Carnegie Tech at 50

When Andrew Carnegie put up the first $1,000,000 to start a school in Pittsburgh, ais objective was on the modest side. His first aim was merely to help the sons of his steelworkers to learn a skill or a trade. But the school collected a first-rank faculty, and Steelmaster Carnegie raised his sights. By the time he died in 1919, his school had become a full-fledged institute of technology.

Under Presidents Arthur A. Hamer-schlag (1903-22) and Thomas S. Baker (1922-35) Carnegie Tech developed one of the best departments of metallurgy in the U.S., gathered one of the top coal-research staffs in the world. It had a big-time football team, a women's college, and a topflight drama department capable of turning out Broadway stars (among them: Arthur Kennedy, Robert Cummings). Then, in 1936, Carnegie got President Robert E. Doherty, onetime dean of the School of Engineering at Yale and a protege of the late great scientist and G.E. engineer, Charles Steinmetz.

Old-Line Shudder. Bob Doherty was impressed with Tech, but he was not a man to be easily satisfied. Over the next 14 years he made Tech hum. He raised $4,000,000 to begin the first building program the school had had in years. He boosted the endowment from $17 to $30 million, tripled the size of the library, upped the number of full-time students two-thirds. Instead of a mere 27 advanced degrees a year, Carnegie Tech was soon giving out 200.

With Carnegie Tech's football team in a long losing streak, Doherty refused to go into the market for better players, took the Skibos out of big-time football entirely ("Perhaps you came to the wrong school," he snapped at protesting students). He increased his research budget sixfold, extended it to bolster fields, where Carnegie had never excelled. He built a new petroleum laboratory, spent $1,800,000 for a nuclear research center.

But Bob Doherty's concerns ran deeper than enrollments, endowments, or even research; he had ideas for changing Tech's curriculum that made many an old-line technical prof shudder. Doherty was among the forward-looking men in technical education who realized just how limited a strictly technical education might be. However skilled they were, he decided, most engineers were "illiterate about the world around them." They were able to do amazing things within their own narrow fields, but they were helpless once they went beyond. As professional leaders and as citizens, said Doherty, they were next to useless.

Soon Tech students were spending a fourth of their time in the social sciences and humanities--not to learn a mass of facts about these subjects, but to understand the disciplines behind them. While learning to solve problems in engineering, they began to learn how writers, economists, and historians solved problems in other fields. "The teacher," said Doherty, "becomes a thinking-coach . . . but the student must do the thinking . . . He soon finds he is using his head the same way regardless of the field."

No Illiterates. Last summer,when President Doherty retired, the Doherty "plan" had become a permanent part of Tech's curriculum, and the idea behind it had carried over into a new field; with a $6,000,000 grant from the William Larimer Mellon Foundation, Tech was launching a School of Industrial Administration, to provide executives well-rounded in both technology and business. Last week, as Carnegie Tech passed its 50th birthday, it could rank itself among the top ten engineering schools in the U.S.*

Bob Doherty himself was not on hand for the celebration and the inauguration of Tech's new president. A fortnight ago, Doherty died suddenly, at 65. But new President John Christian Warner had been a Tech man for 24 years and dean of graduate studies under Doherty. Tech expects to keep on turning out engineers who are not "illiterate about the world."

* Among the others: M.I.T., CalTech, Michigan, Purdue, Georgia Tech.

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