The significance of a liberal arts curriculum for engineering students, for example, has been underscored by recommendations from within the National Academy of Engineering. James Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan and an international figure in engineering education, has argued that professional demands in the various fields of engineering have become sufficiently complex to warrant greater emphasis on broadly based undergraduate preparation in anticipation of subsequent specialization at the graduate level, consistent with professional education in law and medicine.
It is essential that we develop in our students the ability to understand the complexity and interrelatedness of our cultural, economic, natural, political, social, and technological systems. The point here is that we need all of the skill sets from anthropology to zoology as well as transdisciplinary perspectives to reinvigorate programs in civil engineering. Inspired engineering, in other words, could come as a consequence of familiarity with the development of counterpoint in Baroque music or cell biology. Or even the construction methods of indigenous tribes.