European Journal of Engineering Education

ISSN: 0304-3797 (Print) 1469-5898 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceee20

Humanities in Engineering Education

ROBERT RUPRECHT

To cite this article: ROBERT RUPRECHT (1997) Humanities in Engineering Education, European
Journal of Engineering Education, 22:4, 363-375, DOI: 10.1080/03043799708923468

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03043799708923468

Published online: 03 Apr 2007.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 94

View related articles

Citing articles: 3 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ceee20

Download by: [University of Bath] Date: 04 June 2016, At: 13:42

 European Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 22, No.4, 1997 363

Humanities in Engineering Education

ROBERT RUPRECHT

SUMMARY The need for humanities in technical curricula can be explained in part by
the impact technology has on our society. Engineers are the class of people who contribute
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

most, and most directly to the changing face of the earth. So they should have at least an
idea of the context they are working in. Humanities, on the other hand, have been on the
loosing side since World War II. This callsfor some reconsideration. The ever more urgent
call for languages, management and law competencies for engineers is an expression for
this. Humanities can and must play an important role in every well-balanced engineering
curriculum.

1. The Great Era of Technology

When I was a boy, engineers used to be much admired people, at least in the
non-technical environment I grew up in. But it must also have been the case for
a lot of other people. The late 1940s and the 1950s were a period of unprece-
dented technical progress, and this progress came out of the hands of engineers
and scientists. In that period of disillusion and Cold War, one could easily become
convinced that technics and science were to solve all the problems of humanity.
In Europe and northen America, things really went well. The end of World
War II had not brought the political upheaval and economic disasters a lot of
people feared. Thanks to the generosity of the US, reconstruction started soon
after the end of the war, and it had its most tremendous effects in the country
most afflicted by it, in Germany. One used to talk about the Wirtschaftswunder
(economic miracle). It was only partly a miracle, though. The Marshall Plan
appears to be one of the rare examples of insight won from historical experience.
The Americans wanted to avoid a repetition of the disasters that followed World
War I, and initiated a period of unprecedented progress and wealth throughout
Western Europe and the Western world. That it worked best in Germany can be
attributed to the competence of German manpower, the competence of German
workers, engineers, scientists and businessmen and their motivation to compen-
sate for the breakdown they all had just experienced. In the 1950s and early
1960s, in a time where almost everyone subscribed to the motto 'war never again!'
(Nie wieder Krieg!), the disaster of the war actually was the major source not only
of technical and scientific progress but also of general welfare. A third cause of this
development was the rise of the Soviet Empire and communist rule over Eastern
Europe. How much the West could profit from the competition between capital-
ism and communism dawned on almost everyone after the downfall of the Soviet
Union in 1989.

0304-3797197/040363-13 © 1997 European Society for Engineering Education

 364 R. Ruprecht

The spirit that reigned in Europe during these years may be compared with
what happens now in South East Asia where there is no talk about recession and
joblessness. Things just worked well during the first decades after the war. What
has changed then?
Following a line of historical reasoning, we can say that the period of European
reconstruction was followed by a period of worldwide exploitation induced by
decolonization. This victory of the communist block over the old imperial powers
became a most profitable thing for the West. A third fortunate development can
be seen in the expansion of economical exchanges with the communist East. All
these three stages, reconstruction, worldwide exploitation' and business with the
communist East, now lie behind us. The era of constant growth seems at least
stalled. Now, the problems it produced have become visible to everyone.
• • I • •

1.1 The Era of Reconstruction

Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

If we consider the three stages briefly we must see that the first one, that of
European reconstruction, had its hidden costs. Politically it was the time of the
Cold War. The breakdown of the fascist ideology was more than just bringing
home a child gone astray, the fight for freedom and democracy the Western allies
fought was not just a fight for the old values. It was the breakdown of the
traditional philosophical conscepts of the West which had started to crack in the
middle of the ninteenth century. Names like Feuerbach, Darwin and Marx stand
for the first big big earthquakes, but these men did not come out of the cold, they
had their predecessors all right. The fascist systems themselves were a tragic
caricature of the development of European thinking throughout its history, but
especially of the second half of the nineteenth century (think of Nietzsche and
Kirkegaard). They had no vitality of their own. Their breakdown made everyone
suspicious of ideologies and with them of philosophical concepts. The position
that used to be held by religious and philosophical concepts was given up to
economical ones: to the antagonism between the communist and the capitalist
blocks [I]. The European West became centred on economy, relinquishing its
traditional positions and giving itself up to become the playground of two
superpowers fighting each other with determination. These superpowers them-
selves relied on the vast hinterlands that were at their hands, the efficiency their
respective industries could display (there was a time when the standard of living
was measured by tons of steel produced) and the scientific progress they could
incite. That the odds must have been on the communist side could be obvious to
any cool observer, but it was at least not 'politically correct' to put the finger on
that fact. On the contrary, the communist threat proved to be an excellent means
of enforcing discipline, and here we come to the central point: the East-West
antagonism consolidated the pauperization of European thinking. I remember the
popular answer we used to get when we protested against any element of the
ruling system "Go to Moscow if you don't like it here, you will see!" It may be
one of the tragic ironies of that generation that they had nothing to refer to in their
protest but Marxism, the seemingly only alternative to a system they could not
really breathe in. Nothing? Not exactly. These were also the days of hippies,
Flower Power and Woodstock - somehow helpless romantic escapes from an
increasingly inflexible system.
In this environment, scientists and engineers were the men of the day, the
carriers of the banner in East and West. Their task was relatively simple. They had
 Humanities in Engineering Education 365

to discover, to develop and to produce. They were the pillars of the system they
belonged to without really being allowed to think about it. They were the ideal task
force: under the (ideological) motto that there is no ideology to science they could
peacefully keep on searching and inventing. What was declared a scientific truth used
to be beyond any questioning as long as it helped the system. The point was to be
more efficient than the 'colleagues' on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Most of
us still remember the Sputnik-shock,
It is interesting to see that the philosophical pauperism of the 1950s and early
1960s created an immediate reaction in the arts. Artists throughout the world
spontaneously rejected the shallow popular positivism of these days by refusing to
cope. These were the days of absurd literature, of esoteric E-music, rock and pop.
Let me just quote some names:

Literature: Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Friedrich Diirrenmatt

Painting: Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

Sculpture: Henry Moore

Music: Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, The Beatles

While the arts generally opposed the official trends, achitects (being close to
engineers) rather encouraged it. The new one-dimensional society (2] was glad to
respond to the rationalist programme of the Bauhaus period (Gropius, Mies van
der Rohe, Corbusier). Brasilia and Chandigarh may be an illustration of what that
had led to.
So it was easy to be an engineer in the 1950s and early 1960s [3]. One was
supposed to do the job one was assigned to well. People expected this of engineers.
The economy paid them decent salaries. Not that there were no problems. One had
to do good work, to invent new things. This was often a self-denying job, but
self-denial is what everyone expects from their heros. Then: inventing something
genial did not necessarily lead to economic success. But this was not an engineering
problem. That task fell to the businessmen and they did not want anybody to
interfere with them. Engineers had to produce what they were told, the businessman
had to find the markets and the politicians had to open the roads.
All worked well. At least it seemed to.

1.2 The Era of Decolonization

The second srage was initiated by the breakdown of the colonial empires. It
may be one of the big ironies of world history that the moment the Soviet
empire won its biggest victory also initiated its ruin [4]. One of its major goals
in its struggle to ruin the West was the dissolution of the colonial empires. The
communist strategy worked well. There was no real return to power for the
colonialists after World War 1. The development towards independence had
begun after World War I: India helped the UK to fight the Germans with the
assurance that it would win independence after the victory. Indochina and
Indonesia took up the fight right after the war and eventually won. Africa, the
sleeping giant, felt the urge as well but seemed not to be ready yet: the British
were able to retain their power in Kenya, at least temporarily. By 1960, all was
more or less over, and the Soviet assistance to all the independence movements
seemed to have borne its fruit. The UK and France had lost their position as
world powers. But, instead of creating a huge economic crisis, the loss of
colonial authoriry became a success because it was well timed: the West had
 366 R. Ruprecht

just about finished its period of reconstruction and was ready to reach out. Now,
with the political ties cut, the moral ones fell. The former dependent territories
were now trading partners. The development aid movement soon proved to be a
huge booster for Western exports and soon there was more capital flowing from
the poor countries towards the rich ones than in the other direction [5]. The
North-South gap developed. The southern countries had not really been poor at
the beginning of that era, they were not even underdeveloped. The industrial West
declared them to be so [6].
So, the period of coexistence, as the Russians called it, the era of free
competition between the two dominating powers that had started with a Russian
'victory', led to a strengthening of Western industry which could not even be really
shaken by the Arabian decision to stop their export of oil in the context of the
Israeli-Arab war of 1973. It caused some upheaval, certainly, a temporary
shortage and a boost in inflation as the prices for fuel went up sharply. But the
West was not slow in reacting and with some rearrangements of the financial
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

circuits the economic boom could go on.

1.3 Doing Business with the Communist Block

The third stage was reached when the economic exchange with the Soviet
empire became significant. This issue was hotly disputed in the 1960s: Should
one sell to and buy from a hostile system? Can economic exchanges be morally
justified? As business is not very apt to reflect on moral questions but on profit,
economic exchanges with the Eastern block soon developed and proved to be
profitable enough. It was rather one-sided too: the Soviet economy, while being
first rate in space and military technology, lagged more and more behind West-
ern standards, and even its agriculture was not able to produce efficiently. So the
Soviet Union became a huge buyer of Western technology and therefore one of
the supporters of Western economy. A lot of Western products could just be
dumped in the states belonging to the Soviet empire, sometimes literally
dumped, as the planned economy did not always work according to plan and
goods were sometimes delivered in time to a place where a factory was just
supposed to be standing.
It is for that reason that the West fell into the crisis we are still struggling
with: the breakdown of the Soviet empire equals the loss of a major customer to
the entire West, it has destabilized all our economies and-this is pure specula-
tion-it could be understood as a huge and extremely risky maneouvre eventu-
ally to destroy capitalist society. A manoeuvre in which all the odds appear to be
on the side of the former Soviets. But the reaction of Western economy to the
loss of Marxist challenge is telling. The Western economy seems to have lost its
inhibitions towards its working force in about the same way as the West shed its
inhibitions towards the Third World after decolonization. Joblessness is looked at
with an equivocal attitude. After half a centruy of constant economic growth, it
is suddenly considered something normal, something that just must be accepted
[7], and, on the other hand, unlimited exploitation of the people having a job
appears to have become quite as normal, too. Is this the return of the old
Manchester liberalism? Maybe the challenge of South East Asia will teach us
differently, and what some Western leftists have tried to explain to us since the
late 1950s, will eventually bear some fruit: welfare cannot just be measured in
Dollars or Yen.
 Humanities in Engineering Education 367

2. Mixed Blessings
We are still dealing with engineering education, not with cultural history. Yet,
there is no engineering outside the frame of a whole, there cannot be any sound
engineering education that does not pay attention to the whole it belongs to.
Anyway, let us come closer to our topic.
We must have lost something on the way during our economic progress: being
successful must have made us somewhat one-dimensional. In 1956 the first Swiss
nuclear power plant was erected at Muhleberg in the Canton of Bern. That is
about 25 km away from where I live. I still remember how proud we used to be
about the power station, how close to progress we felt and how much we were
convinced that this new source of energy was an answer to many challenges of the
future. Nowadays, people are no longer sure about this. The construction of new
power plants has declined since one became aware, even before Chernobyl, of the
fact that the problems they create may be much bigger than the immediate
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

advantages they bring.

In 1939, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was discovered as a most
efficient insecticide by Paul Hermann Muller, an analytical chemist in Basle, who
won the Nobel Prize for this discovery. It became a world success because it
carried the hope of getting rid of plagues like malaria. After some years of intensive
application, it became clear that DDT could not be decomposed biologically but
wandered through the food chain to end up in human bodies. We still do not
know exactly what harm it does, but we know it is there and the use of-DDT has
been sharply reduced.
Transportation and communication surely have played their role in our history.
The improvement of the means of transportation can be directly linked to
economic progress, so new roads, new waterways, railway links and better air
transportation must contribute to the development of our economies. But do they
do that really? Is that progress just linear? Is there not a point where progress
begins to reduce the quality of life? There was no major resistance against the
construction of the new national motorway network in Switzerland in the early
1960s, but there is a lot of resistance these days against completing the network.
Are we reaching a stage where old, time-proven recipes just do not work any
more?
All these examples are intricately linked with engineering problems. They make
clear that the world has not become safer, cleaner and healthier because of
engineering. We should not be ungrateful, though-engineering has accomplished
a lot. Life expectancy is still growing-at least in developed countries-but so are
lung diseases. Hard chores like washing, heating and obtaining water have been
abolished, but dependency has grown (just think of a breakdown of energy
supplies as was experienced by New York in July 1977). Information exchange has
become extremely easy but so has interference. Our lives are no longer ruled by
the laws of nature. These have become remote as the necessities of a highly
technological world push themselves into the foreground of our daily experiences
[8]. Here lies one of the sources of that irritating modem hostility towards
technology. While technical products are still attractive they are also apt to inspire
awe and feelings of helplessness. We react to them like small children. The
fascination is still there but there is also contempt. We, the consumers, do not
really respect technical products, we just want them, and this attitude is sanc-
tioned by the reproducibility of technical things.
 368 R. Ruprecht

We somehow feel that we have lost control. If there is a demand for a

civilized engineer [9) these days, if we do not any longer want engineers just to
fulfil their appointed tasks, we indirectly show that feeling.
The call for the responsible engineer can be understood as a declaration of
bankruptcy of our traditional leaders. It is the third time this century that
Europe has been confronted with this situation [10). The last time, we could
still believe that traditionally educated engineers would do the trick.

3. Ways Out
If we begin to look for a way out of the dilemma, we must start from the fact
that there is no recipe. The proposition of introducing humanities into engi-
neering education curricula will not solve the problem. Nobody has the neces-
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

sary knowledge to show the way. But there are possibilities. If we believe that
there is a clue in humanities, we may be right.
Everybody has heard about the absent-minded professor who has put his
pocket clock into the boiling water and now intently stares at the egg in his
hands. The concept of the self-denying scientist completely devoted to his field
of studies is a heritage from the great time of science, the nineteenth century.
But these heroes of science are not well understood if they are considered as
the direct ancestors of today's specialists who, as the saying goes, know every-
thing about nothing. They had a different background. There is a right to be
devoted to one's field of activity, there is even an obligation, but this is no
excuse for one-sidedness and 'fachidiotism'. If we understand nothing but our
own field of activity we will not be able to communicate with others, even
about this. We are more or less lost, like a madman in his own world.
There is nothing wrong with immersing oneself into a problem or, for
students, into their education. But there must be no thing like total immersion.
Prolonged periods of heavy concentration on a project are among the easiest
times of any life: one can just put the other problems aside, concentrate on
one's goal, but, when it is finally reached, most of the other problems are still
there, waiting to be dealt with.
Florman reminds us of all the great scientists who were also great humanists
to explain the importance of humanities in engineering education. One might
hold against him that the average engineer is not of the class of the Einsteins,
Bohrs and Oppenheimers of this world (just as the average humanist is no
Shakespeare or Leonardo). But what can be said against trying to be the same
on a smaller scale? There is really no point in pushing people in one single
direction, in trying to form intellectual athletes.
Geniuses cannot be produced, but first-rate people can be encouraged. This
can be done by providing gifted people with a first-rate education. But there is
no such thing as a one-sided first-rate education. A real first-rate education is
always based on a broad foundation, offering the gifted ones more than one
option. In our days of still growing specialization, this fact should be taken
more seriously than ever. We should think of the way rather than of the aim.
We should remind ourselves of the fact that one-sidedness, the one-dimensional
man (Marcuse), is one of the greatest dangers of our time.
There are several ways out of the dilemma which will be discussed below.
 Humanities in Engineering Education 369

3.1 We Must Learn to Lean Back

As university education, especially in Western Europe, has developed during the
last five or six decades towards professional training, it has lost a very important
quality: its aspect of generality. There was a time when students, especially on the
continent, were at least as much interested in what was going on as in what their
particular field of studies was. The Burschenschaften (students' associations) of
German universities had their great time in the early nineteenth century when they
were political organizations disguised as sports groups, choirs, literary clubs and so
on. They played essential roles in several political upheavels. Later, they became
tamed, transformed into bearers of official doctrines, free-time associations or
special-interest groups. So they lost much of their impact and have now developed
into rather marginal phenomena at our universities. How far things have gone can
be seen from the last big students' revolt, the one of 1968, which lead to the
'Verschulung' of our universities by splitting the curricula into small units [11]. So
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

learning what was required became more important than studying. This resulted
in either endless studies or very strict curricula to be mastered in a given time, as
in the Fachhochschulen. Neither solution is really good. Endless studying is a
luxury we may not be able to support for much longer, strict curricula combined
with limited study time carry the risk of producing one-track specialists (Fachid-
ioten). This risk can be minimized by cutting down requirements in the main
subject of studies and introducing foreign subjects such as, for example, humani-
ties in technical studies or technology in law studies. But this will only bear fruit
if combined with a portion of free time which will allow the student to lean back,
to reflect on what he/she is really doing. I think that pursuing a hobby like playing
music, climbing mountains, painting or whatever, has a most important educa-
tional aspect. If one must invest all one's energy into one's studies, there is
something wrong with the system: the student either has not got the necessary
potential (so: why was he/she admitted?) or he must fulfil too heavy requirements
(so: the system is out of touch with what is really possible). There must be time
to lean back, to look at things from a different viewpoint. Each curriculum should
provide this time.

3.2 We Must Learn to Cultivate our Openness

If we are able to relax, we have already made a big step towards openness-but
it is not enough. Taking up studies should also mean making steps into the open.
We all have a basis formed by our experience and what we have learned from
others. \'(le all have a natural inclination not to go further than others have gone.
This inclination has not been cultivated much during the last few decades.
Opening up has been the leitmotiv of practically every field activity, and now we
gaze with astonishment at the effects we have produced. Have we done it the right
way? Or have we opened up with closed eyes?

• Christopher Columbus started westwards to find India which was, as every-

one knew, in the East. He applied a new insight which gave him the courage
to go out into the open. What he eventually found was America, a fact he
remained somehow blind to for the rest of his life.
• Niklaus A. Opel and Rudolf Diesel invented the internal combustion motor
and so found a way for automotive transportation, but they could have no
 370 R. Ruprecht

idea what this invention would bring along in possibilities and problems.
They could not forsee it and the latter did not live to see the first aeroplanes
rise into the air. Nobody has blamed them so far for their inventions,
although we are very much aware of the problems they cause for our
environment.
• The Breakdown of the Soviet system in 1989 did not tum out to be the
triumph of the Western economic system many an observer expected [12].
On the contrary, the disappearing ghost of communism appears to have
raised the ghost of Manchester liberalism, which had been believed dead for
a long time.

So far, we have been able to cope with our steps into the open. We are struggling
with the problems they have brought along, certainly, but there is no way to go
back on anything. Maybe we will be able to solve the problems technology has
caused so far by new technology. We do not know. But to see technology as the
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

path to doom is no less irresponsible than it is naive to believe it to be the path to

paradise.
Friedrich Diirrenmatt has discussed that particular problem in his play 'The
Physicists'. There, a physicist, 'Moebius', who has discovered a dangerous for-
mula, decides to retire to a lunatic asylum in order to save the world from his
terrible finding. Agents of powerful states who have got wind of this work enter the
asylum, disguised as lunatics as well. Finally, they decide to unite and to spend the
rest of their lifetime as false lunatics for the benefit of mankind. But it is too late,
the director of the asylum, Fraulein Doktor von Zahnd, has stolen ail the papers
of Moebius and put his discovery into practice, thus laying the basis to her ruling
the world.
According to Durrenmatt, a play has come to its real end only when it reaches
the worst possible conclusion. Generally, his 'Physicists' have been considered a
warning. I think this is a reasonable interpretation. But one can also look at it
differently. As long as the dynamism that characterizes our time prevails, the
outcome will always be open. Whether it will be negative as described by Orwell
in his Novel 1984, or problematic (as it has been so far) or something in berween,
as described by Huxley in his Brave New World or H. G. Wells in his Time
Machine we cannot know. I think it is very important to listen to the warnings
expressed by these authors, but we must also accept the fact that we cannot stop
any development at will. Neither can we take the world in our hand.
To step into the open is something we must do. But there is no future without
a past, and real openness means looking in both directions. We can find help and
direction, we can even find consolation if we look back into the past. It can be a
source of strength and a guideline. If we derive the courage to go forward from it,
all the better. Our experiences from the past will always show us that there are
limits to our possibilities and that we will eventually have to pay the price for our
mistakes [13].

3.3 We Must Learn to Accept Our Smallness

In his book Der Gotteskomplex, Horst Richter explains how many problems of our
days derive from the fact that we take ourselves for more than we actually are [14].
Humankind has always had an inclination to admire itself for all the prodigious
feats it has produced. The tremendous progress of science and technology of the
 Humanities in Engineering Education 371

last two centuries has produced a feeling of power that has ultimately led US to the
belief that we can control everything. Our civilization has freed us from many
constraints of nature; more and more, we live in a world formed and conditioned
according to our needs. The world, as it is, has become an object of ruthless
exploitation; nature and, as it seems, eventually humankind itself, are considered
more and more as objects, sometimes even a hindrance in the way of progress.
We need not look far to find the examples that illustrate these facts. But if we
see that World War II began much like the Peloponnesian War (430-405 BC),
that Alexander the Great came about as far on horseback as Napoleon who also
had cannons, or Hitler will all his machinery, and used up about the same length
of time; if we see that people who can hop from one continent to the other in a
few hours neither are, nor act more clever than their predecessors in any given
period before, we can see that all our greatness is very small indeed.
If we look at the obvious change in our climate and the somehow hysterical
reactions to it, we tend to forget that there have always been warmer and cooler
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

periods in the history of our earth. So why bother? Of course, we have no right to
change the basic conditions of our existence at will. But can we say that all the
technologies known to be harmful to the world's climate must be banned? If we
were serious about this, we would stan a revolution right away. An impossible
one. Conservation is a very wise attitude, it is to be cultivated. But history tells us
that humankind has been a destroyer from its very beginning.
The Swiss scientist Max Thurkauf, in his critisism of modem technology, once
said: "If you tell us, you have considered every contingency, have you also thought
of the contingencies you did not think of?" [15]. In fact, no assessment of new
technologies will ever be able to cover all the risks. We make steps into the open,
but it is important to be aware of it, to do it carefully and to consider all the
contingencies we can think of. We have no guarantee that humankind will survive,
but it is most likely that nature will somehow make it.
So if we can learn to accept that we live in a greater context, that the world is
not just ours that we are a minority and therefore responsible, if we respect the
rights of all others, human and all other forms of life, beyond ourselves, we may
become better people and better engineers/scientists/humanists.
We must accept our smallness and our limitations openly. We must live the
tension between the extreme power at our hands and our great helplessness.

3.4 We i\1USt Learn to Cultivate Courage

I remember my father repeating on several occasions that heroism is not a
question of doing big deeds but a question of admitting that one was afraid. This
was hard to understand for me when young, but now I think it a wise remark. As
we can hardly know what will come out of our deeds, it is wise to be afraid. But
it is also good to be courageous.
Seeing all the problems at hand, there is no point in lamenting. If the
Europeans have not sunk into general poverty, this is largely due to their spirit of
inventiveness. The general prosperity that still prevails in the Western world is a
direct product of science and technology. The problems science and technology
have brought along must not necessarily be insoluble. In any case, there is no
point in staring transfixedly at them like a mouse in front of a snake. Let us do
something, let us follow Martin Luther's advice who said: "If I knew that the
world would go under the next day, I would plant an apple tree."
 372 R. Ruprecht

It is good to be afraid. It is wise to use fear as a counsellor, but we only act

sensibly when we follow that other reformer's, Huldrich Zwingly's, counsel: "For
God's sake, do something ':courageous!" Courage is a basic quality for any
engineer or researcher.
.r If we are able to lean back, if we are open to whatever may come, if we accept
our smallness, we should not have any problem in also being a little courageous.
It takes these qualities to be inventive and to act responsibly [16].

4. The Role of Humanities in Technical Education

Openness, modesty and responsibility, which are basic qualities of any serious
education, cannot be taught directly. Openness, modesty and responsibility are
attitudes. Attitudes can only be transferred indirectly. Therefore, they can be
induced everywhere. Every teacher of any given subject can and should contribute
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

to this.
Humanities are in the happy, but extremely difficult, situation that contribut-
ing to openness, modesty and responsibility is the centre of their task in a technical
education. A teacher of a humanistic subject must take his/her particular field
extremely seriously, while being aware of the fact that it is considered marginal by
colleagues and students. That has some important consequences.
Humanities appear to be essentially different from technical disciplines. They
seem to be soft in the eyes of scientists and engineers, and they are soft indeed in
the sense of being open to interpretation. This softness is not a disadvantage,
though, on the contrary, it carries the message of complexity. There is not just one
way of seeing and understanding a phenomenon, there are many ways of different,
but often only slightly different, value. There is not only one way to understand a
work of literature, there are as many sound ones as there are serious readers of it.
Not all interpretations will have the same quality because they depend on the level
of the reader as well as-and this is even more important-the degree of
openness/earnestness any reader applies to his reading. To transmit this insight to
my students is one of the goals of my teaching. Engineering students, at least
many of them, live with the prejudice that they are totally incompetent as far as
humanities go. I try to show them that there is no truth· in this belief. My
experience is that they are very competent thinkers in general matters as soon as
they have found the confidence that they really can understand and judge a text,
a novel or a play.
This is only possible if I take my subject seriously. I am no less demanding in
my subject than my colleagues who teach mathematics, sciences or engineering,
neither in my demands nor in the qualifications I give them. But these qualifica-
tions must be transparent. The students must have the right to know why a text
written by them is considered unsatisfactory. They must be confronted with the
arguments of the teacher who has taken their arguments most seriously before. I
think there is a big advantage in the fact that there cannot be one single solution
to a given problem in humanities. The opinion of the teacher is basically not
relevant. Humanities must not be abused for indoctrination; their function,
especially in the context of a technical curriculum, must consist of the encouraging
of critical thinking.
Therefore, humanities in the context of a technical education cannot be
considered as disciplines of relaxation, as entertainment (with the teacher as
entertainer), as a security valve for stressed-students, or as an embellishment of the
 Humanities in Engineering Education 373

curriculum. Leaning back does not mean doing nothing but doing something
different, with all the application of mountain climbing. Humanities can only serve
their purpose in a technical education if they are really integrated in the curricu-
lum as branches with all the weight that others subjects have[17].
If I stressed before that humanities are different from technical subjects, I must
now specify that they rather appear to be different. In fact, there should not be any
opposition between technical disciplines and humanities. They are closer to each
other than one might believe. Being open to a multitude of answers is not a fact
limited to humanities. Is this not the case for technical problems as well?
Whenever I have looked under the hood of a car during these last 40 years,
there has been something quite different under it, although the principle of the
internal combustion engine has not changed since it was invented. That means
that the physical laws applied there are still the same, but the way of handling
them and the technical possibilities have developed. So, in fact, technical solutions
are not just technical solutions but solutions as good as the engineers were able to
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

find at a given moment.

Sciences develop, but their essential results remain valuable for generations.
Newton's laws have not lost their value because of Einstein. Technical applica-
tions do not become wrong because they get outdated. If you want to understand
technology, you must study what others have found out about it, and apply it. If
you want to understand life, you must study what others have thought about it,
and Jive it. It is quite possible to live a life without any real understanding, even
successfully. It is quite possible to profit from technology without understanding
anything of it. But the latter cannot be true for any serious engineer, and the first
is not possible for any open-minded human being. If you want to contribute to
any field of technology you must apply yourself as earnestly as you can. If you
want to contribute to any 'soft' science you msut fulfil exactly the same condition.
In both cases you will be just working at a small point; and the more earnestly you
do it, the clearer you will see how small that point in fact is, how little your
contribution is in the vast field of your discipline. If you lean back, that is. But if
you confound your spot of activity with the rest of all possible activities, you might
well mistake it for the universe and have no consideration for what all the others
do and contribute.
So there should be no opposition between technical and non-technical subjects
in an engineering curriculum but only tension, the tension that exists between the
visible and the non-visible things, between spirit and matter. There is no technical
product that has not been in the mind of somebody before and there is no
transmittable spiritual fact that has no physical side, be it, to put it simply, just in
the letters on a page.
The tension between the two great fields of human thinking is an excellent way
to openness.
Humanities can be a way to lean back, a way to openness, a way to accepting
our smallness and a way to courage in a technical curriculum because they look at
the same things from different viewpoints. Technology and science can fulfil
exactly the same purposes in a humanistic one.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

[I] Communism, although basically an economic ideology having much in
common with fascism (and, on the surface, hardly distinguishable from it),
 374 R. Ruprecht

has more profound philosophical roots than ordinary fascism. It is one answer
to the basic question of philosophy and has its transcendence in the fact that
it believes in the objectivity of science. Fascism, on the other hand, is,
philosophically speaking, extremely shallow. The principles of brutal force, law
and order and racism are most superficial and cannot stand critical question-
ing. That the Italian and the Spanish versions of fascism were not as bad as
the German one can be attributed to the taming force of Catholicism in the
respective countries.
[2) MARcusE, H. (1964) One-Dimensional Man, Studies in the Ideology ofAdvanced
Industrial Society (Boston, MA, Beacon Press). Gust to remind us that this
period was not completely barren philosophically.)
[3) At the Prague SEFI-IGIP symposium 1994, I criticized that in the process of
transforming the non-academical way in engineering education in Switzerland,
the wrong people were involved. In fact, there was hardly an engineer among
the people engaged in that process. One of the engineers thus challenged
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

answered me: "Well, you see, we engineers are happy to deal with our
immediate problems, that's all we are really interested in." Sure, that is not
an explanation every engineer would offer.
[4) Part of the irony I mentioned above is that at this very moment of communist
triumph was marked by a tum in US politics. The cold war team Eisenhower/
Nixon was replaced by Kennedy, who was able to inspire new hope to the free
world and a new impetus to Western economies.
[5) See STRAHM, R.H. (1978) Overndvikling, Underuduihling, (Kobenhavn,
Mellemfolkeligt Samwirke); (1980) Ueberentwicklung, Unterentuncklung, 4.
Aufl, (Gelnhausen, Burckhardhaus); (1988) Warnm sie so arm sind (Wupper-
tal, Hammer); (1985) Derfor er de fauige: en arbeitsbog, (Kobenhavn, Mellem-
folkeligt Samwirke); (1986) Pourquoi sont-ils si pauures] (Boudry, Baconniere);
(1991) Per que somos tao pobres? (Petropolis, Vozes).
[6) I have experienced what that meant during my stay in the former Belgian
Congo in the early 1970s. The Belgians obviously looked after their African
subjects well when they ruled out the country. After their hasty departure
things went gradually down, huge construction projects taken up right after
independence just ended somewhere in the bush and the standard of living
sank by the year. Now the country, rich in natural sources still exploited, is
among the poorest ones in the world.
[7) In his closing address to the 1993 IGIP Symposium in Esslingen, Germany,
Mr Edzard Reuter, Chairman of Mercedes-Benz, bluntly stated that the times
of zero unemployment were over for good. He did not offer the least hint to
a solution of that problem nor did he appear to see the cynicism contained
in his statement.
[8) See the struggle to force the Swiss to abandon their 28 t limit for road
transport, the pressure on the Austrians because of the Brenner Motorway, the
difficulties in applying the Alpenkonvention (convention to protect the Alps
from the impact of heavy road traffic), to mention just a few aspects.
[9) FLORMAN, S.C. (1987) The Civilized Engineer (New York, St Martins).
[10) The first one was the end of World War I, the second the end of World War
II.
[II) Gudrun Kammasch (Fachhochschule Berlin) has called that phenomenon
quite adequately 'Quantelung des Wissens' (dissolution of knowledge in
minute parts; the expression contains a reference to Planck's quantum theory)
in her contribution Reform der Reform] at the 1996 IGIP Symposium in
 Humanities in Engineering Education 375
Budapest. See Ivan Kiss/Adolf Melezinek, Bildung durch Kommunikation
Referate des 25. Intemationalen Symposiums Ingenieurpiidagogik 96, Bu-
dapest, 1996, Alsbach/Bergstrasse, (Leuchrturm) 1996.
[12] Even the eminent economist, John K. Galbraith, appears to adhere to this
theory. See GALBRAITH, J.K. (1994) A Journey Through Economic Time
(Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin).
[13] See RUH, H. (1992) Argument Ethik (Zurich, Theologisches Verlag).
[14] RICHTER, H.E. (1987) Der Gotteshomplex; die Geburt und die Krise des Glaubens
an die Allmacht des Menschen (Hamburg, Rowohlt).
[15] THURKAUF, M. (1979) Wissenschaft und moralische Verantwortung (Zurich, Ex
Libris); (1979) Pandorabiichsen der Naturwissenschaft (Schaffhausen, Novalis);
(1978) Technomanie: Die Todeskrankrheit des Materialismus (Schaffhausen,
Novalis). See also RApPOPORT, A. (1992) Weltbild, Wissen und Glauben (St
Gallen, HSG).
[16] I am aware of the fact that these considerations do not include the economic
Downloaded by [University of Bath] at 13:42 04 June 2016

aspect of the problem. It raises a host of other problems. But our individual
smallness means that we cannot really control what goes on beyond our reach.
This does not free us from our responsibility. See LENK, H. (1994) Macht und
Machbarkeit der Technik (Stuttgart, Reclam); LENK, H. & ROPOHL, G. (1993)
Technik und Ethik (Stuttgart, Reclam); RUPRECHT, R. (1996) Zum Problem der
Ethik in der Ingenieurschulbildung, in: KIss, I. & MELEZINEK, A. (Eds), Bildung
durch Kommunikation Referate des 25. Internationalen Symposiums Inge-
nieurpadagogik 96, Budapest, 1996, Alsbach/Bergstrasse, (Leuchtturm) 1996.
[17] See RUPRECHT, R. (1994) Sprache als Sprache (Biel, Ingenieurschule).