Engineering Education and a Professional Ethic

Science and technology offer endless possibilities for solving our unmet human and social needs. But for the engineers to play his part in these accomplishments he will have to change. He will have to be broader in scope and outlook; he will have to have education in and awareness of the social sciences and humanities to be able to keep up with the rapid changes of our society. To achieve these goals, we must begin at the university level with the engineers of tomorrow. Today scholastic engineering is rapidly becoming more fragmented and narrowly puristic because many professors, harried as they are by the financial, social, and intellectual pressures of the university community, have little time or inclination to view what they do from a universe other than their own. They impose upon the curriculum their narrow disciplinary points of view which place greater value on the scientific frontiers of their field than on its tradition, and certainly not when relating it to a professional ethic such as a liberation of mankind from suffering.