The civil engineers turned out by McMillan and the electrical engineers by Brackett were at first few in number, but by 1912 there were enough of them to organize the Princeton Engineering Association ``to bring together the men of Princeton interested in engineering . . . to the single end that the interests, influence, and efficiency of Princeton University be advanced through its Department of Engineering.'' Enthusiastic about the professional training Princeton had given them, they were eager to have the University broaden its curriculum to include other branches of engineering.
Spurred on by this association, the University announced the formation of a School of Engineering in 1921, and in 1922 Arthur M. Greene, Jr. came from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as its first dean. Greene proved to be, in the words of his successor, Kenneth H. Condit, ``a born teacher, an able administrator, and a dynamo of energy.''
Under Greene's guidance, four-year undergraduate programs were offered in civil, chemical, electrical, mechanical, and mining (later geological) engineering, and one-year graduate courses leading to the corresponding engineering degree (later to the Master of Science in Engineering for all fields).
In 1928 the school was given a home of its own, named the John C. Green Engineering Building (now Green Hall), the old Green School of Science having been destroyed by fire shortly before.
With the help of the Princeton Engineering Association, advisory committees of practicing engineers were formed for all engineering departments in 1935. These groups set the pattern for the system of Advisory Councils for all departments of the University established in 1941. Out of their discussions evolved the Basic Engineering Program, which the faculty formulated in 1938.
Greene's devotion and energy gave the school a sure foundation. When he came to Princeton in 1922 there were 84 engineering students. By 1940, when he retired, the number had grown to 379. But perhaps his most important contribution was the staunch support he gave to the Princeton concept of engineering education, the combining of instruction in science and fundamental engineering subjects with courses in the liberal arts, to provide what President Hibben and he liked to call ``Engineering Plus.''
1940-1954
Kenneth H. Condit, who succeeded Dean Greene, was a graduate of Stevens Institute in mechanical engineering and of Princeton in civil engineering. He had been an editor of McGraw-Hill engineering journals and, f~or a time, executive assistant to the president of the National Industrial Conference Board. He had also been president of the Princeton Engineering Association.
Condit's deanship covered the difficult days of World War II and the immediate postwar period. A rapid development of government research plus a greatly expanded program of instruction for civilian and military engineers during the war was followed, in President Dodds's words, ``by a broadening of all areas of teaching and research far beyond dimensions previously envisaged.''
A new Department of Aeronautical Engineering, initiated by Daniel C. Sayre early in the war, became, in a very few years, a leader in its field. A pioneering interdisciplinary program in plastics was also begun; it later evolved into the Polymer Sciences and Materials Program. The undergraduate curriculum was enriched by the introduction of special programs which permitted students with special abilities to do work in two fields of engineering or to combine their study of one engineering field with additional concentration in a related field of science and mathematics. Two undergraduates founded The Princeton Engineer, which faithfully mirrored the growth of the school in succeeding years. Graduate training, previously limited to the one year required for the M.S.E. degree, was gradually extended to include work for the doctorate: Ph.D. programs were introduced in chemical engineering and electrical engineering in 1946, in aeronautical engineering in 1949, in civil engineering in 1951, in mechanical engineering in 1952.
The growth of the school put a heavy burden on the Green Engineering Building, which had been designed to accommodate 400 undergraduates. Chemical Engineering fell heir to the old chemical laboratory building next door; Aeronautical Engineering, to several buildings near the lake which had been built for the Physics Department during the war; and, with the help of the ever-loyal Princeton Engineering Association, funds were raised to build the Hayes wing on Green for mechanical engineering.
The acquisition, in 1951, of the property of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and its development as the James Forrestal Campus, under Professor Sayre's guidance as director and Dean Condit's as chairman of the administrative committee, provided excellent working space for the burgeoning Department of Aeronautical Engineering.
When Dean Condit retired in 1954, the engineering faculty was three times as large as when he took office; the number of undergraduates had increased from 379 to 528, the number of graduate students from 11 to 87.
1954-1971
Joseph Clifton Elgin, third dean of the school, brought to the office in 1954 twenty-five years' experience as the University's first teacher of chemical engineering, including eighteen as the first chairman of that department.
Outstanding among the school's achievements during his administration was the development of a new concept of engineering education, which left much of the traditional engineering art -- the technology and the skills -- to a period of apprenticeship in industry, and placed increasing emphasis on engineering science, which, in Elgin's words, is concerned with ``the principles upon which all technologies and engineering skills are ultimately based.''
The Departments of Chemical and Electrical Engineering had for some years emphasized the engineering science approach and this was now extended to the other departments. Undergraduate curricula were completely revised and graduate programs strengthened in response to Elgin's urging:
``With strong departments of mathematics and the natural sciences [he wrote], Princeton has an exceptional opportunity to bring its School of Engineering to the forefront in its contributions to graduate engineering education and the advancement of knowledge in the engineering sciences.''
The faculty's efforts to this end were rewarded in 1962 when Princeton was one of five universities to receive grants of one million dollars each from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in recognition of the emphasis they had given the scientific approach to engineering education, which the Foundation sought to encourage nationally.
With these developments, the space shortage which the school had suffered increasingly since World War II made new quarters one of the most urgent needs to be met by the $53 Million Campaign. Canvassers sought $8 million for a new quadrangle for engineering science, and when that amount had been raised, Dean Elgin and his faculty were ready with plans for a center that would provide facilities for new patterns of instruction and for expanded programs of postgraduate education and engineering research.
In the fall of 1962, the school moved into the new Engineering Quadrangle, whose five connecting halls gave it four times the space it had had in the Green Engineering Building and its satellites, and whose library's book capacity was seven times that of its former library.
At the same time, the increasing emphasis the faculty had given to engineering science was recognized by changing the school's name to the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Changing orientations also brought a merger of Aeronautical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering to form the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences, and a change in the organization of Geological Engineering, which merged with Civil Engineering in 1966 and subsequently became a program in that department, offered in cooperation with the Department of Geological and Geophysical Sciences.
Having acquired more adequate space and equipment the school prospered through the 1960s. Interdisciplinary research and instruction were fostered by the initiation of programs jointly offered by several engineering departments, sometimes in cooperation with non-engineering departments, in such fields as solid state and materials sciences, water resources, geophysical fluid dynamics, and environmental studies. In 1969 Elgin's leadership was recognized by the American Society for Engineering Education when it conferred on him its highest honor, the Lamme Award.
Elgin retired as dean in 1971. During the seventeen years of his administration the faculty almost doubled to ninety-seven, the annual volume of sponsored research more than tripled to $3.8 million, the number of graduate students almost tripled to 241, with the number of undergraduate students remaining about the same. But the most dramatic index of the school's growth was the increase in the number of engineering Ph.D.'s awarded in one academic year: from seven in 1953-1954 to fifty in 1970-1971.
THE 1970s
Robert G. Jahn, Elgin's successor as fourth dean of the school, did both his undergraduate and graduate work at Princeton. He won highest honors in mechanical engineering at graduation in 1951 and was joint winner of the annual Kusaka prize as the most promising student of physics when he took his Ph.D. in that subject in 1955. After teaching for seven years at Lehigh and California Institute of Technology, he returned to Princeton in 1962 as assistant professor of aeronautical engineering in the Guggenheim Laboratories for the Aerospace Propulsion Sciences, and in 1967 he became professor of aerospace sciences. In 1968 he published Physics of Electric Propulsion, the definitive text in its field; the following year he received the Curtis W. McGraw ['19] Award of the American Society of Engineering Education for his research in plasma propulsion.
In an interview reported in University soon after he took office in 1971, Dean Jahn outlined the distinctive role of the Princeton School of Engineering in this way:
``Princeton is a very special place in terms of excellence of the overall academic program, size, heritage. We cannot pretend that we are a major technological institute like M.I.T. or Cal. Tech. Nor can we replicate a large university complex, like Michigan or Minnesota. We have a small engineering school which must flourish in the framework of a small, liberal, excellent university. That I regard as an advantage, especially in an era which favors individually tailored~ liberal engineering education for its students. We must respond to the anti-technological criticism being heard today; more important, we must respond to the needs of society for solutions to some very pressing problems. What better place to do it than at a university which has well-developed programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences; and which has a heritage of engineering education that has always emphasized the development of the mind of the student more than the simple transfer of technical facts and techniques?''
``Solutions to . . . pressing problems'' were sought in a series of four interdisciplinary topical programs introduced in 1972 as added study opportunities for undergraduates: Bioengineering, Energy Conversion and Resources, Environmental Studies, and Transportation. The purpose of these topical programs was to demonstrate the relevance of fundamental engineering scholarship to urgent contemporary social problems. This new curricular dimension proved attractive to the students, and helped to reverse the antitechnology mood that prevailed in the early seventies. Enrollment in the freshman class, which had dropped to 135 in the fall of 1971, increased sharply to 185 in 1972, and reached an all-time high of 250 in 1976. The same period also saw the first significant enrollment of women in the school; in 1973 they constituted 11 percent of the entering class, and by 1977 nearly 18 percent of the University's undergraduate engineering students were women -- almost three times the national average. The engineering faculty found equally encouraging a substantial inference in transfers of A.B. students into the school and the enrollment of many more A.B. students in engineering courses. In the words of Dean Jahn, the School of Engineering had achieved ``full integration into the academic fabric of the University.''