MIT Teaches Social Skills

My late father-in-law, Thomas Gordy, who was a PhD statistician and electrical engineer, worked his entire life for General Electric beginning in transformers. He developed many patents, etc, for the company and came to have his own lab to do whatever it was that he want to do. In a word, he was considered very successful in industry and engineering. He and I would often enough talk about his success and what led to it. He told me that the major advantage that he had was that he graduated from the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) in the last engineering class offered there. In a word he was well versed in both the sciences and the humanities, and he applied all of this to his study and work in engineering. Was he a specialist? Yes, indeed. But, he was a specialist who worked out of the broad background spectrum of the liberal, and liberating, arts. That engineers need "people skills" is a strong symptom of what has gone wrong with the teaching and practice of engineering, I can hear Tom proclaim. There is a deep failure here that is perpetuated by the schools themselves.

Frank Harrison of GA 3:51PM October 27, 2009