tce

OPINION

Sean Moran argues there is something rotten in the state of chemical

engineering education

hen I discuss the quality of

graduate chemical engineers with
other experienced engineers,
they all bemoan their lack of engineering
knowledge, their lack of feel for numbers,
process and equipment.
They tell me universities are turning out
engineers with no idea of what chemical
engineers do, who cant read a P+ID, have
never seen a layout drawing, and think
scientific research is the foundation of
engineering practice.
These graduates in chemical engineering
may have been given a sound scientific and
mathematical education, and have been
trained in all of the skills necessary to follow
in the footsteps of their teachers, but their
teachers were not chemical engineers. They

As practising engineers,
we have failed in our duty
of oversight of chemical
engineering education.
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have been taught to be scientific researchers

like the people who now staff our Chemical
Engineering departments.
As practicing engineers, we have failed
in our duty of oversight of chemical
engineering education, so comprehensively
that this wrongheaded approach is now the
entrenched norm in academia.

the core of the problem

There is now profound confusion in
academia between science, engineering
science and engineering; practice and
research; engineers and scientists. This is
both the cause of and the consequence of a
circular self-reinforcing problem:
In order to enhance their research profile,
university departments have employed
people carrying out the scientific research
published in high impact journals.
Universities specify a PhD and publications
as a requirement for the most junior
lectureship. The overwhelming majority of
such candidates have first degrees in science,
not engineering.
There is however no mechanism to employ

www.tcetoday.com march 2015

a proportion of staff who have significant

experience as engineering practitioners and
even if there were, a lack of understanding of
and respect for professional knowledge, and
a large difference in pay make recruitment of
practitioners more or less impossible.
What is the confusion? Firstly, lets
differentiate between pure and applied maths,
science, engineering science and engineering:
Mathematics is a human construction, with
no empirical foundation. It is made of ideas,
and has nothing to do with reality. It is only
true within its own conventions. There is
no such thing in nature as a true circle, and
even arithmetic (despite its great utility) is not
empirically based.
Applied mathematics uses maths to address
some real problem. This is the way engineers
use mathematics, but many engineers use
English too. Engineering is no more applied
mathematics than it is applied English.
Natural science tries to understand natural
phenomena. The activity is rather less rigid
than philosophers of science would have us
believe, but it is about explaining and perhaps
predicting natural phenomena.

CAREERS
OPINION tce
Applied science applies natural scientific
principles to solve some real world problem.
Engineers might do this, (though mostly they
dont) but that doesnt make it engineering,
more related to technology.
Engineering science is the application
of scientific principles to the study of
engineering artefacts. The classic example of
this is thermodynamics, invented to explain
the steam engine, which was developed
empirically without supporting theory.
This is the kind of science which engineers
tend to apply. It is the product of the
application of science to the things engineers
work with, artificial constructions rather
thannature.
Engineering is completely different from
all preceding categories. It is the profession
of imagining and bringing into being a
completely new artefact which safely,
cost effectively and robustly achieves a
specifiedaim.
The role of an academic engineer tends to
include all but this last crucial category.
As one of the few people working in both
fields, I am clear that Engineering Practitioner
and University Professor are thus very
different professions, requiring different skills,
training and experience.
We may hold university lecturers in high
esteem, but we have been foolish to give
them our highest grades of institutional
membership without the relevant
qualifications and experience, as this has
removed a number of checks and balances
onengineering education.

guidelines for masters but thisis taken by

academics to mean scientific research. I
am not aware of anywhere interpreting this
as meaning advancing towards a greater
understanding of chemical engineering
practice. Engineering is a practical profession,
advanced almost entirely through practice
rather than research.

checks and balances 2:

chartered engineers

I am clear that Chartered

practising chemical engineer
and university professor are
very different professions,
requiring different skills,
training and experience.

Chartered engineers are supposed to be

completely aligned under the Washington
accord with the requirements for professional
engineers in countries where the use of the
word engineer is regulated by law. This
means for chemical engineers that they are
supposed to have a level of education and
experience which makes them competent
plant designers, or supervisors of plant
operation. No amount of research and
teaching will make you a PE in the US.
When I was first chartered, there was little
point in submitting an application for CEng
unless you had an accredited degree in
chemical engineering, and could demonstrate
application of safety principles on full scale
plant, and design or operation of full scale
plant. All other experience (including any
amount of teaching or research) fell into the
optional other category. We understood then
that the job of a university lecturer, (whilst
estimable) was not the job of an engineer.
The Chartered engineers IChemE are
counting in University departments are mostly

checks and balances 1:

engineers

The scientists who make up the majority of

UK chemical engineering department staff
run pure scientific research PhDs whose
recipients are considered to have a degree
in chemical engineering - these PhDs
themselves become university lecturers,
despite their having no training or experience
in chemical engineering, and so it goes.
So many of our academic engineers are
really scientists. That they are not engineers
does not, however, prevent them nowadays
from becoming Chartered Engineers.
The Masters year which is now required to
become chartered is largely about research.
The phrase advanced chemical engineering
is used throughout the accreditation

There is confusion in
academia of the difference
between science, engineering
science, and engineering; and
practice and research.

Scientific research does not underpin engineering, which is a practcial profession advanced
entirely through practice
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tce

OPINION

Scientists and academics

are being allowed to become
Chartered engineers despite
not having experience in
safety, plant design and
operation.

people who would not have been allowed to

carry the title twenty years ago. In addition,
since the introduction of a little-known senior
route to institution fellowship for academics
(skipping MIChemE but incorporating CEng)
an academic scientist could now easily hold a
higher grade of membership than a Principal
Engineer. In fact, it has arguably become
easier to reach FIChemE status with an
academic background than as a practitioner.
Such Chartered Engineers are no defence
against loss of focus on core chemical
engineering, and they can in fact work to
counter the input of any engineers present as
if they were equals.
This measure, which was presumably taken
to acknowledge our esteem for educators,
has instead made them lose esteem for our
professional knowledge and experience,
making it even harder for practitioners to
enter academia.

checks and balances 3:

accreditation

Accreditation teams have some difficulty

finding what they call industrialists (aka
engineers) to serve on their visit teams and
committees, and any who are present will
be greatly outnumbered by academics.
Our university accreditation guidelines
are consequently policed largely by nonpractitioners, and we have lost much of our
ability to correct misinterpretations by non-

engineers of the guidelines.

This is important, because misinterpretation
is rife. What many outside academia do
not realise is that, in a modularised degree,
individual module conveners can interpret
the guidelines any way they please. A green
PhD graduate in a completely unrelated
field has the right to decide what they want
to teach, and no obligation to understand its
context either within the overall course, or as
part of the academic formation of a chartered
chemical engineer. It is therefore possible
for a degree course to meet the accreditation
guidelines at module level without any
systematic coherent vision.

checks and balances 4:

industrial partners

checks and balances 5:

institution leadership

Universities often have an industrial panel of

some kind to advise on curriculum changes
etc. It is however in my experience usually the
case that the people on this panel are selected
from companies with which the staff have
research links . Rather than being designers
or operators of process plants, they are
frequently researchers who happen to work in
a privately funded lab instead of a university
one. They are exactly the same kind of people
as the academics, and they are working in
collaboration with them in other spheres. This
is not a proper oversight mechanism.

I am grateful that non-engineers have stepped

in to fill the leadership positions within
the IChemE which it seems professional
engineers are too busy to take up, and I wish
to cast no slur on their abilities, education
and contribution to academia, but this state of
affairs has consequences.
Without engineering practitioners in
leadership roles, how can IChemE maintain
credibility and alignment with what is
internationally understood to be the proper
role of a chemical engineer?
So what have been the consequences of
allowing research scientists to take over the
education of engineers?

consequences 1:
the fundamentals

Please sir, am I becoming an engineer?

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Most of the academics I talk to (and I talk

to a lot) think that engineering just is an
unintelligent application of natural science
and pure mathematics, and that they
are as scientists in possession of a better
understanding of the fundamentals of our
profession than we practitioners. To quote the
Big Bang Theory, they think that engineers are
just the oompa-loompas of science.
They interpret the IChemEs requirement to
teach underpinning science as a requirement
to teach their purer subjects, and consider

consequences 2: research
practice replaces
engineering practice
I regularly see lab and academic research
skills being represented as transferable
skills, as if engineers ever donned a white
coat again after leaving university.
This is the foundation of the MEng
year, but the research done in university
departments by non-engineers had nothing
at all to do with engineering practice. Which
practitioner ever said this problem is too
hard for us, lets go ask our old university
professor how to do it?

consequences 3:
entrenchment of error
We have changed IChemE rules to favour
the academics who largely staff our
committees and secretariat. Academic
scientists are overrepresented in SIGs and
committees as practitioners do not have the
paid time to serve on committees so which
academics do. Neither are we generally as
keen on committees as they are.
We have removed the checks and balances
which prevented university curricula
from drifting too far from the needs of the
profession, and we have replaced those
who should be guarding the guardians with
those who should be overseen.
The ultimate consequence of IChemE
rules being changed unwisely is that
scientists and researchers now hold many
key IChemE leadership positions, and are
inclined to support changes which favour
people like themselves. They are only
human, and this is how humans are.
All of these effects combine so that the
overwhelming majority of UK university
chemical engineering department staff
have no idea what chemical engineering
is about, (though being academics they
may well hold strong opinions on what
it is/should be) and there is no longer
any effective mechanism to correct their
misunderstandings.
What do academics think of this
viewpoint? If backed into a corner, a few
common arguments come out. These are
all what philosophers call straw men, and
engineers call something less polite.

m
gu

:
ent 1

the need to teach

underpinning science

We do indeed need to do this, but natural

science and pure maths do not underpin
engineering. We may need to teach some of
these subjects early in the course in order
to get students ready to learn engineering
science and professional practice, but this
is the equivalent of pre-clinical medical
education.

visiting engineers as a source of an amusing

anecdotal sideshow by someone who
doesnt really understand the basics of his
own subject.
To quote a UK academic on this subject
Industrial input is a valued optional extra.
Most practitioners are great at telling tales,
but cant be relied on providing the, yes,
scientific backbone that differentiates a good
graduate from a plant operator, technician
or draftsman.

CAREERS
OPINION tce

rg

e
um

Chemical engineering is quite

a challenging profession. We
might make it look easy in
a way which might confuse
people with no relevant
qualifications or experience,
but if it really was easy, it
wouldnt be the second-best
paid profession in the UK,
wouldit?

nt 2:

We are educating
engineers, not providing
industrial training for
technicians

This argument reliably comes out as soon as I

propose to academics putting practice at the
heart of the curriculum. They dont mind a
visiting industrialist amusing the students
with a few anecdotes, but the idea that an
engineer might know more about engineering
than a non-engineer with an academic title is
a mortal insult.
There is in academia the commonly held
idea that the natural sciences and pure maths
are cleverer than engineering practice as if,
having jumped through the hoops which
clever academics held out to us, the rest of our
careers were a long slow intellectual decline.
Of course such an idea is only tenable by
people with no significant experience of
practice - chemical engineering is quite a
challenging profession. We might make it look
easy in a way which might confuse people with
no relevant qualifications or experience, but
if it really was easy, it wouldnt be the second
best paid profession in the UK, would it?
This is my call to arms: we need to look at
redefining what constitutes Chartership - and
indeed Fellowship but with the emphasis
on realigning CEng with PE. The practising
engineers among us also need to get more
active in the institution. More of us must
volunteer to help IChemE turn around the
future education and careers of the next
generation of chemical engineers. Leaving
it to academics turns out to have been a
graveerror. tce

Sean Moran (xxxemail) is xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

at xxxxxxxxxxx

Chemical Engineering Matters

The topics discussed in this article refer to the
following lines on the vistas of IChemEs technical
strategy document Chemical Engineering Matters:

Health and wellbeing

Lines 14, 26

Visit www.icheme.org/vistas2 to discover where

this article and your own activities fit into the myriad
of grand challenges facing chemical engineers

march 2015 www.tcetoday.com

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