ADDRESS OF WELCOME.

BY FRANK J. GOODNOW,

The Johns Hopkins University.

It gives me great pleasure to avail myself of the privilege which is mine as representing the Johns Hopkins University to welcome the members of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education at their meeting on this occasion. The university esteems it an honor that you have accepted our invitation to carry on your deliberations within our halls. Our feeling of gratification is due to two considerations. In the first place we feel pleased that you are here. In the second place we congratulate ourselves that, although we have perhaps the youngest engineering school in the country, you have been willing to welcome this infant, so to speak, among the ranks of mature men. We feel sure that we shall profit greatly as we listen to the words which you will utter, based as they will be, on your long experience in the field which we all are cultivating.

I feel, however, that my words of welcome should be accompanied by an apology, perhaps, I should say apologies. For as I see it two apologies are due. One, an institutional apology. The other, a personal apology.

I have referred to the youth of our engineering school. Now youth, whatever may be the advantages, which are its incident, is subject to certain disadvantages. Our institutional youthfulness consists not merely in the recent establishment of our school but as well in the fact that the university, of which the school is a part, has been located at its present site for only a very short time. We have had neither the time nor unfortunately the money necessary to put our physical environment into a condition which permits us to offer to you the kind of hospitality which you deserve. We

have no dormitories in which we can give you accommodation nor a commons in which the material wants of the inner man can be satisfied. We must perforce ask you to make a somewhat long journey from your hotels to Homewood, and to pick up a hasty lunch in the midst of the machinery with which your work days are perhaps too familiar.

When I think of what we can offer you I am somewhat amazed at our audacity in inviting you to hold your meeting here. I fear indeed that had you known our conditions you would have hesitated somewhat before consenting to come.

But we are glad to have you with us and I hope that your meeting will be successful, profitable, and interesting.

I have said I owed you a personal as well as an institutional apology. That apology is due for what I am going to say apart from these few words of welcome. It has been my fate to be president of an institution which pays comparatively little attention to those branches of study with which my past work has made me familiar. A lawyer I have been for the past five years, connected with an institution which has no law school. With little, if any knowledge, of science or the mechanical arts I have been obliged to concern myself with questions to whose solution I have been able to contribute but little. You can well imagine that during the past five years I have had to submit myself to a process of education.

So when it becomes my privilege to address the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, and when I realize that I am venturing to say something on the subject which specially concerns that society I am reminded of a story I heard the other day of a university president who had been long in the harness and who knew pretty well what was to be expected at such functions as university presidential inaugurations. He was in a train en route for one of these ceremonies when a friend saw him and asked him where he was going. His reply was "Oh, I am going to hear some first thoughts on education." When I recall that story I am conscious of the fact that I am taking perhaps an unjustifiable advantage of you in asking you to listen to some first thoughts on engineering education.

My only excuse for making this demand of you is that largely because of our recent experiences educational waters generally are stirring and I feel sure that the waters of engineering education are no exception to the rule.

Some of the first thoughts on this subject which have come to me, really a layman, are in the nature of queries rather than conclusions.

The most important as it seems to me is the query:

What is the purpose of an engineering school? Perhaps the query should not be framed this way. For it may well be that there is no such thing or should be no such thing as a typical engineering school. Perhaps there are and should be different types of these schools. If this is the case, then I suppose the query should be, what is the purpose of the particular school with which we happen to be connected? This query it seems to me we must answer before we can reach any really valuable conclusions as to the character of the engineering education which we should endeavor to provide.

As I have come to see it, engineering schools in general or any particular school may have one of three purposes. Perhaps, while any particular school may emphasize one of these purposes it may have the other purposes as well in mind.

Now these purposes as they outline themselves to one who comes without any experience and with very little knowledge to consider these problems are: (1) General education with emphasis laid on scientific subjects; (2) professional training; and (3) engineering research.

Some schools which I imagine may be classed as engineering schools started as scientific schools, i.e., schools in which it was sought to give a general education through the study of subjects scientific rather than literary in character. Many schools which when organized were schools for the cultivation of mechanic arts have become schools devoted to general education with emphasis laid on the sciences and giving little if any attention to classical studies. There is further, little doubt that many of the graduates of engineering schools do not as a matter of fact make engineering in any of its branches

their profession, while it is also true, I believe, that some eminent engineers never had an academic engineering training but went from a so-called literary college into the practical work of the engineering profession.

Now, if the purpose of engineering education, or perhaps I should say if the purpose of an engineering school is to give its students a general education which will be of benefit to them in other than the clearly professional ranks of life the problems which present themselves are very similar to those presented in the ordinary college. They are not exclusively intellectual but are as well moral problems. What must be sought is in some way to foster the building up of character, the cultivation of industry, particularly intellectual honesty, the capacity to evaluate correctly the things which life presents and the ability to make a profitable use of one's leisure time. If the scheme is to be successful these qualities must be developed in addition to the acquisition of any particular facility or any particular kind of information.

If, however, the primary purpose of the school is professional training I imagine few of us would be willing to say that a by-product, at least, of the school should not consist of the qualities which I have mentioned. I have used the word by-product because I feel that no set of subjects of instruction can claim a monopoly in the production of these qualities. Some of them will be the result of the community life which the students live. Some will be due to the personal influence of the instructor. For few, if any, will the subjects studied be solely responsible.

But assuming that the qualities which should be the result of all education are secured, a scheme of education which emphasizes professional training as its principal purpose, must seek for something more. What that something more should be is a question which I hesitate to attempt to answer. I am afraid my first thoughts are not sufficiently definite or not sufficiently based on experience to have any great value. I can only make a few hesitating suggestions based on experience in other fields. There is always great danger in any

line of work that instruction in it becomes entirely academic. The instructor is always apt, particularly if his life is encompassed by the barriers of institutional environment, to get out of touch with actual life. He comes to live in a world of his own and of his immediate fellows which is quite different from the extra institutional world. In some lines of work such an attitude of mind may not be accompanied by serious disadvantages but a professional school whose instructors are of this character tends to become too theoretical. Its instruction easily becomes too didactic. Its learning becomes almost purely book learning. Its graduates find when they enter real life that they have much both to learn and unlearn. I imagine the history of engineering education will show not a few instances of this tendency towards the academic and away from the actual. Certainly this has been true of many of our agricultural colleges. I remember one case decided by one of our state courts which is illustrative. An action had been brought to take away a charter from an agricultural college because of the fact that it was using for classical instruction money given for the teaching of agriculture. The court refused-courts are always reluctant to forfeit charters to take away the charter alleging as the reason for its action that a knowledge of Latin and Greek would assist the would-be agriculturalist to understand agricultural terms.

The same problem confronting engineering schools which emphasize professional training as their primary purposes, has also confronted the professional schools of law and medicine. Thirty years ago instruction in these schools was almost entirely didactic. In the law schools the student studied text-books and attended formal lectures. He seldom read a case. In medicine conditions were almost the same. The student read about typhoid fever and pneumonia in a book or heard them described in a lecture. He seldom, if ever, saw in his course of study an actual case of a person afflicted with these diseases. He certainly never participated in the care of patients. This has in large measure been changed. Law students read and discuss actual reported cases as a part