Griffin on The State of Engineering Education

Speech by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin: System Engineering and the Two Cultures of Engineering

"I will be frank. Educators, and I include myself, for I have spent many years as an adjunct professor at various institutions, are far less certain how to teach "generalship" than we are of how to teach the laws of thermodynamics. And yet it is clear that an understanding of the broad issues, the big picture, is so much more influential in determining the ultimate success or failure of an enterprise than is the mastery of any given technical detail. The understanding of the organizational and technical interactions in our systems, emphatically including the human beings who are a part of them, is the present-day frontier of both engineering education and practice."