A Lever Long Enough: A History of Columbia's School of Engineering and Applied Science since 1864

摘要

'Columbia College, good in classics, weak in science, with few graduates of distinction' (The Christian Examiner, 1854). '[This book] is intended to be celebratory, published for the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the school, and interpretive, as befits a school that has known over fifteen decades of both success and adversity.' These are quotations from the first page of this history and they indicate well what is in store. Your reviewer has been teaching at MIT since 1966, and has come to expect historical accounts of its progress since its start in 1865 as views of a uniformly triumphant march to its present supposed supremacy among technological universities. (MIT controls its image zealously.) In contrast, Robert McCaughey's account of engineering at Columbia is one full of disputes, disappointments and occasionally appalling behaviour, only rarely interrupted by successes. McCaughey knows his subject: he is a professor of history at Barnard College, an elite school founded by a president of Columbia College, the target of takeover attempts by Columbia and one of his previous books was the history of Columbia University from 1754-2.004.