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The Rebuilding of Engineering
Destined under former President Schmidt for the academic chopping block, engineering under President Levin and D. Allan Bromley seems headed for a new prominence.
November 1994
by Bruce Fellman
In 1852, William A. Norton, an engineer who was teaching at Brown, moved his entire program—including his 26 students—to Yale. Norton evidently felt that the wholesale transfer would add to the prestige of his endeavors, and he was willing to make sacrifices for the privilege. Indeed, Yale had insisted that it would accept engineering into its intellectual fold only if it did not have to pay for the program. That reception proved prophetic.
“Yale has never known what to do about engineering—there’s always been this tension,” says W. Jack Cunningham, professor Emeritus of electrical engineering and author of Engineering at Yale, a history published two years ago by the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ever since engineering made its debut in the curriculum, its fortunes have waxed and waned. Some administrations have proclaimed it critical to the life and future of the University; others have felt that a subject that involves dirtying one’s hands at practical tasks had no place at an institution with a history of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Amid the turmoil during the presidency of Benno C. Schmidt over restructuring the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, there were fears that engineering would be eliminated altogether, but a public outcry and subsequent actions by President Richard C. Levin are seen by many as proof that, for the foreseeable future at least, there’s a place for the practical at Yale after all.
Levin’s most conspicuous gesture of support was the naming last April of D. Allan Bromley, Sterling Professor of the Sciences, to the newly resurrected post of Dean of Engineering. Bromley, an eminent nuclear physicist and one-time engineer who holds a hefty total of 2’ honorary degrees, served as science and technology advisor to George Bush '48 from 1989 to 1993. “I want to get engineering headed back in the direction of its past glories,” Bromley says.
Last year, President Levin publicly dedicated himself to the “goal of assuring Yale a position at the forefront of engineering education and research. As technological change shapes the world in which we live, a university that aims to educate leaders for our nation and for the world must nourish the study of engineering and applied science.” With that declaration, and with the appointment of Bromley, Levin appeared to close the book on a divisive chapter of Yale history.
In late 1991 and early 1992, the now-infamous Committee on Restructuring the Faculty of Arts and Sciences responded to looming deficits and the need to trim Yale’s budget with proposals to selectively cut and reshape some of the University’s academic departments. Especially hard hit was the Council of Engineering, the umbrella organization set up in 1981 to oversee the activities of the chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering departments, as well as the department of applied physics. Under the proposed restructuring plan, the Council would have been abolished, and there were to be major, across-the-board cuts in the number of its faculty members. The three engineering departments were to be merged, applied physics was to become part of physics, and the ability to learn how to turn basic concepts in science and mathematics into practical devices would, professors feared, start to wither on the vine, just as it had the last time there'd been a major restructuring.
In 1963, Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr., also in response to a budget deficit, scrapped engineering’s traditional divisional structure and consolidated its departments under one heading: engineering and applied science. This decidedly unconventional way of doing business was, says chemical engineer Gary Haller, who chaired the Council from 1984 to 1987 and again from 1990 to 1994, “ahead of its time—the idea that we should try to break down departmental barriers and do interdisciplinary research is something that all universities strive for.”
But there were, particularly for undergraduates, “two significant stumbling blocks,” according to Haller. The first was the very freedom the program allowed. In engineering, one does not become a general practitioner: There are chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, and so forth. They may all be involved in designing practical devices—indeed, design is the foundation of the profession—but the educational paths to certification in a particular specialty vary widely and are tightly defined by both the engineering establishment and the industries the practitioners serve.
Under Yale’s radical approach to the subject, however, a student had far greater leeway in putting together a program than would typically be possible. Therein lay a potential difficulty. “It takes a very mature student, and lots of direction, for this to work, and there was a very real danger that the course selection would not add up to something that was greater than the sum of its parts and that you'd get too much breadth and not enough depth,” says Haller.
Then there was the identity problem. For even though undergraduates interested in, say, electrical engineering, might take a curriculum similar to that of their counterparts at such well known engineering powers as MIT and Purdue, Yale students were often not viewed as qualified by the outside world. “As a teaching vehicle, [the single department approach] did not work,” admits Haller.
The Engineers' Council for Professional Development, a national accreditation group, agreed, and after a thorough review of the program in 1966, the ECPD declined to give its stamp of approval. After a return to a more traditional approach, accreditation was eventually reinstated in full in 1982, but the bitter memory of the failed experiment persisted, so when restructurers suggested returning to the kind of arrangement that had already proven ineffective, there was little enthusiasm for the proposal.
In fact, several faculty members left, and morale was exceedingly low. From Washington, D.C., D. Allan Bromley, who at the time was on an extended leave of absence from Yale to serve in the Bush administration cabinet, heard numerous complaints about the events in New Haven. “Distinguished engineers around the nation told me that they considered [Yale’s treatment of the discipline] to be insulting to the engineering profession,” says Bromley.
President Levin’s very public embrace of the conclusions of a 1993 study by an ad hoc committee of experts—a report that repudiated the direction suggested by the restructuring committee—is seen as a good sign by the engineering faculty, as is his decision to allow Council departments to get back up to speed by filling empty junior and senior professorships that had been authorized prior to the restructuring debate. Especially welcome is Levin’s retention of the Council itself, says mechanical engineer Robert Apfel, who chaired it from 1987 to 1990. “There’s a trust that with these governing structures we’ve jointly put together, engineering can manage many of its own affairs,” he says.
Bromley should prove an interesting manager. Elegant, bow-tied, and silver-haired, the 68-year-old scientist and recipient of the National Medal of Science is no stranger to the rough-and-tumble ways of political and corporate power. He is also no stranger to engineering.
Born in the tiny Canadian village of Westmeath (population 200), in the wilds of northeastern Ontario, Bromley was the only student in his high school class. “The teachers were hopelessly incompetent in physics and chemistry, but by some strange fluke, the labs were well equipped,” Bromley recalls. “I was given some textbooks and lab manuals and told to go at it.”
The teenager did so with a vengeance and excelled, but ironically, it was his prowess as an essayist that got him into college. As a high schooler, he won a national essay competition, sponsored by the Women’s Canadian Temperance Foundation, on the evils of alcohol. The prize was a college scholarship.
Bromley enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario and majored in engineering. He graduated in 1948 and, along with his diploma, received an iron ring, the signature piece of “jewelry” worn by professional engineers in much of the world. “The ring is normally made from the wreckage of some catastrophic engineering failure,” explains Bromley, adding that his came from the remains of a bridge across the St. Lawrence River that collapsed shortly before completion near the turn of the century.
The idea behind the rings is that engineers should always be aware of what can happen when they don’t do their jobs properly. American engineers have yet to adopt the practice, a lapse Bromley says he “may try to do something about.” (Bromley confesses that no longer wears his original ring because, as he puts it, “my body chemistry and Quebec bridge iron were not compatible—I had rust halfway up to my elbow.” He replaced it with a stainless steel version that he still wears.)
After graduation, Bromley worked for Ontario Hydro as an engineer at the utility’s generating stations at Niagara Falls and then went to graduate school, first at Queens and later at the University of Rochester (he had applied to Yale, but was not accepted). He'd hoped to study cosmic ray physics, but the week he arrived at Rochester, one of his professors died of a heart attack; the other had to flee the U.S. to avoid persecution by McCarthyite zealots.
Casting about for a suitable thesis project, Bromley was sent to the physics building’s basement, in which resided, dusty and unused for ten years, the world’s second cyclotron, an “atom smasher” that could be used to study the landscape of the atomic nucleus. The donut-shaped device was about two feet in diameter, and to operate it, Bromley was given a budget of $19.’2. “In retrospect, it was good training,” he says. “I learned to beg, borrow, and steal—even to design and machine parts—everything necessary to make something work.”
As a graduate student and then a faculty member at Rochester, and later as a physicist for the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.’s Chalk River research facility, Bromley probed the fundamental structure of atoms. At Chalk River, he received an intriguing lesson in the development of technology and the vagaries of technology transfer (the process by which scientific discoveries move from the laboratory to industry). “We needed a new kind of detector,” Bromley recalls, “and since we couldn’t understand the textbooks that told us why we couldn’t make detectors out of silicon, we went ahead and made them.” They worked, but the research organization’s patent officer deemed the devices “of no commercial value.” Silicon-based semiconductor detectors now generate about $2 billion in sales each year; the original patent, alas, is in the public domain. Given the potential importance of tech transfer to today’s engineers, university coffers, and industry at large, Bromley is unlikely to miss such an opportunity a second time.
Bromley came to Yale in 1960 and immediately became enmeshed in a project that introduced him to the often Byzantine workings of both Yale and the federal government. He arrived intent on helping to restore the University’s once-preeminent position in experimental nuclear physics by building a new laboratory, but departmental squabbles put the lab on hold. To shepherd the project over various hurdles, Bromley had to learn to work with a variety of constituencies: recalcitrant professors, alumni (who were called on to provide money for the laboratory building), Washington bureaucrats, even neighbors, who were less than enthusiastic about living next door to an atom smasher. “There was a lot of on-the-job training,” says the researcher about his lobbying, diplomatic, fundraising, and public relations efforts. But they were all ultimately successful. The Arthur W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory was dedicated in 1966 with Bromley as its director, a post he occupied until 1989, when, after years of government service on a variety of science committees, he accepted an invitation to join the Bush administration as assistant to the president for science and technology. (Bromley recounts the story of his four years in Washington in a new book, The President’s Scientists: Reminiscences of a White House Science Advisor, Yale University Press, 1994.)
During the Wright Lab’s nearly 30 years in operation, it has provided taxpayers with, Bromley says, “a helluva return in terms of trained personnel and results.” For not only were investigators pursuing answers to fundamental questions, but the lab’s director also had researchers looking for applications. “We generated a whole array of useful things,” he explains, citing as examples techniques for measuring the age of glass and methods to keep integrated circuits—as well as artificial hip and knee joints—working indefinitely.
Bromley’s inclination to keep the practical in mind should help reverse a disturbing trend in academia that might be dubbed science envy. “Too often we forgot that we were still engineers: people who actually build devices that do things,” says Bromley. “A lot of engineering drifted into becoming more science, and as a result, design got lost. We’re going to have to focus much more on design.”
There are already moves in that direction. Robert Apfel, for example, has inaugurated a course called “Mechanical Design Studio” that immerses beginning students in the subject at the start of their educational careers. And this year’s gift by Cadence Design Systems of a $42 million software package gives Yale design capabilities found in only a handful of universities.
There are other reasons to be optimistic, says the dean. “In the recent confusion and uncertainty, Yale has to some degree lost track of the fact that we have some areas of major strength in engineering—areas like understanding combustion, laser diagnostics, fluid flow, and separation chemistry. It’s crucial to build on our strengths, and we hope to expand into areas we think will be important, like bioengineering, environmental engineering, and biomedical engineering. But it would be quite wrong for us to try to build the expertise we need in every area in every department.”
In other words, it would be quite wrong to try to become an engineering factory. Yale, by necessity, must pick among possibilities, choosing to excel in some while ceding other areas of inquiry to investigators at other universities, argues Bromley.
Nor has the dean any desire to push for the resurrection of a School of Engineering, which existed here from 1932 to 1966. (Before that time, the subject was taught at the Sheffield Scientific School, which began in 1861 and for more than ’0 years served to effectively separate Yale’s technology side from its classical core.)
“I feel very strongly that engineering should remain within the arts and sciences faculty for the indefinite future,” says Bromley. One practical reason for continuing the arrangement is that it enables engineers to expand their research and teaching possibilities simply by teaming up with researchers in other A&S departments, rather than by adding more faculty members. This “school without walls” approach has already led to closer ties with computer scientists and applied mathematicians, and Bromley envisions developing joint efforts with both the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and the forestry school. “There’s no way you can have an effective environmental program without a substantial engineering component,” he says.
Maintaining a strong A&S tie has other benefits, argues the dean. “Learning engineering within a humanistic tradition has given our graduates a very real advantage in dealing with the outside world,” he says. “But I also feel that in this increasingly technological society, it is vitally important that we recognize that students outside of engineering have much to learn from interacting with engineers. This is not a one-way street.”
Offering courses such as “Science and Public Policy,” which Bromley teaches, and “Perspectives on Technology: the Electronic Revolution” is one way to reach nonscientists, he explains, adding that he hopes to spearhead efforts to bring more students into the fold, particularly minorities and women. While he was in Washington, Bromley looked at the nation’s entire primary and secondary educational system. “The problem about minorities and women goes back to the elementary schools—that’s where students are being wiped out of the sciences and engineering,” he says. “They’re not even given the chance.”
Obviously, the situation cannot be changed overnight, but Bromley took a small step towards improving things when then-President Bush signed an executive order near the end of his term that, as Bromley describes it, “for the first time in history made education part of the mission of every one of the 20-plus federal agencies.” The edict directed agencies to make their resources and staffs available to schools, something Yale already does through a variety of programs, including one coordinated in part by the Council to bring high schoolers interested in science and technology to campus for Saturday morning lectures, demonstrations, and lab sessions with professors and graduate students.
Bromley has another item high on his agenda: to build much stronger ties between Yale engineering and the high-tech community locally, regionally, and nationally. “There’s a natural set of common interests. Engineers in these places are very eager to continue their education, and we have to make that very easy for them,” he explains. “And by bringing them to Yale, our students are going to get a much better insight into the kinds of opportunities that are available in the industrial world.”
The new dean also hopes to use his extensive contacts in business and politics to make Yale a place where corporate and government leaders can meet periodically on an informal and non-confrontational basis. “I think we might make an enormous contribution to the well-being of this nation if we could improve the interface between our senior industrialists and the key people in Washington,” says Bromley.
Engineering professors have liked what they’ve seen so far, and, surprising as it might seem, they even suggest that the restructuring cloud had a silver lining. “The wonderful thing about this whole process we’ve gone through over the past few years is that we’re ending up in a better place than we would have been if we had been left alone,” says Robert Apfel.
If sheer force of enthusiasm—a Bromley trait—counts for much, perhaps “glory days” are already at hand. “When I graduated from engineering school, television and antibiotics were both laboratory curiosities, and the DC-3 was the backbone of the transportation industry,” recalls the dean. “Portable telephones were still firmly in Dick Tracy’s hands, and a man on the moon was science fiction. We simply can’t imagine what’s going to happen next.”  |
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