The paradox of “engineering science”-a cold war debate about education in the U.S

During the early years of the Cold War, engineering educators in the United States vigorously debated a rather abstruse topic that, nevertheless, had lasting public policy implications. Did the field called “engineering science”, which the newly formed National Science Foundation (NSF) was chartered to support, indeed exist, and, if it did, how should engineering colleges and the NSF support it? My recounting of the public aspect of this debate (which occurred in articles published in the Journal of Engineering Education and magazines of professional engineering societies from 1945 to 1960) will focus on attempts by prominent engineers and a few scientists to come to terms with a perceived epistemological paradox. Although these groups had defined engineering as the application of science in the first half of the century, the NSF and the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) promoted research and teaching in “engineering science” after the war on the assumption that it represented “basic research in engineering”. This paper raises the historlographic method suggested by O. Mayr (1976) and examines how historical actors themselves defined and used the term “engineering science” rather than appplying the concept of engineering science to the past as an analytic tool