This week, Brown University becomes the last school in the Ivy League to turn its engineering program into a full-fledged School of Engineering. Administrators say the impact – which was approved in May after a decade of planning – will be much more than semantic.
“I think it will end up being a transformational change for engineering at Brown,” said Rodney Clifton, interim dean of engineering at the university.
Brown Provost David Kertzer said the new designation signals the priority Brown as an institution places on engineering. It becomes only the second professional school there, joining the Warren Alpert Medical School. (A proposed School of Public Health has not been accredited yet.)
“I think everyone realizes that a university of the stature of Brown, when it announces it’s creating a School of Engineering, it’s more than just putting a name on the door,” Kertzer said. “It’s a real commitment.” Harvard and Yale made the same move in 2007 and 2008, respectively.
Brown’s division of engineering ranked 57th on U.S. News & World Report’s list of 198 top engineering schools this year. Establishing the School of Engineering will help the school recruit talented faculty members and students and secure additional research funding, Kertzer said.
“A lot of it is symbolic … but there’s a sense that if you don’t have a School of Engineering, you’re not as devoted to engineering, so I think the pressure has built because of what’s gone on around us with our peer universities,” Kertzer said. “More generally, the engineering faculty here believe we have some good programs, but they are smaller than any of our peers, not as visible and not operated at as high a level as they’re capable of.”
The engineering school will build on Brown’s existing strengths in the areas of solid mechanics and the mechanical behavior of materials; biomedical engineering; and large-scale systems such as energy, the environment and infrastructure like highways and electricity distribution, according to Clifton.
Its creation comes as students nationwide show increased interest in engineering amid exhortations from President Barack Obama and others to maintain the nation’s prowess in science and technology. Engineering is the top area of academic interest among students entering Brown this fall, with 140 of 1,554 freshmen planning to study it, compared with about 100 in the sophomore and junior classes.
Clifton and Kertzer see the benefits of the new engineering school extending outside of Brown’s campus gates, because another of its focuses will be expanding both the C.V. Starr Program in Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship, which is offered to undergraduates jointly with the economics and sociology departments, and the four-year-old Program in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship for master’s degree students.
The hope is to develop students into “the so-called renaissance engineer, who’s going to not just understand the technical side but also how to translate [innovations] into viable commercial products,” Clifton said.
Kertzer agreed, saying Brown expects the School of Engineering “to be huge for Rhode Island and Providence.”
The pair also want to see the engineering school expand Brown’s links with outside companies, which has been a hallmark of the division going back to the days of Packard Motor Co. Since 2001, for example, General Motors Corp. has financed a materials-research laboratory that explores ways to make cars lighter and more recyclable.
Clifton said the school’s doors will be wide open to businesses of all sizes. “We’re open for interactions,” he said. “Smaller firms are fine.”
The next step for the School of Engineering is to recruit a permanent dean to succeed Clifton. Brown also plans to add 12 new engineering faculty members, and to build or renovate new office and laboratory space for the school, which right now is housed alongside the physics department in the half-century-old Barus and Holley Building on George Street. •
