Penn State College of Engineering
The Penn State College of Engineering is the engineering school of the Pennsylvania State University, headquartered at the University Park campus in University Park, Pennsylvania. It was established in 1896, under the leadership of George W. Atherton. Today, with 13 academic departments and degree programs, over 11,000 enrolled undergraduate and graduate students, and research expenditures of $124 million for the 2016–2017 academic year, the Penn State College of Engineering is in the top 20 of engineering schools in the United States. It is estimated that at least one out of every fifty engineers in the United States got their bachelor's degree from Penn State. Dr. Justin Schwartz currently holds the position of Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Engineering.
History
The Early Years: 1855 – 1895
In 1854, the Pennsylvania legislature granted a charter to The Farmers’ High School. The purpose of the institution, according to the 1859 catalogue, was to “adopt a system of instruction which shall embrace those departments of all sciences which have a practical or theoretical bearing upon agriculture.” The Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society encountered little resistance to the proposal, and the revised charter – dated February 22, 1855 – became the official founding day of what would become Penn State. A legislative appropriation of $25,000 – along with an additional pledge of $25,000, plus funds raised through public subscription and private donation – was used for the construction of the Main Building on 200 acres of in Centre County, near the geographic center of the state. The first class of 69 students was admitted in February 1859.Pugh’s Establishment of an Engineering Foundation
was selected as the first head of the Farmer's High School, and his appointment began in 1860. Pugh had received his Ph.D. from the University of Goettingen in 1854, and his vision for the Farmers’ High School included an expansion beyond agriculture into fields that would be of benefit to the nation as a whole. Chief among these were engineering and “industrial arts” – subjects which required a high degree of both theoretical and practical knowledge, such as surveying and carpentry.This notion was considered radical at the time since American universities of Pugh's era tended to focus on topics such as ancient languages, philosophy, and rhetoric, which Pugh felt were inadequate for a nation seeking to “tame a hostile natural environment” and maintain economic and political importance upon the global stage. At the time of Pugh's appointment, fewer than 12 universities offered baccalaureate programs in engineering and produced fewer than 200 graduates combined; in most of those curricula, engineering was included as one of several subjects of study, rather than as its own major. The overarching belief was that because engineering was utilitarian and benefitted the many, it was inferior to the classics, which focused on the mental and moral improvement of the student; the prevailing thought – especially at tradition-bound schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth – was that integrating engineering with classics would subvert the purpose of higher education. In Pugh's time, most engineering programs focused almost exclusively on developing skills within civil engineering – e.g. canals, railroads, bridges – for obvious reasons: the expansion of the nation required knowledge of developing infrastructure. Pugh realized that on-the-job training, combined with the nation's economic and geographic growth, would not adequately meet the demand for educated professionals familiar with the “mechanic arts.”
The passing of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts in July 1862 presented Pugh with the opportunity to help secure the School's future. Under the terms of the Act, a land grant bequeathed upon an institution 30,000 acres for each senator and representative of the institution's state; this land was then to be sold, and the profits of the sale – which could take months or years to be fully realized – would be used to fund colleges with four-year curricula. Pugh was instrumental in securing the school as the sole recipient of all land-grant revenues in 1863, although his untimely death from typhoid in April 1864 resulted in his vision of industrial education being delayed by several decades.
Development of the Mechanic Arts Program
William H. Allen was elected to succeed Pugh in 1864. Allen was a professor of chemistry and natural history at Dickinson College. Unlike Pugh, Allen showed little interest in broadening the curriculum, and instead focused on the political challenges the university faced at the time: specifically, a debt of $50,000 and lobbying efforts from other Pennsylvania colleges challenging university's designation as the commonwealth's sole land-grant institution. The lobbying efforts were defeated in 1865 but left the university in such a dire state financially that mortgage bonds of $80,000 were issued, both to pay off debt and to establish a working fund.The first true champion of the mechanic arts at Penn State was John Fraser, appointed as a professor of mathematics in 1865 and as president of the university in 1866 after Allen's resignation. Fraser's time in the Union army served him well at Penn State, becoming the school's first lecturer in military tactics, and military drill was substituted for farm labor for the students. Fraser aimed to expand upon Pugh's vision, and the first four courses added for the 1868–69 academic year were general science, literature, mechanical and civil engineering, and metallurgy, mineralogy, and mining. Each was a four-year curriculum leading to a Bachelor of Science degree. The falling enrollment numbers of the time – 145 students in 1864–65, 114 in 1866, 82 in 1867, and 30 in 1868, with no class graduating in 1867 – led to a cautious approach to the expansion of the curriculum: the catalogue for the 1868–69 academic year listed mechanical and civil engineering, but the trustees did not hire faculty to provide instruction. After Fraser's resignation in March 1868, the trustees dissolved the new curricula and reduced the total faculty to four, and the university faced a severe lack of public confidence in the stability of the institution.
Fraser was succeeded by Thomas H. Burrowes, who felt that the intentions of the Morrill Act would be best served by the original setup of the farmers’ high school. Burrowes reinstated manual labor and offered a single course of study. Under the Burrowes system, the Agricultural Course was mandatory, and students were awarded a Bachelor of Scientific Agriculture degree after three years of study. The fourth year was the Scientific Course, intended for “civil engineers, general mechanics etc.” and leading to a Bachelor of Science degree; despite its name, the Scientific Course included little formal instruction in engineering, and no engineering faculty were hired. A fifth year was known as the Literary Course, which closely mirrored the traditional format of a classics education, and culminated in a Bachelor of Arts degree. The agriculture-intensive curriculum had minimal impact on enrollment: the 1870–71 academic year saw 59 enrolled students, 52 of which were in their first or second year of study. The fact that agriculture was insufficient to support an entire college was experienced by many land-grant institutions, and the challenge of incorporating a non-agriculture curriculum reform was exacerbated by the general indifference of the Pennsylvania legislature toward land-grant institutions as a whole. It was felt that, as the school was an instrument of the commonwealth, it should be supported via regular state appropriations; however, critique for curriculum reform was often received from Harrisburg, but not the money necessary to enact it. The financial burden from Allen's administration continued, and Burrowes died of exposure in February 1871 without seeing his three-course format implemented.
The Calder Era
The Reverend James Calder was elected as Penn State's fifth president in 1871. Calder eliminated Burrowes’ proposed three-course system and reinstated the four-year curriculum and felt that the Morrill Act envisioned more than simply formal instruction in agriculture, reincorporating several elements of orthodox classical institutions. The university began to offer non-agricultural baccalaureate degrees, and adopted the name Pennsylvania State College in 1874 to reflect the broadened curriculum. No provisions were made for mechanic arts, save for how they related to agriculture and scientific courses. Routine field demonstrations of various farm implements began to be incorporated into the curriculum, and civil engineering coursework was offered only at a high level; labs and practicums were nonexistent, as the “applications of knowledge” available at local businesses were felt to be sufficient. Meanwhile, colleges and universities across the nation with dedicated engineering departments rose to 70 by 1872 – more than half of which were land-grant endowments – and Penn State continued to lag due to the insistence on imitating classical institutions. The receipts from sale of land scrip were converted to an interest-bearing bond in 1872, leading to the abolishing of tuition in 1874: students were instead charged a flat $20 annual fee for fuel, lighting, and janitorial service. Only 14 students graduated during 1875 – 1877, and dissatisfaction with Calder's administration among trustees, faculty, and the legislature led to his resignation in 1879.Shortlidge and the McKee Interregnum
succeeded Calder in 1880, and his first act was to offend trustees, faculty, students, and the general public with his address at the commencement exercises in July 1880. The Shortlidge administration saw the formation of the Wickersham Committee, formed to assist with the massive reform needed to help the college satisfy the needs of the nation's most industrialized state. In Shortlidge's own words, “as an industrial college, we are a failure”; however, the three-professor panel was staffed with faculty whom Shortlidge believed would be lukewarm toward reorganization. The exception proved to be Thornton Osmond, professor of physics, who launched his own unofficial reorganization study – with the support of sympathetic faculty and trustees – due to the slowness of the Wickersham Committee and the entrenched stance of the other faculty on Shortlidge's panel. The very existence of Osmond's “committee” demonstrated how strained relations between the president and faculty had become, and Shortlidge presented his resignation in 1881 “couched in terms so offensive that the accepted it forthwith.”Osmond's recommendations were presented to – and almost immediately accepted by – acting president James Y. McKee. The proposed curriculum would include six courses of study: two “general”, four “technical”, and practicums in the mechanic arts. This proposal was accepted by the trustees, who named Louis A. Barnard, a highly-experience civil engineer, to head the department of civil engineering. So confident were the trustees in Osmond's recommendations, and McKee's acceptance of them, that they asked the General Assembly to investigate the affairs of the college, calculating that the probe would vindicate the reorganization efforts and attract more students. When published in February 1882, the report not only vindicated the reorganization efforts, but also urged the Pennsylvania legislature to make “periodic and generous appropriations” to Penn State: “ the state should give it such fostering care as will make it not only an object of just pride, but a source of immeasurable benefit to our sons and daughters.”