Summary Notes on Engineers and Ivory Towers, by H. Cross, McGraw-Hill, NY, 1952. [Referred by Professor J. M. Roesset]

Summarized by J. M. Roesset, and J. T. P. Yao, 9/24/01

ON EDUCATION

“ The purpose of education is to prepare a whole man to live a full life in a whole world. … In a way, education is a rather simple matter. … But schools are far from simple, and there lies the trouble.”

"… The function of the universities is to turn out intelligent men with some knowledge of practical fields rather then to turn out non-intelligent men with detailed knowledge of limited fields. … Education should give men an opportunity… to develop freely their intelligence, to think some things out themselves, to arrive at conclusions new at least to them. … It may be accepted that some bad education is worse than none and more bad education is worse than less. … To send people to college with too vague purposes simply to learn standardized form of fragmentary knowledge is dangerous. … The purpose of education must be service and not self-promotion. …"

"Distinction must be made between education, training and schooling… It is difficult to educate without training and equally hard to train without to some extent educating. But the two things are not the same. … Schooling is helpful in the process of education.”

"Does the engineering curriculum train for leadership? … The university can take men of reasonable health, ambition, character and intellect, and put them in an environment in which they will learn something of leadership, of its realities and its failures. Clearly all men cannot lead. … Science and system, law and custom, men and manners. The universities will not correlate these… but the universities… show students that later they themselves must try this correlation and that the sooner the start, the better. …"

 “It is easier to teach rules than it is to train judgment; therefore, when teachers get tired in the schools they are likely to revert to rules. … Consequently college curricula… tend to degenerate into compilations of rules, regulations, cases and classes unless these curricula are constantly revitalized. … But the rules must be taught as well as judgment, and college is a good place to teach many of the rules. …"

"… Some educators appear to think that if the number of courses and classes available is increased, then the training will be better and more valuable. … He who sets up two courses where one grew before two often thinks of himself as progressive and looks with

scorn on the reactionary who asks whether the two courses could not just as well be combined. … Inflation of the curriculum is not new. … Engineering in the undergraduate curriculum is becoming pocketed in smaller and smaller pigeonholes… Some think this multiplication of courses is necessary for development of the research attitude among the younger men of the staff and among the undergraduates. Actually, all engineering is research if by research is meant the solution of a problem not previously encountered or the development of a new solution of an old problem. …"

“Great buildings and expensive laboratories can never make a great university: great teachers do.”

 

ON TEACHING

"Teaching is an art. … As an art, teaching is necessarily individual… It can be accomplished by lecture or by discussion. … A teacher's first job is to teach, not to write or to do conventional research or to make speeches or to run errands on academic or technical committees, but to teach. Do not misunderstand this… Not only must they be in contact with technical societies but they must also follow the relations those technical activities to other developments. … Scholarship? Of course. … The great teacher must know his field, must know it in a peculiarly clear and vivid way. Then he will not only be a thinker, but an original thinker. Productivity? A teacher constantly trying to master his field almost inevitably produces… The output will have value… because of its quality and not because of its quantity. … Research? … Hard and intelligent study of any field of knowledge inevitably leads to research…"

"How shall the teacher teach? … Some of the most popular teachers are mighty poor ones; some of the greatest teachers have not been generally loved. … Uniformity of method is certainly the last thing to be desired. … There are many kinds of teachers, many fields of thoughts. …"

“ A clear and simple restatement of a fundamental principle may have profound influence. The virtue here is not due to any novelty of the rewording, but rather due to the simplicity and clarity of the contribution. … In the field of engineering the known basic principles are not very numerous. … The difficulty comes in applying them.”

"There is much talk of 'research,' of 'original contribution' and of the 'progress of science.' … These may be experimental or analytical… they may be bibliographical… Many of the candidates for the doctorate have planned to go right into teaching. This is almost certainly bad, for one who is to become a teacher of engineering should be trained primarily to be an engineer, and association with the profession outside of the ivory towers of learning is absolutely essential."

“ … The professor acts in part as a catalyst… Alumni are much inclined to have educators carefully prepares some part of this long road. … Thus a young graduate of thirty often think that he should have had more technical details in courses. At forty there is often the complaint that not enough attention was given to law and management, at fifty the alumnus wishes that he had studied more English or that he had read more of classical literature, at sixty he is usually grown up enough to recognize that colleges are dealing with young men of twenty…"

ON ENGINEERING

“Engineers are not primarily scientists. If they must be classified, they may be considered more humanists than scientists. Those who devote their life to engineering are likely to find themselves in contact with almost every phase of human activity. Not only must they make important decisions about the mere mechanical outline of structures and machines, but they are also confronted with the problems of human reactions to environment and are constantly involved in problems of law, economics and sociology.”

"… some types of planning, designing and experimenting can be put on an assembly line and some types can be put on an assembly line of skilled brains only, but much of the most important work cannot be done by using fixed rules, standardized formulas or rigid methods. … Machines, methods and systems cannot be a substitute for men. …The assembly line can never replace the brain that has created it.”

"… Many engineering problems are as closely allied to social problems as they are to pure science. … The workaday world does not fit into an academic department or into so-called fields of learning. … In addition to necessary classical interests engineers need character and culture and charm… Few men ever live life fully, but the opportunity and the birthright are there for the engineer. …The work of the engineer deals with human customs as well as material facts. … An important duty of teachers is force students repeatedly back into the field of reality… Some seniors forget that the laws of mechanics make them fall and bump their heads… that energy may kill. … Good engineers have a vivid sense of reality. … Engineers are primarily conscious of and intimately concerned with the consequences, social and political, of the works they have in hand. … Another important element of intellectual training is coordination of analysis and synthesis. …"

"… Interpretation of the evidence is always difficult, correct and gifted interpretation represents the highest attainment of the scholar. … Not enough use is made of the simple statement, 'I don't know.' … A brief and clear summary maybe the crowning glory of a good engineering report and good summary is very hard to write. …"

"Of course, there can be no discrepancy between correct theory and good practice. … All theory is limited in application. … Laboratory experiments may give valuable evidence. … All these sources of evidence provide needed information. …"

"Poor engineering entails failure and misfortune, inconvenience, suffering and death. … Errors of judgment will occur… For just this reason competent engineers… go back to test their conclusions by simple truths; for the great principles of engineering are always simple… It is not important whether engineering is called a craft, a profession or an art; under any name this study of man's needs and of God's gifts that they may be brought together is broad enough for a lifetime."

"… 'One test is worth a dozen opinions' … Someone else has said that 'no test is worthy of credence unless supported by an adequate theory.' Engineers can… see and weigh the truth of these conflicting views. … Engineers are always critical of statistical data and regularly ask whether the indications of the data were not inherent in the method of collection. … Engineers usually know what they are trying to do. … Engineering is essentially a craft. … Varying degrees of emphasis are given by different thinkers to the importance of human affairs, of genesis, of analysis, of synthesis - the reaction of new concepts, the analysis of known phenomena, or the putting together of old things to make better things. …"

[Readers who are interested in this book are encouraged to read the original version in its entirety. Other summary notes on faculty reward systems are available on the Internet at http://lohman.tamu.edu under the heading "Summaries of Papers ..."]