In writing this paper I set out to investigate the origins of engineering education in the United States and whether it can explain the school-to-defense pipeline. This task was easier than anticipated. Though this is not information well-known among those actually receiving an engineering degree, its roots in the military are visible and documented. (The word ‘engineer’ itself has the etymological meaning of “a designer and constructor of fortifications and weapons” as recorded in the Oxford Dictionary.) The history of engineering education reveals that even though the technological America at present is commonly regarded as unprecedentedly dark times, the proliferation of the B.S. in Weapons Manufacturing is not some distinctly fascist event. Instead, the formal study of engineering in the United States was a product of war from the very beginning. There is, it turns out, something inherently militarized about the engineering education young people receive in schools across the country.

In discussing engineering as related to the broader academic fields of STEM, it is appropriate to note that the STEM acronym has had mainstream use only in recent decades, usurping the ungainly “SMET” of the 90s, and has always invited varied interpretations of what subjects it entails. It is largely up to the administrating agency to define the parameters of STEM, whether that be a local K-12 school or the Department of Homeland Security. This study looks most closely at the fields of technology and engineering. These fields have the most direct ties to the military and have also commanded the most excitement, controversy, and influence in current culture. Additionally, however anachronistic the term “STEM” may be in discussing the pre-21st century, I use the acronym regardless of time period for convenience and to contextualize my interaction with the topic.

The first American engineering college was the United States Military Academy. West Point, as it is more commonly known, was established in 1802 to supply trained officers to the Army Corps of Engineers and remained the leading engineering institution until the Civil War. In the years of the early republic, American higher education had yet to take the practical sciences seriously, and no bachelor degrees in science were offered. While schools taught math and natural science, they were of the opinion technical skills were better suited for trades training and not as a program of study. Meanwhile, the republic was busy grabbing Native land, and European empires were ceding territories. America’s borders were changing rapidly and its property would soon nearly double in size with the Louisiana Purchase. West Point came and evolved out of the strictly utilitarian need for an army who could not only defend and expand the country but also, as settlers flooded in, physically build it.

Logel (2016) observes that during this period, an “emphasis on science, mathematics, and engineering determined the nature of American security strategy.” While West Point’s early phase focused on military fortification engineering, starting in 1817, superintendent Sylvanus Thayer and professor Dennis Hart Mahan remodeled science, math, engineering, and military instruction after Napoleon’s École Polytechnique. Civil engineering, namely the building of roads, canals, and other infrastructure, was the central field of study as it was crucial to expanding and settling the land. Subjects like topology and mineralogy were also taught for this purpose. In 1824, Congress passed the General Survey Act, which called for investment in civil engineering and thus motivated West Point to maintain consistently high standards.

Engineering instruction aside, West Point graduates were first and foremost meant to carry out the military interests of the state. Such interests involved persistent engagement in genocidal warfare against Native nations as the United States staked claims on the frontier. West Point men of the 19th century were either actively involved in these conflicts or implicated in them. They were not only more equipped to be, with their training in science and technology; they were also incentivized because additions in territory sustained their careers as civil engineers. As such, science and engineering education and war were interlocked in a self-fulfilling codependency. These operations could not have occurred without the advancement of military technology, and civil technology continued to develop because of the success of such operations. Nor did it end there—West Point was further implicated in violence down South, where many graduates from the slaveholding class returned home upon discharge from the Army to oversee their families’ plantations.

In the antebellum era, West Point held dominance over the few schools teaching dedicated engineering courses: graduates of West Point filled STEM teaching positions and founded engineering programs at universities, training future generations in both militarized and non-militarized schools, and textbooks written by West Point professors became standards. Considering West Point’s unprecedented, uncontested influence in professional engineering’s early years, it is difficult to imagine that the institution’s culture—which positioned colonization as a necessity, in fact relied on it to grow, and was tolerant if not in favor of attitudes upholding enslavement—did not infuse itself into the culture of academic science and engineering overall.

Ironically, it was war that dethroned the Military Academy as the leader of engineering. While more engineering or polytechnic schools had established by the end of the antebellum era, and universities had begun integrating engineering courses alongside the more traditional program, the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862 was what brought practical science education its widest recognition and financial support. One of the most consequential pieces of educational legislation in American history, the Morrill Act prompted the land-grant university system that propagated colleges across the Union. Each state was given a tract of public land from the frontier, the sale of which would generate funds to go towards an institution of higher education in that state. These were institutions that “produced the country’s scientific, technical, and agricultural leaders, spawned innovations that changed the face of the nation, and helped create the modern world” (Marcus, 2015).

The land-grants were obligated to follow two requirements. One, that they focus on agriculture and mechanic arts, and two, that they include a military tactics education. When Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced this bill a few years prior, President Buchanan had vetoed it. The military tactics requirement was a new addition when it passed under Lincoln a year into the Civil War, and it was a conscious one. Morrill explained its inclusion as a “consequence of the new conviction of its necessity forced upon the attention of the Loyal States by the history of the past years” (Lyons, 1955).

Upon the outbreak of the war, the North was forced to confront the fact that their army was not as prepared as the Confederacy’s. The antebellum South had already embraced a civilian-military relationship that “fully accepted and incorporated the military ideal into its society and institutions,” a culture that strengthened the system of slavery. The success of their military tradition became eminent when a third of West Point graduates defected and joined the Confederate Army and the school’s superintendent from 1852 to 1855—Robert E. Lee—reappeared as Confederate commander. In response, the Morrill Act endeavored to build the civil-military relationship that was so weak in the North. Expanding the military college would not work, as West Point had clearly failed in attracting officers to lifelong loyalty to the Union; the Union would have to bring the military to the civilian college instead.

The legislature was stoically ambiguous on how exactly this “military tactics” education should be included, leading to different interpretations and enthusiasm levels across colleges, but most schools implemented a compulsory two-year training program. Regardless of the quality of these programs, the Act enforced at least some degree of military presence on each land-grant campus and that many students received a military education at the same time they trained to become scientists and engineers. As mandated by the Act, these militarized land-grant colleges were simultaneously champions of the new wave of science and technology programs. These colleges, many of them known as A&Ms (agricultural and mechanical colleges), aided in particular the growth of mechanical engineering.

Military-trained instructors were not exclusive to West Point graduates. Robert H. Thurston of the U.S. Naval Academy, “a most influential pioneer in mechanical engineering curricula in America,” was one professor who also later served as director of Cornell’s engineering school (Emmerson). The Naval Academy in general was a considerable incubator of mechanical engineering, and when Navy operations came to a lull in the 1870s, several officers took teaching positions at civilian colleges to teach steam engineering and shipbuilding. These appointments were provided by law: the “necessary bill was passed in February 1879, and in the ensuing seventeen years forty-eight of such appointments were made, mostly to the major land grant universities” (Emmerson). Thus, the militarization of engineering was continued and fortified through the land-grant university through both the military education mandate and the enduring officer-to-professor pipeline.

Literature on the Morrill Act’s legacy tends to gloss over this facet of land-grant schools as if it had little consequence. On the contrary, the implemented programs were the catalyst of the ROTC system, which today is the greatest producer of new U.S. Army active duty officers and “an important source of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in the military” (Leal, 2007). An even more neglected, and crucial, point is that like much of America’s story, the land-grab university was made possible through a massive seizure of Native lands. The “public” land donated to states was transferred to the property of the United States via a series of treaties—many of which earned signatures through fraud and coercion—and violence-backed conquests. The cost of the land-grab university was 10.7 million acres of land expropriated from 245 tribal nations. Many treaties were not honored, leaving nations without any compensation for the lands taken from them.

Who taught these military science and tactics courses at the colleges? Like the engineering professors, they came from, as may be obvious, the military. In a study of the land-grant North Carolina State University, Bailey points out that instructors had often been direct players in the “forceful concentration, dispossession, and killing of Indigenous people during their military careers” and spun in “a revolving door” between teaching and active warfare in the late 19th century. After cutting their teeth committing colonial violence against Native people, some used that learned experience in imperialist military campaigns during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) where large numbers of the Filipino population died in captivity.

These grim histories are rarely dwelled on, overshadowed in the narrative by the Morrill Act’s less insidious effects. After all, to many, the existence of the military holds an inherent tension with the land-grant mission. The Civil War, agricultural and industrial developments, and continued westward expansion (especially with the lands acquired after the Mexican-American War in 1848) demanded addressing, so the land-grant institution arrived as Americans had been clamoring for a more practical education both personally and for purposes of the state. A cult of modern science had also taken hold, as well as a conviction that a liberal arts education and its preoccupation with dead languages was failing to advance the American people. The Morrill Act, the new champion of scientific and technical knowledge, came to be acknowledged as a transformative policy that brought the coming of the modern American university.

In this sense, the land-grant era was also a democratizing force: it is remembered for increasing access to education across race and gender. By 1880 thirty-nine Black colleges had been established, and the second Morrill Act of 1890, which required each state to admit Black students in at least one higher education institution, added seventeen new land-grant HBCUs. And while it was not required, many land-grant schools were also co-ed.

However, that is not the full story. Conservative values informed these seemingly progressive policies, using higher education to further mold students to the status quo. The loophole of the 1890 Act upheld racial segregation which subjected Black schools to “chronic underfunding” and “discrimination in accessing federal funds” (Grim, 2015). As for women, land-grants encouraged them to pursue domestic science degrees that prepped them “for future homemaking” (Bix, 2015). Moreover, the disturbing means by which the Morrill Act was actually accomplished further challenge this progressive view. And the Act’s investment in defense indirectly called for greater perpetuation of settler-colonial aggression, since increased access to higher education—as a result of the Act’s second requirement—was directly followed by increased participation of students in military training.

Historians of ROTC and the civilian student-military marriage find that the military component of the Act stayed underdeveloped and ineffective for the first few decades. It did later prove itself undeniably impactful, perhaps even central to the land-grant character, as U.S. involvement in warfare exploded in scale beginning with World War I. However, whether or not land-grant militarization contributed much combat power in the later 19th century, it certainly exerted great power over the study of engineering, and this influence cannot be ignored. By keeping science and engineering intertwined with imperialist goals, the U.S. was able to use an unparalleled skill and technology force for the fortification of its empire.

The two World Wars continued to feed the engineering school-war partnership. Advanced technology was essential to the victory in World War II, aided by land-grant faculty who “often were relocated to engage in top-secret projects, including radar and the atomic bomb” (Marcus, 2015). Riding the momentum brought by technological superiority, the Cold War prompted the greatest legislative support for science and technology education since Morrill. Frenzied by the success of the Soviets in launching Sputnik in 1957, Congress raced to pass the National Defense Education Act a year later. Like Morrill, the NDEA aimed to increase education access, and invested unprecedented amounts into financial aid packages and counseling programs to assist STEM students who may not have been able to afford higher education otherwise. It also encouraged the growth of science and technology programs at the compulsory grades of public schooling and linked these subjects to “gifted” education. High school curriculums were updated; science, math, and foreign language teachers were provided sponsored professional development opportunities. The NDEA recognized that “the defense and the security of the Nation are inseparably bound with education” and that “every young person from the day he first enters school should have an opportunity to develop his gifts to the fullest” (U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1959).

America knew the path to winning the Cold War was that of science and technology, but it could not simply culminate in a single, immediate display of national power. It had to be long-term—to take roots in civil society. It had to be hegemonic, transforming the very culture of American life so that it would be sustained without government supervision by the personal beliefs of the people. As it had done with ROTC, the U.S. saw the immense need for and potential of a standing army of educated civilians who could mobilize in times of national emergency. The difference was that while ROTC was physical, STEM was intellectual, and enjoyed a degree of distance from actual defense operations. That distance allowed the dissemination of state ideology through more natural and inviting means, and K-12 public education was one of them.

Meanwhile, the universities, particularly land-grants, acted as primary research centers funded by defense agencies. With mounting pressure from civil rights and anti-war movements, most institutions eliminated ROTC’s mandatory characteristic or even (temporarily) disposed of the program entirely in the 1960s. However, this was a divestment red herring. Where the military lost its campus presence in ROTC, it gained it in the intellectual soul of the university. Government agencies provided billions in “federal funds relating to defense…most of which went to university-related research” in science, math, foreign language, and area studies (Downs). Engineering departments, the quieter leg of the military academia complex, found themselves engorged.

As STEM education ballooned, it also diversified. School integration had supporters not only in the civil rights movement but also in the scientific race against the Soviets: “the United States debated…how much desperately needed brainpower was being squandered by the intentional neglect of America’s Negro schools” (Shetterly, 2016). More women enrolled in engineering courses thanks to the “unusual pressures of wartime” that, in some institutions, “permanently pushed open the doors of a few engineering programs” to them (Bix, 2013). And what was then acknowledged as a “brain drain” was happening—the migration of skilled foreign knowledge to the U.S. by way of international students and professionals who often did not return to their home countries. By 1967, engineers made up the largest group of these immigrants.

In the 21st century, international engineering students continue to flock to American universities. As of 2020, “11.2% of bachelor’s degrees, 53.2% of master’s degrees, and 58.8% of doctorate degrees in engineering were awarded to international students” (Xu, 2023). However, the harshly limited, endlessly complex nature of U.S. immigration policy and its whims means international students live in a constant state of uncertainty that the higher education community has difficulty comprehending. As visa holders, international students—while typically far from poverty—are pillaged financially while ineligible for federal assistance programs. They are threatened by amazingly inflexible deadlines for finding employment after graduation while immediately turned away from most industrial sectors. During times of economic hardship, like now, they are demonized and scapegoated by American citizens. In their jobs, they are often not granted the same benefits as permanent-status employees, but their total lack of protections discourages collective organizing for improved labor conditions. As foreign nationals they are also subject to heightened surveillance and political hostility. At the institution, many “silently fall through the cracks of the higher education system, feeling lost while finding little guidance” (Xu).

As explicated earlier, since the mid-1800s, science and engineering has enjoyed the same egalitarian reputation as has the Morrill Act. Science is natural, seemingly factual, and immediately practical; technological innovation has improved living conditions in much of the world. Science is necessary because it combats religious traditionalism and releases human knowledge from the grip of a single authoritative agency; it is seen as a high form of knowledge that comes from evidence and is therefore irrefutable and absent of bias; it is a hallmark of a democratic, modern society. Or is it? Eugenics was once classified as a science (and still is to some). Not all technological developments are necessarily beneficial to the people, nor are they ever free of bias, because they are created by humans in a politicized society. And as we have seen, the progression of American scientific and technological knowledge comes from highly political, conflict-laden motivations that arrive to favor the U.S. military and empire. The legislative actions to further accessibility and diversity in STEM are perhaps not as celebratory as they seem to the students themselves. In actuality, after international students are welcomed into the university, they do not experience these equalizing, humanizing qualities but are othered and reminded every day of their disposability lest they fail to contribute to American capital. They are also pressured to mask their native experiences and assimilate to U.S. culture, all while producing research and technologies vital to the strengthening of U.S. empire. In effect, the international student is the American neocolonial project.

International students are far from being the only ones who lack support from their administrators and peers in engineering programs. Black, Latina/o/x, and Native students remain poorly represented in the field, as do women and working class, gender/queer, and disabled and differently-abled students. The need to address this disparity is incredibly dire, leading to extensive advocacy related to it, including the creation of many STEM programs centering those underrepresented in the field. Educators call for science and technology schooling to be more accessible to these students so that they do not “fall behind,” which can have serious material consequences, as it may mean losing a chance towards economic mobility. Interestingly, this argument implies a certain fear towards the power of technology, assuming a deterministic perspective that in turn sustains this fear. Capitalizing on public perceptions of its positive effects as well as its great risks, STEM education is able to keep pushing for investment at a level totally above all other fields of study.

Yet the clamor to push underrepresented young people into the STEM pipeline makes it difficult to simultaneously encourage critical interrogation of the system. The connection between engineering and the military becomes especially apparent in role model stories of minoritized engineers, who were naturally often involved with war. Dorothy Vaughan and other “computers” at NACA did the math for the atomic bomb over Japan, Mary Golda Ross worked on missiles at Lockheed Martin, Grace Hopper wrote code for the Navy. These women’s stories are absolutely necessary to learn—but discussion of their wartime contributions tend to be left out. Unfortunately, the systemic devaluation of Black, Native, and women’s (among others’) work in science and technology has created an awkward dearth of documented role models that makes it arduous, potentially nonproductive, to challenge those few stories that have been told. On the other hand, critical dissection of war as a system of power is often the very channel for addressing STEM disparities in the first place. For example, the gender gap can be partly explained by the historical intimacy between engineering and the military, the greatest example of hypermasculinity. Additionally, obfuscating the impact of the U.S. military on oppressed people also obfuscates students’ own histories.

These points suggest a pattern of current STEM diversity initiatives actually acting as deliberate recruitment tools, only to mask diverse experiences and reshape them to fit conventions, rather than meaningfully working towards a just and ethical engineering education—even when the latter is the intention. Education itself has long been weaponized, and as an institution, it is one of the most pervasive, effective, and invisible devices of epistemological violence. Understanding the engineering-military relationship is necessary because it then allows advocates and educators from the community to see that their actual mission is typically at odds with that of their sponsors and institutional administrators. It may also shift the conversation on diversity to one that calls for a different STEM rather than a funneling of different identities into the existing STEM paradigm. Because—as in the case of international students and underrepresented students—entry into an engineering education may be achievable only for the educational environment itself to be hostile and demoralizing.

Engineering education is “not simply training in a prescribed set of appropriate, academic courses, but is enculturation into a well-established system of practices, meanings, and beliefs. These engineering traditions or customs have persisted over time and are ‘passed down’ from mature practitioners to novices” (Tonso, 1996). There are certainly other, much more nuanced and contemporary factors that uphold an inequitable engineering culture. However, the original culture of engineering education, namely its interwoven pillars in the dispossession of indigenous peoples and expansion of American imperialism, cannot have escaped its practices, meanings, and beliefs. Engineering at the university brought forth the technology used in violent dispossession that has caused so much of the enduring, generational trauma inflicted upon its “diverse” students. To say it is all in the past would be grossly untrue. We have only to look at the examples of today’s university and its ongoing relationships with the weapons manufacturing industry, ICE, and the Israeli military.

That being said, most engineering professors are probably not advocating for their students to pursue postgraduate careers in the defense industry. Nor is the entire purpose of modern engineering education such a militarized monopoly. Engineering has become more creative, social, and interdisciplinary. Far from being totally utilitarian, it can be rather holistic and encourages young people to be imaginative builders and problem-solvers. Transforming the study of science and engineering to genuinely benefit students and communities in a healthy, more ethical manner is entirely possible but requires a serious decolonial paradigm shift. Harris (2025) advocates for the incorporation of Indigenous Futurism and Afrofuturism in STEM education—pedagogies that are innovative and optimistic about technology while prioritizing reclamation of ancestral knowledge. These are values engineering education has been desperately waiting for.

Engineering curriculums also need greater inclusion of its own history and analysis of its social impact. College students are graduating into a politically terrifying, economically desperate period of time in which they are faced with increasingly dystopian expectations of technology labor. It is not ethical nor humane to push them into a pipeline, not teaching them where it may lead to until they are too entrenched socially and financially in it. They are entitled to much more agency in their life paths. Having the right to an education that is personally relevant and emotionally beneficial is not absurd; nor is it to feel comfortable and grounded in one’s work, but this is a sentiment many young engineers at corporate facilities cannot relate to.

Science and technology deserve to return to the people. Sooner than later, it is imperative that we decolonize STEM education into one that provides the knowledge to build tools for community healing and betterment without being tied to leadership that invests in genocide, war, and detention. And engineering must be understood for what it is, which is an inherently social—and political—technology, with consequences beyond the machine. That means all those contributing have both a responsibility and a say in it.

As mentioned in the introduction of this paper, the STEM acronym has generated many interpretations and uses. This variability allows us to see that STEM is, rather than an objective and natural grouping of deserving subjects, a product of institutional perspectives built by broader goals tied to labor, capital, and immigration policy. It also offers us a chance to imagine how science and technology can be further reinterpreted: towards one that is more personal and critical, and ultimately, hopeful.