Bringing the Liberal Arts to Engineering Education

By Loni M. Bordoloi and James J. Winebrake. "It’s required." Too many engineering undergraduates utter this simple phrase when asked why they are taking a particular liberal-arts course. The structured curricula that exist for most students in engineering fields create a checklist approach to liberal-arts courses that makes them seem, well, "required" — not relevant, salient, or connected to their professional aspirations. As a result, students struggle to see the value of the liberal arts, even though solving the complex problems of our time — eliminating hunger, preventing terrorism, minimizing our carbon footprint, to name a few — requires a multidisciplinary approach. More...