Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (review)

Advocates of diversity in American science and engineering have seen women’s participation grow substantially over recent decades, but black representation in engineering has stalled at just over 5 percent. Slaton links this situation to an institutional reluctance to reform within modern engineering itself, “a body of knowledge and practice rooted . . . in a racially stratified worldview generally resistant to radical social change” (80). Although reformers periodically pushed to open engineering education to more African Americans, the system kept reverting to narrow criteria for excluding students, justified by conservative definitions of rigor. By embracing seemingly objective quantification and standardization, engineers sought to render race invisible and to separate technology from real-life political and social considerations.

Slaton’s methodology brings together ideas from science and technology studies, African-American studies, education studies, and sociology into a historically centered analysis meant to inform present thinking and policymaking about education. Slaton presents historical case studies of six universities—the historically black and traditionally white campuses of the University of Maryland and Texas A&M, plus the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Slaton skillfully contrasts these examples to illustrate how policymakers, administrators, trustees, faculty, and others approached institutional and cultural questions of race and engineering.

Slaton argues that for decades, even progressive-minded educators envisioned a two-tier economy in which African Americans served as rural workers, repairmen, or mechanics rather than modern engineers. “[E]xecution of good science was believed to require segregation. . . . Blackness and technological achievement . . . remained . . . mutually exclusive categories” (50). Amid the civil-rights pressure of the 1960s and 1970s, university leaders initiated projects to support selected minority individuals, but they backed away from accepting students whose marginal test scores or grades hid potential talent. Engineers resisted offering remedial courses, fearing accommodations would damage their reputation with accreditation boards and funding sources. They excluded topics such as environmental problems, affordable housing, and public transport from teaching and research, lest such unconventional inquiries undermine profitable connections with the Defense Department and industry.

Despite the backlash against affirmative action, Slaton writes, the 1980s through the 1990s brought small successes. The National Science Foundation and other federal agencies sought to prove that technical excellence can thrive with inclusiveness. In earmarking research support for historically black colleges, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) defied conventional granting procedures by rethinking arbitrary time frames. nasa expected results of equal quality, but allowed more open schedules to compensate for the structural challenges of overcoming long-standing inequities.

Slaton regards such flexibility as the key to increasing minority membership, calling on faculty, schools, and other decision makers to “expand our ideas about the sorts of character traits and educational background that may produce a successful engineer” (208). By creating remedial courses, learning communities, and other alternative teaching approaches, reformers can redefine restrictive constructions of competence and “recognize the social instrumentality of rigor as another important and persistent, if unintentional, means of perpetuating African American absences from STEM fields” (217).

This thought-provoking book should interest educators and scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as engineers and scientists. It shows beautifully how an understanding of history can inform present-day thinking about crucial questions of race in our technology-centered society.