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It didn't look like history in the making. On a chilly evening early in March, in a third-floor lounge in Burton Hall, 40 or 50 Smith students gathered, packed so tightly in the low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit alcove that they nearly hid the furniture and floor on which they all sat facing one wall. Their dress ran to T-shirts, jeans, sweats. They were a notably international group but shared a certain cast to the eyes-the caffeine-fueled, fixed-to-the-far-horizon gaze of those who shoulder courseloads deeply ballasted in math and hard science. A few faculty members and guest speakers looked on. A cheerful but subdued mix of shoptalk and gossip buzzed as a last few stragglers arrived. Then Malgorzata Pfabé, Sophia Smith Professor of Physics, strode before the group, smiling broadly. "Welcome," she said, "to an historic event: the first presentation of the engineering program at Smith College, and the first at any women's college." Her greeting elicited no cheers or applause. Only a wave of brightening eyes and tight-lipped smiles hinted at the pride that filled the room. Of course, there had already been plenty of acclaim for the plan to teach engineering at Smith. The college had been basking in the national spotlight for the past week and a half, ever since the board of trustees, at its spring meeting, had given its blessing to the program. The New York Times had run a laudatory front-page story in which Smith President Ruth J. Simmons, whose strong support for the initiative had been consistent and decisive, spoke of the need for "a critical mass of women moving through engineering together" to topple sexist barriers, explicit or implicit. CNN played up the news, and prominent accounts appeared in newspapers from coast to coast. The San Francisco Chronicle even had an editorial on the subject. "We salute Smith for its bold step into a male-dominated area of study," it said. "We are confident Smith engineers will be paragons when they begin to graduate in 2004." Not that anyone on campus needed outside help in seeing the importance of this step. Back in January, at an all-college meeting, a man Pfabé credits with having been instrumental in the program's creation had discussed it in a speech to students. While noting that "the history of women's colleges is proud and diverse," John Connolly, provost and dean of the faculty, pointed out that "it is not often that even a Smith or a Wellesley gets to say, 'Only we have dared to do x,' where x is something of significant national importance and also represents the next frontier for women." The object of all this attention is the Picker Program in Engineering and Technology, named for the late Jean Sovatkin Picker '42, who was a United Nations official and Smith trustee, and her husband, Harvey Picker. He is chairman of the board of Wayfarer Marine Corporation, a dean emeritus of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and a longtime Smith supporter. His $5 million gift established an endowment for the engineering program, and further support has been provided by Rosemary Bradford Hewlett '40 and the William R. Hewlett Trust. Their collective generosity has enabled the college to embark on what President Simmons characterizes as "a bold venture but an important one for a forward-looking women's college." Skeptics hearing such talk might be forgiven for wondering why on earth Smith would decide to challenge such renowned, powerful and deeply entrenched engineering strongholds as MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cornell and Cal Poly. They might also be reassured to learn just how compelling are the reasons for doing so. To begin with, career prospects for engineers are bright-so bright that Smith can ignore them only at peril of seeming to betray its fundamental mission of "continually developing programs that advance the frontier of achievement for women." The National Science Foundation expects engineering-related jobs during the coming decade to spring up at a rate three times higher than that for jobs generally. A recent Bureau of Labor Statistics study predicted that the demand for computer engineers will more than double by 2006. Electrical and electronic engineers and engineering managers are also expected to be in high demand. For whatever reason, though, women have been slow to claim their fair share of the engineering pie. "Twenty-five years ago almost all engineers were male," said John Connolly in his January speech, "and even today, after a whole generation of the women's movement, roughly five out of every six engineering students and nine out of 10 engineering professors are male. Engineers literally design and build much of the human environment. Women must not accept so marginal a role in so important a field." A signal boost for engineering at Smith came from the self-study the college conducted in 1997. The self-study committee's final report urged Smith to push harder in preparing women for careers in science and technology "to distinguish the college as an institution where women's minds and prospects for achievement know no boundaries." In the wake of that report the college formed a task force to study the feasibility of establishing an engineering major. In addition to Connolly and Pfabé the group included Ruth Haas, associate professor of mathematics; Dominique Thiébaut, associate professor of computer science and chair of that department; and Doreen Weinberger, associate professor of physics. Their efforts spanned the better part of a year and put them in touch with engineering educators from MIT, Rensselaer, Cooper Union, Cornell, Dartmouth, the University of Massachusetts and other premier institutions, as well as representatives from the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering. The task force didn't begin in a vacuum. There had been talk of starting an engineering program at Smith as long ago as the 1970s. The college had an active dual-degree program with the engineering college at UMass Amherst from 1976 to 1991. Since 1985 Smith has offered an engineering minor, with emphases in chemical, civil, computer, electrical, industrial and mechanical engineering and in operations research. And last year the MacLean Program, a partnership with Dartmouth College, began enabling Smith students to earn in five years both a bachelor of arts degree from Smith and a bachelor of engineering degree from Dartmouth. To the task force, all that history made one thing clear: Smith students perform well in any engineering program in which they participate--even when they arrive lacking what are thought to be necessary prerequisites. Their success offers gratifying proof both of the soundness of the college's math and science curricula and of the discipline and adaptability of Smith students. The task force also quickly saw that Smith could make a foray into engineering with relatively little risk. "This," the group's final report explained, "is because of the breadth of what we currently do in the sciences and the way certain engineering subfields could naturally emerge as extensions of programs we have. The bases for all engineering programs--mathematics, physics, chemistry and, increasingly, biology--are all strong at Smith." Further encouragement came from a group of engineering educators who visited Smith in May 1998. They said in their subsequent report that "we enthusiastically support the idea that Smith both could and should create an engineering program" and that "having the expertise and excellence for engineering available for students on Smith's campus would be a significant benefit for attracting outstanding students and faculty." As the idea of launching a Smith engineering program gained ground, much of what resistance did emerge hinged on one question: How would such a program fit in-could it fit in-with Smith's traditional devotion to the ideals of liberal arts education? John Connolly dealt with this issue in his January speech. He traced the origins of the perceived conflict between engineering and the liberal arts, telling how over the past century and a half mainstream engineering education had derived from the model of the French polytechnic, which offered little or no place for the liberal arts. This long tradition, he said, "leads people to think that engineering is per se incompatible with the liberal arts. But this is simply the fallacy of mistaking a de facto separation for a necessary one. In reality the study of engineering is no more out of place in a liberal arts curriculum than is the study of biology or chemistry or architecture or education." The task force was able to buttress this assertion by pointing to long-established, highly regarded engineering programs at two top-25 liberal arts colleges, Swarthmore outside Philadelphia and Trinity in Hartford, Connecticut. After visiting both campuses, task-force members could report seeing "with our own eyes what is possible in [engineering] at liberal arts colleges considerably smaller than Smith. We saw students moving on from these programs into engineering and other professional careers with the confidence born of their training in both the liberal arts and engineering. We believe that Smith, in time, could do at least as well." Beyond confirming that liberal arts colleges can support worthy engineering programs, the task force found evidence of a real need in industry for liberally educated engineers with broad academic backgrounds and strong skills in writing, speaking and analytic thinking. In fact, engineering accrediting agencies have been moving to give greater weight to the liberal arts in designing curricular standards. "The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology is very much leaning toward this approach," Malgorzata Pfabé notes. "Many engineering educators also favor it, and I often hear professional engineers say they wish they had gotten a more general education." The task force made another exciting discovery: that a Smith engineering program is likely not merely to duplicate the success of the programs it emulates, but to produce important pedagogic innovations. These are expected to evolve in response to the poor records of existing programs in attracting women, retaining women and producing women graduates who go on to find secure footholds in the profession. "If today five out of six engineering students are male, even while medicine, law and business are approaching gender parity, then clearly there is great need for another educational paradigm," Connolly argues. President Simmons agrees. "It is a matter of national import," she says, "that our country not only produce more women engineers but also develop new, truly effective models for educating them." Those who look to Smith to provide such a paradigm note that the college has already done so in other realms. Nationally, women who enter college interested in science or mathematics often don't persist in it through graduation, and those who do tend not to keep up with their male colleagues in gaining advanced degrees and forging extended careers. Yet it is one of Smith's proudest boasts that its students graduate with science majors at two and a half times the national average for men and women combined, and that Smith science graduates pursue advanced degrees at a rate far above the national average for women. Thus, Connolly believes, "a student's chances of leaving Smith with an engineering degree are likely to be much greater than they would be at a university." The task force came to see Smith as being well positioned to create a rigorous program in engineering, one that will attract and retain a highly select cadre of students. (In 1998, high school students expressing strong interest in engineering careers typically had SAT scores 100 points above the average.) Such a program would produce, in Simmons' words, "a steady stream of women engineers who enter the profession and rise to the top." Now it only remains to make all this happen. A search is unde way for a founding chairperson for the new department. She or he will work with the advisory committee to determine which specialties will initially be offered. The most likely are computer engineering, electrical engineering and environmental engineering, all of which would build on existing faculty strengths in computer science, geology, physics and the environmental sciences. The college will offer its first engineering course, "Designing the Future: An Introduction to Engineering," this fall. Taught by Ileana Streinu, an assistant professor in the computer science department, and Doreen Weinberger, the associate professor of physics who served on the engineering task force, it will take as its theme "Designing Intelligent Robots." A number of existing courses offered by other departments will also be included in the engineering curriculum. Smith's first engineering majors are expected to graduate in 2004 with bachelor of science degrees in engineering. Once the program is fully established the college expects to enroll 100 engineering majors at any one time, graduating approximately 25 per year. "Smith will be a leader in educating women engineers, not by virtue of numbers--we are never going to have a very large program--but by virtue of having an exemplary approach," says John Connolly. "Engineering at Smith will be scientifically rigorous and steeped in the liberal arts, and all of its graduates will be women. No one else will have anything like it." |
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