Numeracy and Literacy: the Two Cultures and the Computer Revolution
Henry Petroski
In the years following the great American technological achievement of landing men on the moon before the Russians did, engineering here became not a booming but a depressed field. When the morality of majoring in engineering was not questioned, the sanity of doing so was. By the mid-1970's engineering enrollments were down by a third from their heyday in the shadow of Sputnik, and still not all graduates could find jobs. Now, only a decade later, an about-face has occurred on college campuses. Soaring engineering enrollments are causing overcrowding in long-neglected laboratories; and although there is a shortage of engineering faculty at a time when a paucity of open positions in the humanities have hundreds of applicants, nonengineering students seem no longer to look down on the engineers. It is not so simply a matter of engineering majors getting more and higher-paying job offers on graduation, for the engineering job market is still a very volatile one. Rather it seems to be a perception that our whole culture is changing, and that understanding technology is indispensable to coping with the future. And who should be in a better position for understanding technology than the engineer? Thus, in addition to teaching overcrowded classes of engineering majors, engineering faculty are being asked more and more to teach engineering and technology to liberal arts students.
