Practicing Without a License
In selecting faculty, schools value advanced degrees over professional accomplishments — to the detriment of engineering education.
By Henry Petroski
I recently had lunch with a professor of the practice from another university who had been told he no longer could teach semester-long courses because he lacked a Ph.D. According to his department head, a master’s degree was an insufficient credential to warrant lecturing on more than an ad hoc basis.
But the title “professor of the practice” was created precisely for individuals who had distinguished themselves not by letters after their name but by achievement in their field. The first use of the title in engineering is believed to have occurred in 1946, when Harvard University named Karl Terzaghi Professor of the Practice of Civil Engineering.
Inspired by his extensive consulting experience, Austrian-born Terzaghi had established the field of soil mechanics with the aid of makeshift experimental apparatus. He published much of the scientific foundations of the field not in peer-reviewed journals but in trade journals. It was on the basis of his achievements, not his degrees, that he was given the title Professor of the Practice.
With the postwar emphasis on research and funding, engineering schools began to de-emphasize practice in favor of engineering science. Rapid increases in enrollment led to the growth of faculties, with a stress on recruitment and the rapid advancement of freshly minted Ph.D.’s with exclusively academic backgrounds. Understandably, such faculty members tended to replicate themselves by hiring similarly educated engineers, ensuring that engineering education became increasingly theoretical rather than practical. Needless to say, there were shrinking opportunities for professors of the practice.
Less research-oriented fields, like the performing arts, continued to have professors of the practice on their faculties. This made sense in a university environment full of Ph.D.’s, not only because the terminal degree in such fields was typically a Master of Fine Arts but also because the most credible teachers of dance, drama, and the like had themselves performed.
In the past decade or so, during which university departments of all kinds have come increasingly to rely on adjunct and part-time faculty members to cover teaching obligations, many institutions have revived the use of professors of the practice in virtually all fields. Unfortunately, the designation has been reinterpreted: The term “practice” no longer refers to the work of engineers but to the profession of teaching.
Some engineering search committees now expect that someone being considered for a nontenured professor of the practice position possess a Ph.D., with registration as a P.E. sometimes optional. There appears to be no concern that a faculty candidate may have zero experience in practice outside the academy. This is a sad development, for it passes over talented engineers who have so much more to offer than a piece of sheepskin.
My lunch companion, for example, chose to pursue a career in construction management rather than a Ph.D. He did earn master’s degrees in both civil engineering and management, and accumulated decades of experience in private and government management positions in areas relating to energy and the environment. His wealth of real-world knowledge should be considered indispensable to a university program in construction management. Unfortunately, the academy’s narrow focus on advanced degrees and other academic credentials appears to be depriving students of the beneficial exposure to his practical experience and war stories.
It is a sad commentary on the priorities of the academy that in so many cases it has forgotten the historical roots of the title “professor of the practice,” and co-opted the designation to serve the practice of the professor.
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. His latest book, The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship, will be published by W.W. Norton in early May.
Photo by Catherine Petroski