BuIlding better engineers

Kevin Craig joined Marquette as the Greenheck Chair in Engineering Design, an endowed chair funded last year by alumnus Robert Greenheck. Craig spent the past 18 years teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and consulting with companies such as Xerox, Proctor & Gamble and Dade Behring. He is a leading proponent and practitioner of mechatronics, which is the integration of engineering disciplines throughout the design process. Craig effuses enthusiasm for engineering education and the Jesuit tradition. Here he talks about why he chose to come to Marquette and how engineering education must change.

interview By anne broeker  Photography by dan dry

Q What excites you most
about Marquette?
Marquette engineering under the leadership of Opus Dean Stan Jaskolski is on a path to become the premier engineering college in the nation with that elusive balance between education and research missing in so many institutions today. It doesn’t get any more exciting than that.

There are events in one’s life that bring about a dramatic change, a transformation. I attended Xavier High School, a Jesuit high school in New York City. I began to understand what it meant to be a follower of Jesus Christ, to try to live a life of service to others. I kept Xavier close to my heart. In a sense, it was home. It was where I became a man, a Christian man. Now I am moving west to Marquette University but in a very real sense, I am coming home. I feel all I have done in my life has been in preparation for this task. I am grateful, excited and enthusiastically optimistic.

Q How do you teach engineering design?
As engineering educators, we face daunting challenges. Rote memorization has replaced understanding. Students focus on facts, tests and grades, and fail to understand concepts and processes. They are unable to integrate knowledge, processes, techniques and tools — both hardware and software — to solve an engineering problem. This persists in practicing engineers and represents a national crisis.

The problems the world faces are multidisciplinary in nature and require a multidisciplinary engineering systems approach to solve. That’s engineering design. Multidisciplinary engineering systems have as integral parts electronics, computers and controls. Performance, reliability, low cost, robustness and sustainability (the ability of a generation to meet its needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs) are absolutely essential. Engineers have to understand all of that.

Q What questions does engineering face today?
There are two compelling questions the engineering profession faces: How can engineering educators best transform students into engineers poised to solve the problems of the 21st century? How can a company transform itself to successfully design multidisciplinary engineering systems? Nothing less than dramatic change will do.

This is the vision of Dean Jaskolski. Changing culture is the most difficult challenge for any leader. I think you first have to set a seemingly impossible goal. Amazing things happen when people claim responsibility for creating the impossible. In 1961, when President John Kennedy called the nation to put a man on the moon, he didn’t know how. But his vision was so compelling, his expectations of the American people so high — that they drove the moon shot well after he died.

Q Do your strong ties to industry affect how you teach?
I believe that only through industrial interaction and knowing the types of problems engineers face — the concepts, processes and tools they use to solve those problems, and the personal and professional attributes essential to be an engineering leader — can we develop engineering curricula to transform our students. A key element for success as an engineer is achieving a balance between theory and practice, between modeling/analysis and experimentation/hardware implementation. Students need to be shown the difference between studying engineering and becoming engineers. They need to take a shared responsibility for their education. They need to take an active role and embrace knowledge, make it a part of their being. Only then will they become engineers. A transformation is also required for teachers. Teachers must be more than the “sage on the stage.” At a university, it must always be about the students. We are the “guides on the side.” It can never be about what we know.

Q What is your proudest accomplishment?
“Who I am, and who others are because of me, is the ultimate measure of my life.” These words written by Antony Campbell, S.J., say it all. Accepting God’s unconditional love as we are and responding to that love is the key to life. My greatest accomplishment is that I try to respond to God’s love every day of my life.

Q How do you balance your faith with science?
Last fall the Catholic Newman Fellowship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute honored faculty they considered role models for students. I was one of the faculty selected; I was also asked to be the homilist at the Mass of celebration. This exceeded any honor, academic or athletic, I had ever been accorded. As November 15 was the feast day of St. Albertus Magnus, the patron of science, I chose my homily topic as “Faith, Reason and the God Who Won’t Let Go.”

Web Exclusive: Read Craig’s homily.