<p>JHS, I understand what you are saying in your second paragraph, and that’s why a state-U style or even MIT-style Engineering program would clearly not be a good fit at Chicago. </p>
<p>But other solidly liberal-arts colleges like Princeton (no Business School! no Law School! no Medical School!) and Columbia (the “other” institution with a Core, though Engineering students get an abbreviated version) manage to have respectable Engineering programs. And then there is Swarthmore. Even Smith! Smith! They, too, deeply embrace liberal arts values along with an aversion to vocational training at the undergraduate level. Have they “sold out”, or have they found a way to, if not incorporate Engineering into a liberal arts education, at least make them coexist peacefully?</p>
<p>It is a pet peeve of mine when people narrow-mindedly think that the liberal arts include only humanities, not the sciences, as in “my daughter is a liberal arts type, only likes French and theatre and can’t stand the sciences”. I myself, however, am not sure how Engineering, as an area of human endeavor, can be made to relate to the liberal arts. And I am also trying to figure out exactly by what mechanism some form of Engineering seems quite important to a top-tier institution (other than the empirical observation that, except for Chicago, all other tippy-top institutions have it).</p>