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.