Research is Overemphasized
To train engineers, universities should hire more practitioners and fewer pure scientists.
Opinion by Seán Moran
Discussing the quality of recent engineering graduates with other experienced engineers, I hear repeated complaints that universities are turning out “engineers” with no idea of what engineers do, who can’t read basic engineering drawings and who lack a feel for numbers, process systems, and equipment. These graduates may have a sound scientific and mathematical education and been trained in all of the skills necessary to follow in the footsteps of their teachers, but their teachers were not engineers—they were scientific researchers.
In the United Kingdom, and I suspect in North America as well, there is now profound confusion in academia between science, engineering science, and engineering; between practice and research; and between engineers and scientists. This is both the cause of and the consequence of a self-reinforcing problem: In order to enhance their profile, university engineering departments seek out scientific researchers whose work has appeared in high-impact journals.
How can we maintain credibility and alignment with what is internationally understood to be the proper role of an engineer? There is at present no mechanism to employ staff with significant engineering experience, and even if there were, a lack of understanding of and respect for professional knowledge, and a large difference in pay, make recruitment of practitioners more or less impossible.
To clarify the confusion, let’s differentiate between pure and applied math, science, engineering science, and engineering:
Mathematics is a human construction, with no empirical foundation. It is only “true” within its own conventions. There is no such thing in nature as a true circle, and even arithmetic (despite its great utility) is not empirically based.
Applied mathematics uses math to address some real-world problem. This is the way engineers use mathematics, but many engineers use English, too. Engineering is no more applied mathematics than it is applied English.
Natural science tries to understand natural phenomena. It is about explaining and perhaps predicting natural phenomena.
Applied science employs natural scientific principles to solve real-world problems. Engineers might do this (though mostly they don’t), but that doesn’t make it engineering.
Engineering science is the application of scientific principles to the study of engineering artifacts. The classic example of this is thermodynamics, invented to explain the steam engine, developed empirically without supporting theory.
This is the kind of science that engineers tend to apply, the science of engineered artifacts rather than nature.
Engineering is the profession of imagining and bringing into being a completely new artifact that safely, cost-effectively, and robustly achieves a specified aim. The role of academic “engineers” tends to exclude this last category—many are really research scientists.
What have been the consequences of allowing research scientists—rather than practitioners—to take over the education of engineers? Without engineering practitioners in leadership roles, we have removed the checks and balances that prevented university curricula from drifting too far from the needs of the profession.
Many academics think that they, as scientists, possess a better understanding of the fundamentals of our profession than we practitioners. Theirs is the commonly held but infrequently voiced idea that the natural sciences and pure math are cleverer than engineering practice. In support of their approach they will argue:
- We need to teach the science underpinning engineering.
- We do indeed need to do this, but science and math do not directly underpin engineering. We may need to teach some “pure” subjects early in the course in order to get students ready to learn engineering science and professional practice, but this is the equivalent of pre-clinical medical education.
- We are educating engineers, not providing industrial training for technicians.
This argument reliably comes out as soon as I propose to academics putting practice at the heart of the curriculum. They don’t mind a visiting “industrialist” amusing the students with a few anecdotes, but they reject the idea that an engineer might know more about engineering than a non-practitioner with an academic title.
In fact, engineering practice is quite a challenging profession. Those who perform it well tend to make it look easy in a way that confuses people with no relevant qualifications or experience. But if it really were easy, it wouldn’t be one of the best-paid professions.
Seán Moran, a chartered chemical engineer, is a former associate professor at the University of Nottingham, where he won multiple teaching awards. He is the author of An Applied Guide to Process and Plant Design (Butterworth-Heinemann , 2015).