Preface: This is the third of three session proposals organized by the Promethean (Engineering) SIG’s working group on history and engineering education. We have grouped these papers/sessions according to the themes of “global perspectives” (A), “the history of US engineering education” (B), and “humanistic-social education in engineering curricula” (C). This proposal covers the last of these themes. If all three sessions are accepted, we recommend that they appear in the program in this sequence.

Finally, in this session, we wish to examine why engineers have, and continue to embrace the notion of liberal education as part of their professional identity. This is clearly a movement that preceded the postwar era; the first call for greater emphasis on the “humanistic-social stem” of engineering education—a phrase coined by members of the (US) Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education—began with the society’s Mann Report in 1918, and then was reiterated in the subsequent Wickenden Study (1929) and the two Hammond Reports (1940 & 1944) produced by the same organization. Nevertheless, the postwar and Cold War years introduced new reasons for engineers to broaden their professional identity, specifically by claiming responsibility for the allegedly augmented social implications of a more “technological era.” Akera’s paper examines the earliest of these postwar discussions, this at a key institution (MIT) that began to embrace a more liberal vision of engineering education. Wisnioski’s paper then looks at an important crisis in this vision, as seen through the lens of the sixties, and especially in light of evolving historical attitudes towards functionalist thought. Finally, Martello’s paper helps bring this conversation fully into the present by considering how, in the post Cold-War order, industrial interests have come to replace military and federally driven ones. But this has produced only a rearticulation—a translation, really—of similar concerns for the “broader training of engineers,” as reflected in documents such as ABET’s “Engineering Criteria 2000” or the National Academy of Engineering’s The Engineer of 2020. In spanning our recent history from 1947 until the present, these papers also trace the origins of the institutional environment that was conducive to teaching the history of technology, which in turn contributes to both historical and present-day reflections about our own disciplinary identity.