When graduating college this month, many North American engineering students will take a special pledge, with a history dating back to 1925.
The tradition of taking an engineering oath began over a century ago in Canada. In 1922, Herbert E.T. Haultain, professor of mining engineering at the University of Toronto, presented the idea at the annual meeting of the Engineering Institute of Canada. The seven past presidents of that body were in attendance, heard Haultain’s speech and accepted his suggestion to form a committee to create an honor oath. Later, they formed the nonprofit Corporation of the Seven Wardens, which would oversee the ritual. Next year, in 1923, with the encouragement of the Seven Wardens, Haultain wrote to poet and writer Rudyard Kipling, asking him to develop a professional oath for engineers. “We are a tribe—a very important tribe within the community,” Haultain said in the letter, “but we are lacking in tribal spirit, or perhaps I should say, in manifestation of tribal spirit. Also, we are inarticulate. Can you help us?”
While Kipling is most famous now for “The Jungle Book” and perhaps his poem “Gunga Din,” he had also written a short story about engineers, “The Bridge Builders.” His poem “The Sons of Martha” can be read as a celebration of engineers:
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.
Kipling accepted the ask and wrote the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, which he sent to Haultain a month later. In his response to Haultain, he stated that he preferred the word “Obligation” to “Oath.” He wrote the Obligation using Old English lettering and the old-fashioned capitalization. Kipling’s Obligation binds engineers upon their “Honor and Cold Iron” to not “suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, Bad Workmanship or Faulty Material,” and pardon is asked “in the presence of my betters and my equals in my Calling” for the engineer’s “assured failures and derelictions.” The hope is that when one is tempted to shoddy work by weakness or weariness, the memory of the Obligation “and the company before whom it was entered into, may return to me to aid, comfort, and restrain.”
Using the Obligation, The Seven Wardens created an induction ceremony, which seeks to unify the profession and recognize engineering’s ethics, including responsibility to the public and the need to make the best decisions possible. The induction ceremony included recitation of Kipling’s “Obligation” and incorporated an anvil, a hammer, an iron chain, and an iron ring. The inductee engineers sat inside an area marked off by the iron chain, with their more senior colleagues outside that area. At the start of the ritual, the leader beat out S-S-T in Morse code with the hammer and anvil—the letters standing for Steel, Stone, and Time. A more experienced and previously obligated engineer placed the ring on the small finger of the inductee engineer’s working hand. As per Kipling, the ring’s rough, faceted texture symbolized “the young engineer’s mind” and the difficulties engineers face in mastering their discipline.
A persistent myth purports that the original iron rings were made from the beams or bolts of the Quebec Bridge that failed twice during construction.
The first induction ceremony took place on April 25, 1925, in Montreal to obligate two of the Seven Wardens, along with four graduates from the University of Toronto class of 1893. On May 1 of that year, 14 more engineers were obligated at the University of Toronto. From that time to today most Canadian professional engineers have gone through that same ritual in their various camps, called Kipling camps—local chapters associated with various Canadian universities.
Henry Petroski, Duke University’s professor of civil engineering and history, notes in his book, “Forgive Design: Understanding Failure,” that Kipling’s poem “Sons of Martha” is often read as part of the ritual. However, sometimes inductees read Kipling’s “Hymn of Breaking Strain,” instead, which graphically depicts disastrous outcomes of engineering mistakes. The first stanza of that poem says:
The careful text-books measure
(Let all who build beware!)
The load, the shock, the pressure
Material can bear.
So, when the buckled girder
Lets down the grinding span,
'The blame of loss, or murder,
Is laid upon the man.
Not on the Stuff—the Man!
As if to strengthen the importance of these concepts, a persistent myth purports that the original iron rings were made from the beams or bolts of the Quebec Bridge that failed twice during construction. The bridge spans the St. Lawrence River upriver from Quebec City, and at the time of its construction was the world’s longest at 1,800 feet. Due to engineering errors and poor oversight, the bridge’s own weight exceeded its carrying capacity. Moreover, engineers downplayed danger when bridge beams began to warp under stress, saying that they were probably warped before they were installed. On August 29, 1907, the bridge collapsed, killing 75 of 86 workers. A second collapse occurred in 1916 when lifting equipment failed, and thirteen more workers died.
The ring myth, however, couldn’t be true. The original iron rings couldn’t have come from the failed bridge since it was made of steel, not wrought iron. Today the rings are made from stainless steel because iron deteriorates and stains engineers’ finger black.
On August 14, 2018, Morandi Bridge over Polcevera River in Genoa, Italy, collapsed from structural failure, killing 43 people.
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The Seven Wardens decided to restrict the ritual to engineers trained in Canada. They copyrighted the obligation oath in Canada and the United States in 1935. Although the ritual is not a requirement for professional licensing, just like the Hippocratic Oath is not part of medical licensing, it remains a long-standing tradition.
The American Obligation of the Engineer has its own creation story, albeit a very different one. The American Order of the Engineer (OOE) was initiated in 1970, during the era of the anti-war protests, Apollo missions and the first Earth Day. On May 4, 1970, the National Guard shot into a crowd of protesters at Kent State University, killing four people. The two authors of the American obligation—Cleveland State University’s (CSU) engineering professor John Janssen and his wife Susan—reflected these historical events in the oath they wrote. Their version of the oath binds engineers to “practice integrity and fair dealing.” It also notes that their “skill carries with it the obligation to serve humanity by making the best use of the Earth’s precious wealth.” As Petroski explains in his book, “campus antiwar protestors around the country tended to view engineers as complicit in weapons proliferation [which] prompted some [CSU] engineering student leaders to look for a means of asserting some more positive values.”
Kip A. Wedel, associate professor of history and politics at Bethel College, wrote in his book, “The Obligation: A History of the Order of the Engineer,” that the ceremony was not a direct response to the Kent State shootings—it was already scheduled when the shootings happened. Yet, engineering students found the ceremony a positive action they could take in contrast to the overall turmoil. The first American ritual took place on June 4, 1970, at CSU. In total, 170 students, faculty members, and practicing engineers took the obligation. This established CSU as the first Link of the Order, as the OOE designates its local chapters. For their first ceremony, the CSU students fabricated smooth, unfaceted rings from stainless steel pipe. Later they were replaced by factory-made rings. According to Paula Ostaff, OOE’s Executive Director, about 20,000 eligible students and alumni obligate themselves yearly.
Societies hope that every engineer is imbued with a strong ethical sense and that their pledges are never far from mind. For some, the rings they wear serve a daily reminder that every paper they sign off on is touched by a physical reminder of their commitment.
These ethical and responsible engineering practices are especially salient today, when one in three American bridges needs repair or replacement, some have already collapsed, and engineers are working on projects related to the bipartisan infrastructure bill President Biden signed into law in 2021. Canada has committed $33 billion to its Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program. At the heart of these grand projects are many thousands of professional engineers, collectively working millions of hours. The professional vows they took aim to assure that the homes, bridges and airplanes they build will work as expected.
Recent immigration restrictions have left many foreign researchers' projects and careers in limbo—and some in jeopardy.
"I spent about $4,000 on lawyer fees and another $1,200 to pay for the motions I filed," she recalls. "I had to borrow money from my parents and my cousin because without my salary I just didn't have the $7,000 at hand." But the already narrow window of opportunity slammed completely shut when the Trump administration suspended issuing new visas for foreign researchers in June. All Mohan's attempts were denied. In August, she had to leave the country. "Given the recent work visa ban by the administration, all my options in the U.S. are closed," she wrote a bitter note on Twitter. "I have to uproot my entire life in NY for the past 6 years and leave." She eventually found a temporary position in Calcutta, where she can continue research.
Mohan is hardly alone in her visa saga. Many foreign scholars on H- and J-type visas and other permits that let them remain employed in America had been struggling to keep their rights to continue research, which in certain cases is crucial to battling the pandemic. Some had to leave the country, some filed every possible extension to buy time, and others are stuck in their home countries, unable to return. The already cumbersome process of applying for visas and extensions became crippled during the lockdowns. But in June, when President Trump extended and expanded immigration restrictions to cut the number of immigrant workers entering the U.S., the new limits left researchers' projects and careers in limbo—and some in jeopardy.
"We have been a beneficiary of this flow of human capacity and resource investment for many generations—and this is now threatened."
Rakesh Ramachandran, whose computational biology work contributed to one of the first coronavirus studies to map out its protein structures—is stranded in India. In early March, he had travelled there to attend a conference and visit the American consulate to stamp his H1 visa for a renewal, already granted. The pandemic shut down both the conference and the consulates, and Ramachandran hasn't been able to come back since. The consulates finally opened in September, but so far the online portal has no available appointment slots. "I'm told to keep trying," Ramachandran says.
The visa restrictions affected researchers worldwide, regardless of disciplines or countries. A Ph.D. student in neuroscience, Morgane Leroux had to do her experiments with mice at Gladstone Institutes in America and analyze the data back home at Sorbonne University in France. She had finished her first round of experiments when the lockdowns forced her to return to Paris, and she hasn't been able to come back to resume her work since. "I can't continue the experiments, which is really frustrating," she says, especially because she doesn't know what it means for her Ph.D. "I may have to entirely change my subject," she says, which she doesn't want to do—it would be a waste of time and money.
But besides wreaking havoc in scholars' personal lives and careers, the visa restrictions had—and will continue to have—tremendous deleterious effects on America's research and its global scientific competitiveness. "It's incredibly short-sighted and self-destructing to restrict the immigration of scientists into the U.S.," says Benjamin G. Neel, who directs the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at New York University. "If they can't come here, they will go elsewhere," he says, causing a brain drain.
Neel in his lab with postdocs
(Courtesy of Neel)
Neel felt the outcomes of the shortsighted policies firsthand. In the past few months, his lab lost two postdoctoral researchers who had made major strides in understanding the biology of several particularly stubborn, treatment-resistant malignancies. One postdoc studied the underlying mechanisms responsible for 90 percent of pancreatic cancers and half of the colon ones. The other one devised a new system of modeling ovarian cancer in mice to test new therapeutic drug combinations for the deadliest tumor types—but had to return home to China.
"By working around the clock, she was able to get her paper accepted, but she hasn't been able to train us to use this new system, which can set us back six months," Neel says.
Her discoveries also helped the lab secure about $900,000 in grants for new research. Losing people like this is "literally killing the goose that lays the golden eggs," Neel adds. "If you want to make America poor again, this is the way to do it."
Cassidy R. Sugimoto at Indiana University Bloomington, who studies how scientific knowledge is produced and disseminated, says that scientists are the most productive when they are free to move, exchange ideas, and work at labs with the best equipment. Restricting that freedom reduces their achievement.
"Several empirical studied demonstrated the benefits to the U.S. by attracting and retaining foreign scientists. The disproportional number of our Nobel Prize winners were not only foreign-born but also foreign-educated," she says. Scientific advancement bolsters the country's economic prowess, too, so turning scholars away is bad for the economy long-term. "We have been a beneficiary of this flow of human capacity and resource investment for many generations—and this is now threatened," Sugimoto adds—because scientists will look elsewhere. "We are seeing them shifting to other countries that are more hospitable, both ideologically and in terms of health security. Many visiting scholars, postdocs, and graduate students who would otherwise come to the United States are now moving to Canada."
It's not only the Ph.D. students and postdocs who are affected. In some cases, even well-established professors who have already made their marks in the field and direct their own labs at prestigious research institutions may have to pack up and leave the country in the next few months. One scientist who directs a prominent neuroscience lab is betting on his visa renewal and a green card application, but if that's denied, the entire lab may be in jeopardy, as many grants hinge on his ability to stay employed in America.
"It's devastating to even think that it can happen," he says—after years of efforts invested. "I can't even comprehend how it would feel. It would be terrifying and really sad." (He asked to withhold his name for fear that it may adversely affect his applications.) Another scientist who originally shared her story for this article, later changed her mind and withdrew, worrying that speaking out may hurt the entire project, a high-profile COVID-19 effort. It's not how things should work in a democratic country, scientists admit, but that's the reality.
Still, some foreign scholars are speaking up. Mehmet Doğan, a physicist at University of California Berkeley who has been fighting a visa extension battle all year, says it's important to push back in an organized fashion with petitions and engage legislators. "This administration was very creative in finding subtle and not so subtle ways to make our lives more difficult," Doğan says. He adds that the newest rules, proposed by the Department of Homeland Security on September 24, could further limit the time scholars can stay, forcing them into continuous extension battles. That's why the upcoming election might be a turning point for foreign academics. "This election will decide if many of us will see the U.S. as the place to stay and work or whether we look at other countries," Doğan says, echoing the worries of Neel, Sugimoto, and others in academia.
Dogan on Zoom talking to his fellow union members of the Academic Researchers United, a union of almost 5,000 Academic Researchers.
(Credit: Ceyda Durmaz Dogan)
If this year has shown us anything, it is that viruses and pandemics know no borders as they sweep across the globe. Likewise, science can't be restrained by borders either. "Science is an international endeavor," says Neel—and right now humankind now needs unified scientific research more than ever, unhindered by immigration hurdles and visa wars. Humanity's wellbeing in America and beyond depends on it.
[Editor's Note: To read other articles in this special magazine issue, visit the beautifully designed e-reader version.]