Faculty Discuss 'Facilitation Process' for Engineering

Faculty on Tuesday discussed what some are calling a "facilitation process" of the College's engineering program.

"This is not a review of engineering," said President Roger Hull at a general faculty meeting. "This is an attempt to make sure we are marshalling our assets in the best possible way," Hull said. "In this day, with the competition we face, we had better be putting our resources in the proper place."

The College has retained a consulting group led by Tom Kosnick, principal of GLEAN Team and a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Engineering, to do what President Roger Hull described as a "bottom-up — rather than top-down" process to determine "how we can best use the asset of engineering."

The principal, who is not an engineer, is "not simply going to tell us what others are doing," Hull said. "Instead, we want to have a facilitator who can work with the engineering faculty to try to bring out the best practices and see how we might be able to adapt them to Union."

The College has made significant changes in engineering, Hull said, including the revised engineering curriculum that features an internationalization of the curriculum and sweeping changes in the first-year program, both of which were featured in a national conference the College hosted last weekend on curricular changes in engineering, he noted.

"We have gone a long way with engineers taking advantage of being at a liberal arts college, said Dean of Faculty Christie Sorum. "I think we might be able to go further. Can we, for example, have engineering with a real global twist? Can there be more interdisciplinary work? Would we require all engineering students to have a minor outside of engineering? There must be lots of other ideas that could emerge in this process."