To cement their status as legitimate professionals, engineers decided to make the case that they, the engineers, are the keystone of civilization. A bold claim, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but what’s interesting is that they linked engineering firmly to the humanities. To be an engineer, they argued, meant to accept responsibility for the full weight of human values that underlie every engineering problem. And to be a responsible member of society, an engineer needed formal training in the humanities, so that he (and it was always he) could discover himself, identify his place within the community, and act accordingly.