…is finally getting an engineering school.
Not sure what the rush is. It’s only been 380 years or so since it was founded. Looks like they’re not going to have an aerospace department, though.
9 thoughts on “Harvard”
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…is finally getting an engineering school.
Not sure what the rush is. It’s only been 380 years or so since it was founded. Looks like they’re not going to have an aerospace department, though.
Comments are closed.
Waitaminute…. Harvard didn’t have an engineering school? How in the hell could they ever call themselves a university without one? How did they get to be a prestigious university without STEM?
They’ve always had hard science and math departments, but no, not engineering. Engineering wasn’t viewed as something that gentlemen do.
That’s not correct; Harvard has had an engineering school, under various names, since 1847. It’s true that at various points the Harvard leadership tried to pawn off its engineering programs on MIT (then known as Boston Tech), but those plans were ultimately abandoned in 1917. Gordon McKay* had given Harvard the largest gift in its history to that point to support engineering and applied sciences, and a court ruled that the money (and therefore the school) could not be transferred down the street to MIT.
McKay was a colorful figure (here’s a short bio by the “Gordon McKay professor of computer science” who gave me my first programming job). McKay patented a machine to sew shoe uppers to soles, and came up with an innovative way to sell manufacturing equipment (the manufacturers paid him a per-shoe royalty). His machines sewed much of the footwear issued to the Union Army, and at one point produced half the shoes made in America.
Well the article puts an emphasis on an introductory Computer Science course at Harvard. I attended a lecture back in the day given by Fred Brooks of “The Mythical Man Month” fame. He used to claim that any discipline that used the word “Science” in their name was inherently not a science. I would say Computer Science, per se, poses no threat to any “pure science” and certainly the faculty wouldn’t muddy the waters by claiming to teach “software engineering”. On the contrary, Harvard could do quite well with a Department of Eclectic Engineering. Yet another opportunity to lead the country in a unique discipline! For anything else there is a rumor of activity down at the other end of Mass Ave.
I’d say Brooks was right. And there are a few other words like “science”, where if you add an adjective, you negate the noun: “justice”, “truth”, and “correct” come to mind.
They aren’t doing ChemE, probably not for the nonresponsive answer that he gave, but because it’s damn expensive for the student labs and it doesn’t scale well. As for CivE, it’s boring to design roads and bridges and stuff. Rand, Aerospace might be part of MechE as it is at other schools.
The fact that they don’t seem to have structured majors can be a problem for the students – they’ll end up taking a grab bag of hot and trendy courses and hit walls when they get to the real world. Also, it will make it damn hard to get a PE license if they want to set up their own shop. Since I’ve got a BA is science, not engineering, and an MEE, I would have had trouble getting a PE.
Scalability was a major issue for them, which is why they initially focused on computer science, which doesn’t require labs and equipment.
I’d note (as I will with my Kickstarter project) that scalability is a major issue with space as well, and Congress seems determined to make the program as unscalable as possible. Because there’s not enough graft in the alternative.
This is likely to multiply the number of conservatives on their faculty by an order of magnitude at the very least.
Only if they select faculty with industry experience; if they stick with academics, they’ll be as bad as anyone else on the faculty.
Of course, Steven Pinker is at Harvard, and somehow he manages to be politically incorrect and revered at the same time…