Keynote Speech
ICCEE Conference at Union College

Richard K. Miller
October 19, 2001
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

Olin College Overview

Olin College is an entirely independent institution conceived and funded by the F.W. Olin Foundation of New York, NY. The College, located in Needham, MA, on about 70 acres of land adjacent to Babson College, was chartered in 1997 by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education to offer B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Engineering. Conceived as a residential undergraduate institution focusing on the education of engineers, its ultimate enrollment target is 600-650 students. A fundamental objective of the F.W. Olin Foundation is for Olin College to offer all of its admitted students a four-year merit-based tuition scholarship, not just for the first few years but also in perpetuity. Admission to the College is expected to be highly competitive, and a 10-to-1 student/faculty ratio will be maintained (a much lower ratio will be supported in the early years). Although Olin College is completely independent from nearby Babson College, the two institutions have established strong collaborative relations that enable the sharing of certain facilities and services and the joint development of academic programs. Collaborative relations with other nearby institutions are also under development.

Olin College is distinctive in several ways. First, it does not intend to establish traditional academic departments. Instead, the internal academic structure will involve several multidisciplinary clusters of faculty whose primary bond is the successful development of a cohort of engineering students. In addition, faculty employment relations will be based on renewable contracts rather than a traditional tenure system. A primary objective of Olin College will be to develop a new culture of innovation and continuous improvement, with enhanced entrepreneurial focus. The College established a two-year strategic plan in pursuit of this objective (Invention 2000), which centers on a comprehensive effort to rethink all aspects of an educational institution, including curriculum, student life, administration and finance, admission, development, and college governance. In each of these areas a deliberate four-stage plan consisting of a period of discovery (investigation of best practices), invention, development, and test is in progress. One particularly important aspect of this plan is the Olin Partners Program.

In order to establish the initial curriculum, Olin College decided that it would be beneficial to involve a group of students to help brainstorm and test different concepts. These students are considered in some respects as partners with the faculty in the development of portions of the curriculum and student life programs. The first group of 30 Olin Partners were recruited earlier this year and arrived on campus on August 23, 2001. They are currently involved in a unique academic program consisting of development and testing of components of the curriculum, student life, community service, and relations with nearby colleges. Their program is organized into six modules of either 4 or 5 weeks each, and is intended to include a 4-week trip to France next March to undertake an academic program on the campus of Georgia Tech Lorraine in Metz.

The first freshman class of about 75 is planned to arrive in fall 2002. The class will consist of the current 30 Olin Partners (who will spend a total of five years to complete their B.S. degree, including the current unique year of curricular development), another 15 "Virtual Olin Partners" who received deferred admission in last spring's recruitment effort, and about 30 additional new students to be recruited during the current academic year.

Olin College currently has about 20 faculty and 30 staff, and expects to recruit additional faculty and staff each year for the next several years. Expansion to full staffing and enrollment is expected to take about 10 years.

Facilities

Even before the first employee was hired at Olin College, the F.W. Olin Foundation began planning an entirely new campus consisting of about 500,000 square feet in eight new buildings. The first four buildings are currently under construction with completion scheduled for late spring of 2002. These four buildings include an academic center (faculty offices, administrative offices, library, computer center, and auditorium), campus center (dining hall, student life offices, central heating and cooling plant), classroom/laboratory building (including 27 major classrooms or labs of about 1,100 square feet each, as well as numerous smaller labs), and the first residence hall (188 beds, in double rooms, each with a private bathroom) in about 300,000 square feet of new construction. The second phase of construction (planned to begin within about two years) will include one more academic building and three more residence halls.

The opportunity to plan the facilities of an entire campus at once is extremely rare. The complementary layout of buildings and utilities, matching architecture, and landscape are extraordinary for their striking appearance and functionality. However, planning and building facilities before faculty and students arrive presented special challenges.

Temporary facilities for all campus activities during the period of construction are provided by modular units that are currently located on the soccer field near the campus entrance, and five residential houses converted to offices along the perimeter of the campus property. Athletic facilities, main library, performing arts center, student health center, and certain other central facilities are available to Olin students on the adjacent Babson College campus.

On Starting From a Clean Slate

The bold decision of the F.W. Olin Foundation to start a completely new institution is extremely rare and provides several opportunities that are essential to their vision for the College. These opportunities enable the College to consider fresh approaches without the constraints of tradition, historical agreements, or legacy systems of various kinds. These approaches include some new ideas which might be considered high risk in another institution, and other ideas which amount to questioning or rethinking of the fundamental approaches which are common in other institutions. (It is noteworthy that the Foundation made the decision to start their own independent institution only after considering several less expensive alternatives. The alternatives were rejected for several reasons including the fact that they did not allow the opportunities provided by starting from a clean slate-opportunities which they believe are important in exploring many of the fundamental challenges of engineering education.)

It is important to note that many advances are underway in engineering education at other colleges around the nation. These efforts are well documented in this and other national conferences, they are extremely important, and they address a wide range of innovative new ideas. There is little doubt that these efforts will eventually result in a degree of improvement in the quality of engineering education on a broad scale across the country, and they should continue. However, some observers have called for changes of broad scope that are not easily attempted at any existing institution 1,2,3. Others point out the need for a diversity of approaches in higher education in order to enhance the process of innovation 4. In the business arena, start-up companies rather than recognized large corporations have often led the way on many radical new products or new industries. Similarly, it is possible that new markets and fresh approaches in higher education may be more easily identified and developed by start-up enterprises like Olin College than by an existing institution.

A Culture of Innovation and Continuous Improvement

A major opportunity for change afforded by starting over is the potential to establish a new culture focused on innovation and continuous improvement. The F.W. Olin Foundation believes strongly that there is a need for a new culture in higher education that is more receptive to innovative ideas and more open to changes that lead to improvement in curriculum and all aspects of institutional performance. Olin College has taken this very seriously, and established the unusual position of Vice President for Innovation and Research among the first five positions created. To initiate our efforts to establish this new culture we have assumed that continuous improvement is everybody's business, and have built it into our core values. Our current approach is based on the following key ideas: (1) it is most important to establish processes which result in the continuously improving quality of people associated with the College, (2) a clearly articulated vision is necessary so we all have the same "compass direction," (3) we need to actively encourage the taking of appropriate risks, (4) we need to avoid unnecessary formality and procedures which might inhibit entrepreneurial behavior, and (5) we need to deploy appropriate time and leadership resources to insure that this effort leads to real results. This commitment to a new culture of continuous improvement underlies our decision not to employ a standard tenure system for faculty. Another example of a recent decision in support of this basic goal is the implementation of 360-degree staff reviews for all faculty and staff in the College. We certainly do not claim to know how to achieve this new culture, and we expect to learn from our mistakes and from advice from others. However, we are determined to focus on this goal until we achieve a degree of success.

Values Beyond Academic Achievement

A related opportunity afforded by starting anew is that of seriously embracing values beyond academic achievement. The most common metrics valued in higher education are research (or scholarship), teaching, and service. There is no doubt that these dimensions to professional performance are of central importance. However, one might consider these as different components of a single measure of what is achieved in a professional career. As important as this is, there are other dimensions to job performance that many regard as equally important in the work place. One such dimension is that of teamwork and developing successful long-term personal relationships. Corporate leaders often report that the career development of young engineers is limited far more frequently by human relations issues than by technical preparation issues. This has more to do with how you achieve than what you achieve. It is well known in engineering education that corporate leaders have long listed communication and teamwork at the top of the list of characteristics of graduates that are most in need of improvement. In addition, a recent survey by the National Urban League's Institute for Opportunity revealed that 91 percent of business executives interviewed rated "character"-defined as integrity, determination, and the ability to overcome obstacles-as the most important attribute for professional achievement5.

Unless faculty members model this behavior, it is unlikely that students will become proficient in this dimension of their education, which is apparently very important to their career success. Since we are starting fresh, we have an opportunity to experiment in ways that would be extremely difficult at an existing institution. Therefore, within the first four months we established a set of core personal values at Olin College, and we use them in discussing our job performance. These core values include: (1) integrity, (2) respect for others, (3) passion for the welfare of the College, (4) patience and understanding, and (5) openness to change. It is our goal to develop a culture in which these (or similar) values are authentic and lead to improvement in the abilities of our graduates in teamwork and human relations. As a practical matter, we expect to measure our performance in a two-dimensional plane consisting of what you achieve along one axis and how you achieve it along the other. Once again we are not experts in this area. We expect to learn from our early experiences and from advice, including advice from the corporate community. However, we are determined to make adjustments and improvements until we achieve a degree of success in this area.

Student Centered Education and Development

Undergraduate engineering students must learn and develop competence in a wide array of skills beyond academics during their four or five years of study. During this period students must become independent from their parents, learn to manage their time and money, establish working relations with a room mate, become comfortable with social issues relating to religion, alcohol and sexual intimacy, and often meet their life partner. These "extra-curricular" activities are often more important to the development of students than participation in athletics, music, or the arts. There is some indication6 that freshman entering selective engineering schools lag behind those with other majors in their social maturity and self-confidence in social situations. Furthermore, due in part to the comparative rigor of an engineering academic program and the resulting heavy demands for academic study, students apparently fall even further behind their peers in other majors by the senior year. This situation is compounded by the changes in demographics in recent years that have resulted in an increased percentage of students with stressful home situations. Furthermore, the trend in residential housing has been toward increased integration of women and men in the same facilities, further increasing the pressure to quickly demonstrate successful social relationships. Perhaps not surprisingly, the accumulation of these factors has sometimes resulted in a record of very serious personal problems among engineering students and may also be related to later difficulties in teamwork skills and human relations. Those with experience in this area report7 that serious personal problems among engineering students rarely arise because of academic stress, but frequently arise because of social and psychological issues relating to broken relationships. We conclude from this that to do the best job of helping engineering students achieve their full potential we must take very seriously their need for social and emotional development.

Starting with a clean slate, Olin College is determined to focus on this need. Our current approach in this area is based on the following key ideas: (1) we will provide on-campus housing for all students, (2) we do not intend to establish a Greek system, (3) our students have endorsed our core values and have embraced an ambitious honor code, (4) our Dean for Student Life reports to the Provost, (5) we intend to blur the distinction between formal academics and less formal student life activities by developing co-curricular "course" offerings, (6) we have engaged a psychiatrist who has conducted training sessions with our faculty, and (7) we have initiated a "peer vigilance" culture on campus in which students are encouraged to watch out for each other and, when needed, to express concerns to appropriate staff members without fear of punishment. Once again, we do not expect to do things perfectly on our first attempt in this area, but we are committed to learning from our experiences and from the advice of others.

Faculty Responsibilities, Organization, and Employment Relations

The highest priority for faculty members at Olin College is providing an exceptional educational experience for undergraduate students. Our intention is to identify and recruit only those faculty members that are (or will become) inspirational teachers at the undergraduate level. This clearly involves direct involvement in instruction, but also indirect involvement through advising and mentoring, and availability to students for personal support and advice when appropriate. As a secondary concern, faculty members are expected to maintain a vigorous individualized portfolio of activity intended to insure continuous intellectual vitality. Since a person can teach only what he or she knows, it is essential that each faculty member remain current with recent developments in the field of his or her expertise.

A secondary mission at Olin College is the development of innovative approaches to engineering education. Faculty members are also expected to be open to new ideas, to be frequently engaged in experimentation with new educational approaches, and to share the results of their efforts with others off campus.

To emphasize the primary focus on students and to enhance the opportunity for multidisciplinary study, the faculty will be organized in multidisciplinary clusters rather than traditional academic departments. Each cluster will have representation from a broad range of disciplines, including engineering, mathematics, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities and the arts. The common bond of the faculty in any cluster is the welfare of an assigned cohort of students rather than recent research developments in a common academic discipline.

Olin College does not intend to establish a traditional tenure system. While such tenure systems have obvious strengths and advantages, they also may contribute to attitudes and perspectives that result in resistance to change and avoidance of risk. We intend to explore alternatives to tenure that will provide an improvement in this area while simultaneously addressing other needs. These other needs include the adaptation of assigned responsibilities over time to better match the interests and abilities of faculty members as they progress through various stages in their careers. A major objective is the development of faculty incentives and rewards which align with the expectations for teamwork, the practice of engineering, and involvement with entrepreneurial activity. Our current approach is based on renewable contracts. We will work continuously to refine and improve this model as we strive to develop a new approach to faculty employment.

At this point in the development of the College, there are 22 faculty members, including some who have other responsibilities (administration) and some who are not full-time. The interest in faculty appointments at Olin College has been extraordinary. Last year (our first year of recruiting) we received about 1,200 resumes from candidates for a total of about 10 available positions. The quality of the faculty who have chosen to join Olin College is very high as may be seen from their biographical sketches (available on our web site at http://www.olin.edu). In addition, the national visibility of many of these founding faculty members is excellent, their involvement in funded research contracts is comparable to that at many research universities, and about 1/3 of them are women.

Early Directions in Curriculum Development

The curriculum at Olin College is intended to provide rigorous preparation in the fundamentals of engineering, with the goal of enabling graduates to advance in many directions. Our vision is that the study of engineering should provide a broad educational foundation upon which graduates may excel in many different careers, including the practice of engineering, but also medicine, law, business, or leadership in public or private institutions. The adjacency to Babson College will provide opportunities for an excellent exposure to the fundamentals of business and entrepreneurship to broaden and enhance the Olin curriculum in engineering. We believe that engineering education is often presented in a demanding, tedious, and uninspiring manner. This approach has contributed to attrition and low enthusiasm among students. We intend to explore new ways to present engineering so that it is more fun and inspiring.

The founding faculty have been involved with invention of the curriculum since fall 2000. Our strategy for development involves a four-step process over a two-year period that began in fall of 2000. By fall 2002 we expect to have an overall structure for all three B.S. degrees and materials ready for delivery of the first year of the program. Work will continue on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year of the program for the following three years.

The first phase of the curriculum development process was devoted to discovery activities (investigations of "best practices") at engineering schools around the world. Over several months we visited or hosted visits from more than 30 different engineering schools with the specific purpose of identifying best practices. Last February the faculty held several intensive retreats in which some preliminary directions were determined. We are currently working on a curriculum model that will include three major themes. The primary theme is "superb engineering," which we interpret to include rigorous preparation in science and mathematics with engineering design integrated throughout. In addition, we expect to develop two secondary themes, one in "entrepreneurial thinking" and one in "innovation, creativity, and the arts." The structure for delivery of this curriculum is currently under review. We expect students to spend considerable time in activities designed to give them experience in learning how to learn, such as involvement in research or professional design projects.

The Olin Partners are engaged this year in testing curricular approaches and brainstorming new project ideas as part of the development and test phases of our curriculum development effort. We believe that students are needed to determine strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, and to identify those that offer the most potential. (The Olin Partners are also engaged this year in developing many aspects of the student life program, as well as community service and international experience.)

After the curriculum is designed, we expect it will employ several fresh approaches. However, just as the faculty do not have tenure at Olin College, neither will the curriculum. Our commitment to continuous improvement will include periodic reviews of the entire curriculum with the potential to start over again in the not-too-distant future. Again we expect to continuously learn from our experience and from the advice of others.

Management Philosophy, Goals and Objectives

The task of building an entire institution from scratch has a multitude of dimensions and simultaneous challenges. However, it bears some similarity to the design and project management of a large engineering system. The design of any complex system is subject to constraints, and requires a set of guiding principles or a philosophy that is inherently subjective. Since very few independent colleges have been created in the past 50 years, it is difficult to find relevant case studies from which to obtain guidance in identifying these constraints and useful principles.

Perhaps the most relevant historical example is that of the founding of Harvey Mudd College (HMC) in 1957. A detailed account of the first 20 years of HMC is recorded in a wonderful book by its founding president, Dr. Joseph B. Platt8. Dr. Platt reports that perhaps the most important principle used to initiate HMC was its decision to give highest priority to the quality of the students it recruited. Consequently, HMC decided from the start to admit only those students who are exceptionally well prepared, even if this resulted in a very small enrollment and revenue stream. History has proven this principle to be extremely valuable for HMC and it has also been adopted by Olin College. A generalization of this principle adopted by Olin College is that quality people attract more quality people. Therefore, we are committed to identifying and recruiting people of the highest quality, as students, faculty, and staff members. In fact, to incorporate this principle with that of continuous improvement, we strive to attract only those people who are "better" than we are in some sense, with each new addition.

Other sources of useful principles for the establishment of Olin College are (1) a recent study of businesses that have been extraordinarily successful for a sustained period of more than 100 years9, and (2) a recent study of a business that has excelled at developing a sustained record of extraordinary innovation10. These studies emphasize the importance of authentic core values in providing institutional endurance over the years, and of practicing visualization and group brainstorming to obtain sustainable innovation.

Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy

In the mid 1980s I taught an undergraduate aerospace design course at USC in Los Angeles. Teams of 4-6 students worked for a semester on real projects suggested by practicing engineers in industry, and they presented their results in a final design review to a jury of about 20 practicing engineers at the end of the term. One group in particular did a fine job. The industry sponsor stood at the end of their presentation and announced that he was very pleased with their work and surprised that they had somehow stumbled on to his company's patented solution which enabled them to win a $200 million contract. Two of my students came up to me after the presentation with wide eyes, and asked two simple questions: (1) what is a patent? and (2) how do you make money from ideas like this? Nothing in our engineering curriculum at that time provided an opportunity for these students to obtain answers. All relevant courses on these topics were taught at the graduate level in the School of Business and were inaccessible to undergraduate engineering students. It struck me then that engineers across the country badly need some knowledge of the basics of business and entrepreneurship.

In recent years many engineering schools have recognized this need and have begun to develop effective programs to provide a degree of exposure to business and entrepreneurship. The ASEE has established new committees, and the popular media have tracked the progress11. However, most of these programs remain extra-curricular in nature, resting more on a business plan competition or summer internship than a formal curriculum in the subject. Experience at engineering schools where a curriculum is provided (for example, the Technological Entrepreneurship Certificate program at the University of Iowa) shows that employers are eager for graduates with this standard coverage of topics with certification on the transcript.

Olin College intends to make sure all its graduates are prepared to answer the two questions mentioned above. It will work closely with neighboring Babson College to develop a curriculum in technological entrepreneurship, supplemented by joint project experience with students from Babson. Some joint curricular projects between the two schools are already being tested with the Olin Partners. I believe it is important for the engineering community to realize that both engineering and business are problem-solving professions. The opportunity to learn effective educational strategies from innovative business schools is enormous, and remains largely overlooked in the engineering community.

To the public, the word entrepreneurship sometimes raises questions about obsession with personal wealth. While entrepreneurship is clearly focused on financial success, it is more about initiative in a small business setting and techniques for survival under cash-flow constraints than about wealth. It has a great deal in common with design in an engineering program. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the largest foundation in the U.S. focused on entrepreneurship, defines entrepreneurs as self-sufficient people intent on building healthy communities. This notion clearly involves social responsibility and voluntary giving to create opportunity for others. Following the legacy of extraordinary generosity of the F.W. Olin Foundation (demonstrated through their nearly 50 years of providing building grants that met 100% of the construction and furnishing costs, and now tuition scholarships that meet 100% of the educational costs) Olin College intends to establish a strong culture of philanthropy in combination with entrepreneurial thinking. Olin College will develop student life and co-curricular programs that emphasize social responsibility and philanthropy.

Gender Balance and Diversity

As previously noted, the National Science Foundation and business leaders have long identified teamwork and communication as major areas in need of improvement in engineering education. The ability to establish and maintain successful long-term human relations and communication is a major concern for the successful practice of engineering. As the work force becomes more diverse and the practice of engineering becomes more globally focused, these skills are likely to become even more important in the years ahead. However, engineering students are generally more homogeneous in their background and interests than students in many other disciplines. This homogeneity is likely to be a significant contributing factor to problems later in the area of teamwork and human relations in the workplace, and is therefore a concern at Olin College. It is our intent to work hard to provide an educational environment with life experiences that expose Olin students to many kinds of diversity, including gender, ethnic, socio-economic, geographic, religious, and others.

It is important to note that the vision of the F.W. Olin Foundation is for Olin College to base its admission decisions primarily on merit. Merit includes high levels of academic preparation by all standard measures, as well as other demonstrated achievements inside and outside the classroom. After the subset of applicants who clearly meet the merit requirements for admission is identified, Olin College will work to develop a student body that is diverse. We are proud of the fact that half of the Olin Partners are women, and about 1/3 of our faculty at this point are women. In addition, the Olin Partners also represent significant ethnic, geographic, religious, and economic diversity. These results were obtained in spite of admission requirements among the highest in the nation, and were made possible by the very high levels of student interest in our program. More than 20 applications were received for every offer of admission. We intend to work hard in future years to increase the applicant pool among candidates that would add further to the diversity of our community. More information on the admission process at Olin College is contained in a recent article12.

References

  1. Duderstadt, James J., A University for the 21st Century, University of Michigan Press, March 2000.
  2. Duderstadt, James J., Fire, Ready, Aim! The Importance of Liberal Learning for an Increasingly Technological World, 10th Anniversary Symposium, Ivan Allen College, Georgia Institute of Technology, March 15, 2001.
  3. Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid, Universities in the Digital Age, Change (July 1996), 11-19.
  4. Riggs, Henry E., Venturing, Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences (adapted from a speech to the Sunset Club, Los Angeles, CA, November 17, 1999).
  5. Corporate Leaders Urge Colleges to De-Emphasize SAT Scores in Admissions, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 27, 2001.
  6. Personal conversations with student life staff at selected engineering colleges about confidential data from the annual College Student Surveys conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, CA..
  7. Conversations with Olin College student life professionals and, through them, student life professionals throughout the northeast United States.
  8. Platt, Joseph B., Harvey Mudd College: The First Twenty Years, Fithian Press, 1994.
  9. Collins, James C., and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last, Harper Collins Publishers, 1994.
  10. Kelley, Tom, (with Jonathan Littman) The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm, Doubleday, 2001.
  11. Rae-Dupree, Janet, Get Technical Skills Plus Start-up Smarts: New Programs Build Entrepreneur-Engineers, U.S. News & World Report, (April 9, 2001), 72.
  12. Sanov, Alvin P., A First Class Partnership, PRISM, (September, 2001), 26-29.