Words matter, and times are changing. President Obama has embraced the E-word, putting engineers on a par with scientists in his vernacular—and giving engineering a public status that the diverse field has never held in relation to science, at least within the discourse of politics.
In November 2009, for instance, Obama declared, ”Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models.” In April of 2009, he told a gathering at Georgetown University that he’d like to see ”our best and brightest commit themselves to making things. Engineers, scientists, innovators…what we can really use is some more scientists and some more engineers who are building and making things….”
In October 2010, Obama continued his promotion of engineering as a career, and an activity. At an event called the White House Science Fair, the president went out of his way to highlight the contributions of engineers, showing a unique awareness of any modern president of the essential equality between careers in science and engineering. ”This is an interesting statistic,” Obama said, ”particularly at a time when young people are thinking about their careers: The most common educational background of CEOs in the S&P 500 companies—all right, the nation’s most successful, most powerful corporations—the most common study of CEOs is not business, it’s not finance, it’s not economics—it’s actually engineering. It’s engineering.”
To be sure, some proud engineers might argue that engineering is more important than science. But that’s not a view widely shared, and it misses the point that in the politics of technoscience, engineering has too long been ignored, or been conflated wrongly with science.
Names are important. Engineers and scientists represent parallel occupations, harder than ever to distinguish and yet distinguishable. To speak their names properly helps clarify, and illuminate, in subtle ways complex issues facing experts of all dominions. That Eisenhower edited engineers out of his famous farewell address—and that Obama today includes engineers on an equal basis with scientists—shows that the public understanding of technological change does not stand still.
This story was corrected on 12 January 2011.
About the Author
G. Pascal Zachary is a professor of practice at the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University. He is the author of Showstopper!: The Breakneck Pace to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft (1994), on the making of a Microsoft Windows program, and Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997), which received IEEE’s first literary award. Zachary reported on Silicon Valley for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s; for The New York Times, he launched the Ping column on innovation in 2007. The Scientific Estate is made possible through the support of Arizona State University and IEEE Spectrum.
