There is little to no chance that I will take an actual engineering class at Brown. In fact, I struggled as a sophomore to find Barus and Holley for my first ENGN 0090: “Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organization” lecture last fall. Engineering as a whole is extremely foreign to me, and I can only appreciate from a distance all of the important work engineers do. But eating at the Sharpe Refectory with a good friend after my history class and his biomedical engineering class is a treat — I get to see how different minds work and how groups of friends at Brown can be so academically diverse. This is why I was disheartened to read in The Herald that Brown’s administration was considering moving the School of Engineering down to the Jewelry District.
After reading the article (“Expanding engineering school considers off-campus space,” Jan. 30), I was sympathetic to the desire to revamp engineering facilities and expand the department. I cannot speak to the current quality of engineering resources at Barus and Holley, but I totally understand the natural desire to seek more space and superior technology. Brown has the oldest engineering program in the Ivy League, and that breeds a strong sense of pride. I get that. But moving downtown is not the answer. In fact, I believe the strength of Brown’s engineers stems from their integration with the campus as a whole. Having the ability to easily jump from a chemical engineering class to one in art history provides opportunities for diversified course loads and academic experiences.
Moving parts of an undergraduate department to the Jewelry district is fundamentally incompatible with Brown’s academic philosophy and the New Curriculum. The essence of the New Curriculum is predicated on the idea that students should feel free to explore various disciplines and subjects, both inside and outside of their comfort zones. By physically separating a significant percentage of Brown students, solely based on their course of study, the University would be strongly discouraging engineers from taking a diverse array of classes and virtually prohibiting humanities students from trying their hands at more technical classes. This is oppositional to the Brown mindset and inhibits Brown’s educational goal to encourage students to try new things — not because they need to fulfill requirements but because they choose to do so on their own.
Furthermore, we must not create further divides by creating the “college” system many of our sister Ivy League schools, such as Penn and Columbia, currently employ. Under this divisive college blueprint, students are labeled, both academically and socially, by which college they are a part of. This is detrimental to both the social cohesion and exchange of ideas at Brown. The discussion of cybersecurity, for example, is exceptionally enhanced when shared by computer engineers and political science concentrators alike. Further isolating engineering students will significantly decrease the communication across disciplines. I am not suggesting Brown will soon have various colleges with different admissions criteria, but any sort of divisiveness between academic fields is detrimental to Brown’s explorative culture.
Also hinted at in the Herald article was how the move downtown would affect professor-student relationships. Brown’s faculty prides itself on being incredibly accessible to undergraduates for both research opportunities and general advice. Imagine if your engineering professor’s office hours were all the way downtown. Would you go? I certainly would be far less inclined to trek down, especially if there was lousy weather. A Jewelry District engineering building would undoubtedly separate professors from engineering students. Why should engineering students be at a disadvantage when it comes to building working rapports with professors?
It is for these reasons that I humbly recommend that Brown’s administration make plans to revitalize the School of Engineering on College Hill itself. I know developable land remains at a premium, but I am sure there are creative ways to establish more engineering spaces. Engineering absolutely deserves plenty of investment, but we should remember that there must not be any barriers preventing each Brown student from being the architect or engineer of his or her own education. Some might say that this recommendation further encapsulates Brown on College Hill, isolating it from the rest of Providence. In fact, I am okay with this — preserving the Brown community by maintaining close proximity amongst students and faculty will actually allow us to better integrate with the city through better dialogue and debate.
As a history concentrator, I am not going to pretend to know the resources needed for a stellar engineering program. I don’t know much about nanotechnology or chemical isotopes. But I do know that my friends who know about these subjects consider themselves Brown students first and engineers second. Moving to the Jewelry District would strip them of the ability to make that distinction. To me, that seems pretty unfair.
Zach Ingber ’15 would like a nice engineering student to give him a tour of Barus and Holley. He can be reached at zachary_ingber@brown.edu
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