In 1906, Anson Marston, dean of engineering at Iowa State College, assert ing that a new six-year degree program in his division ranked on a par with the college's curricula in law and medicine, claimed for his intellectual prog eny membership in" a great learned profession." In the same year Charles Dudley, the prominent industrial chemist, exhorted engineering instructors to avoid overemphasizing" accumulated information" in their teaching to the" neglect of underlying principle and reason." Technical work, these men suggested, was rarified mental labor. A consulting engineer put it simply in 1915:" And who has to think more deeply than the engineer?" 1 Strange, then, to find that from 1900 onward, graduates of prestigious American engineering schools commonly left the tidy confines of the labo ratory for grittier environs: the dust and smoke of the modern concrete construction site. 2 Outwardly the work bore little resemblance to the white