"Back in the day", I went to UMR. It could go back to being the School of Mines and Metallurgy.
I'm guessing you already know that what was once the University of Missouri at Rolla is now known as “Missouri University of Science and Technology.” I live a half-hour away from Rolla.
12 posted on Wed Jan 09 2013 15:57:26 GMT-0600 (Central Standard Time) by Da Coyote: “I really think it’s time for the science/engineering group to break from all universities and start their own colleges. That way, titles such ‘PhD and Professor’ and other terms normally associated with true intellect will not be wrongly appropriated by members of the university ‘we wouldn’t have any jobs at all were it not for tenure’ group. And Clown Group is truly what they have all become.”
On the broader issue being raised of technical versus liberal arts training, let's not forget that many of the Founding Fathers were highly educated men and many of them had an education in what we would today call “liberal arts.”
I personally think conservative professors at conservative colleges need to give up on trying to redeem the term “liberal arts” — I understand its etymology, but it's gone, just like “gay” or “comrade” — and come up with a new term such as “Foundational Principles of Classical Western Civilization” which avoids unnecessary misunderstandings within conservative circles while making clear to liberals what is being taught, and why.
There is no way we would have our Constitution today without having highly educated men in the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and many of the state legislatures who understood the history of Greece, Rome, British common law, and (at that time) nearly a millennium and a half of Christian civilization in Europe.
I totally agree that our professors of history, government, English, sociology, and other non-technological fields have gotten seriously off-track, but teaching people the history of Western Civilization is not a two-day process.
I also totally agree we need good engineering schools. But the last thing we want is a government filled with highly skilled engineers who think every problem in the world can be solved with a calculator or a laptop computer. That's great for building bridges, but not for building a government. Do we really want lots of engineers who know how to build things but don't ask the “why” questions of whether the thing being built should be built? I suspect there are a lot of victims of eminent domain who lost their private property to have something built on it because some city council somewhere didn't understand the important principle that private property is only to be taken for public purposes, and those public purposes are historically **VERY** limited, regardless of what the abuses our Supreme Court now allows.
The proper solution is to get a lot more private conservative colleges on a model of Hillsdale, and their equivalents in the evangelical Protestant and traditional Roman Catholic college world.