Courtesy MIT Museum
Editor’s note.—On the first of December, 1995, the Program in Science, Technology and Society and the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a one-day colloquium honoring Elting Morison. The day brought many of Elting’s friends and family back to MIT, where he had spent much of his career as a teacher and scholar. Thomas Parke Hughes, long a close friend, suggested that Technology and Culture would best serve Professor Morison’s memory by sharing several of the day’s presentations with our readership. Here then, by way of memorial, are three short essays, the remarks that day of Leo Marx, Kenan Professor of American Cultural History emeritus at MIT; Joel Moses, Provost and Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT; and Hughes himself, Mellon Professor of the History of Technology emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with the presentations of other participants in the colloquium they have been collected in “From Know-How to History: Symposium in Honor of Elting Morison” (Working Paper No. 22, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995), and are reprinted here with permission.
Marx, another longtime friend and colleague, interprets Morison’s career primarily in terms of his blend of New England tradition with midwestern sensibility, and in terms of his dual ancestral roots in the clergy and in engineering. This long view of Morison’s intellectual and moral commitments situates the question which Hughes and Moses address as central. Morison understood the seductive attraction of the often-noted cultural chasm between engineering and science, on the one hand, and the humanities on the other. Hughes and Moses build on Morison’s lifelong commitment to a style of education that would integrate these two powerful intellectual traditions.
Both address the matter in terms that will be of interest to many T&C readers: how might engineering education change its internal structures to prepare a more culturally supple engineer for the requirements of the coming century?
Elting Morison
We are here this afternoon to remember our colleague and friend, Elting Morison, the founding spirit and intellectual guide of the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and to talk about the special meaning, for us, of his life and work.
Even before Jerome Wiesner assumed the presidency of MIT, he and Walter Rosenblith, his provost-in-waiting, had begun to talk about the creation of a new entity within the Institute. Its aim would be to develop an innovative educational program based on what Wiesner liked to call a new “curriculum for the twenty-first century.” The curriculum would be designed to turn out a new sort of broad gauged scientist and engineer. These men and women, like most MIT students, would graduate with high technical competence. But Wiesner and Rosenblith believed that such competence, in itself, no longer sufficed. They wanted to develop a mode of education that would complement MIT’s traditional training in science and engineering with an historically-informed, sophisticated understanding of the surrounding society and culture.
That aspiration, to be sure, hardly was a novelty in 1971. Anyone who examines the historical record will find that prominent people at MIT had been expressing similar aspirations for a long time. This had been, probably still is, one of the Institute’s oldest, fondest dreams, a fact that Elting half-facetiously acknowledged when he called the objective of the Wiesner-Rosenblith project “the New Jerusalem.” It is easy to imagine how excited they became as they fantasized about the new program, but also how their exhilaration turned to gloom when they got around to selecting a leader. At that point, I imagine, they must have fallen into a miserable funk, not because they could not think of a qualified candidate, but rather because they could. In fact, they thought of exactly the right person. What dismayed them was the knowledge that, after having been under their noses—right here at MIT—for some twenty years, he only recently had been allowed to escape to Yale.
Of course we all know how their panic was allayed. One of the new administration’s first acts was to entice Elting Morison to return to MIT as the Killian Professor, just in time to take charge of the planning of the New Jerusalem. The serious point of my (almost true) account of these events is that it calls attention to Elting’s unique qualifications for exactly this assignment. He had acquired some of the more important of those qualifications effortlessly, as part of his immediate family’s combined New England and midwestern heritage.
Although the Morisons had had a long history in New England—traceable to one John Morison who settled in Londonderry, New Hampshire, in 1719—Elting’s father had broken, or at least stretched, these hereditary ties when, as a young man, he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it was there that Elting was born and raised. This admixture of midwestern culture in Elting has at times been a source of puzzlement to those who knew him, as I can confirm from firsthand experience. I first met Elting around 1973, when he was recruiting faculty for the new program. At the time I knew nothing about his Wisconsin origins, and I simply assumed that he had always been a New Englander. He certainly bore many of the obvious Yankee stigmata. Yet I was immediately struck by the marked contrast between him and the one member of the family I had known: his cousin, the historian, Samuel Eliot Morison. I had been a student of Admiral Morison’s, as he liked to be called, and though I admired many of his sterling traits, his demeanor admittedly invited comparison with the stock image of the aloof, highfalutin Boston patrician. (The sculptor who did the portrait of the Admiral that stands on Commonwealth Avenue conveys something of his ample amour propre.) By comparison, Elting, with his irresistible humor and amiability; his gravelly voice; his direct, no-nonsense, even gruff manner; his plain, unpretentious language, seemed positively down-to-earth. A man of the people. To be sure, these homely, perhaps midwestern traits were accompanied by a certain taste for elegance; I haven’t forgotten Elting’s strict rules about the proper way to make an omelette (firm on the outside, soft in the middle) or a martini (icy cold gin plus a mere whiff of vermouth), but nevertheless he seemed to emanate from a wholly different world than his cousin. Then I discovered that that was in fact the case, and I decided to give Wisconsin some of the credit for the side of Elting that made him feel at home with engineers.
But of course living in Wisconsin could not—did not—erase the profound effects of a two-century-old New England heritage. One revealing aspect of that heritage is implied by the fact that Elting’s immediate forbears included both a clergyman and an engineer: Elting’s grandfather, the Reverend John Hopkins, and his great-uncle, George Shattuck Morison, whom the Dictionary of American Biography describes as “the leading bridge engineer in America, perhaps in the world.” That the Morisons took up both technological and religious vocations will not surprise anyone who is knowledgeable about New England culture, with its Calvinist hierarchy of values, and its obsessive interest in the proper adjustment of relations between means and ends, the instrumental and the spiritual sides of life.
It is helpful to remember that Elting was born in the year William James died. One way to think of James’s contribution to American thought, the philosophy of pragmatism, is that it recast in secular language certain ways of thinking that originally had been cast in the language of theology. It also is helpful to remember that Elting came to maturity at exactly the time that the concept of “technology,” as we use it today, was gaining popular currency. Like a number of his farsighted contemporaries—Siegfried Gideon, Lewis Mumford, Karl Polanyi, Abbott Payson Usher, Lynn White—Elting was convinced that the role of technology in shaping modern life had been grossly neglected. This conviction informs everything he wrote, but he framed it in a distinctive way that had its origin in the early history of Puritan New England.
That Calvinist culture had always encouraged a strong commitment to practical, worldly callings as providing the indispensable means of achieving a good life; at the same time, however, it always stressed the ultimate primacy of nonmaterial or spiritual ends. To appreciate the strong impress of that theological culture on Elting’s view of things, therefore, one has only to note his unfailing insistence on the fact that technological innovation and power, vitally important as he believed them to be, should never be allowed to usurp the highest place on our society’s pyramid of values. That place, Elting believed, must be reserved for ends, for ultimate meanings and values—those that point in the direction of a desired form of life.
As he often noted, however, the obligation to respect both sides of the hereditary culture has become more and more difficult to fulfill. By 1974, when he published his meditation on American technology, From Know-How to Nowhere, he acknowledged that an immense, often seemingly unbridgeable fissure had opened up between them. Although the book exhibits his abiding interest in hard, nuts-and-bolts details about the process of technological innovation, it is dominated first to last by one overarching question: how to direct the resulting forms of technological power toward the development of a more humane, a more just form of life. But those words are mine. Elting chose simpler, more effective language to name a more modest goal. He defined our dilemma this way: “how to organize a technological world we can live in.” There is no way to put it more bluntly, more simply, than that; and yet, if you listen carefully, you can still hear the old Puritan subtext with its obstinate grip on the separation of means and ends.
Leo Marx
Parallel Tracks in Engineering Education in the 21st Century
It is a great honor to speak at this symposium. I did not know Elting Morison, but I and everyone who has attended MIT in the past fifty years was influenced by him. Morison was a principal author of the Lewis Commission Report of 1949. This report was in effect the strategic plan for MIT for the postwar era. It recommended a School of Humanities and Social Science, continuation of the government-funded research mode (although there was some concern about this), and continuation of the core requirement of one humanities or social science subject a term for every undergraduate. The majesty of the writing—Morison’s writing—is, I believe, a key reason for the influence of the document.
It is also a great honor to speak at the same session as Tom Hughes. This is the second time this has happened to me. The first time I was asked by Tom to give some comments following his talk on post-modern engineering. Tom’s ideas on this topic have had a great influence on me. In fact, when I wrote the Long Range Plan for the MIT School of Engineering in 1994,1 was thinking of subtitling it Postmodern Engineering. The Long Range Plan talks of a paradigm shift in engineering education and research following the end of the cold war. To put this shift into context we need to consider engineering education in the decades immediately before the Lewis Commission Report.
Engineering education prior to World War II was based on relatively little engineering research and a heavy reliance on safety factors in design. At MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, which developed radar for the war effort, electrical engineers saw that physicists and mathematicians were much more capable of learning the new technology than engineers were. This led to a postwar revolution in engineering education that combined heavy reliance on mathematics and science and new research results in engineering to create an approach to engineering education and research which has come to be known as Engineering Science. This approach has permeated engineering education for the past fifty years. It has been extremely successful in creating a large body of knowledge about engineering analysis. The approach, however, has had some weaknesses which became increasingly apparent in the past twenty years.
The weaknesses of Engineering Science were probably first noticed in U.S. industry. The competitiveness of much of U.S. industry was a critical problem by 1980. In part this can be traced to what the new engineering science traded off from prewar engineering. In order to have the time to teach additional math and science, design and hands-on work were much reduced. The engineering faculty lost interest in manufacturing issues, in environmental issues, and in the management of industrial projects and enterprises. After the war, leaders of U.S. firms increasingly became MBAs, lawyers and financiers, whereas prior to the war, engineers led most industrial enterprises, or so it is believed by many engineering faculty members today.
Engineering schools responded to the challenge. They did not issue a recall on earlier engineers who were trained in the Engineering Science approach, but they did broaden their education for new generations of engineers. Most engineering schools have a greater emphasis now on design and manufacturing than they did fifteen or twenty years ago. Some schools, notably MIT, have created joint programs with management schools, and of course the students are forcing our faculties to teach more about the environment. These changes do not constitute a wholly new paradigm, but build on the strengths of the Engineering Science movement. Consequently, to label the new era “Postmodern Engineering” is misleading because postmodern architecture, which initiated the term postmodernism, has been much more critical of Modernism than is intended by these new trends in engineering.
If one were to look ahead and see where the changes in this new era for engineering education will lead in the coming decades, one can start with changes that are going on in graduate engineering education today. At MIT, the Master of Science degree became, during the Engineering Science era, a step toward the Ph.D. Even if a student wanted to go to work immediately after receiving the S.M. degree, he or she would be required to complete a thesis that involved much Engineering Science research. As a result, the S.M. programs at MIT have grown in length from one year to over two years, and in at least one case the average completion time for the S.M. is over three years. The completion time for the Ph.D. program has also expanded, at MIT and nationally, by about a year per decade since the 1950s. Recently, however, MIT created a parallel track at the masters level, that of the Master of Engineering. The MEng is intended for students who will most likely work in industry. It emphasizes design and synthesis more than the typical S.M. program does and can be completed in under one year. Meanwhile, the S.M. programs remain largely unchanged as an alternative track for most MIT students.
Two years ago, one would have had great difficulty finding a U.S. engineering or science faculty member who had anything but great praise for the doctoral programs in this country. This has changed since many newly minted Ph.D.’s have had difficulty getting traditional jobs in academia or in research laboratories. Thus, while there is likely to be some broadening in the traditional Ph.D. programs around the country, one might also imagine someday extending the MEng track by making it something akin to the European Sc.D., which is intended for practicing scientists and engineers and is based on papers they have written, usually while working in industry.
To round out the two graduate tracks, let me point out the existence of programs intermediate between the traditional masters and the doctorate. Unfortunately, these are also called masters programs. I call them Second Professional Degrees. The best example is the MBA. Many U.S. engineers obtain an MBA degree, because most engineering schools during the Engineering Science era did not care about management issues, even those pertaining to the management of engineering projects. As noted earlier, there are now joint programs between engineering and management that emphasize manufacturing. This fall MIT introduced a new program, entitled System Design and Management, that is a dual to our very successful Leaders for Manufacturing program, and deals with issues that arise in the design and management of large and complex engineering projects, such as cars, planes, and software. Actually, MIT has several other Second Professional Degree programs, in policy, transportation, and construction. All have a nontrivial emphasis on management issues, and all are intended for students with several years of industrial experience.
What about undergraduate engineering education? We are likely to see a similar bifurcation in programs. Historically, engineering faculty members have assumed that their graduates would all become professional engineers. But this is less and less the case. At MIT, probably a fifth of our engineering majors will go to medical school, and many others are being hired to do financial analysis. I do not view this with alarm. Rather, I believe that the students are recognizing that a sound engineering education is a good entrée to professions other than engineering. In a sense, an engineering education can be a version of a liberal education in the coming century.
Engineering educators are frustrated by the fact that relatively few leaders of US firms are engineers. We are also frustrated by the fact that relatively few of our political leaders have a technical education in science or engineering. A bifurcation of undergraduate engineering education can lead to a partial solution to these frustrations. The proposal I shall make is actually one that arose a decade ago in a committee chaired by Ken Keniston that reviewed the MIT undergraduate requirements in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The concept is that of dual undergraduate degrees in engineering and in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Such dual degrees can be obtained in the normal four years. Each institution will have to create its own version of such degrees. The description I give here applies to the MIT situation as it exists at present.
All MIT undergraduates are required to take eight subjects in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS). Engineering majors normally take about twelve subjects required by their major in math, science and engineering in order to obtain an accredited engineering degree. The proposal is to offer degrees which are not accredited, but which combine a very significant engineering component with a competency in some field in the humanities, arts, or social sciences. The dual major would require about nine engineering subjects and nine subjects in a single discipline or field within HASS. Because of the structure of the HASS requirement at MIT the effect will be to create a very significant engineering competency with about nine subjects, and a dual competency in some field of HASS with also about nine subjects. The degree that recognizes the dual competency would read “A with B.” For example, a mechanical engineering student with a dual competency in history would receive a degree that would read “Mechanical Engineering with History,” or vice versa, depending on the student’s choice.
I believe that engineering faculties are becoming interested in producing students with dual competency, more than at any time in the past. They recognize that the breadth of interests of such students would have a very positive impact on the rest of the undergraduate engineering culture. Moreover, because the long term value to a society whose leaders have a dual competency would be considerable, my colleagues in engineering are likely to welcome such an initiative.
The dual degree proposal brings us back to Elting Morison, one of the founders of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. By creating STS, former MIT President Jerry Wiesner’s dream was, I believe, to produce a cadre of students who would have a deep background in science and engineering coupled with a liberal education in HASS. He initially wanted to do this in a separate college within MIT. The college concept did not attract sufficient funding. Had it been funded, the college would probably have failed because its exclusivity would have gone against the grain of MIT as an institution. Wiesner often tended to go against the grain at MIT. Occasionally, his concepts proved extremely successful, as with the creation of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, the first interdepartmental laboratory at MIT. Some concepts he introduced during his presidency in the 1970s were much less successful, in part because they almost always went against the departmental power structure.
The dual degree concept could be successful because it does not go against the grain of departmental prerogatives, and because of the changes in attitudes of engineering faculty in recent years. Students need not be specially admitted into the dual degree program. In fact they might be able to delay the decision to dual major until the senior year. The dual degree concept will, if it is to succeed, require much cooperation from the departments in devising and monitoring programs that are both deep and broad in both components of the dual majors Elting Morison might have been pleased with this concept. But let us recognize that the dual degree program is no panacea. We will have to be creative in figuring out ways in which dual competencies can be fostered so that the modes of thought and creativity of an engineer can be coupled with the modes of thought of the humanist, the artist and the social scientist. We do, however, need to leave some challenges and creativity for future generations.
Joel Moses
Transdisciplinary Engineering, or Gesamtingenieurkunst
In 1982 Elting Morison spoke of “the search [at MIT] for the appropriate contribution of the humanities.”3 In response to this query, I shall make a modest proposal today. In so doing, I shall repeatedly draw on Elting’s wise words as set down in his articles and books, and—thanks to Helen Samuelson and her MIT archival associates—his talks, memoranda, and committee reports.
The Built Environment: The Second Creation. The lesson for today is taken from Morison, Men, Machines, and Modem Times, chapter 8, page 209:
Or, to put it another way, the system may have acquired a mass and scale and intricacy and internal rate of change that make it increasingly difficult for human beings to live comfortably and fully within it. Or, to put it yet another way, we may be caught in the irony that at the very moment when by our wit we have developed the means to give us considerable control over our resistant natural environment we find we have produced in the means themselves an artificial environment of such complication that we cannot control it.
On another occasion, using one of his frequent Old Testament references, Elting observed: “We have ceased to be in the position of Job struggling to deal with an almighty God out there. We have arrived at that power of God and we have to manage the plant; and that raises questions for us all.” (Morison, “Remarks before the Commission on MIT Education,” 1969, 2.)
Or to put it still another way, Perry Miller, a Harvard professor of American literature and culture, wrote:
We might venture that even more tragic than any classical or Shakespearean drama is the crisis of illumination when man realizes, much too late for any last minute panaceas, that he is unequal to the task of dealing with a universe of his own manufacture. Gloucester in King Lear blames the gods who kill us for sport, as wanton boys do flies. Shakespeare was even then at liberty to accuse the “gods.” But whom dare we blame for Gary, Indiana?
And nobody doubts that [this constructed universe] requires intelligence to design, intelligence to construct, and even more intelligence to improve. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a citadel of the mind in America, if any bastion is. (Perry Miller, “The Responsibility of Mind in a Civilization of Machines,” in The Responsibility of Mind in a Civilization of Machines [Amherst, Mass., 1979], 202-7.)
Taking my theme from Morison and Miller, I suggest that the universe of human manufacture is surpassingly complex and that MIT, the citadel of the mind, should respond in the next century to a far greater extent than it has until now in designing and shaping—control is too aggressive a word—a universe of our own manufacture, one that will respond to a complex, even messy, variety of human needs and desires. My emphasis is on complex and messy.
I propose that MIT engineers in the next century think of themselves as designers and managers of the human-built, material environment, not simply as the masters of machines, structures, and devices that constitute the environment. They should realize, as did such modern architects as Walther Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, that designers of the environment express values in their creations and that these creations influence the way in which all of us live. Not only can our words and our deeds express virtue, but the technological systems that we design can as well.
To put it another way, members of the MIT faculty should see themselves as culture bearers responsible for dealing with a universe of human manufacture. They should endeavor to embed in the human-built world the most socially benign values that humans are capable of defining and articulating. I push my argument about value laden technology further and suggest that technology is a cultural expression. By this I mean that through technology we express our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual values much in the way we express them through art, architecture, music, and literature. We reveal our character in our technology just as we do in our art and in our politics.
Elegant Reductionism and Messy Complexity
I also urge MIT engineers to forge a closer alliance with their colleagues in the School of Humanities and Social Science, an alliance which I believe Philip Khoury warmly endorses. The engineering faculty has trained engineering students to solve problems in an elegant reductionist way, but in the future with the help of their humanist colleagues, engineers might place more emphasis on responding to complex issues, not simply manageable problems, and on introducing political, environmental, aesthetic, and social values into their designs, not simply economic and technical ones.
In the future, the engineering faculty might also place even more emphasis than they currently do on preparing their students to take part in large-scale, mission-oriented projects, especially projects that respond to Elting’s call for us to build “a technological firmament that will really fit us.” (From Know-How to Nowhere, 5) Focused problem sets discipline the mind but do not prepare students for the ill-defined, multiple-variable issues to which they will need to respond when they become involved in engineering practice laden with political, environmental, and social restraints.
To reinforce such an approach to complexity, members of the humanities faculty at MIT should continue their efforts to persuade students, especially engineering students, that the world is messily complex and that acceptance of this proposition will prepare them to better understand the multidimensional world and to practice engineering more effectively within it. In order to persuade engineering students of this, the humanities faculty, especially those associated with the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, should inform themselves even more thoroughly than they already have about the nature of engineering design, technological change, and the management of large-scale engineering projects. This is a way to win the confidence of—and gain a hearing from—engineering students and faculty and to persuade them that engineering is a value-laden cultural activity.
In his insightful essay, “The Responsibility of Mind in a Civilization of Machines,’’ Miller suggests that humanists should not offer students an escape from the web of technology into “poetry.” Instead, humanists should encourage their students to engage with the technological enterprise, helping to shape it through exploring values that they feel are representative of the best of the “American Mind.”
Parenthetically, I agree with Elting that the humanities faculty at MIT should not fear any loss of integrity by close association with the business of engineering, and I also agree with him that at the same time the humanists should not be infected by science envy. We do not need a pallid and esoteric would-be science-like humanities.
Both engineers and humanists should heed the words of Robert Venturi, a humanist and an architect, and of Denise Scott Brown, an architect and urban planner. He writes:
I like complexity and contradiction . . . I speak of a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience, including that experience which is inherent in art . . . complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged, from Godel’s proof of ultimate inconsistency in mathematics to T.S. Eliot’s analysis of “difficult” poetry and Joseph Albers’s definition of the paradoxical quality of painting. (Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York, 1966), 16.)
She writes:
[D] esign is the subtle organization of complexity, the orchestration of sometimes inharmonious instruments, the awareness that discord at a certain level can be resolved as harmony at another. It requires patience. It is a pinpoint upon which it is difficult for the professional to live. (Denise Scott Brown, “Between Three Schools,” Architectural Design 60 [1990], 19.)
Will-o’-the-Wisp Of Transdisciplinarity
My interwoven major themes thus far deal with value-laden technology and messy complexity. Now I turn to transdisciplinarity. As you know, transdisciplinarity, though a goal much talked about and sought after at MIT, is one achieved only rarely. Recently I have been rereading James Killian’s autobiography, The Education of a College President. Frequently this former MIT president and Chairman of the Corporation refers wistfully to the quest for the will-o’-the-wisp of transdisciplinarity and nods approvingly on those rare occasions when the goal is achieved.
Killian quotes from a letter he wrote in 1957 to the Ford Foundation in which he presented the administration’s ideas on engineering education:
MIT has been evolving, in accord with a “grand plan”—a plan to achieve in scope, excellence, values, and spirit a new kind of university where science and engineering are cultivated at an advanced, innovating, humanistic, professional level, …. but embracing as essential partners the social sciences and the humanities, each interpenetrating the other and all working with the double objective of advancing engineering and of using it for the creation of a better society. (James R. Killian, Jr., The Education of a College President: A Memoir [Cambridge, Mass., 1985], 184.)
Elting adds his voice in 1982:
MIT is not yet a modern university (nor is any other place). During the last decades we have added new fields and beefed up some old ones, which has altered the character and enlarged the vision of the place. But in spite of some determined efforts to do so, we have not succeeded in demonstrating how these fields necessarily interact with each other or how this diverse learning is comprehended in indivisibility. (James R. Killian, Jr., The Education of a College President: A Memoir [Cambridge, Mass., 1985], 403.)
He was especially worried because the humanities interacted too infrequently with the rest of the Institute.
Transdisciplinary Projects
My recent study of large projects persuades me that transdisciplinarity can be impressively achieved through messily complex discourse and in messily complex engineering projects. This is especially true when the discourse and the projects not only involve the design of the material environment, the design, for instance, of hospital complexes, housing developments, bridges, parks, highways, public buildings, and university campuses, but are dedicated to ecological restoration and enhancement, as well. Engineers, humanists, and a host of persons of other backgrounds and persuasions can engage in a transdisciplinary fashion in discussing and designing these projects.
Elting flourished at MIT in the 1950s and 1960s during a golden era of the project approach and of transdisciplinary institution building. Transdisciplinary summer studies—the Servomechanisms Laboratory, the Digital Computer Laboratory, the Lincoln Laboratory, and Joint Center for Urban Studies—flourished then. Elting and MIT faculty colleagues in the 1950s and early 1960s realized that a project- or mission-oriented approach can make interdisciplinarians of all but the most blinkered specialists.
Elting played a leading role in 1950 in a summer study, Project Troy. Funded by the State Department, the project tried to find effective means of reaching and influencing the Russian population through Voice of America broadcasts. Having been asked to organize the project, the MIT administration took the transdisciplinary path by naming John E. Burchard, Dean of Humanities and Social Science, to head the project. He assembled an extraordinary group of scholars from a variety of disciplines including Elting, Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckholm, Nobel laureate physicist Edward Purcell, Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner, MIT electrical engineer Jerome Wiesner, and MIT economist Max Millikan.
From this transdisciplinary, project-oriented cocoon emerged several notable institutions, among them the MIT Center for International Studies and a Supper Club that dined the first Friday of each month at the St. Botolph Club. Bruner recalls that Project Troy was the best club to which he had ever belonged, so he insisted the experience be prolonged. In a memorandum prepared for Killian, Elting commented about Troy: “[It] didn’t change the course of history—or even of the State Department policy, but it gave the people who worked together in it the best possible liberal education for the world they were living in.” He added that Troy provided a model of how universities might develop in a culture shaped by technological change.
Bruner, incidentally, found Elting the spiritual “convenor” of the Supper Club, a man with an “exquisite sense of the mix of ‘high-mindedness and low cunning’ that animates great enterprises,” and a man who could “always be counted on to discuss the central, moral dilemma of MIT: the relation between power and knowledge.” (Jerome Bruner, In Search of Mind [New York, 1983], 212, 220.)
In my studies of large engineering projects and the institutions associated with them, and in my recent visits to MIT, I have found other models of transdisciplinarity in addition to Project Troy. Several years ago when he was Dean of Engineering, Joel Moses laid out a highly imaginative plan for a transdisciplinary program in sociotechnical systems. I hope his plan will move from the drawing board into practice. In my research and teaching, I also encounter outstanding examples of transdisciplinarity in complex projects such as the multipurpose Tennessee Valley Authority, the Manhattan project, and, more recently, the building of the Central Artery and Tunnel now under way in the Boston/Cambridge area.
The last-named project, despite its many flaws, provides a highly instructive and positive model of participatory design and transdisciplinary development involving engineers, managers, politicians, architects, landscape architects, and environmental activists. Such cases the engineering and humanities faculties can use in preparing their students for rocks, shocks, shoals, and goals of future practice. I cannot pass on from the Central Artery and Tunnel project without expressing my admiration for Fred Salvucci, an MIT graduate in civil engineering, a veteran of activist politics, and former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation who, as a system builder, masterfully navigated among the technical, political, ethnic, and environmental forces swarming about the project. He, for instance, cleared political hurdles and proposed technical solutions so that the tunnel would not exit in East Boston, take houses, and destroy the delicate fabric of the neighborhood. Salvucci, a model system builder, a Boston native who had seen his immigrant grandmother ousted from her home to make room for a highway, has demonstrated a genius for presiding over multidimensional, value-laden engineering projects. I am sure Elting would have enjoyed doing one of his classic case histories about Salvucci as system builder.
Conclusion
In closing, I return to Elting’s vision in which MIT becomes the first modern university. I offer the modest prediction that engineering education at MIT in the 21st century will play the leading role in bringing this to pass. I am assuming that the engineering faculty in league with the humanities faculty, especially the STS program, will define itself as a designer of the human-built world, will broaden its value-laden approach, and will stress transdisciplinarity by drawing the other MIT faculties into its projects.
Recalling that Wagner’s masterful interweaving of music, libretto, acting, lighting, and stage design in his operas has been called Gesamtkunst, I suggest that engineering at MIT in the 21st century might well become Gesamtingenieurkunst, or total engineering.
Thomas P. Hughes
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Riepe, Dale. “Review of Men, Machines, and Modern Times, by Elting E. Morison, and: The Evolving Society ed. by Alice Mary Hilton, and: Science, Technology, and Human Values by Cornelius A. Benjamin.” Technology and Culture 8, no. 4 (1967): 524–32. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894422.
Morison, Elting E. Men, Machines, and Modern Times. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1966. (Morison, Elting E., Rosalind Williams, and Leo Marx. Men, Machines, and Modern Times. anniversary edition ed., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/65913.)
Stratton, Julius Adams, and Elting Elmore Morison. Science and the Educated Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966.
Morison, Elting E. Research and Development in the Social Studies: New Curriculum Models for History and the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Social Studies Curriculum Program, Educational Services, 1965.
Morison, Elting E. A Case Study of Innovation. Alhambra: C.F. Braun, 1950.