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Abstract
This paper examines initiatives in engineering formation in the USA as, in part, responses to dominant territorial identities defining what counts as progress. The absence of a primary method of engineering formation during the antebellum period suggests that no metric of progress had yet scaled up to a level of dominance. Robert Thurston's efforts in the 1890s to scale up school‐based formation without liberal education did not fit a country that emphasized high‐volume production at low costs. The attempts of the Wickenden study in the 1920s to achieve coordination did not fit a country highlighting self‐realization through consumption. The 1955 Grinter Report achieved great success when the sudden appearance of Sputnik scaled up a new territorial identity for the USA. Overall, by responding to the evolving metric of low cost, mass use, advocates of engineering formation have designed engineers to serve the country.
Acknowledgments
This research was conducted with support from National Science Foundation award Nos. DUE‐0230992, SES‐0549442 and EEC‐0632839, and completed while the author was 2005/2006 Boeing Company Fellow in Engineering Education at the National Academy of Engineering's Center for the Advancement of Scholarship in Engineering Education. Thanks to Yiannis Antoniou, Michalis Assimakopoulos and Konstantinos Chatzis for inviting the paper for their 2004 conference ‘National Identities of Engineers: Their Past and Present’ in Syros, Greece. Thanks also to members of the STS Department at the University of Virginia, members of the Research in Engineering Studies Group at Virginia Tech, especially Jonson Miller and other conference participants for their insightful and challenging comments. Finally, thanks to Juan Lucena for a continuing collaboration.
Notes
[1] Reynolds, ‘The Engineer’.
[2] Seely, ‘The Other Re‐Engineering’.
[3] Thurston, ‘Technical Education’, 855.
[4] Ibid., 860–861.
[5] Noble, America by Design, 29–32.
[6] Thurston, ‘Technical Education’, 994–1002.
[7] Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer, 49, 94, 102, 45.
[8] Ibid., 47, 177.
[9] Downey and Lucena, ‘Knowledge and Professional Identity’, 396–399.
[10] Ibid., 402–411.
[11] The concept of territorial identity builds on a general view of identities as projects locating entities in relation to other entities. As such, identities have both conceptual and material dimensions.
[12] This paper does not address the identity politics involved in people from the USA calling themselves Americans to the exclusion of South Americans, Central Americans, and other North Americans.
[13] National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk, 5–8.
[14] Reynolds, ‘Education of Engineers'.
[15] See, for example, De Laet, Research in Science.
[16] Calhoun, American Civil Engineer, 182–199.
[17] Reynolds, ‘The Engineer’, 11.
[18] Meiksins, ‘Engineers in the United States’, 62.
[19] Weiss, The Making of Technological Man, 63.
[20] Brittain and McMath, ‘Engineers and the New South Creed’, 127, 126.
[21] Downey and Lucena, ‘Knowledge and Professional Identity’, 404–407.
[22] Hounshell, From the American System, 122.
[23] Misa, Nation of Steel, xx–xxi.
[24] Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer, 278.
[25] Reynolds, ‘The Engineer’, 21.
[26] Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer, 65.
[27] Meiksins, ‘Engineers in the United States’, 67.
[28] Thurston, ‘Technical Education’, 862.
[29] Ibid., 856.
[30] Ibid., 859.
[31] Ibid., 103.
[32] Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, Report of the Investigation, 142, 116, 56.
[33] Ibid., 1045.
[34] Noble, America by Design, 62.
[35] See, for example, Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction.
[36] Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 26–27.
[37] Noble, America by Design, 229.
[38] Hounshell, From the American System, 12–13.
[39] Dumenil, The Modern Temper, 85, 82, 86.
[40] Ibid., 34.
[41] Nye, Image Worlds, 132.
[42] Layton, Revolt of the Engineers, 124–127; Meiksins, ‘The “Revolt of the Engineers”’, 420–424; Noble, America by Design, 39–44, 277–302.
[43] Noble, America by Design, 198, 193, 203.
[44] Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, Report of the Investigation, 142, 115–116, 8.
[45] Ibid., 121.
[46] Ibid., 81.
[47] Ibid., 1045, 1044.
[48] Noble, America by Design, 206.
[49] Seely, ‘The Other Re‐Engineering’, 292.
[50] American Society for Engineering Education, ‘Report on the Evaluation’, 26.
[51] American Society for Engineering Education, ‘Report on the Evaluation’, 38, 31.
[52] Seely, ‘The Other Re‐Engineering’, 289.
[53] Seely, ‘Research, Engineering, and Science’.
[54] Seely, ‘The Other Re‐Engineering’, 291.
[55] Lucena, Defending the Nation, 29.
[56] Ibid., 41.
[57] Meiksins, ‘Engineers in the United States’, 82.
[58] Akera, ‘Practice and Discursive Constructions’, 9, 10.
[59] Meiksins, ‘Engineers in the United States’, 78.
[60] American Society for Engineering Education, ‘Report on the Evaluation’, 43.
[61] Akera, ‘Practice and Discursive Constructions’, 23.
[62] American Society for Engineering Education, ‘Report on the Evaluation’, 27, 44.
[63] Reynolds and Seely, ‘Striving for Balance’, 143.
[64] Meiksins, ‘Engineers in the United States’, 78.
[65] Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 85.