Engineering and the Liberal Arts

An American civil engineer and vice-president of Kreisler Borg Florman Construction Company, Samuel Florman was influenced personally and professionally by his liberal undergraduate education at Dartmouth College as well as by his graduate studies at Columbia University, where he received an M.A. Florman's first book, Engineering and the Liberal Arts (1968), highlights the importance of a liberal arts education for engineers. As a result of the book's popularity, Florman was invited to speak at universities about the role of technology and engineering in society. During the emergence of science/technology/society studies as an academic field of study in the mid-1970s, Lewis Lapham invited Florman to write a series of articles for Harper's. Between 1976 and 1980, Florman wrote dozens of articles and eventually became a contributing editor at Harper's. He also regularly contributes to Technology Review.

In his subsequent books, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1977) and Blaming Technology (1982), Florman expresses his concern about a growing antitechnological backlash and a decline in the status of engineers. Florman's style eschews bitterness and delightfully conveys his belief that "technological creativity is a wondrous manifestation of the human spirit."

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