It All Comes Down in the End

A facebook friend recently posted a pointer to a song by Patti Casey, called It All Comes Down. The song is about the impermanence of human built things.

        It all comes down, in the end,

        all the works of your hand,

        though built of stone and honestly,

        no earthly house shall ever stand,

        and it all comes down, in the end,

        like a handfull of sand,

        and it all comes down in the end.

It’s a beautiful song, although it might seem sad.  But it is not, for later she sings “so seek wisdom and show mercy…  did you help some troubled soul, did you try to lend a hand, for only kindness in the end alone shall stand.”

It’s true that each individual physical work of humanity has a finite lifetime, but the entire enterprise is transmitted from generation to generation and goes on and on.  It may all come down in the end; after all, most mammalian species survive only a few million years.  But I believe our important works will endure in the minds of our children and are continuously renewed by their hands.

For this reason, I work in education.  What we do in educating our children and the young apprentice adults in our universities is the foundation of all that you see around you.

Happy Holidays.

Calculation

On August 29, 1907, the Quebec Bridge collapsed into the St. Lawrence River. This collapse can be traced to a failure to calculate.

Modern engineering practice is highly quantitative, and it is this quantitative practice that distinguishes engineering from the trial and error practice of earlier artistry.  When faced with a problem engineers most start with the tools of creative design: brainstorming, sketching, dreaming, editing,.. it's fun, exciting and produces many sketches on napkins or whiteboards.  But in engineering such ideation must be followed by analysis: are there quantitative specifications that define the need being addressed? Does the proposed system perform within this specification? Without building the system (trial), this question of fitness to purpose can be answered only by mathematical modeling, prototyping, and testing.  All too often failure to analyze leads to a system that fails (error).

Only naive approaches to engineering emphasize design without analysis. It is all too common to see students building a prototype system without any quantitative analysis of the system. This is medieval at best (although even early cathedral builders did some quantitative analysis).  Our ability to model the physical world using mathematics allows us to "test" a design before it is built.  Our ability to do this is not perfect, but it is very good and improving rapidly, especially as computational power increased.  In developing new ideas for radiation shield design my student and I have tested over 100,000 different designs using mathematical techniques.  Of course this is all done algorithmically, and we never personally look at most of these designs: they are generated and rated automatically using our ability to model reality.

The Quebec Bridge collapsed because the design was not sufficiently strong to hold the weight of the bridge; the steel members were not the correct size.  When the steel for the bridge weighed more than expected, there was no recalculation of the stresses in the members.  When the bridge span was lengthened from 488 m to 550 m there was no recalculation. The failure to calculate was a retreat to a naive process of trial and error.  And over 80 men died.

Prestige or Purpose?

Students admitted to the University of Michigan are amazingly accomplished. The University itself is well known, selective, and indeed among the best in the world. Frankly, it’s a prestigious place. But “prestige” has little to do with the spirit of the place. Indeed, often we are criticized for being too Midwestern – friendly, cooperative, soft-spoken.

But the University of Michigan is dedicated to making an impact on the world. This is a large ambition, and it goes back to the first President of the University of Michigan, Henry Tappan. In 1852, looking at six buildings in the middle of a tiny Midwestern town, Henry Tappan imagined a huge, comprehensive university that would attract students from all over the United States, and possibly the world, to study and teach everything.  “It embraces,” he wrote “all possible means for studying every branch of knowledge, and thus perfecting education, and all possible means for making new investigations, and thus advancing knowledge.” He imagined a university that would make a difference through the cultivation of people, placing the university within the State’s aspirations as “Let us make men, as well as houses and railroads.”

We do this still by helping to propel young people towards excellence, and we insist that those young people will go forth with a drive to matter, a drive to make a difference.  Students who come to Michigan are devoted—they must be devoted—to having an impact on the world.  At the university we must dedicate ourselves to molding all the members of our creative community into agents of change.  This is at the heart of the University of Michigan: it’s not about prestige; it’s about purpose.

Note: This entry was inspired by discussions with many students and faculty at the University of Michigan during a number of meetings in November 2011.  The commonality of this theme arising out of so many independent conversations was striking.  The phrase "it's not about prestige; it's about purpose" was used at a meeting of the President's Bicentennial Planning Committee; I believe Scott Page first chained it together.

Thanksgiving differences

While driving across Indiana today, I heard a characterization of the “first” Thanksgiving that gave me pause: it was an event in which diverse people from two very different cultures, English and Wampanoag, came together for a harvest celebration.  I’d never thought of Thanksgiving as a cross-cultural event.   Without doubt, the English settlers had benefitted from the ideas of the other culture, and merged those ideas they brought over the sea, to solve the problem of feeding their colony. This coming together of different peoples, both to share ideas and to celebrate is a core activity of any creative community: constructive debate and interaction across differences, followed up by action, are the heart to solving complex problems.  While we have not always lived up to this principle of constructive interaction across difference, the power of the principle overshadows our failure to always achieve it.

In 1863, in a time of unparalleled strife, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving as a national event, saying,

“I … invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, … to set apart and observe … a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that ... they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

He meant this message for both the Union and the Confederacy.  This is a remarkable request to a nation torn apart by Civil War, and it is remarkable that both the North and the South observed the day.

Today Thanksgiving is a day to come together with family.  It is notable, and perhaps sad, that this celebration no longer expects the diversity that the first Thanksgiving provided.  We do not often sit down with those very different from ourselves to celebrate how working together had solved a problem.   This is also a year of rancorous political debate, when our leaders fail to truly debate, listen, and act.   If the colonists of Plymouth had used the same techniques, there would have been no more colony.

There are notable exceptions at the University of Michigan, where I know faculty, staff and students who have invited international students over to their homes for Thanksgiving day.  This generosity will be amply repaid, in unexpected and rich ways.

It is perhaps a good time to reflect on those past moments when people truly came together to solve a problem.  These are the moments that make the human community so worth celebrating.

The China Challenge

This entry is based on a speech given at the China Business Challenge, November 12, 2011.

The China Business Challenge was the result of hard work by UM students in the China Entrepreneurship Network.  The University of Michigan is proud of their work.  With nearly 50 teams of students participating, including 3 from Michigan State University and 7 from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the China Business Challenge has to be considered a success. The work that our students took on to organize this business competition illustrates education at it’s finest: active, engaging, and experiential.

It is important that the business challenge was designed to engage the creative minds of our students to propose business models that can address some major problems in China, and by adaptation, some major problems in the world. The Challenge was organized around the three themes of high technology, environmental issues, and social impact. There are few more important challenges in China, or in the world.

China is a partner to the US, but is also a significant competitor.  While the US economy is the largest in the world, China might be poised to overtake us sometime in this decade (although I suspect it will not).  But if the US and China are competitors, why should the University of Michigan, or the United States, be engaged in China?   Why should we be doing joint research with Chinese universities, or building educational collaborations like our University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute?  Why are we sharing our best organizational, technological and educational ideas with China?

Because competition is not conflict.   Competition, informed by strong purpose driven value systems, is in fact a stimulus to improvement for all of us.  The best way to avoid conflict between the two great economies of the world is to promote engagement, understanding, and mutual dependence.  It is in the United States’ interest to have China fully engaged in the normal international economic and legal structure of the world.

Further, the challenges of China are not unique to China.  China provides us with a laboratory, a laboratory in which we can all learn new approaches to development in a nation that seeks modernize its economy in a 21st century way.

Not surprisingly, this process of transformation is not smooth. Creating change requires high functioning teams that know the value of diversity and the power of inviting and working through disagreement.  It is from this disagreement that the best ideas are born, built from the shards of ideas in collision.  But China is still insufficiently tolerant to organized disagreement.   And any of us who have experienced the dirty air of a Chinese city know that plenty of mistakes are being made as China jump-starts its economy, recreating at a large scale some of the environmental blunders of the West.  But these mistakes represent the pains that an entrepreneur seeks to address with a strong business venture.   Solving these problems in China presents all of us with new tools to solve them elsewhere; failure to solve these problems in China presents all of us with a catastrophe.

While China’s economy is large, her per capita GDP is not.  The US is somewhere around 10th in the world by per capita GPD, but China’s per capita GDP places it somewhere around 90th.   Being the world’s second largest economy is not the same as being a prosperous country.  China houses 1.2 billion people, some 800 million of whom still live in relative poverty.

It does not seem necessary, it does not seem healthy, it does not seem right, to maintain my own privileged position by denying these 800 million people access to the ideas that might improve their lives.

Living Abroad

I’ve had the chance to live overseas three times: from late 1964 to mid 1969 my family lived in Bangkok, Thailand; then from 1984 – 1985 I lived in Cambridge, England, doing the study abroad bit; and finally I lived in Germany for a couple months in the summer of 1996 doing research.   Each experience had an impact, but today I want to dwell on Thailand.  Well, Thailand and Oklahoma.

Of course in the 1960’s I was young: I turned 4 just after we arrived and was nearly 9 when we left.  But I spoke Thai well, I spent lots of time with folks who were very different from the typical 1960’s American kid, and I grew up thinking about the world differently than I would have, had I been raised in the States.   In Thailand I cannot claim to have experienced society as the Thai people did, because we interacted with the international community in Bangkok as much as with the Siamese. But because I was a kid the mix of Thai and international “expat” culture did not seem “different” to me.  It was just the world as it was.  Our cultural environment socializes us, and while these influences are profound they are largely unnoticed.  The only way to truly appreciate a cultural difference is to experience it.

We returned from Thailand to live in rural Oklahoma.  It was this move that created the true culture shock for me.  I did not know what to make of that space, I did not know what to make of the other kids in elementary school, I did not know how to behave in their world.  In reality, even though I was born in the US, moving from Thailand to the States was my first international experience.  I was socialized in Thailand, and was now observing a new culture.  It was fascinating and strange and frustrating, but I was too young to think of it in any articulate way.  Fortunately these transitions are easier for us when we are young, because our minds are more open.  

But still, moving back to Washington DC in 1969 was a bit of a relief, because at least the traffic was more like that in Bangkok!

Go abroad - are you up to the challenge?

Education is too often thought of as a process of transmitting information or ideas. I think education has a larger role: I see education as a process that allows me to explore my own personal values and goals, gives me insight into the human condition, provides the tools to make a contribution to society, and creates the mental structures to develop wisdom.

I just returned from Shanghai, where I participated in a review of the UM-SJTU Joint Institute at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.   It was a packed trip, punctuated by helpful feedback from the review team and great connections with some of the most amazing people I know.

We helped to create the Joint Institute because it could be designed as “landing pad” for College of Engineering students to study engineering, abroad, in English, in China, during the summer!  And while all classes there are taught in English, they are mostly populated by the Chinese Joint Institute students, The American students can take classes in Chinese language, and Chinese culture.   So the American students study and live alongside Chinese students, run around after hours like students everywhere, doing things maybe I wish they would not, all the while meeting Chinese students at one of the strongest engineering schools in China.  It's a life changing event.

Whenever I go to China I’m very aware of being a minority: people take pictures of me, adults sneak peeks and little kids gape.   And the differences are more than skin deep: my values and expectations are, deeply, the result of my society and upbringing; they are the product of my culture. While I believe in universal human values, those commonalities are buried under many layers of cultural subtlety.  Learning how to work with someone who is different in a deep way is a challenge, and learning how to survive in a human environment where my reflexive actions are the wrong ones, is difficult.  It’s difficult and frustrating, but taking these challenges on provides an unparalleled opportunity for growth that cannot be created within the normal campus experience.

Those who return from a great experience abroad, one where their own assumptions of culture and expectations have been challenged, have a light in their eyes: they have changed, and they get it.  I wonder if you are up to the challenge?

Fast Food Education

Ken Robinson has given a couple of great TED talks about education.  The latest is here.   In this talk Sir Ken comments that our current educational model is based on the same approach to quality control as fast food: batched production of standardized items.  It’s an old observation that our school system, especially K12, is based on the needs of the industrial revolution, with standardized expectations achieved through clock and calendar driven processes.  This is true of engineering education at the college level as well – our curriculum is based around specific disciplines and well defined knowledge expectations in which parts are bolted in order onto the chassis of the student to form the complete product: a statics module, a dynamics module, a thermodynamics module, a fluids module, a control theory module.  The total quality management approach to engineering education, formalized now in the ABET continuous improvement model around 11 objectives (lovingly known as “A” through “K”), is a late 20th century industrial engineering model.

Most of us falsely believe that the way we educate today is the only proper way to educate.  Our teachers educated this way and we were successful, and so it has always been.  But our current approach to education is only about 100 years old.  Even the system of grading students goes back only to wild and divergent experiments in the 19th century, timed with the arrival of mass production of books and the mass education for workers in an industrial society.  Our educational system is designed for quality assurance through uniformity, and uniformity is not the obvious means to generate creative solutions for a complex future.  We must reexamine this manufacturing approach to education.  My friend Jack Hu argues that while the 20th century was the time of mass production, we are moving into a 21st century in which the right model is mass customization.  Ken Robinson argues for an agricultural model, in which we create the environment for growth, and the growth—the intellectual growth of the student—occurs because the environment is right.  What other models can we develop for engineering education in the 21st century?

Have passion, or get out!

I had the honor of listening to a talk by Vincent Gorguze last week.  Vince is a "street kid from Detroit" and a College of Engineering alum from the class of 1941.  He's Chairman of Cameron Holdings, and at 95 years of age still works his butt off every day at the office.  Why?  He loves what he does.  During his talk he addressed the students present, reflecting on the importance of passion. "If you aren't passionate about what you are doing, get the hell out and get a new job," he said.  

Last week I wrote about the 10,000 hour rule: the notion that you have to put in 10,000 hours of deliberative practice in order to achieve mastery in any field. Deliberative practice is activity that is designed specifically to attack your weak points and improve in those deficient areas.  It's playing the scales on the piano, or solving 50 different differential equations with constant coefficients and exploring the results, or shooting 1000 free throws every day, or machining the same part 10 times to get it right.  Deliberative practice is usually not fun.   So why do people do it?  Because they have passion for their craft and want to get really good at it.

It's a hard leap -- it will take hard work, and not always extrinsically fun work, in order to excel at something you really enjoy.  But if you are passionate about your work then the deliberative practice that makes you better can feel good because you are slowly getting better.  But the motivation must be intrinsic.  It must come from within.  So if you aren't passionate about it, get the hell out.

The value of working your butt off

I’m often asked, “What is advantage of the University of Michigan over other schools?” This question is hard to answer, because the real advantages are cultural and environmental.  Of course we can talk about amazing faculty at the forefront of their fields and we can talk about amazing facilities.  But these are just some of the conditions that create the UM advantage; they don’t define the advantage itself.  In the end, I think the essential value that the UM provides to undergraduate students is this: we make students work really hard.   The notion of hard work is in the air here, and no student will feel out of place spending 50 or 60 hours per week on serious intellectual work.

I’ve met successful students in many different majors, from engineering to art to history to neurobiology, and the common experience for these students is a packed day: packed with classes, study, student organization activity, or project teamwork.   Their major is secondary to their success: the development of an ethic for achievement and a willingness to put in the work necessary for that achievement is the primary driver. 

In an influential article Ericsson Anders, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Romer asserted the importance of deliberative practice and lots of it as the route to high achievement (Anders, Krampe and Tesch-Romer, “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance,” Psychological Review, Vol 100(3), Jul 1993, 363-406).   This work, and subsequent work by many researchers, has put the idea of the 10,000-hour rule into the mainstream.   The idea is that about 10,000 hours of deliberative practice are required to achieve true mastery in any field of endeavor.  The typical UM student will get about 60% of the way to that goal by the time the achieve their degree, and if they use the summer well they can pretty nearly achieve the 10,000 hour mark.

Not every school creates the environment in which hard deliberative practice is the norm.  The UM does it through the people we assemble: faculty, staff and students.  We create a community whose members have an intrinsic drive to develop mastery, and these role models and the demands that they make of each other encourage students to seek the same mastery.  Students who are already here become similar role models for new students, and the system is a self-renewing community in which the fun associated with true accomplishment pervades the culture.  So in the end, each student here will know and feel, deep in your bones, the value of working your butt off.

A UM Engineering Student Bucket list

Where Rob Reiner, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman lead, there others follow.  Reiner’s 2007 movie “The Bucket List,” stars Nicholson and Freeman as two terminally ill patients who flee the cancer ward and set their sights on completing a list of adventures before they “kick the bucket.”  In critical reviews it was generally seen as a mediocre movie, but audiences generally liked it and it turned a profit.  More interestingly, it brought the phrase “bucket list” into common usage as a list of places to see or accomplishments to achieve before death.  It has spawned worthy sites like www.thebucketlistreamfoundation.org . 

I’d like to suggest a rather modest “bucket list” for UM engineering students starting in Fall 2011.  But this is a list of unexpected and unusual things to do in southeast Michigan before you graduate and leave Ann Arbor, so perhaps it should be called a Sheepskin List.  It’s easy to write a list that says “Hill Auditorium” and “The Big House,” but what about the paths less trodden?  You need transportation to get to many of these, but its worth the effort to find a ride.

• Visit Jiffy Mix, in Chelsea Michigan.  Many of you know the corn bread mix in the blue box.  These, and their other products, are all made in the little town of Chelsea, 20 miles West of Ann Arbor (also home of movie star Jeff Daniels, and the best restaurant in Michigan, the Common Grill).  Jiffy Mix offers tours, and now you can see where that corn bread mix comes from.
• Eat at the Common Grill.  And while you are in Chelsea, eat at the Common Grill.  Grill owner Craig Common describes himself as “a simple chef,” but visiting Chelsea for seafood at the Common Grill is an uncommon experience.
• Between Chelsea and Ann Arbor lies the town of Dexter.  Two skew arch railroad bridges built there are worth seeing, one over Dexter-Pinkney road, and one across the Huron River (best seen from the little park hidden behind the Fire Station).  These bridges were designed and their construction overseen by Fredrick Blackburn Pelham, the first African American to graduate, in 1887, in Engineering from the University of Michigan.
• Peach Mountain is worth a visit as well.  Just a few miles north of Dexter, Peach Mountain is the location of the University of Michigan Radio Telescope, as well as a large amateur optical telescope.  It has a great view of the area south of the mountain (well, it’s a big hill, really), and more importantly a great view of the sky.  Peach Mountain hosts open houses for stargazers of all ages.
• Back in Ann Arbor, visit the Vault of Midnight, on Main Street.  This is one of those geeky comic book stores, and not something you can find just anywhere.
• The Ann Arbor Art Fairs are quite well known, and might not deserve a place on this list, except for the fact that so few of our students get the chance to attend.   Held in late July when few students are around, the Art Fairs (there are several simultaneously) are a must see destination for Ann Arbor in summer.  If you need an excuse to spend a summer in Ann Arbor, do some summer research and go to Art Fair.
• If you really can't make the Art Fair, at least go to Festifools.  Festifools is Ann Arbor’s street fair of giant puppets, mostly created by students in the Lloyd Hall Scholars program and in the School of Art and Design.  Held in early April on Main Street, it just a silly, fun blast of creative experience.
• The galleries of the School of Art & Design are well worth a visit.  These include the Slussler Gallery (first floor) and Robbins Gallery (second floor) in the Art & Architecture building, and the Work gallery on State Street, across from 5 Guys Burgers.   These are places to see challenging things, from the beautiful to the weird.
• The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first general purpose electronic computer, first became operational in 1946.  Four of its panels are now on display in the entryway of the Computer Science and Engineering building.
• The Ann Arbor Hands on Museum (http://www.aahom.org/ ) is designed to spark kids interest in science, and is therefore a wonderful playground for engineers of all ages.  UM Engineering students recently designed and built a digitally controlled inverted pendulum for the museum.  Turn it on an it up-ends itself and maintains an inverted position, no matter how hard you try to knock it down.  Everything there is a blast.
• Traveling east you will find the town of Dearborn, Michigan, home of the UM Dearborn campus, and The Henry Ford.   The Henry Ford (yes, that’s it’s exact name) is a huge museum of technology, from the 19^th century to the information age.  Presidential limousines, amazing steam locomotives, an IMAX theater, a living history museum at Greenfield Village … it’s all good.    

What are your favorite, unusual places around southeast Michigan?

Navigating Ambiguity

Imagine that you graduate as an engineer a few years from now, and have taken your first job as a civil engineer for a great company in Ann Arbor.  You are part of a team doing structural design for the world’s tallest building, to be built in Shanghai. Your boss comes into your office and says. “Evan, I want you to use equation number 16 from Chapter 6 your CEE 312 textbook to calculate the size and spacing of the main columns in the building core.”

Seem unlikely?  It is.  If it was really as simple as pulling formulas out of a book, nobody would be that interested in paying you to do it.

Frequently you have to create your own approach to problem solving, on the fly.  Of course, many problems can be solved by application of known solutions.  But even in such cases it’s seldom that the solution approach is obvious.  You have to look at an ambiguous situation (design the columns to hold up the building); consider alternate designs to address it and recognize some key criteria for assessing those designs (will the columns buckle? will they bend too much from the wind load?); reach for tools that can quantify those criteria (Euler’s formula? finite element analysis?); assess their appropriateness and uncertainty (is an expression for critical buckling load reliable in my situation? did the finite element analysis converge?); and then reach a conclusion about how that analysis informs the problem at hand.  Even when the solution can be found using known ideas, nobody knows what chapter, or chapters, the solution is hiding in, because real problems come without a chapter number.

Solving real problems requires judgment.  It requires making decisions.  And it requires living with the uncertainty that perhaps you don’t have the best answer.

A good university curriculum will challenge you to develop such judgment and make such decisions.  In your classes you should look for and embrace problems that do not have a clear answer, but in which multiple approaches are possible and the result has to be justified and defended.  As a rule, new university students do not enjoy this ambiguity.  We give you ambiguous problems that we did not teach you how to solve, and still your grade depends on the result!  But one role of the university curriculum is to teach you, through experience, how to critically assess problems and build solutions that were previously unknown.

Committing to a decision is hard, and not all judgments are good.  Even so, you should embrace the opportunity when we give you problems that you do now know how to solve, because learning to solve the (apparently) unsolvable is the essence of creative engineering.

Navigating the University of Michigan

Today, first year engineering students begin orientation at the University of Michigan, in one of those rites-of-passage for young adults transitioning from high school to college.   The format is fairly common across American universities: students flocking with excitement to campus, sleeping a few nights in a residence hall, meeting finally with advisors, selecting a set of  fall term courses, and generally learning how to navigate their new environment.  For students at Michigan the details of this navigation are, of course, unique: what’s the Arb? what’s Michigan time? what’s a “Big Blue”? where is CC Little, or, for that matter, who was C. C. Little?   These details of college life are important, of course, but they are eventually conquered as students become used to their new home.

Yet there is another channel to navigate that requires more investment, but which is more important to students’ receiving long-term value from their time at the UM.   Students must also learn to navigate the intellectual culture.

The University of Michigan is one of a small number of selective research universities.  As well described by Jonathan Cole in The Great American University, these schools have a unique character based on core values of free inquiry, the tolerance of challenge to ideas, open communication, and the preparation of the next generation of thinkers. These values are reflected in an educational environment and curriculum in which achievement is less about learning specific facts and rather more about learning the techniques of knowledge application and creation.  It is this curriculum that undergraduates must learn to navigate during their 4 years of study.

Engineering students sometimes think they are here to learn the formulas, to learn information.  But in fact our curriculum aspires to help students learn to analyze systems, synthesize knowledge, to make judgments, and to reach decisions based on this analysis, synthesis and judgment.

Just as new students must be oriented to the buses and extracurricular opportunities at the UM, it is also essential that they be oriented to the core academic values that will undergird their educational experience.

Make A Difference

Last week I asked what you imagine your obligation is to society.  I was pleased that no one challenged the premise of the question, which is that an engineer has an obligation to society.  Long gone are the days when an engineer’s professional obligation was simply to provide technical expertise to a company in exchange for a paycheck.   

The collaborative creation of new things that give us better ways to accomplish fundamental tasks – from providing basic nutrition, to providing aesthetic stimuli, to stretching our minds into new realms – has long been the defining human characteristic.  As much of this work has become professionalized as “engineering,” and made more powerful through this systemization and through a synergy with science and mathematical reasoning, it has become clear that the collective impact of engineering is as important in defining culture as is art.

Standard engineering ethics lays out the case that the negative impact of careless technological practice compels engineers to consider their obligation to safety. This is an important social contract, but it is not the only one. 

Engineering drives our economic engine and provides for human needs.  Engineering creates artifacts – products, technologies, networks – that shape the very way we live.  It is this power of our profession for impact that generates the tremendous social obligation compelling us to think carefully how our work will change the world.  Even though we cannot see all ends, we cannot fail to look and consider what the ends might be.  The primary driver for all our work must be an expectation of a positive impact on human well-being.  This pact to make a positive difference is our fundamental obligation.


This saturday is commencement at the University of Michigan.  I hope our students are thinking, "I will make a difference."

The Social Engineer

Last weekend in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan we undertook a simple ceremony called the Order of The Engineer.  Over seventy students approaching graduation elected to participate in the event and join the order.  The students recited an oath, and then lined up to proceed, one-by-one, to have a stainless steel ring placed on the small finger of their working hand.  It’s the only meeting of the Order of The Engineer in which they will ever participate.  Huh… what’s up with that?

The ceremony has a very simple purpose: it’s a moment to pause, right before their last set of final exams, and think about what they have committed to in undertaking to be engineers.

As part of the ceremony we recall an episode in engineering history when American and Canadian engineers building a bridge in Quebec screwed up.  During construction, on August 29, 1907, the bridge collapsed, killing over 70 workers.  The collapse was the fault of poor design, poor analysis, and poor construction management: errors squarely on the shoulders of the engineers.   Because of this collapse Canadian engineers commonly wear iron or steel rings, said originally to have been made from the wreckage of the bridge.   This ring is a reminder to the engineer of her obligation to those who rely on her skill for their livelihood and safety, and by its wear against paper as the ring moves over pages of plans and calculations the experience of the engineering is symbolically judged.

In the United States this same tradition has taken hold over the last 40 years through the Order of the Engineer ceremony for graduating engineers, reminding American engineering students to reflect on their obligation to society.   

What do you imagine is your obligation to society?

Is this the new student activism?

I often hear a wistful regret expressed that students have lost their passion; that the student activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s has been lost and will not come again.  I don't agree.

In 1968 UM President Robben Fleming and future Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers were communicating with each other through bull horns on the lawn outside the president’s house on South University avenue in Ann Arbor.  While Fleming was against the war in Vietnam and generally tolerant of student protests, Ayers still saw him as “the establishment.”  Fleming writes in his autobiography of addressing crowds of protesters so large they shut down streets, of draft cards and flags burning in his yard, and confederate flags appearing in his windows.  When the Chicago Seven were convicted, a protest march of some 2000 appeared in Ann Arbor.

On the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, a group of students occupied the University of Michigan’s administration building, baring the doors against entry.  BAM, the Black Action Movement formed in Ann Arbor, and in 1970 organized a general student strike.  Students stopped going to class, professors canceled classes, and the university effectively shut down for a week.  BAM demanded increased black student enrollment at the university, and through negotiations with Fleming, they got it.   These students were passionate.  They saw that the world could be better, and insisted that it be made so.

Where is this passion today?  I think it is still here, but our students have become much more sophisticated in pushing their agendas, and their agendas are theirs, not ours.

Consider for example, today's MPowered student group.  The students in MPowered are passionate about entrepreneurship.  While many of us old “establishment” professors see entrepreneurship as the process of starting a business, the students in MPowered see it as an empowerment mindset.  Their mission, at root, seems to be to make each student realize that that her ideas have value and power, and to provide each student with intellectual tools for making her ideas impact the world.   They routinely get 3000 “pitches” in their annual pitch contest.  Their latest campaign is a petition drive, 1000 Voices, petitioning our College of Literature, Science and the Arts to provide more classes in entrepreneurship.   As I write this they have over 1200 signatures on their petition.

Another example is BLUElab.  These students seek to create appropriate technologies for the developing world, and to actually deploy them in those countries where they will make a difference.  They put huge energy into this, both in Ann Arbor and at sites in developing counties.  Their latest effort is a wind turbine with woven blades that can be made by local women in Guatemala, producing the product for local markets, and providing double economic impact.

These are just two examples; there are others.  The students in BLUElab and in MPowered are passionate about what they do.  They see that the world could be better, and insist that it become so.

Are these the new student activists?

Why do we do what we do?

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, enacted by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation, expanded the United States through the creation of the Northwest Territory, a region including the modern State of Michigan.   The ordinance includes the provision that "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."   This is the tradition from which the University of Michigan springs.  The University predates the Morrill Act, but the purpose of that act,  “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life,” further codifies the goals of the university, as was subsequently articulated by UM President James Angell in the oft quoted maxim that the UM provides “an uncommon education for the common man.”

For me these capture the “why” for the College of Engineering. 

We admit students to our school because we believe it is good for them, good for the College, and good for society that they become part of the Michigan Engineering Community.  The work we do with these students will allow them to have a positive impact on the world.  No one of us can solve the problems that face humanity at each moment of history, but we aspire to position our graduates to be significant contributors to such solutions.  Through our work with undergraduate and graduate students comes our primary potential for positive impact on the public that we serve.

We also engage in scholarship – engineering research – with the goal of creating the new scientific knowledge and technological possibilities that will be exploited in addressing major challenges such as making solar energy economical, advancing personalized learning, managing the carbon cycle, and more.  We conduct this research because the knowledge created can itself be of value to society, but also because this research work provides our students, both graduate and undergraduates, with invaluable learning experiences that better prepare them to make their own contributions.

In order for our scholarly and educational work to have the best effect, we believe that we must pursue it within context – we cannot divorce our work from the potential problems that it might solve or the people who it might serve.  Equally, because the problems that our community must tackle are complex, it is critical that our community members work with others across differences of purpose, approach, and culture, while bringing a deep and sound technical foundation to this collaborative effort.

What is a public university?

We all know the University of Michigan (UM) is a public or "state" university.  It’s interesting therefore to note that from its founding in 1817 the UM received no funding from the State of Michigan until 1867.  We operated for 50 years as a public university using student fees and revenues from the sale of a federal land grant.   Yet from the 1851 state constitution on, the UM has been governed by a Board of Regents directly elected by the people of the state.  So we are clearly an institution with a mission and responsibility directed towards the people of Michigan, but the state was 30 years old before the UM received state public funding.

Now public universities in the State of Michigan are facing yet another in a long string of reductions in state financial support.  If the new governor’s budget plans go forward, when all the dust settles the University of Michigan will face a 15% reduction in state support, a loss of about $47 million.  The level of state support at the UM is already a small fraction of the total – the state provides only about 20% of the general fund of the university, and by the time this filters down to the College of Engineering we receive only about 10% of our budget from state funds.   So, many ask, are we really a public university?

I think the question misunderstands what it means to be a public, or state, university.  Don’t misunderstand me: I think the State of Michigan should, indeed must, support the UM and the other public universities of the state.  Like all universities we provide a vital public good, and as befits our public mission we give preferences to residents of the state --- preferences in admissions, in financial aid, and in tuition.  But we should not define our public mission in terms of revenue sources.

A public university makes a commitment to access.  This is why state schools are large; no private school has our scale and scope.  Scale is a direct consequence of our commitment to access; throughout its history the UM has grown so as to provide that “uncommon education for the common man” to an ever-widening population.  And we have grown in the scope of disciplines we offer too – spanning the liberal arts and fine arts, professional programs in engineering, nursing, business, law, and more.   A private school would have gone a different route, because their mission does not demand scope or scale.

A public university must also provide educational opportunity that is, as far as possible, independent of previous advantages for disadvantages.   In the US today there are significant differences in higher education opportunity for students from different communities.  These differences are due to differential K12 school resources, both financial and human, and are due also to cultural causes, especially around the ability of communities and parents to prepare their children for college through a knowledge of college preparation expectations, college education benefits, and financial aid systems.

All public universities must accept the responsibility to make a positive impact on the world.  We do this first through the students that we graduate, well prepared to be contributors to society in all the many dimensions through which every person should contribute – as citizens, as caregivers, as economic actors.  But as a public research university the UM takes on an additional responsibility to the public: to make positive impact through the knowledge that we create.  The UM is a pre-Morrill act land grant school, and indeed helped to create the mold of the public research university, but the purposes of the Morrill act for the promotion of a “liberal and practical education” describe our own goals well, and extend to our scholarship.  We must aspire to practical impact -- economic impact, policy impact, aesthetic impact -- that is for the good of the state and the wider society.

With all these responsibilities we accept that the work we do must be for the public good. These aspirations are not about funding sources, or a trade of support for services.  These aspirations are about accepting a principled mission.   We will continue to provide an uncommon educational opportunity for the citizenry of Michigan. We commit that the intellectual results we generate and the alumni we graduate will have positive impact on the public, if not today then in some tomorrow that we do not yet conceive. And as a public university we make these commitments not because the state funds us, but because it is an important mission for humanity.

Outreach 2.0

Engineering colleges are increasingly concerned about the low interest in engineering among high school graduates.  This might appear a selfish concern for an engineering college, but it is in fact a national concern.  The continued success of the US has been founded on the innovation of engineers since the time of the industrial revolution.  Government officials at all levels have consistently drawn attention to the disturbingly low numbers of US students going into engineering and related fields such as science and mathematics, and the risk that this poses for our future competitiveness as a nation (see, for example, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5, from the National Academies Press).

So in recent years colleges of engineering, including the UM CoE, have been increasingly engaged in K12 outreach programs.  At the UM we have especially focused these efforts on underserved schools, often in urban and rural areas, where the schools have been less effective at preparing their smartest students to pursue and succeed further education at selective schools like the UM.  However, our own outreach efforts have been moderately effective at best.  We interact with relatively few students, influence fewer yet, and succeed with even fewer.   Our most successful programs result in perhaps 30 students enrolling in the UM, and this is achieved at only very high cost.  We need a change of strategy.

One alternate strategy is to focus on teachers, and not on students.  Each teacher reaches a hundred students or more per year.  Another is to reach out to many students in a different and more effective way using social media.    Bill Hammack, a University of Illinois professor, has suggested this latter approach in his recent book, Why engineers need to grow a long tail  (Articulate Noise Books, 978-0615395555).    The concept is to create a social media site, perhaps on a Wikimedia platform, focused on engineering projects and curriculum that support learning in primary and secondary education.  This site can be salted with projects and content from college faculty and students, and from working engineers.  It can capture ideas from the “broader impacts” work of NSF supported grants. 

If this catalog of projects were the extent of it, the site would be like many others that provide engineering projects for K12 schools (such as http://teachengineering.com/ ).   But Hammack’s additional idea is key – because this is a social wiki, students and teachers can do more than read the site and pursue the projects: they can edit and improve them live, in the way that Wikipedia is edited, improved, and augmented by its readers.    Such a site, if well targeted and well branded, can reach many students.  But also, it engages students in a way that they expect and understand, with mashup capabilities and user generated content.  K12 students would own such a site through their editing, in the same way that users own youtube, digg, and similar social sites.  Such a site would need constant tending to ensure that the projects are correct and usable, in the same way that Wikipedia’s volunteer editors constantly review and comment on user edits.  University students could serve in this role, and could improve their own understanding through having to make their own fields accessible to others.

Distracted by the buzzer

It’s been an interesting week for students of intelligence.  A supercomputer known as Watson competed in an exhibition Jeopardy match against two human players, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.  The human players were a couple of the best to ever play the game, but they were defeated.  Conceding the success of the computer in his Final Jeopardy question, Jennings, wrote “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” 

The response is the normal one that arises when a machine appears to best humans at their own game: the computer cheated through an unfair advantage.  Many commentators have noted that the machine did not have to listen to the questions, but instead received them electronically and had an unfair advantage by being able to buzz in first.   Of course at the top level Jeopardy has always been won by whoever could buzz in first; the players generally know the answers, and the winner is the one who can get Trebek’s attention first.  Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter are renowned for this quick signaling ability – Jennings appeared on Jeopardy 74 straight times, in large part because he could signal his answers faster than any of his opponents.   So the electromechanical signaling interface of Watson is quicker than the humans.  No surprise, and not very interesting.

What is interesting is that Watson can take the strange “questions” of Jeopardy, generate potential answers, rank them, and quickly offer a best choice.   Even when Watson was not first on the buzzer, it usually had a correct answer to offer.  The capability to dissect a sentence, find important words, analyze the grammar, and connect that with other information (for example,  the name of the category in Jeopardy) is a significant one.  That Watson was able to do it quickly and quite well suggests many possible advances and applications.  These range from the trivial -- a phone menu that works -- to the significant -- rapid, automated, feedback for students in a personal learning environment, or improved free text search.