As professional schools, including the independent engineering schools, were more and more absorbed into the general culture of the university, they hankered after academic respectability. In terms of the prevailing norms, academic respectability calls for subject matter that is intellectually tough, analytic, formalizable, and teachable. In the past much, if not most, of what we knew about design and about the artificial sciences was intellectually soft, intuitive, informal, and cookbooky. Why would anyone in a university stoop to teach or learn about designing machines or planning market
...more
