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Giving Back in a Big Way

With a record gift from engineer-turned-industrialist Henry Rowan, New Jersey's Rowan University has charted a new course in engineering education with its experience-based approach

By Debbie Barsotti

"It's not enough to be knowledgeable in one area," says Dianne Dorland, dean of engineering at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. "The hands-on process our students seek when they come to Rowan enables them to be outstanding practicing engineers. We don't just think engineering, we do engineering." Henry Rowan, the school's namesake, reinforces this when he adds, "We should be teaching people how to build things, how to create real wealth, real jobs."

The "doing" Dorland talks about takes place throughout Rowan University's innovative engineering curriculum, manifested in a unique clinic sequence that has evolved. All this has come about because Rowan transformed his electrical engineering education into a hugely successful company, which allowed him to donate a record $100 million to Glassboro State College. With this, the college created a groundbreaking new engineering school from scratch and became Rowan University.

Beginning with Freshmen Clinic I, and culminating with the Junior/Senior Clinic experience, engineering students are exposed to both theory and practical application. Professor John Schmalzel, who chairs the Engineering Clinic Committee, says, "We want to develop agile technologists who can adapt to new technologies and new situations. They need to ask the right questions, learn quickly, become flexible in their thinking, and take risks."

On a brisk October morning, a group of bleary-eyed freshmen donned hairnets and entered the newest laboratory in Rowan's six-year-old, state-of-the-art engineering building: the Food Processing Lab. Each of the engineering college's six freshmen sections will have their turn here, learning about engineering processes endemic to the food industry. This semester's project, designed by Rowan's chemical engineering professors Kathryn Hollar and Mariano Savelski, is sure to wake the students or at least their taste buds. The lab project will involve enrobing cookies in chocolate.

Quickly, the students realize this is not their grandmother's kitchen. The session begins with an overview of the chocolate manufacturing process and a look at the unique sequence of chemical engineering operations involved. Students become familiar with concepts such as mixing, fluid flow, and temperature control, with the goal to forget about the allure of chocolate and begin to think like engineers. The scope broadens as they consider the industrial processes and how not only chemical engineers, but also electrical, mechanical, and civil engineers play roles in the process and plant.

After being instructed on safety and contamination prevention, the students divide into teams and begin the hands-on (with gloves) part of the lab. Without so much as a lick, they proceed to melt the chocolate and perform the "dip and drip" process of trying to uniformly coat prepackaged-cookies. Now thinking like engineers, team members are responsible for record keeping, measurements, coating, and time keeping. The lab report requires calculating the mass of each cookie before and after dipping, as well as the adjusted nutritional value of the dipped cookie. Teams compare results, noting standard deviations. Then the students are asked to consider other industry concerns: production rate and quality control; economic benefits of waste reduction; consumer demands for uniformity in size and nutritional content; and other aspects of food, pharmaceutical, and similar manufacturing industries. As they attend to the business of consuming the cookies, the students begin to digest the big picture, and they see the role of engineers in industry more clearly than before they smelled the chocolate.

This experiment comes as part of a three-week chem-engineering module. During the semester, each freshman will have similar lab experiences in all four of Rowan's engineering disciplines: chemical engineering, civil and environmental engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering. Chemical engineering professor Stephanie Farrell notes, "Through the clinic structure, the freshmen learn skills not discipline-specific such as teamwork, computer software, ethics, writing, presentations, statistics, and economics."

Ground Floor Opportunity
So how did the industrialist Rowan get to a position where he could singlehandedly finance the creation of a new engineering school like this? After he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from MIT, his career began with Ajax Electrothermic Corporation of Trenton, New Jersey, at the time the world's premier manufacturer of induction melting furnaces. The small company had taken advantage of a new technology to melt metals with electromagnetic fields. Rowan's rise to lofty status wasn't foreseeable when, in 1953, he built the world's most advanced 60-pound induction furnace in his garage. Then in June 1956, a partner convinced Rowan to go into the induction business full time, so he resigned and committed his scant resources but considerable energy to creating Inductotherm Industries. Undaunted, he set to work designing the manufacturing equipment that would create state-of-the-art induction furnaces.

In his book, The Fire Within, Rowan notes that he never wanted a "nice, respectably sized, stable company." Driven by perfectionism and the need to go a little further, Rowan pushed his company, taking risks that eventually forged Inductotherm Industry's fate. Today Rowan, 78, is the chairman and CEO of the world's largest designer and manufacturer of equipment for induction melting, heat treating, and welding. Inductotherm Industries, Inc., based in Rancocas, New Jersey, is a global conglomerate of over 50 high-tech firms that make everything from electromagnetic components to plastics to technical control equipment. He has amassed a net worth reported at $400 million.

As an entrepreneur, Rowan embraced the opportunity to generate jobs and wealth in a community. It was in that spirit that he took on yet another risk. In 1990, Philip Tumminia came to Rowan, soliciting donations for Glassboro State College. Rowan listened as Tumminia talked about the college's development fund that would allow the college to raise its standards to the benefit of the students and the region. That struck a resounding chord with Rowan, as he relished the idea of making a contribution to enhance higher education and impact the economy of the region. That had been his goal for Inductotherm Industries, and he was proud of its contribution to the state's economy, averaging $200 million in annual sales in the state and $3 billion in salaries and expenditures locally.

In 1992, Henry Rowan himself raised the standard by pledging an historic gift of $100 million to Glassboro State College. At that time, this was the largest amount ever given to any public college or university. To honor him for his vision and generosity, the institution changed its name to Rowan College. This gift prompted the new college initiatives that ultimately raised its status to university in 1997. "I had a two-fold interest in Glassboro State College," Rowan explains. "The student body was drawn, in the main, from the state where I had lived and worked almost all my life. It was a state that had been good to me, my family, and to Inductotherm." Rowan also felt that, in one respect, Glassboro was much like his alma mater MIT -- "a no-frills kind of college, a place to roll up your sleeves and get to work."

When Rowan made his gift, he made only two requests. He wanted his gift to be used to establish the best and most forward-looking engineering program that could be designed. And he wanted the college to set up a scholarship fund for the children of Inductotherm employees. His pledge spanned an eleven-year period, beginning with an initial payment of $26 million in 1992. The investment and allocation of those funds is managed by the Rowan University Foundation. The foundation, separate from the university, determines how much goes to university spending and how much to the university endowment each year. By 1996, the foundation had allocated $3.2 million to establish the School of Engineering and enroll its first freshman class.

Real World Skills
"Rowan's program is designed to turn out engineers with communication skills, business skills, interpersonal skills, and self-confidence," says James Tracey, who, in 1994, became the College's founding dean. "Establishing a new engineering program was a golden opportunity to do things differently." He realized that a new program, totally unencumbered by past traditions, could be designed to capture the best elements in engineering education while expanding and evolving to address concerns raised by engineering educators and industry leaders. "Too many of the bright young graduates lacked communication and interpersonal skills; their creativity seemed stifled. We looked for ways to help these bright, capable engineering students make more of their talents."

After Dean Tracey appointed four faculty members to serve as department chairs in 1995, the dean and chairs used the recommendations of the National Advisory Council to develop Rowan's engineering program. "A little gem in the draft of the curriculum caught my attention," recalls John Schmalzel, also chair of electrical and computer engineering. "It made me realize that we had an absolute opportunity to develop a curriculum that would include not only significant lab experiences in a multidisciplinary context, but would also expose students to economic enterprise in a continuously evolving process. We could provide students with the realities of entrepreneurship through eight semesters of hands-on, minds-on clinic experiences involving real world engineering projects."

In their second semester, all engineering freshmen participate in Freshmen Clinic II -- an experience in the reverse engineering of a product or process. Chemical engineering professor Robert Hesketh explains the project he introduces to his section of freshmen: "We use a common consumer product, the coffee machine, as a vehicle to illustrate engineering science and practice. The coffee machine contains examples of engineering principles from many disciplines. For example, chemical and mechanical engineers are required to design heaters, condensers, systems for multiphase transport of fluids, and they fabricate plastic and glass components. The process of leaching the organic compounds from the coffee beans uses principles from mass transfer, unique to chemical engineering. Automation of processes requires concepts from electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineering. Finally, engineering decisions are required to select the components of a system and place them within an affordable, compact unit that can be easily used by the consumer."

Other reverse engineering projects include the investigation of electric toothbrushes, computer mice, and the brewing process. Students who sign up for Professor Farrell's reverse engineering project get a look at a very unique closed system - the human body! It may look like a health and fitness class, but as students exercise, monitor their cardiovascular activity, learn about the strength of their bones, and even find out about the shock-absorbing construction of their running shoes, they're exposed to a wealth of multidisciplinary engineering concepts. The modules explore respiration, metabolism, pulmonary mechanics, the cardiovascular system, the strength of bones, biomechanics, and the mechanics of sneaker materials. Through the investigation of these systems, they learn basic concepts of mass and energy balances; fluid flow; work, energy, and efficiency; forces and levers; material strength and stresses; and electrical signal processing.

Each semester, the College posts a list of open-ended, real-world engineering projects. According to their interests and skills, juniors and seniors become members of small, multi-disciplinary teams that will, under faculty supervision, carry out the work on these unique projects. The projects may take several semesters to complete. Students research and review background information; develop a clear and concise problem statement; conduct research, design, and testing activities; and publish results in a written report and give an oral presentation.

These research and design projects vary in scope and have included the development of an automated crash notification system, the evaluation of Philadelphia's Betsy Ross Bridge, the investigation of fluidized bed combustion, and a drug release project focused on the controlled delivery of peptides. Some projects support areas of research conducted by the faculty. Most are sponsored by regional industry and local and government agencies. "The students benefit immensely from the work on these real life problems," says Professor Tirupathi Chandrupatla, chair of the mechanical engineering department. They become competent with analyzing programs and testing apparatus, and they also gain experience with vendors and customers.

With $50,000 granted by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, Rowan Engineering established a Venture Capital Fund (VCF) for those student teams who have a good idea and are willing to commit a full semester to the design, development, and prototyping of their product. To date, VCF grants have funded 18 projects, resulting in two student patent disclosures and three startup companies.

With success like this, Rowan's creative faculty has gained recognition for their innovative approaches to engineering education. "We haven't cornered the market on creativity, but Rowan's engineering faculty brings one critical aspect to engineering education," says Dean Dorland. "Our engineering faculty opens our process to continual scrutiny," she explains. "They share their insights and disseminate information, inspiring other faculty to try their ideas."

Henry Rowan started the ball rolling and set the parameters for Rowan University's engineering program, and the college's faculty helped realize his dream by designing the structures. The clinics are preparing students to be a vital force in the region's business and industry, as Rowan wanted. But he may not have realized that by creating a model for other engineering schools, the benefits would extend beyond the region as well.

Debbie Barsotti is a freelance writer in Franklinville, New Jersey.

Progressive Engineer
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