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The liberal studies curriculum as the basis for an engineering education

The experience of 25 years of teaching undergraduate engineering students at one of the premier institutions for engineering education in the world, as well as many years also spent teaching social science research methods to doctoral students in engineering systems, has led me to what may seem on its face to be an ironic, if not outright puzzling, conclusion: the ever-increasing technological complexity of our world demands an education that is less narrowly focused on the acquisition of technical skills rather than more as the current engineering curriculum might suggest. This is not to say that technical proficiency is unimportant for successful engineering practice; but in and of itself a technical education produces technicians. If engineers want to be creative producers of useful and useable technology, to solve problems that have tremendous social, economic, or political ramifications in addition to their technical challenges, to engage in culture-making and not just the production of gadgets, or to advance into corporate and governmental leadership, they will require the skills and contextual awareness acquired through the broad exposure to social processes, history, human flourishing, and discovery of the natural world encompassed in the liberal studies curriculum. The current emphasis on STEM education (with its casual conflation of science and math on the one hand, with technology and engineering on the other) makes it easy to forget that science and technology are very different kinds of intellectual enterprises. Science is fundamentally a process of discovery, and not one of innovation. That is to say, it is not the making of things, but the process of finding out about the world. (In this regard, it has more in common with say, sociology, than it does with engineering.) It requires a set of coherent and formal frameworks of explicit knowledge to explain nature or reality, even if those frameworks are themselves dependent on the personal knowledge and past experience of each individual living within a particular community. Science may well be a moving target, but it nonetheless has a stable reality as its goal of discovery. Likewise, it is not a utilitarian pursuit, even if its discoveries may sometimes prove to have utilitarian off-shoots. Technology on the other hand is grounded in the realm of non-natural things (artifacts) that some people (a community of users) find useful (creates value) when they share its use. It seeks to make or do, to solve a problem, meet a need, or generate a new desire. Technology is more than just the artifact though: it also requires a community of believers in a certain way of using it in order to create the added value that we call innovation. Without users, there is no technology, and hence, no innovation. Despite their very different intellectual bases then, both science and technology are equally embedded in a human context. The successful diffusion of advances in both