A Centennial of Auburn Engineering: Modern Leadership for the Modern Age of Engineering

In the decades that built up to the turn of the century, the College of Engineering was administered by a progression of leaders who aligned its programs with the changing face of technology, teaching methods, research needs and career opportunities.

Lynn Weaver, a nuclear engineer recruited from Georgia Tech, served from 1982-87, with then-president James E. Martin remarking that Weaver had developed the foundation of a strong engineering college and contributed significantly to Auburn’s development as a research university.

Weaver’s five-year tenure is remembered as a time of rebuilding and change of direction for the college. By the time he resigned to become president of the Florida Institute of Technology in 1987, Auburn Engineering had nearly doubled postgraduate enrollments to 11 percent of the student body.

Weaver’s tenure was also marked by the creation of a new academic program that recognized the growing importance of computer technology. Before that time, Auburn’s first computer courses were administered by a committee made up of representatives from many departments.

That changed during the early ’80s, when administrators determined that a new academic program was needed and that it should reside in the College of Engineering. Dave Irwin, who was electrical engineering department head at the time, was asked to create the program.

“When we launched the new program, students signed on in droves,” says Irwin. “We were teaching classes at 7 a.m. to meet demand. The program was spun off into a new department, computer science and engineering, in 1984.”

Following Weaver’s departure, M. Dayne Aldridge was named interim dean. Aldridge was already recognized for a solid record of engineering, academic and administrative experience, and had served as part of the dean’s office for three years.

As assistant dean for research, he coordinated the college’s research programs, which totaled $10.6 million in 1987 — double the amount when he assumed the post in 1984. As associate dean for cross-disciplinary studies, he built on his experience as director of the Thomas Walter Center for Technology Management, which built bridges between engineering and business.

Aldridge’s tenure was followed by the appointment of William F. Walker, chairman of the department of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice University in Houston, as Auburn’s ninth dean of engineering. His timing was propitious. Engineering and pre-engineering enrollment increased in the fall of 1988 for the first time in four years, and the number of women studying engineering grew to 20 percent, compared to about 15 percent of engineering freshmen nationally.

Walker’s tenure as dean was marked by a great deal of effort sustaining the growth of Auburn’s female engineering enrollments, as well as building new inroads to the enhancement of minority engineering programs.

New developments in electrical and computer programs were also changing the face of instruction in response to the nation’s growing reliance on electronic technologies. With guidance from members of the Auburn Alumni Engineering Council, the college’s electrical engineering department became electrical and computer engineering, while computer science and engineering became known as computer science and software engineering.

“The move was a good one, and put Auburn in a leadership position in the area of software engineering,” says Irwin.

They were among several programs that began their evolution under Weaver, and continued to grow during Walker’s years as dean, as he led the college through the ’90s. Walker would later move to the provost’s office and eventually to the institution’s presidency.

ENROLLMENTS GROW IN THE ’80s AND ’90s

During the 1980s, 19 percent of all Auburn graduates received degrees in engineering, second only to the business college. Combined, the two colleges accounted for 42 percent of all graduates, compared with 33 percent during the 1970s. While the College of Engineering emphasized research and postgraduate education under Weaver and Walker, undergraduate education remained the key mission and represented the majority of its students.

In June 1993, Larry Benefield, who was named by Walker as associate dean for academics, noted that the college had grown to the point where it was tenth in the number of bachelor’s degrees produced in the nation, and fifteenth in enrollment at the undergraduate level.

However, the college sought quality as well as quantity. With only 20 percent of the student body, engineering students represented 40 percent of Auburn’s honor students during the 1992 academic year, a trend which has continued to grow, even today. With engineering starting salaries among the highest for new college graduates, and with a strong outlook for employment in most areas, the pipeline of engineering applicants grew.

“Auburn had begun to develop a reputation as one of the premier engineering institutions in the Southeast,” said Benefield, adding, “We were beginning to develop a national presence, something we had already accomplished to a significant extent in our research programs.”

Like his predecessors, Walker was faced with funding problems that he felt compromised Auburn’s plans to move the college to greater recognition as one of the nation’s best programs. However, unlike them, he was much more aggressive in seeking private financial support.

At the beginning of his administration, only 1,216 of Auburn’s 26,000 engineering alumni contributed to the college; they gave a bit more than $300,000, not including another $1.1 million in corporate support. By the end of the 1990 academic year, just two years into his administration, donations to the College of Engineering increased to $2 million, including $660,000 from alumni and friends.

With increasing private support and ongoing engineering construction, the perennial issue of engineering accreditation faded into the background. ABET, the accreditation board for engineering and technology, visited campus to review five curricula in August 1989, and in August 1990, reaccredited all five for an additional three years.

The accreditation agency noted in its report that “a great deal has been done to improve the engineering programs at Auburn University since the last visit in 1986.” They also wrote, “new construction and renovations have improved the laboratory and classroom space problems in most departments, and new computer and other laboratory equipment have been acquired.”

ALUMNI SUPPORT BECOMES CRUCIAL

The university began a major fundraising effort, called “Campaign Auburn: the Next Generation,” in 1994 with a goal of $175 million; when the campaign officially ended in December 1996, the final total exceeded $200 million, and Auburn Engineering shared in its benefits.

As was normal practice, the university initially relied on a small cadre of major donors to kick off the fundraising effort before announcing it publicly. Earle C. Williams ’51, an electrical engineering graduate, was campaign chairman, with John M. Harbert III, ’46 civil engineering, and Ben S. Gilmer, ’26 electrical engineering, serving as honorary chairmen — all three quite successful in business.

However, with Fob James’ return to Montgomery as governor in 1995, the state legislature reduced appropriations for higher education by 7.5 percent, taking Auburn’s budget back to almost the same level as in 1993. Indeed, as it related to state appropriations, the university had flat or lower state funding each year during the first half of the 1990s. As a result, the president cut staff, instituted a hiring freeze and offered early retirements. Most cuts came in administrative and support areas, while academic units experienced small reductions. The president also eliminated overlapping and underutilized curricula, and consolidated smaller programs, which led to vigorous debate.

Brick by brick: Auburn dedicated the John M. Harbert III Engineering Center on April 4, 1986, and a year later Auburn’s Board of Trustees allocated $7.5 million from a state bond issue for the construction of a new aerospace engineering building. Constructed as a second phase of the center, groundbreaking took place on April 29, 1989, in a ceremony punctuated by an F-16 flyover. The building was renamed in 2007 as Charles E. Davis Aerospace Engineering Hall. Despite these additions, the college again found itself short of space. During the summer of 1993, Dean Walker requested nearly $10 million for a major renovation of Wilmore Laboratories, but with tight budgets, construction funding was difficult. Relief would come when the university received a $2 million National Science Foundation renovation grant to make Wilmore “a modern, safe research and teaching engineering facility.” The university committed an initial $2 million to match the NSF grant, a course fee raised $1.7 million, and alumni and corporate donations accounted for another $2.2 million. The building was rededicated in a ceremony in the fall of 1997, with the total project cost at some $12 million; the administration had to rely on additional university funding and alumni donations to close the gap in funding.

PRESSING ISSUE OF FUNDING

Throughout three academic years from 1995 to 1997, state appropriations for higher education in Alabama declined by 6 percent. During the same period, all other southern states increased appropriations for higher education, ranging from a low of 4 percent in Tennessee to a high of 19 percent in Florida, while Georgia increased its appropriations by 11 percent. Auburn continued to suffer financially, leading the dean to write, “Three years ago the College of Engineering stood on the brink of becoming one of the nation’s leading engineering programs. We had the faculty. We had the students. Our facilities, particularly in terms of computing, were making the kind of strides that needed to be made to reach the goals we had placed before ourselves.”

But despite its inability to compete for students with scholarships, cutbacks in student recruiting, faculty salaries that failed to keep pace with other institutions in the region and funding cutbacks for new equipment and facilities, the College of Engineering found ways to stay competitive.

Walker remained concerned about adequate funding for the college, and was quick to point out that many people did not recognize that more than half of Alabama’s economy depended on “manufacturing, space-related research, aerospace production and emerging high-tech industries.”

The college ranked high in a number of measures. In 1996, Auburn awarded more than half of the engineering degrees conferred in the state of Alabama. Auburn’s program was second only to the United States Naval Academy in preparing officers for the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, and it ranked tenth nationally in the number of engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded.

Between 1987 and 1996, a ten-year period, the College of Engineering’s budgets totaled $264 million, and only 30 percent — or $79 million — came from state appropriations. Research expenditures exceeded $114 million during that period. During the same decade, 41 percent of Auburn’s honor students studied engineering, a clear indication that despite obstacles, the quality of Auburn’s engineering students had not diminished.

With the American economy in a technology bubble in the late 1990s, employment opportunities for engineering graduates improved, and so did engineering starting salaries. Falling faculty salaries and rising industry salaries, along with a decline in the amount of funding available for fellowships, caused Auburn to again experience a situation similar to that of the 1960s, when new graduates received higher salaries than some of their professors. The demand for engineers also caused graduate student enrollment to decline slightly, as students saw the opportunity for immediate and lucrative careers.

BEGINNING A NEW CENTURY

In September 1998, Benefield became interim dean of engineering and then dean in April 2000. He quickly established a goal of elevating the College of Engineering to one of the top engineering programs in the country. Benefield saw a number of benefits from raising the profile of the College of Engineering among peers in the region, as well as on a national basis. The most obvious was that higher rankings would bring more respect to the college’s academic programs, and make its graduates more sought after in the job market.

But he saw other benefits as well, including the role that Auburn Engineering could play in attracting high-tech industries to Alabama. This would, he hoped, motivate state leaders to support increased funding for higher education and help grow the state’s economy. The impact that Benefield’s leadership brought to Auburn is a story for another day, but it should be noted that his track record has been one of impressive gains in the development of the College of Engineering.

From mainframes to minicomputers: If it takes more than a blink of an eye to pull up a piece of data, run an algorithm or check a spreadsheet, it must be time to buy a new computer. If the internet goes down, you might as well go home for the day.

That’s how we roll now. But only a generation ago, the typical Auburn Engineering student, or professor, would key in a data stack on punch cards, walk it over to the L-Building or Parker Hall, and pick up the results the next morning. Numerical analysis was done on IBM mainframes, and the output was reams and reams of tractor paper. There were no CRT displays much less gooeys (GUIs). But when integrated circuits and microprocessors came onto the scene in the ’70s, things began to change, and change fast. Auburn Engineering jumped on board quickly, with HP, DEC and Harris minicomputers that let users key in programs and receive results on a screen instead of a printout. But even the term minicomputer was relative; the Harris Super mini took up most of a lab in Wilmore.

The first PCs came to the college in the mid ’80s and were incredibly slow compared to mainframes and minis — but there was no waiting in line, the machine was yours. Of course, the PC developed quickly, but it lacked the interconnectivity of a network, which is hard to imagine now. The solution for Auburn Engineering was to invest in several hundred SUN workstations and establish the university’s first network. The SUNs were significantly more powerful than PCs, allowed engineers to design and test increasingly sophisticated models and also made use of 3D imaging. During the ’90s, the college purchased powerful SUN servers that allowed for even faster design and testing of physical models. By the late ’90s, PCs had caught up to SUN in processing speeds, but not interconnectivity. That changed in the early 2000s, when much of the software that had been the domain of DEC, SUN and Silicon Graphics was ported to Windows XP running on inexpensive PCs. Linux had replaced Solaris (SUN’s operating system) by the end of the decade, and Intel based servers began to run the college’s data, email, web and FTP network disk storage functions.

Students are now using smartphones, tablets and pads, even though they all own laptops as well. And while comparing speeds can be problematic — a program may run fast on one machine, and dog along on another — in the raw world of millions of instructions per second, or MIPs, the IBM mainframes discussed earlier ran at about 1 MIP. In 2009, Auburn Engineering acquired a computer cluster with 128 Intel quad core processors capable of performing 5.725 teraflops, or a trillion floating point operations per second. Thirty years from now that will seem incredibly slow, and we will all wonder how we got along.

This article has been adapted from chapters of a manuscript by alum Art Slotkin, ’68 aerospace, detailing the history of Auburn Engineering, from its founding in 1869 to its establishment as a college in 1908 and into the modern age of engineering that we know today.