Slide Rules to Socrates

"We sometimes fear," M.I.T.'s liberal arts dean, John Ely Burchard, says of engineering students, "lest in the necessary pursuit of their education they shall not have time to develop a sense of proportion about the whole society." In recognition of this fear M.I.T. will inaugurate a five-year study program next year whereby students may simultaneously earn both a science and a liberal arts degree.

The narrowness of standard technical education methods have received sharp criticism from sources within the engineering profession itself, including, most recently, a group of articles in the official magazine of the national engineering honor society. In their attempts at solving this dilemma, educators have so far achieved only limited success. Engineering students spurn a normal liberal arts education followed by two years of graduate work because of their notorious haste to enter active practice. Even arrangements to cut this time down, such as that between M.I.T. and sixteen small colleges, can handle only a small number of students because of the size of the institutions involved. The logical area for improving engineering education is at the engineering institutions themselves. It is to technical schools like M.I.T. and California Tech, that most engineers want to go; it is here then, that a liberal arts background can be most meaningfully integrated with their professional training.

Currently, M.I.T.'s four-year curriculum requires students to take one humanities or social sciences course each semester. Amid his voluminous engineering schedule, however, the Tech student often regards his liberal arts course as a superfluous burden and gives it only secondary attention. Other engineering schools, notably those of Northwestern and Cornell, have five year program in effect; but they only grant single Bachelor of Science degrees. Outside educators also find that these schools waste early years on secondary school level material and thus later have to stress technical work rather than liberal arts.

The new M.I.T. program will begin on an experimental basis, with twenty-five students participating. Sixty percent of their studies will be spent in a normal technical field of concentration, while the remainder will be devoted to a major in the liberal arts. These second fields may include such subjects as industrial economy or the history of science, which will broaden the student's outlook on problems which he will likely encounter in his later career. Also, M.I.T. administrators expect five-year students to add a liberal arts element to their school's usually technologic atmosphere.

With its national prestige, M.I.T. traditionally sets new trends in U.S. engineering education. If the new five-year program proves successful, it will establish standards which other technical schools can profitably follow.