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Martha Monserrate on Engineering and Duke's Traditions

Trustee, founder of Given Limb Foundation, delivers annual Founders' Day address

monseratte

First, I would like for all the engineers—the students, faculty, alumni, board members and guests—to rise for a moment of quiet recognition.  You are the founders of the Pratt School’s present and its future. On behalf of Duke, I thank you for that service. You may be seated.  And to those who remained seated, you perform an equally vital role in founding the engineering school’s future here at Duke.

These two roles of engineer and non-engineer are integral to Duke’s history—and its future. Consider James B. Duke, who, although a non-engineer, included an engineering school in his original plans for Duke, fifteen years in advance of the school’s founding. And what about President Brodhead? He, a non-engineer, left his Ivy liberal arts pursuits to embrace a university with an engineering school. And there is Dean Tom Katsouleas, our engineering school dean. No one has worked harder to support and advance the engineering academic enterprise here—yet he is not an engineer, but an esteemed physicist.

But I think, in terms of Duke’s history, the importance of the engineer and non-engineer to one other is best explained in a poem by Rudyard Kipling.  Written by Kipling in 1907, the poem was later, around the time of Duke’s founding, selected to be made part of the ritual performed by Canadian engineers when graduating.

The poem is called “Sons of Martha.”  But before you think this was an egotistical choice for today, let me say that Martha is really the bad actor in this poem, and every time I read it, I am humbled by any comparison I might make of myself to her.  But I will tell you the poem’s theme and then a couple lines from it.  It will take you back in time, back to the days Duke was founded, when religion and education were closely tied as reflected in Duke’s motto.  You will hear in its words also how engineering was perceived.  In the poem, Kipling alludes to the story in the Bible in which Jesus visits Martha and her sister, Mary.  Jesus begins to preach and Mary sits at his feet and listens intently.   Martha meanwhile runs around frantically trying to provide food and drink and be the good hostess.  Finally, Martha loses her temper and says, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?”  Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are troubled about many things; only one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

In his poem, Kipling reflects on Martha’s plight and declares that really all engineers are Sons of Martha.  All are destined in life to make amends for Martha’s transgression, for her prideful complaining. To do this, according to Kipling, they work hard—without fanfare, without notoriety, without complaint—in order to let society, those he calls “Mary’s sons,” enjoy “the better part.”  And yet, there is a note of admiration in his voice.  Here is an excerpt:

The sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;

But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.

And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,

Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.

 

It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.

It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.

It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,

Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.

Our Duke engineering graduates and faculty have worked for 75 years to let society enjoy the better part. Safe drinking water, safe buildings and roads, safe cars and airplanes, safe power generation and electricity delivery, safe medical devices and surgeries—and, in my case, in the old New York Giants Stadium, a toilet and sewage system I designed that did not overflow—all of that, while members of society have carried on their lives without care or worry.

On this 75th anniversary of the Pratt School of Engineering, who are the greatest Sons (and Daughters) of Martha? Well, to give you a complete list would be contrary to the theme of the poem, wouldn’t it?  

But one can hardly forget the first dean in 1939, William Hall, and his dozen or so faculty, and those first pioneering engineering students whose classes were on East campus. Those men were housed there too—the only men living there among hundreds of women.  I am sure that was a significant hardship for those engineers, although I understand they managed to make the best of their situation and on occasion, put on their bathrobes at night and performed serenades outside the women’s dorms.

Of course, I joke about that being a hardship.  Most of those young men went directly into military service after graduation.  World War II was raging by then, so I am sure they endured real hardships greater than anything they experienced here at Duke.

So, what then was the earliest innovation to come out of Pratt? I did some research and found there was an Annual Engineers Show that was performed by the school in its earliest days to show off technological marvels for Durham and Duke.   One such creation was a combination telephone-television booth. Invented by whom? We don’t know.  There was no mention of his name.  And it is too bad nothing ever became of his wacky idea for a single device combining voice and video. [The speaker showed the audience her iPhone.]

Fast-forward to my time here. Along with my fellow graduate students, we were part of Duke’s history as we helped to launch environmental engineering as a new discipline and degree.

Although I had been an undergraduate civil engineer in 1981, many of my environmental engineering graduate colleagues had not been engineers as undergrads.  They had degrees in biology and chemistry and mathematics. At the time, bringing in non-engineers to a masters program in engineering was a new and not entirely welcome idea. I saw my colleagues treated by some other faculty and students with a bit of disdain; they were “engineer wannabes.”

Then there was the image problem.  We were starting out in a discipline that just a decade before had been called “sanitary engineering.” It did not help that our offices and labs were located, right along with the plumbing, in the most unwanted, unfinished space in the basement of Hudson Hall.

But our defining moment came with the egg drop contest.  The egg drop was a much-loved tradition and competition in the engineering school in the 1970s and 80s. In the contest, competitors took one or more eggs and designed and built different ways to encase the eggs, such that they could be dropped from the roof of Hudson Hall. Awards were given for the most spectacular failures, but the top prize was given for the most spectacular flight with the egg landing intact. Typically the mechanical and materials engineers excelled at this competition.  Civil and environmental engineers? Not so much.  But we environmental engineering graduate students decided to enter—to try, just maybe, in some uncomplaining way, to make our mission better understood.

When the day of the competition arrived, the weather was very warm.  Our entry was one of the last.  As our entry was announced and held at the roofline, everyone below began to laugh.  You see, we had designed our entry to be an enormous scale model of a single maple leaf seed. Yes, the kind you see fluttering to the ground like a little helicopter. Our entry had no mechanical or moving parts. It was just a simple, scaled-up mimic of nature’s own handiwork.  The egg was exposed, taped in the spot where the seed would go, and the leafy part was made of cardboard.  To the crowd, it looked like a joke.  They thought it was intended to be one of those fantastic failures.  As it was released, it fell straight down.  The end with the egg plummeted directly for the ground. I was horrified. My mind raced: Maybe the hot sun had partially baked the egg and made it denser and somehow changed the weight distribution.  But when it got halfway down, it slowed, the leaf-like wing turned sideways and began to spin furiously, and the whole thing landed gently on the ground with the egg intact. Laughter turned to applause, derision to appreciation. Yes, we won—and later, even mechanical engineers began to visit us in the basement. 

I like to believe that was the exact moment when interdisciplinary collaboration began at Pratt—but I would be wrong, by about a decade. In fact, when I check my Duke history, I realize that the formation of the Civil AND Environmental Engineering Department was preceded by two other formalized collaborations: the Department of Biomedical Engineering in 1971 and the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science in 1974. Okay, so we were third, but it was still the early days.

What has followed since has been a long trail of collaborative departments, facilities, and programs, many with a non-engineering component.  So often we use their acronyms that we sometimes forget their true collaborative natures. The list of the top ten of these ventures hardly reads like Kipling or David Letterman, but here is the list of the top ten in chronological order of their birthdates since 1982.  Just listen to how collaborative these are:

Electrical AND Computer Engineering

Engineering Management

Center for Photonics AND Communications

Fitzpatrick Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine AND Applied Sciences

The SHARED Materials Instrumentation Facility

Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology

The Grand Challenges for Engineering

Triangle Materials Research Science AND Engineering Center

Coulter Translational Partnership

Center for Materials Genomics

And just think:  what were the options for students in 1939?  “Son, would you like Civil OR Electrical OR Mechanical Engineering?”  That’s it.

What’s next? Well, next week, this civil engineer will be in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, helping to repair a dam that was built back when Duke was founded.  That dam is now leaking like a sieve. But its reservoir supplies water to several major cities, and they are all hurting for water there these days.  So I am a bit anxious about completing this project correctly and on time.  I am most definitely afflicted with Kipling’s “careful soul and troubled heart.”  And yet I try to keep perspective:  after all, not many Pratt graduates can claim to have a career like mine that has come full circle from worrying about toilets overflowing to worrying about making sure there is water in the toilets.

But one thing has remained true to me throughout my career and board service.  We are so fortunate as engineers, as the “Sons of Martha” here at Duke, to have all you “Sons of Mary” close at hand. The biologists, literary experts, historians, theologians, political scientists, economists—you all inform our worldview and our spiritual view. You remind us daily whom we serve and why.

I believe that this is truly Pratt’s strength.  It is the reason our engineering school, despite its modest size, has a faculty among the most highly productive in research funding and publications.  It is the reason we have come soaring into the top 20 engineering schools in the country.  Yet, not one of us wishes the university to become, before our 100th anniversary, the Duke Institute of Technology. 

We all realize, here at Duke, that working in collaboration can sometimes mean a bit of working in obscurity, but that such work can have excellent results.  It can be the perfect way to make change happen on a large scale so that society can continue to enjoy the better part. 

Martha L. Monserrate E'81 G'82 is the founder and president of the consulting firm Environmental Excellence Engineering.  She is also the founder and president of the Given Limb Foundation, which seeks, without overhead, to improve prosthetic technology and opportunities for amputees—both American members of the military and victims of land mines in developing countries. A member of the Pratt School of Engineering Board of Visitors from 2001 to 2009, Martha served as vice chair in 2008-09. She was elected to the Duke University Board of Trustees in 2009 and currently serves as vice chair of the Medical Center Academic Affairs Committee.