If engineering is to be practiced as a profession, and not just a technical craft, engineers must learn to harmonize natural sciences with human values and social organization. To do this we must begin to look at engineering as a social science and to teach, practice, and present engineering in this context.
To many in the profession, looking at teaching engineering as a social science is anathema. But consider the multiple and profound connections of engineering to people.

Looking Back A report on engineering education from the Associated Society of Electric Engineers (ASEE) executive director, 2026 A.D.
For this 35-year anniversary issue of ASEE PRISM, it seems timely to reminisce on the changes in engineering education since our first issue in 1991. Just after the turn of the century, along with the acute political and sociological changes that occurred worldwide, a significant shift took place for intellectual property ownership--one that came to profoundly alter the infrastructure of education generally, and specifically the nature of engineering education.
Gates's Intellectual Property Monopoly
Major research universities concluded that dramatic increases in their endowments would be necessary to weather the dramatic decreases in available federal research funding. Entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates was thus able to successfully conclude his lengthy negotiations with Stanford University and purchase the right to copy the copyright-expired contents of the Stanford University Library along with the rights to Stanford's entire nonresearch-related intellectual repository. The payment to Stanford was estimated to be in the billions of dollars. Based on that coup, after further bargaining with major publishers, Gates established royalty agreements for most copyright titles as well. Using the massive handler-scanner system developed for that purpose, the complete inventory of Stanford intellectual property-theses, journals, books, monographs, artwork--was digitized, creating the Gates/Stanford Library, the largest-ever digitized library of human knowledge.