University budget cuts could risk eliminating Engineers in the Community, an undergraduate engineering class with the mission to connect engineering education to the lived realities of St. Louis communities, at risk of elimination. This is partly due to the closure of the Engineering Communication Center, which has long supported the class. Students and faculty have raised concerns directly with administrators.

Professors Sandra Matteucci and Seema Dahlheimer launched Engineers in the Community in the spring of 2016 in response to the Ferguson unrest in 2014, with support from the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement. The course was designed to do something uncommon at WashU: connect engineering education to the lived realities of St. Louis communities. Nearly a decade later, the program’s future is uncertain.

Unlike traditional engineering courses, Engineers in the Community does not use predefined problem sets. At the start of each semester, students are paired with a St. Louis nonprofit or community organization and collaborate on projects tied to that organization’s mission. Past work included building a website for Just Moms STL to consolidate EPA-defined safe levels of toxic chemicals from multiple sources into one accessible site.

J. Tucker Krone, a senior lecturer in the Division of Engineering Education, said the open-ended structure is deliberate. 

“There’s a wild card element to this course, and not all students are comfortable with that,” Krone said. “That discomfort is intentional. The course asks students to slow down, to listen, and to reconsider what it means to ‘solve’ a problem.” Dahlheimer put it more directly: “Just because it’s the optimized solution on paper doesn’t mean it’s going to have the most positive impact in a community.”

Many students including, first-year dual degree biomedical engineering student Victoria Lisson, discovered gaps in their education they hadn’t fully recognized before and challenged the way they had been trained to think. 

“Engineers are known to be kind of robots — we think like robots,” she said. “It’s so important to consider who our work is going to affect.”

In a letter to administrators advocating for the course, Lisson called it “the most impactful class” of her college career. 

“Without this course, we risk graduating engineers who are technically excellent but disconnected from the communities they serve,” she wrote. “It helped me understand what I want to do. … I learned that my own sense of well-being depends on having that connection.”

Some faculty and students have pointed to the University’s stated priorities in making their case. In 2019, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin announced WashU’s “In St. Louis, For St. Louis” initiative. Its mission includes “listening to, learning from, and collaborating with local leaders and institutions to improve quality of life for all who call the St. Louis region home.” Madeline Fialkov, a second-year dual degree student biomedical engineering student currently enrolled in the class, says WashU’s commitment should be put into practice.

“It’s not enough to just eat the beef-filled ravioli and be like, I’m living in St. Louis,” she said. “I think really connecting with the place is important and it’s valuable.”

Senior Muskan Paliwal, a premed biomedical engineering student, discussed the potential elimination as a direct contradiction of that pledge. 

“I came to this school hearing ‘WashU in St. Louis, for St. Louis,’ and I was really excited about the aspect of being able to immerse myself in the community,” she said. “By removing this class, are we really living up to that ‘for St. Louis’ aspect? We’d be doing an injustice by not taking advantage of these resources and giving back to the community that’s giving us so much.”

Bob Hansman, a senior lecturer at the Sam Fox School, leads a bus tour during the course’s immersion trip. Lisson described the bus tour as one of the most impactful experiences of the semester. 

Hansman said the decision to cut the course reflects a deeper contradiction. Engineers in the Community is built around the idea that technical expertise alone is not enough — that good engineering requires understanding the communities a solution will affect, the history behind a problem, and the human cost of getting it wrong. To cut the one course that teaches students to think that way, he said, “just drips irony.”

Hansman framed the stakes in broad terms, not just about one class but about what kind of education WashU chooses to prioritize. 

“I can’t square it with the needs of the world,” he said. “I can’t square it with what I know the students value and need, and I can’t square it with our own slogan.”

Over the years, the course has built sustained relationships with St. Louis nonprofits. Students have developed websites, conducted research, and created outreach materials that partner organizations continue to use after the semester ends.

Paliwal said a recurring theme among student groups was that community partners had strong ideas but lacked the technical means to execute them.

“Their clients had a lot of ideas, but maybe just didn’t know how to execute them properly,” she said. “For example, they didn’t know that a specific app could be created to convey what they’re trying to convey. That’s where a class like Engineers in the Community really helps bring ideas to life.”

Matteucci questioned whether the financial savings are worth the loss of impact on the St. Louis community.

“Given the value that this course delivers to students, this would be worth it to continue funding,” she said. “It’s not that much in the large scheme of things.”

Lisson, in her letter to administrators, framed the decision as one with consequences beyond any single course. 

“What truly makes a university great is not only the success of its graduates,” she wrote. “It is the impact they have on the world.”

Read Victoria Lisson’s full letter to administrators here.