Business of Engineering Education, The

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2008 by Soyster, A L

Consider the following conversation that might take place a dozen years into the future.

Fall 2020, United University, College of Engineering.

Dean: Welcome Sharon. It is so good to greet you again as a brand new faculty in our College of Engineering, and congratulations for being selected by our recruiting committee. Your teaching and mentoring experience was, of course, the key in our selection. I am sure that you had many other opportunities because of your fine record.

Sharon: Thanks Dean. I am delighted to be here. After my visit here last March, I knew this was where I wanted to be. You must be extremely proud of being ranked No. 7 by American News and Global Report in the prestigious category of Teaching/Learning and Career Preparation.

Dean: Yes, we are. You may not recall but back in 2010, engineering programs began to be ranked by how well they taught their students and prepared them for careers. This change had some early problems, such as finding metrics for judging success, but something had to change. Engineering enrollment was flat, tuition was rising, and, in our case, state support was falling. We had to focus more on our core business-educating new engineers.

Sharon: That must have been a strange world 10 years ago. I remember back in high school reading The World is Flat and hearing of the "quiet crisis." I did not understand then the larger meaning but I realize now how fortunate I am to have earned my Ph.D. My Ph.D. program not only provided a strong research background, but also gave me room to complete a minor in psychology, work for a local company, and pursue a three-semester program on "How Engineering Students Learn."

Dean: Sharon, it is important for you to focus on both the development of your research, scholarship program as well as your expertise in teaching, learning and advising. What is most important to our college is your critical role in the classroom. During this next six years you will be involved with several hundred students and you will be playing a critical role in their lives. Of course, for our own sustainability as an engineering college, we need to help them be successful, so we will be as well! I am relaxing our expectations on publications and research grant activity for the next few years so you can focus on the core mission of the college.

Does this vignette seem a likely forecast of how engineering colleges may be operating in 2020? For most of us the answer is probably-"Yeah right, when pigs fly!" But why does the scenario seem far-fetched?

Certainly it is different from the present. Today, engineering schools, at least the ones with graduate Ph.D. and research programs, take a different tack New faculty members are given light teaching loads-little or no advising responsibilities-to enhance their scholarly outputs during the typical six year pre-tenure period. The desired norm becomes a bevy of refereed publications and increasingly important, externally sponsored research. Most often the new faculty is advised to focus on maximizing these research outputs while seeking to achieve a lesser goal in teaching and advising. In the spirit of full disclosure, this author has, in the past, sometimes dispensed this general advice as well.

Why is it that engineering schools, in general, mentor their new, highly prized and heavily recruited faculty to focus the beginning of their careers on the research side of their portfolio, and not on their classroom and advising responsibility? One reason is to encourage new faculty to capitalize on the momentum of their Ph.D. research as a means for joining their community of scholars. But a more dominant reason, in my view, is that the rewards, in the present organizational culture, heavily favor the faculty member who demonstrates research expertise, rather than the innovative teacher and mentor.

The successes of these researchers in turn reap success for the leaders in the institution (department heads, deans, provosts, presidents, and governing boards) in both dollars and rankings (25 percent of the U.S. News and World Report component of Engineering Graduate School rankings is sponsored research). It is a win-win scenario for everyone, so it is no wonder that our engineering culture so strongly reinforces the status quo. Even individuals with different roles in the engineering college (deans and department heads in contrast with faculty tenure committees), seem to adhere to this modem of institutional rewards.

Do I think that the current model of faculty rewards and advancement is misguided, that the overall enterprise should be restructured so that entrepreneurial researchers would receive less status and rewards? Absolutely not! If I were to launch a brand new College of Engineering, many of my "first round draft choices" would be engineering researchers who have been my colleagues and competitors. Knowledge discovery and innovation will always be a core business of engineering colleges. Furthermore, faculty recruited in 2008 will be teaching our engineering students in 2048, so they must be able to "retool" themselves on a regular basis.