Against Academic Engineering

Stop trying to shove engineering in a science-shaped bucket.

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Academic engineering is a funny thing. At the end of the day, engineering as a discipline is about making a specific thing for a specific purpose. Academia, with its roots in philosophy, rewards creating maximally general knowledge about the world. This academic bent is fine for science (aka natural philosophy!) where it does make sense to get more excited about general relativity or evolution than the way that this one specific worm looks for food. (No shade on worm scientists of course.) But trying to shove engineering into an academic framework leads to bizarre “discoveries” like necrobotics. Researchers hooked a dead spider up to pneumatics and used it as a gripper, which is neat, but the authors frame the work as unlocking a whole field of using dead animals as robots, which is a bit absurd¹.

The absurdity is particularly apparent in the necrobotics example, but spend any time around academic engineering and you’ll see it everywhere. Researchers focus on building systems that do something new or do it in a new way, but when you ask “cool, so how does that go on to be useful to people in the real world” there is either an answer that holds no water or a sheepish “oh it never will.” At least one of us (Ben) is guilty of this ourselves! Even when work looks useful on the surface, it is often done at such a high level of generality that it doesn’t actually help anybody implementing it in a real system. The academic researchers building actually useful things often need to just ignore the broader academic system they’re embedded in.

The charade of academic engineering isn’t the fault of academic engineers: nobody gets credit for “look we made a thing that does a thing!” Many people who go into academic engineering fit the archetype of those who would have been professional “inventors” in a past age. It’s a shame to waste their talent in this way just because professional inventing is no longer an available path (for more reasons than we have time to go into here).

Academic engineering does have a place when it looks more like science: when the ultimate goal is to study an existing system and perhaps suggest how it might be improved rather than build a new one. That is how academic engineering started – a plane company would bring a new wing to Theodore von Kármán who would run it through the wind tunnel and analyze the data; Prussian cannon companies would ask the new universities about the metal in their guns; burgeoning yankee industries would come to MIT.

So what is to be done? Ideally a much smaller fraction of engineering research would happen in academia, period. Within academia, heavily-licensed patents could count towards tenure and a PhD as much as well-cited papers. Engineering departments could require professors to have previous professional experience and strongly encourage them to spend 20% time in industry. More broadly, academic engineers should own the fact that engineering is a different thing from science and stop trying to shove it in a science-shaped bucket.

1. It’s not even that novel. There’s a long history of using insect antennae for sensing in robots, culminating in the (we’re not making this up) smellicopter. Others would push back and say that it is entirely novel because necrobotics is actuation and the smellicopter is a sensor. 🤦