This was around the time, explicit "liberal arts" disciplines in universities were discovering and adopting a very different but overlapping sense of "liberty" derived from things like LatAm liberation theology (pedagogy of the oppressed by Frere was very popular).
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Though he didn't say as much, my advisor strongly implied a corollary -- that people in the formally designated liberal arts corner simply lacked the literacy to see the liberal arts streak in engineering, or how it had evolved beyond vocationalism in the 20th century.
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As engineering education got more vertical in the late 90s, it got more liberal in the sense he meant, by forcing you to think in holistic, expansive ways about technologies in context, rather than bits and pieces and formulas.
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Ironically, the so-called "liberal arts" at the time were getting more like engineering used to be -- narrowly focused on functionally siloed techniques/ formulas. They were getting trapped by the procedural mechanics of "liberation" theology.
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Instead of reading challenging books and simply exploring the resulting thought trails with their teachers, the liberal-arts kids where learning the techically correct usage of "always-already" and "subject position" the way we had been learning... Kirchoff's laws of circuits.
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On the flip side, engineering was shifting to the equivalent of a "great books" pedagogical model. The challenging and integrated capstone design course model that emerged ~1998-2000 thanks to cheap computers had undergrad seniors doing the equivalent of tackling Ulysees at 22.
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Since I finished undergrad in 1997, just before this kicked in, as a grad student, 1998-2003, I *taught* students who were in the new mode, but I myself was not steeped in it (and a bit envious). I could do the math/theory better, but they could *build* and were more "liberated."
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And across campus, the liberal arts kids who thought they were learning about the nexus between knowledge and social justice (was: liberation pedagogy, "critical" anything) were getting increasingly trapped... I didn't recognize this event till ~2006 or so when it became obvious.
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Bet you didn't think culture war subplots would enter a thread on self-teaching power electronics 🤣 🥳
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One reason I'm still a tech supremacist in 2021, after 5 years of tech backlash is that I still believe engineering is pretty much the only true liberal art. It's the only robust path available to trigger a virtuous cycle of genuine agency and knowledge in yourself.
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Unlike every other discipline (except perhaps fine arts), it is primarily mediated by material interactions with reality itself, rather than interactions with social/mathematical *models* of reality.
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Also extends to the experimental sciences. Any discipline with a lab or studio locus attached. This is not a naive "see with your own eyes/do with your own hands" position. It's about how your mind is transformed by short-circuiting the symbol layer of civilization even slightly.
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"reality has a surprising amount of detail" ... and those details will set you free :D
yeah, kinda a version of Hegelian-slave ethos, with all the problems, but there's a germ of truth there...
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And to add a final twist... my late advisor was a black guy... born in Congo, raised in Belgium, devout Cathloic, and a kinda Luke Cage energy to him, except on the mathematician-philosopher end of the spectrum. He would have had... interesting thoughts on current events...
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In the last conversation I had with him a couple of years before he died, he was musing on doing away with engineering majors altogether as the right next evolutionary step for engineering ed.
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Fascinating guy. Very private in his views, and would mostly stick strictly to the business of getting me done and out the door with a PhD, but would occasionally let revealing glimpses of his thinking on broader matters out. Very formative influence on me.
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The mind is the "material" substrate which mediates ideas. It's the finest canvas in existence


