Engineering Human Souls

It is a discipline the College has never quite known how to deal with. Over the last century, engineering has been taught under five different administrative organizations at Harvard. During this time, the discipline has always been an unsettling force within undergraduate education. Were it a colony, it would have the liveliest nationalist movement, having attempted “secession” twice, at its inception and in 1919. Today, it is content to be a privileged province.

The creation of the new Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (we’ll call it SEAS) reflects this chaotic legacy. With characteristic indecision, the school will be the only separate school within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), yet its undergraduate admissions policies and administrative operations will remain under FAS control. It is, in effect, a department in all but name.

This change will be accompanied by a tangible increase in faculty numbers, but such resources could also be added without the creation of a separate school. To pretend that both are linked, as University Provost Steve E. Hyman did in a May 25 press release, is theatrical and misleading. The creation of SEAS is cosmetic, designed to increase the visibility of FAS in the face of competition from other, more prominent engineering schools. It is dictated by advertising, not even by industrial imperatives.

But even if the creation of SEAS is superficial, the idea it embodies is very real.

What is more troubling here is not the change itself, which might be necessary, but the lack of campus discussion that has greeted the development, which affects not only the future of engineering but also of liberal arts at the College. We may be gaining a first-rate engineering program, but, to put it simply, something is also being lost in the process, and it is a poor calculus that ignores the left side of the ledger.

To appreciate this, one must situate the creation of SEAS within a national context. Today, most of American higher education favors specialization, not generalization. Whereas in 1970 more than half of baccalaureate degrees were awarded in a liberal arts discipline, by 1995 that number had declined to nearly 40 percent. This suggests that the liberal arts model in America is in decline, and the creation of SEAS is ominous when seen in this context. It is a step, however small, in that direction.

It is not the right direction. Today, we need to be integrating knowledge, not fragmenting it. Vartan Gregorian, the former president of Brown University, has termed the project “the reconstruction of the unity of knowledge” in a coruscating 2004 essay. He writes, “[T]he complexity of the world requires us to have a better understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields.” A society more fragmented than today’s, Gregorian argues, has more of a dependence on experts and more of a temptation to eschew judgment in favor of accepted opinion. A fragmented knowledge defers answers to the “big questions” because it has decided that no one is qualified to answer them. Yet the big questions always remain.

No one is suggesting that SEAS’ creation has led Harvard to abdicate from the “big questions.” Harvard is not about to become Boston University, with its 20 centrifugal schools, anytime soon. But it is equally thoughtless to think that the creation of an entire school within a school will leave Harvard absolutely unscathed. It is difficult to say precisely how SEAS will contribute to the fragmentation of knowledge, but a look at the historical record gives us some idea of how it has happened in the past.

To begin, Harvard once had an undergraduate engineering school. It began in 1847 as part of the Lawrence Scientific School and was, in 1938, completely subsumed into FAS. Once absorbed, engineering was the only part of the College to eschew formal examinations for undergraduates. (Physics and chemistry, both subjects in the Scientific School, had mandated them). It was also the only discipline to confer undergraduate degrees besides the A.B. (Bachelor of Arts) and S.B. (Bachelor of Science) degrees—in Civil Engineering, Mining Engineering, and Metallurgical Engineering. And even the S.B. degree in 1906 did not even require Latin or Greek for admission.

But undergraduate engineering education also made significant strides towards modernity and mobility. Until 1906, the school admitted many non-traditional “special students” who would not have otherwise attended Harvard. Engineering was also one of the first—and only—to require five years of its concentrators, in deference to the difficulty of having both an engineering and a liberal arts education within the span of four years.

The common thread here is that engineering seems to have had a compulsion toward self-isolation to a degree not common to the other sciences. It is the ugly, productive child that avoids her peers. (This may hint at the rationale for the current cosmetic change.) The reasons are varied and many, and I’d rather not appraise a field’s essence for rebellious idiosyncrasies. But both the recent decline of the liberal arts model, as well as the field’s history of self-fragmentation, suggest that the creation of SEAS is a step in the wrong direction.

In the same essay, Gregorian had noted how a society that catered to a fragmented vision of knowledge was one that would perpetually crave wholeness. Last month, Harvard took a small step to becoming just such a place. At some point, it too shall crave wholeness.

Sahil K. Mahtani ’08, a Crimson associate editorial chair, is a history concentrator in Winthrop House.