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

Amy E. Slaton is an associate professor of history at Drexel University, focusing on the history and sociology of science and science, technology, and society. Following her initial book on technology and workforce development in recent U.S. history, she presents this second piece which focuses on the dearth of African Americans in engineering education and the engineering labor market over the last 70 years.

Based on six staggered institutional case studies that are presented in three pairs, this book examines the state of engineering education between the 1930s and the 1990s, describing how specific state and institutional policies were enacted within national, political, economic, and racial contexts. This is not just a story of engineering; rather, it attempts to tell a broader history of American higher education and how state university systems in Maryland, Illinois, and Texas systematically excluded African Americans from engineering through social constructions of merit.

Chapter 1, the introduction, sets the stage by referencing the ongoing disparities in minority participation in engineering, and then suggests the role historical analysis can play in explaining the status quo. Building on the work of education historians like James Anderson, Slaton explicitly focuses on race and education for African Americans, briefly mentioning issues such as desegregation, urban renewal, and affirmative action, suggesting their role in the social construction of academic merit and Black participation in engineering.

Chapters 2 and 3 describe the history of the University of Maryland system through the 1930s and '40s, noting the second Morrill Act of 1890, which required that any state receiving federal funding for a land-grant university closed to non-White students create a second facility for its minority citizens. This case study compares the College Park flagship campus for White students with its isolated Eastern Shore site maintained for Black students. Slaton describes how Harry Clifton ("Curly") Byrd, president of the Maryland system from 1936 to 1954, systematically denied resources to the Eastern Shore campus and resisted numerous opportunities to close or consolidate it with Baltimore's Morgan State College, an HBCU.

Slaton explained these efforts as Byrd's attempt to keep African Americans out of urban settings, thereby relegating them to rural-oriented professions that did not (necessarily) require advanced technological education; it also excluded them from opportunities for political and civil engagement. As a result, Eastern Shore, which focused on a rural agricultural curriculum, drained "power" from Baltimore and over Morgan State, both in terms of obtaining state resources and in discouraging rural Blacks from moving to the urban center.

This narrative is further explained through a lens of racial difference, highlighting how ideologies of Black inferiority both promoted and reinforced segregation in policymaking and its enforcement (or lack thereof), institutional enrollment, funding allocations, and academic program development. For much of this period, African American intellectual achievement and leadership were associated with rural endeavors. Furthermore, instances of Black success were disingenuously attributed to individuals as exceptions, thereby establishing an accepted social distance between African Americans and education, and by extension the engineering arena.

Chapters 4 and 5 compare two urban Chicago institutions: the private Illinois Institute of Technology and the public University of Illinois at Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. In this more engineering-specific chapter, the focus is on how these institutions were initially advertised as progressive technical solutions to urban problems (e.g., poverty and blighted neighborhoods). Despite their initial missions to educate a diverse regional population (i.e., IIT) and returning GIs (i.e., UIC) rather than seek national prestige, this case study highlights a departure from the institutions' departures from these respective missions and the evolution of the present two-tiered system in American engineering education: top-tier schools aligned themselves with military and industrial research; lower-tier schools focus on education and social problems.

In addition, the association...