A Centennial of Auburn Engineering:
From Red Clay to Red Satellite
Continued...

In 1944, Duncan promoted Hannum to dean of engineering and director of the Engineering Extension Station. Shortly after Duncan appointed him, the dean sat down with the head professors of each engineering department because, as he wrote, “An entirely new day was dawning in engineering education.” The dean and faculty set out to work “continuously for six months until API’s engineering curricula had been redesigned to meet postwar needs.”

The 1944 Catalogue reflected the changed attitude about women brought about by the war, and urged them to “enter courses affording training for the critical occupations.” Women responded and enrolled in engineering and aviation management. However, besides the traditional curricula targeted at women, such as home economics and education, the college added courses in “Red Cross Sewing and Knitting, Canteen Hostess and Pattern Making,” alongside other courses in “Foundry, Machine Shop and Welding.”

With the end of the war approaching, the School of Engineering reorganized into five engineering degree granting departments – aeronautical, civil, electrical, industrial and mechanical engineering – and two management degree granting programs – aviation and industrial management. The department of textile engineering became the “School of Textile Technology,” although it remained a part of the School of Engineering and offered degrees in textile chemistry and textile engineering. The Auburn School of Aviation separated from the Department of Aeronautical Engineering and the Department of Industrial Management separated from the Department of Industrial Engineering. Indeed, industrial engineering ceased to be a department in 1945, only to reopen later.

By the winter quarter of 1946, there were 1,600 veterans enrolled and soon, in addition to 194 temporary apartments for married students and faculty, temporary buildings included 15 two-story dormitories for men and 13 classroom buildings, two cafeterias, a supply store and pharmacy laboratory. New temporary, semi-temporary and permanent buildings covered the campus and one student who graduated in 1952 recalled taking freshman English in 1948 in a temporary building located outside the Alumni Gymnasium, where the Foy building is located today. Auburn enrollment during the 1946 academic year grew to almost 5,500 students, with more than a quarter of them being women. Engineering enrollment increased to a third of the total student body including 33 women and eighty-five percent of the engineering students were freshmen or sophomores, leaving only 15 percent in the two upper classes, a remnant of the low enrollment during the war.

Moreover, the veterans attending Auburn under the G.I. Bill were quite interested in learning. Some of them had college training before the war; many had some technical training in the military. Many more had some engineering experience in the military. They had relatively good backgrounds and were serious students. One professor said, “It was a challenge teaching them because they did their homework and they weren’t interested in anything but really learning fast so they could make up for the time they’d lost in the military.” The boom of the postwar years would not end with the returning World War II veterans, however.

Cheering students gather in the football stadium to celebrate the end of the war.

By 1950, Auburn began to resemble the pre-war period when young men and some young women dominated the college and the town. However, America was soon at war again and the graduation of World War II veterans, combined with the mobilization for the Korean War, meant fewer students. As registration for the fall quarter of 1952 began, it became apparent that enrollment would increase with returning Korean War veterans.

The Auburn Graduate Placement Service said that the average engineering graduate in June 1953 interviewed with “eight or ten companies . . . from all sections of the country.” However, while undergraduate engineering enrollment exploded, there were few graduate students in engineering because there was no money for research or fellowships and no member of the engineering faculty held a doctorate at that time.

Three years before Sputnik, as the Cold War heated up, a report from the National Research Council published in the Auburn Engineer said, “America is rapidly falling behind Russia in the race to produce engineers.” While 19,000 engineers graduated in the United States in 1954, the USSR graduated more than 50,000.

The fear of losing technological superiority to the Soviet Union continued as a theme in science and engineering circles but without state funding, Auburn’s engineering school fell further and further behind. Between 1951 and 1955, enrollment grew by 76 percent, but the dean was unable to add faculty.

In 1956, enrollment increased again and it was noted that “the pressures of enrollment have not been distributed equally among the schools, and most of the increase has been in the School of Engineering,” which grew by a factor of two and a half since 1951. This caused problems in obtaining qualified engineering faculty, equipment and supplies necessary to satisfy the rapid growth. With inadequate funding and increasing enrollment, the School of Engineering found itself in an untenable position. All of it came to a head with several significant events in 1957.

In October of that year, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, a small, unmanned satellite, which most Americans saw as a direct threat to national security. Then, just after Auburn won the Associated Press national football championship poll, the Engineers Council for Professional Development informed the institute that they “temporarily withdrew” accreditation for the electricaland mechanical engineering curricula, precipitating a crisis at Auburn.

The action came about because teaching loads were “considered excessive” and faculty salaries“too low in the judgment of the council,” conditionswhich had existed since 1949. The national press howled at Auburn’s loss of engineering accreditation at a time when it won the national football championship and they accused API and the state of Alabama of having more interest in football than in academics. What came to be Auburn’s “engineering crisis” led to soul searching and major changes at the School of Engineering – changes that we will look at when we resume the final segment of the history of Auburn Engineering. It goes without saying that Auburn pulled itself up by its bootstraps.

Administration, faculty, students and alumni did what it took to move back into accreditation as one of the most celebrated engineering programs in the Southeast and the nation. It is a story of guts and glory, of advances and retreats and amazing determination in the ebb and flow of recent history. Most of all, it is a story about the students who became the engineers that ushered the country into a newfound period of economic gain, space exploration and increased appreciation of the role of engineering in our society.

The next installment of “A Centennial of Auburn Engineering” will be featured in the fall/ winter 2011 issue of Auburn Engineering. We will continue to explore the evolution of the college and a number of its successes, as well as its challenges, which were met with an unyielding resolve to achieve progress.

This article has been adapted from chapters of a manuscript detailing the history of Auburn Engineering, from its founding in 1869 to its establishment as a college in 1909 and into the modern age of engineering that we know today.

Auburn alum Art Slotkin is a 1968 aerospace engineering graduate with a master’s in civil engineering and flight structures from Columbia University. After a diverse career, he retired from the computer services industry in 2003. He then attended Georgia Tech to obtain a master’s in sociology and history of technology and science. Slotkin has conducted much of the research for his book and this article in the Auburn University Library, Archives and Special Collections Department, with help from the university’s professional team of archivists.

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