Light on the Hill, Volume II
Miller, Russell
1986
AS TUFTS ENTERED ITS SECOND CENTURY its College of Engineering was a relatively small but rapidly growing, exclusively undergraduate professional school, with the bulk of the students recruited from the Greater Boston area. Between 1953 and 1956 the engineering enrollment increased from 549 to 622, partly to meet the backlog of demand that had built up after World War II. The largest enrollment in 1956 was in electrical engineering, followed by mechanical, civil, and chemical, in that order. All of the four major departments had been accredited by 1952. A non-accredited General Engineering curriculum also existed. There had been some discussion in 1953 about discontinuing it but no action had been taken. | |
The job market for engineers seemed to be almost unlimited in the 1950s, and graduates with a BS degree frequently entered the profession at substantially higher salaries than their professors were receiving. The majority of the engineering faculty were faced with such low salaries that they were forced to supplement their stipends by holding outside jobs as consultants and teaching evening classes in neighboring institutions. Particular attention was called to the salary problem at Tufts by the Engineering Council for Professional Development when representatives visited the campus in the spring of 1954. During 1952-53 engineering interviews arranged through the Placement Office ended several weeks earlier than scheduled because there were so few applicants. In that year, ninety-four of the ninety-six engineering graduates had offers of more than one good position from which to choose. That year, one graduate who had taken the Naval ROTC program was hired by the Du Pont Company, for which he worked one week between the end of classes and Commencement. That brief employment kept him on the Du Pont payroll even while he was serving his compulsory time with the United States Navy. | |
Unlike the curricula of the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Jackson, those of the College of Engineering were determined to a large extent | |
84 | by outside professional accrediting agencies. In 1952, at the request of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), Dean Harry P. Burden had appointed a local Committee on Evaluation of Engineering Education which submitted a final report to the ASEE in January 1956. This necessitated an inventory of the situation at Tufts in comparison with other New England institutions which took many months to complete. Three questionnaires were used to collect information for the study, two of which were sent to the four engineering departments and one to the deans of colleges of engineering in New England. MIT was considered Tufts' principal competitor for students in the Greater Boston area. |
Several significant changes were made in the College of Engineering in the 1950s as a result of the two local questionnaires and much subsequent consultation. Beginning with the spring semester in 1957 all matters connected with admissions were transferred from the office of the engineering dean to the Director of Admissions for the College of Liberal Arts. This consolidation was confirmed by Dean Ashley Campbell who had succeeded Burden after the latter's retirement that fall. Miles Uhrig at first undertook the responsibility for handling engineering admissions in the central office. | |
Also as a result of the faculty questionnaires all secondary school students making application to the College of Engineering were required to have acquired a background in both physics and chemistry which was part of the engineering curriculum in either the first or second year. The importance of College Board tests was stressed, including competency in English. Efforts to integrate the humanistic and social sciences into the engineering program were to continue. However, much of this invocation of the liberal arts tradition seemed to have been only rhetoric, for until 1956 ROTC courses could be used to fulfill the humanities requirement. A (temporary) end was put to this by the Engineering Council for Professional Development which refused to accredit programs that followed such a practice. It should be pointed out that the local evaluation committee had in 1956 looked "with apprehension upon appreciable substitution of ROTC credit for humanistic and social studies." | |
At the time the College of Engineering reviewed its degree requirements in the 1950s, the total required was 120 credit hours in Liberal Arts and Jackson and 140 in engineering, including two credits in physical education. The engineering faculty recommended a forty-course requirement instead of the customary credits - a conversion made in 1958 in the College of Engineering but delayed for several years in the other undergraduate divisions. The change | |
85 | to a course system meant a reduction in the forty-three engineering course credits previously required in each department. Within the degree requirements recommended, there was to be roughly equal division among the physical sciences and mathematics, engineerirg sciences, humanities and social sciences, and departmental concentration. |
The College of Engineering was the last division of the university to become involved in graduate instruction, with the exception of the College of Special Studies in its early years. Only one out of seven faculty members possessed a PhD in 1956. It remained an exclusively undergraduate teaching facility until 1961-62, when master's programs were first offered in all four major departments. Unlike most other graduate programs at Tufts, there was no foreign language requirement for engineering graduate degrees. Embarkation on graduate instruction had been the topic of extended discussion and debate which had begun in the 1950s and was encouraged by President Wessell. When the Tufts-Carnegie Self-Study was completed in 1958 some of the faculty admitted that graduate study in engineering was probably desirable, but not necessarily at Tufts. Others felt that a program of graduate study should be "eventually" introduced but probably not in all departments. Many saw no use at all for such a program. All available funds should be spent on buildings, equipment, and staff salaries in order "to provide Tufts with a unique and outstanding undergraduate program." As late as 1959 the majority of the engineering faculty expressed serious doubts about embarking on graduate work, and when there was talk in 1960 of establishing such a program at the master's level it was suggested that it be operated in conjunction with late afternoon or evening classes and not even as part of the regular curriculum. | |
However, pressure from Wessell continued to mount for introducing not only a master's but a PhD program in engineering. Within two years of the approval of master's work, a doctoral program was announced in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (1963), followed by one in electrical engineering in the spring of 1964. A PhD program in chemical engineering was approved in the fall of that same year. A PhD program in the Department of Engineering Design was not approved until 1981, and in 1985 a doctoral program in civil engineering was approved by the faculty. Half the engineering faculty possessed PhD's by the mid-1960s. | |
Both the introduction and expansion of graduate instruction pointed up the problem of understaffing and posed difficulty in providing a balance between instruction and research. | |
86 | The discontinuance in 1967-68 by the Selective Service system of military deferment of engineering graduate students during their first year was a temporary blow to the growing graduate program. |
One of the principal reasons for delaying the introduction of graduate work in engineering was the sad state of library facilities in the 1950s which were almost non-existent and which also adversely affected the quality of undergraduate teaching. A study was made in that decade by Tau Beta Pi, the undergraduate honorary engineering fraternity. (A chapter of this fraternity had been established on campus in 1923.) It revealed that there was really no such thing as a "library" in the usual sense of the word. What passed for a library was actually a random collection of books (largely outdated texts) dispersed among various departments in Robinson Hall and "stored in closets, cupboards and drawers, and occasionally on shelves." Some engineering materials, such as back files of periodicals, were in Eaton Library. There was no catalogue of any kind and, of course, no librarian. It was, in sum "not a picture of a library but of generally dispersed, disorganized and inaccessible collections of [materials] inadequately catalogued, maintained, and serviced." Much of the library problem was alleviated, if not completely solved, by the opening of a new engineering building (Anderson Hall) in 1960 which included for the first time adequate library space and facilities (later to be outgrown) and both books and money from the Lufkin Foundation. | |
Revisions in the undergraduate engineering curricula were put into effect in 1958. Among them were a common-core five-course program for each of the first four semesters; an increase in the humanities and social science electives from six to eight courses, part of which could be substituted for the English 1-2 requirement; a ten-course departmental concentration requirement; and the discontinuance of the General Engineering program. In order to encourage recruiting in the lagging Air Force ROTC program, up to twelve of the forty engineering courses required for the degree were allowed in 1960, at the expense of the humanities and social science requirement. A similar arrangement was made for Naval ROTC courses. | |
The recurring practice of allowing ROTC courses to be used in place of the humanities and social sciences resulted in further negotiation in 1961 when the Engineering Council for Professional Development granted limited-term accreditation of programs until the amount of ROTC credit allowance was either reduced or eliminated. The maximum was reduced to six in 1962, but the question of ROTC credit was not finally resolved until 1966, when the number of courses counted (two) were considered free electives and not a | |
87 | part of the humanities/social science requirement. The Engineering Council for Professional Development had for many years resisted the "stubborn disbelief" of the Tufts engineering faculty in the value of so-called "cultural" courses. The humanities area was still further reduced when the basic English 1-2 requirement was dropped completely, effective in September 1966 - a step which caused considerable comment (mostly adverse) by the liberal arts faculty. Two electives were substituted "to encourage broader intellectual interest." |
After the Experimental College was created in 1964 its courses could be counted as part of engineering electives. When the pass-fail system was adopted in 1966, on the initiative of the Tufts Student Council, it was pointedly noted that there were no engineering students in that organization. As in most other instances (with the notable exception of ROTC), the College of Engineering followed the pattern set by Liberal Arts and Jackson, including student participation on faculty committees in 1968, the introduction of the Winter Study period, and the reduction of the course load from five to four in 1970. After Winter Study was abandoned, the minimum course requirement was set at thirty-eight for accredited undergraduate | |
88 | degree programs in 1974. The engineering degree requirement was correspondingly reduced from forty to thirty-six. |
One of the problems faced by the College of Engineering was unexpected fluctuations in enrollment. Both applications and enrollment went down in the late 1950s. Freshman enrollment declined from 225 in 1957 to 145 in 1960. Part of the explanation offered was the increased attraction of the physical sciences over programs combined with engineering. There was a simultaneous rise in the incidence of academic difficulty, with as much as one-third of the freshman class on probation or warning. By contrast, Liberal Arts and Jackson students in academic difficulty seldom reached 10 percent. A record 25 percent of the engineering student body was required to withdraw in 1958-59. The decline in applications continued into the early 1960s. In order to make up a freshman class of 200 in 1961 it was found necessary to admit 55 percent of all applicants and to accept students below the upper 60 percent in their secondary school classes. | |
The Admissions Office then engaged in an especially vigorous recruiting program in 1961-62, and teams of engineering faculty visited numerous secondary schools in an effort to interest prospective students. Within the next five years there was a marked increase in both the quantity and academic quality of engineering students. Over 90 percent of the freshman class in 1965-66 were in the upper one-fifth of their secondary school classes and more than 75 percent received their degrees. | |
Another noticeable slump in applications and enrollment occurred in 1971-72, when over 65 percent of applicants had to be admitted in order to fill available spaces in the freshman class, as compared to less than 20 percent in the College of Liberal Arts. Applications fell so sharply in 1972 that a concerted effort was made to route applicants to liberal arts and Jackson into engineering. Of the 300 students contacted, 90 were admitted as engineering students but only 37 of them actually enrolled in engineering. | |
Other schools besides Tufts experienced at the same time the same serious decline in engineering students. In 1972 the president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute contacted President Hallowell and suggested that his institution take over the functions of the Tufts engineering college while allowing its students to continue to receive Tufts degrees. Hallowell's prompt answer was a decisive "No." One means of bolstering engineering enrollment was the broadening of curricula and degree choices. In 1969 a combined bachelor's/ master's program was adopted, and in 1971 a double major in engineering and mathematics was approved. Two new degrees were | |
89 | also approved between 1969 and 1971 - a BS in Engineering (without departmental designation or professional accreditation) and a BS in Engineering Science. The general degree program was originally to have been designated as a "Bachelor of Science in Engineering Arts." The first was designed to cut across departmental lines and emphasize versatility rather than specialization. The new Engineering Science degree placed the emphasis on "underlying scientific disciplines." The two new degrees were intended to appeal to men planning to go into law or business administration and to women with mathematical ability. Women had first enrolled in engineering during World War II and the first to earn an engineering degree (chemical) had graduated cum laude in 1944. Eight women were enrolled by 1970 - a number greatly exceeded in later years. |
There had always been some transfer of students between the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts as career goals changed and as academic capabilities were reassessed. Customarily the flow had been predominantly from engineering to liberal arts, but after the introduction of the two new undesignated degree programs a significant reversal took place, and was evident by 1970. | |
Another program with special appeal was the Unified Science Study Program (USSP), an experiment in individualized learning. Fourteen Tufts freshmen engineers were enrolled at MIT in 1969-70 and the program was so well received that a similar program was established at Tufts under the supervision of John Sununu, with twenty-five participants, financed by a three-year grant from the Sloan Foundation. | |
Dean Campbell resigned in 1968 to assume an academic position at the University of Maine after eleven years at Tufts, and in that year a Visiting Committee assessed the general state of the engineering program. One member characterized the undergraduate program as "unimaginative but solid," and the graduate program as very weak and too small to have much positive impact. He blamed much of the difficulty on the lack of will by the older faculty to venture into new areas. After a brief interim period, Ernest D. Klema, a professor of engineering at Northwestern University, was appointed dean, but resigned in 1973, after only three years, to return to teaching. | |
Three of the four major departments were reaccredited for four years in 1972. However, the Chemical Engineering Department received accreditation for only two. The chemistry curriculum was considered to be below minimum standards, and physical facilities in the Pearson Chemistry Laboratory where the department was located were becoming more and more inadequate. The graduate program | |
90 | was still so shaky that the decision was made in 1973 not even to apply for advanced-level (master's) accreditation. Six-year accreditation for the undergraduate program in chemical, civil, and electrical engineering was accomplished in 1976, but the Mechanical Engineering Department was accredited for only two years because of a variety of alleged weaknesses. |
Arthur Uhlir, Jr., who had joined the faculty as Professor of Electrical Engineering in 1970 after an extensive career in private industry, served as acting dean for two years, following Klema's resignation. Uhlir was appointed dean in 1975 and served for five years. After another nationwide search, Frederick C. Nelson, chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department since 1969, and an engineering alumnus (1954), succeeded Uhlir who, at his request and like Klema, returned to teaching. | |
The great issue of the 1970s, extending into the 1980s, was the relationship between the College of Engineering and the rest of the institution. Bernard Harleston, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was fully aware of the historically close ties between liberal arts and engineering at Tufts and was firmly convinced that the tie should not be weakened but should continue. He had become so concerned by 1972 about a perceptible drift of the engineering college away from its roots and about its increasing desire for autonomy that he appointed a large (twenty-three member) task force, of which he was chairman "to consider future policies and management of the Engineering College." But the task was even broader than that. It was to assess "what direction the Engineering College should take and wants to take, and what role the College of Engineering sees for itself in the context of the larger Arts and Science program." He requested the college "to develop a statement of purpose and educational direction ... in the relationship both to its own educational program and to the educational program of Arts and Sciences." The whole question had been precipitated by a variety of concerns: a sharp decline in engineering applications; a growing fear that the college was turning out merely narrowly trained technicians rather than truly broad-based professionals; and that the engineers, both faculty and students, were becoming more and more isolated from the rest of the institution. The trustees shared Harleston's concern and recognized the need for a review of the entire situation. In response, Dean Klema attempted to justify the existing engineering program, pointing out that, as a result of the Tufts - Carnegie Self-Study, the faculty had adopted both a scientifically oriented curriculum and, in the mid-1960s, a graduate program. By the early 1970s there was a growing realization that the professionalism of the | |
91 | engineers had to be "tempered" so that an increasingly diversified student body could be exposed to the rapidly changing technological needs of society. This broader conception inevitably involved a widened role in liberal education. The extension of degree options was one indication that the needs of the engineering student were not artificially channelled into a rigid and narrowly conceived curriculum. Independent study as well as close faculty-student relationships had been encouraged and should be a means of attracting able students. |
As to their conclusions and recommendations, the engineering faculty was adamant that their college continue to be a distinct unit of the university, and that it again have its own separate admissions program. The college rejected the idea of adding a technology requirement to the liberal arts degree program, arguing that increased cooperation with specific liberal arts departments be undertaken instead. It was further recommended that additional engineering courses be accepted for fulfilling the distribution requirement in natural sciences and technology. Joint conduct of interdepartmental and interdisciplinary seminars was encouraged as between engineering and liberal arts. A recommendation that the long-separate curriculum committees of the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Jackson and that of engineering be consolidated as a Committee on Undergraduate Studies did not come to pass. Neither did a three-year, non-accredited degree program with increased liberal arts content. There was inescapably an air of defensiveness about the dean's report in 1972 which may or may not have been justified. But in any case it resulted in no dramatic changes in the structural relationship between the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Jackson on one hand, and the College of Engineering on the other. | |
While debates over administrative relationships continued there was much quiet but significant progress being made in such cooperative programs as community planning, environmental science and the health sciences, and in joint majors and interdisciplinary endeavors in such fields as psychology and biomechanics. The interrelatedness of human knowledge was being realized to an extent never approached in earlier eras. The great challenges of the 1970s and 1980s were to clarify relationships, close gaps, and strengthen further a part of Tufts which had originated in 1865 with the creation of the Civil Engineering Department and the organization of a College of Engineering in 1894. | |