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Herbst Program founding donor Clancy Herbst chats with students in the living room of the Lesser House during a party in 2016.

The Herbst Program of Humanities in Engineering was launched 30 years ago through the vision and generosity of donors Clancy and Linda (Vitti) Herbst. Since then, the Herbst Program has been helping engineering students develop the non-technical skills and sensibilities crucial to their future engineering careers. 

Among the skills are precise writing, critical thinking and negotiating open-ended questions — all essential to effective engineering practice. Among the sensibilities are self-awareness and ethical responsibility, which are essential to life-long integrity, both private and professional. 

Herbst courses, which count toward engineering students’ humanities and social sciences credits, include seminars in literature and philosophy, as well as lecture courses in fields such as engineering history, the ethics of bio-engineering and the meaning of information technology. These courses challenge engineering students to apply their intellectual rigor beyond their technical courses — to the ethical and social complexities of being human and of being engineers.    

Until now, the program has been known by the humanities, the discipline from which so many of its texts come. Going forward, the program will be known by the complexities for which it prepares students. The Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics and Society indicates that Herbst courses consider the various intersections among these three fields: 

• Engineering (education, practice, and perspective)
• Ethics (considered not as an academic discipline but as a personal responsibility)
• Society (or the socio-cultural context within which personal and professional lives are lived) 

The Herbst faculty and the Herbsts themselves fully endorse this change. We all believe that the program’s new name will help students, faculty and administration understand what we do and why we do it. Incidentally, our course prefix will change, too (from HUEN to ENES), but that will not be effective until spring 2020. 

Many thanks to Dean Bobby Braun for his strong support of the Herbst Program and of its mission within the College of Engineering and Applied Science. And here’s to the next 30 years! 

Leland Giovannelli is the director of the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics and Society. She started teaching in the program in 1989 – its first year of operation.