trend of the times that it is being brought out in different ways by a surprisingly diverse group of observers. You will remember that Josh Billings once said, It's fine to know a lot of things, especially if some of them are so. Similarly, I might phrase the principle I am speaking ofin the words, A youngster had better not know too many things, even if all of them are so g in other words, there is real danger in our teaching these students of ours too much about the specific careers ahead of them. Why waste time in an engineering school learning details, descriptions of processes and of machines, tricks of technique of hand or brain, or even miscellaneous facts, all of which, insofar as one wants them at all, can be learned far more effectively on the job? Why not devote one's time in the school in learning what one may never have another chance to learn, namely, fundamental principles, and how to think? And always re- member that ignorance, plus willingness to learn, plus ability to learn, is a far better basis on which to establish appropriate and satisfactory human relationships with one's own organization, and with the world in general, than is knowing a lot of things, even if all of them are so. My conception of the educational opportunity which the undergraduate engineering schools of today would do well to offer to their students must be, by now, fairly clear to you. There will not be a multiplicity of more or less specialized undergraduate curricula, each designed to train for some one variety of engineering career. There will be one curriculum. And in this curriculum the emphasis will be placed on the basic dis- ciplines that underlie all engineering careers: there will be plenty of mathematics, physics and chemistry: there will be mechanics in all its branches, including the deplorably few fundamental principles that are yet known as to the nature and serviceableness of the materials of enginecringg stress will be laid on thermo- dynamics and in particular on the two laws of thermodynamics and on how to use them as a vital part of one's thinkingg there will be electrodynamics with emphasis on the fundamental principles of both direct and alternating current phenomenag at least a foundation will be laid in hydro and aerodynamics: and there will be thorough training in the various arts of mensuration, and in the still greater art of feeling instinctively the appropriate degree of skepticism as to the results. Many useful facts will be automatically stored away in the studcnt's mind if his teachers will merely adhere strictly to the practice of basing every problem or examination question on real data. But there will be a great dearth of survey courses designed primarily to impart facts. Throughout, the method of attack, rather than the answer, would be the significant thing. This curriculum will also emphasize the non-technical, purely human side of an engineer's life, by offering an appropriate amount of history and literature, of economies and government, of psychology, of philosophy and ethics and even of music and art, and by stressing the economic and human sides ofengineering itself in every available way. And finally, this curriculum will bc such as to develop in each individual student, to at least an acceptable degree, the various arts of self-expression and of communication, including not only the sketching pencil and the drawing pen, without which so many engineers are hopelessly inarticulate, but particularly the written and the spoken word. Preferably, all of these arts of expression will be developed by patient, long continued, informal, individual guidance, extending throughout the student's four years, and intimately related to the ordinary activities of his academic life, rather than by a multiplicity of special, artificial activities called plates, themes and orations. There will, I say. be only one unspecialized undergraduate curriculum rather than seven or seventeen or forty-three specialized onesg and the one curriculum will prepare, in one sense,for all sorts of engineering careers, and in another sense for no career whatever. That is, it will not attempt to teach the details of any one of many branches. Its graduates won't know much but they will have the saving grace of knowing that 26 -

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Y rm 3 4,--. .1 Q J- . umgtltlii,.i!Mz.,ZLH'-...ie Sr l h FL ntl IEIIIIIIIIIIIHEllllulllwlt I e .!!..!!!!!!!Q!e.'5..?!l !!! !!!!!!!!J . .JL i leinruiafi. !.! !!!!5s!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JE The Trustees of the Stevens Institute of Technology OFFICERS WALTER KIDDE . . . . . . . Chairman FRANKLIN B. KIRKBRIDE . Ist Vice-Chairmen EDWARD WESTON . . 2nd Vice-Chairman ALTEN S. MILLEIK . ..... Secretary JAMES CREESE . . . . Treasurer and Assistant Secretary MEMBERS ROGER C. ALDRICH, M.E., Alumni Representative . JOHN ASPINWALL, M.E., M.A. . . . JAMES CREESE, LITT. B., M.A. . HARVEY N. DAVIS, A.B., PII.D. . . . HENRY T. GERDES, M.E., Alumni Representative . GEORGE GIBBS, M.E ..... DAVID S. JACOBUS, M.E., E.D. . WALTEIX KIDDE, M.E. . . FRANKLIN B. KIRKBRIDE, A.B. . JOHN W. LIEB, M.E., E.D. ALTEN S. MILLER, M.E. . . . FREDERICK A. MUSCHENIIEIM, M.E. . ROBERT C. POST, M.E. . . EDWIN A. STEVENS, JR., M.E. . WILLIAM E. S. STRONG, . ALBERT C. WALL, B.A., M.A. . EDWARD WESTON, LL.D., Sc.D. . MRS. I'IENRY O. WITTPENN .... RICHARD A. WOLI-'I-', M.E., Alumni Representative 28 . Newark, N. J Newburgh, N. Y . Hoboken, N. J . Hoboken, N. J Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y New York, N. New York, N. New York, N. New York, N. New York, N. New York, N. New York, N. New York, N. New York, N. . Hoboken, N. J New York, N. Y Jersey City, N. J . Newark, N. J . Hoboken, N. J New York, N. Y