First-Hand:ASEE Fellow History - Feisel

History of an ASEE Fellow

Lyle D. Feisel

As of December 20, 2017

Birthplace: Tama, Iowa

Birth date: October 16, 1935

Family

My ethnic origin is basically German, with ancestors of my great grandparents’ generation immigrating to the United States in the 1860s and 70s. My mother came from a farm background in Iowa and my father – a WWI veteran who served in France – fell into farming, which he did with moderate success but also with moderate enthusiasm. In his late fifties, we left the farm and he started a small construction firm, doing what he really enjoyed.

Since 1957 I have been married to Dorothy Stadsvold, a Home Economics graduate of Iowa State University and daughter of a Danish immigrant. We have three children: Patricia Cargill is a mechanical engineering graduate of Iowa State who works for General Electric, designing jet engines; Margaret Craig is an electrical engineering graduate of Iowa State who has served in the executive suites of various companies and is now CEO of Signiant, Inc.; Kenneth Feisel is a graphic artist and a graduate of Pratt Institute who has worked as Design Director for a number of organizations in New York City. We have two grandchildren, both of whom are mechanical engineering graduates from Purdue.

Education

My first nine years of formal education were in a one room country school that had a total of ten to fifteen students. For eight of those years, I had the same teacher, Enid Edna Geiger, who was, fortunately, an excellent teacher. High school was in Tama, Iowa where I excelled in drama, succeeded in academics and squeaked by in athletics.

In 1953, I enrolled in engineering at Iowa State College. By the end of my freshman year, I had done well academically but had expended my meager financial resources and had also lost the fire in the belly that would have made studenthood more palatable. The remedy for both of those ills was to be found in the Korean GI Bill that was still in effect so, in August 1954, I joined the US Navy. After boot camp and a technical school, I serve for three years aboard USS Norton Sound as one of the first people to hold the rating of Guided Missileman.

Upon completing four years in the Navy and my first year of marriage to Dorothy, I returned to Iowa State (now University) where we set up housekeeping in Pammel Court, the married student (primarily ex-military) housing. The houses were surplus military corrugated metal buildings on concrete slabs, heated by an oil fired space heater in the winter and cooled (inadequately) by window fans in the summer. But the rent was $24 per month and it was a short walk to the center of campus. I joined the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) and in my senior year was elected Chairman of the student branch thereby beginning many decades of involvement in the affairs of IEEE, the result of a merger of IRE and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE).

During my senior year (1960-61), I worked as a laboratory technician for Prof. Roy Mattson. One day he suggested (commanded?) that I apply for one of the relatively new National Defense Education Act (NDEA) graduate fellowships. The Russians had launched Sputnik in 1957 and immediately Congress did what it does best in a crisis: 1) panic and 2) respond. The response in this case was to take a number of actions to produce more advanced-level scientists and engineers to give a boost to our space and defense efforts. I, along with many other young men and women, was a beneficiary of the program, completing a PhD degree in 1964.

Employment

Most of my career has been in academia. Immediately after receiving my doctorate, I joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. The School was just getting started in graduate education and I, along with Carl Gruber, another newly minted PhD (University of Illinois) was elected to lead the charge in EE. Which we did. We established laboratories, conducted and directed research and produced a number of master’s degree graduates. Later, a doctoral program was initiated and the faculty expanded to conduct it.

In 1975, the EE Department Head, William Hixson, died unexpectedly and I became Acting Head and, after a national search, Head of the department.

I had two sabbatical leaves during my 19 years at SD Tech. The first was in 1969-70 as a National Visiting Scholar at Cheng Kung University in Tainan, Taiwan. The second was holding the Wachtmeister Chair at the Virginia Military Institute. As is often the case with sabbatical leaves (and is their intended purpose) these experiences had a profound effect on my life and career.

In 1983, I was appointed dean of the new Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science at the State University of New York at Binghamton. My challenge was to integrate some graduate programs from the just-eliminated School of Advanced Technology and some technology programs from the School of Human Development while creating from scratch baccalaureate and master’s programs in three fields of engineering. There were various ups and downs, including the transfer of the technology programs to SUNY Alfred, but the overall effort was successful and the Watson School today is a vibrant part of SUNY Binghamton with a wide variety of BS, MS and PhD programs and an exciting research effort. I retired in 2001 after 18 years in the deanship.

In addition to my academic employment, I also spent several summers in industry working for Collins Radio (now Rockwell Collins), Honeywell, IBM and Northrop.

Research and Scholarship

While I have had a great deal of fun doing and directing research in my career, I would not claim any great breakthroughs and only a few incremental contributions to progress. My master’s and doctoral research were in the area of thin insulating films, specifically investigating a negative resistance effect that I accidentally discovered while I was working at Honeywell in the Summer of 1962. I found that when an insulating film was broken down in a controlled manner, it often resulted in a two terminal device wherein, over a certain range, an increase in voltage resulted in a decrease in current, contrary to what one expects in a nominally passive device. The fabrication method was not very reliable and no one ever developed a practical use for such a device, but it is out there in the literature.

I continued working with thin films for a number of years, investigating thin film diodes and transistors, various insulating films including silicon monoxide and oxides of tantalum and titanium. I did some of the early work with tin oxide when solar cells were being developed and built what I thought was a deucedly clever device that was the electric analog of a magnetic core memory. It worked, but when I submitted a paper on it, some experts declared that it couldn’t work, so my results were never published. I did get a patent on the device, however, and some 20 years later, I ran across a paper describing essentially the same device, perhaps written by the same experts. I will never know.

In the mid-seventies, Ron Schmitz and I received an NSF CAUSE grant to do “Autoremediation”. The idea was to produce a set of exercises that a student could use to see if they understood certain concepts and then further exercises to help them learn material in which they were deficient. The exercises were presented as little booklets or, alternatively, using a jerry-rigged carousel projector to show the appropriate frame as determined by the student’s response. It all worked, but it would have been a lot better if we had had the computing power that became common 10 or 15 years later.

I have cluttered up the literature with a number of papers over the years but never was sufficiently disciplined to properly record my work. One paper, however, has turned out to be long lived and apparently useful; that is “The Role of the Laboratory in Undergraduate Engineering Education”, co-authored with Al Rosa and published in Journal of Engineering Education in 2005. The core of the paper is a set of laboratory learning objectives that were developed in an ABET-Sloan workshop that I co-chaired with George Peterson.

One of my more satisfying scholarly undertakings was writing Lyle’s Laws for the Bent of Tau Beta Pi and then publishing the collection in book form.

Philosophy of Engineering Education

When I received my doctoral degree, I don’t think I knew much about either engineering or engineering education, although I’m afraid I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I did know a lot about natural science and mathematics and engineering science and while that knowledge is all necessary to be a good engineer, it is not sufficient. As I gradually learned that, I added the teaching of engineering to my usual practice of teaching engineering science. What do I mean by all that?

Natural science is the process of systematically studying the natural world. Engineering science is the process of systematically studying the manmade world. Engineering is the process of creating the manmade world or, if you prefer, technology. That is, technology is the product of engineering. Engineering, i.e., the process of creating technology, has a number of subjective components that are not present in the objectivity of the underlying sciences. In a paper I started to write but never finished, I identified four such subjective considerations: context, i.e., the milieu in which the engineering solution is to be implemented; creativity, i.e., that indefinable spark that leads engineers to generate/discover/recognize new combinations of existing components; human relations, i.e., the effect that the engineering solution has on the real people who will be living with it; and ethics, i.e., the imperative to do the right thing even when the wrong thing is perfectly legal and probably moral.

With all that said, I can now state that a central tenet of my educational philosophy is that in addition to all the mathematics and natural science and engineering science, we must also help our students to learn that they must consider the context of their work, they must be creative and foster creativity in others, they must consider the effects of their engineering on human beings and the environment and must, above all, behave ethically.

In that last paragraph, another principle central to my educational philosophy snuck in; I didn’t say, “we must teach our students to …”. I said, “we must help our students to learn …”. Some years ago, I wrote a short essay – published, as I recall, in the predecessor to JEE – entitled, “Teaching Doesn’t Matter”. The central message was that you can say all you want about what you are teaching, but if the students aren’t learning … Well? Well, in the end, our job is not to teach. Our job is to help our students to learn. We are managers, managing the activities that help our students to learn.

So I will segue to another word,” activities”, that encapsulates another element of my teaching philosophy. Another of my short essays was entitled something like, “Active Learning (Snicker, Snicker. Wink, Wink)” The premise in that essay was that when we talk about active learning, which was very trendy at the time, we should do it with a wink because there is no such thing as inactive learning. Talking about active learning is like talking about an underground tunnel. There are no aboveground tunnels. If we want students to know something, i.e., be able to do something, the best way for us to help them develop that ability is to have them do it. If students listen to lectures, they are primarily learning to listen to lectures.

Finally, my last bit of educational philosophy. This was introduced to me by John Lindenlaub and nurtured through many long discussions and arguments with Ron Schmitz. Simply stated, if you want your students to learn/know/be able to do something, you should first define what that something is. You should then write those somethings down and communicate them to your students and when it comes time for assessment – either formative or summative – you only need to see if your students can do them. And no, I did not say see if your students have learned them or see if your students know them. You have to see if the students can DO them because the only thing you can observe is what they DO. So the best thing for you to do is to write those learning objectives (outcomes, we now call them) in terms of what the students should be able to DO after you have helped them to learn.

ASEE Activities

Shortly after taking my first teaching job at the South Dakota School of Mines, I joined ASEE, probably because my Department Head told me to. Of course, I was interested in becoming a better teacher and soon realized that I didn’t know much about teaching but that some folks in ASEE did. We had an ASEE “Branch” on campus and I attended the meetings and eventually started going to the meetings of the ASEE Rocky Mountain Section. Eventually, I became VP and then President of our branch and then Campus Activity Coordinator. In these positions, I brought a number of speakers to campus, including such luminaries as John Lindenlaub.

In 1973, I was named Outstanding Campus Coordinator of the year for Zone IV due, at least in part, to the influence of one of my ASEE heroes, Gordon Flammer. In the fall of 1974, the four recipients of this award were invited to Washington DC where we were asked to organize a committee to integrate new members into the Society. Thus was born the first New Engineering Educator Committee (NEE), which I was honored to chair. The other members were, if I recall, Don Decker, Jim McDonough and another guy whose face I can almost see but whose name escapes me. The officer – I don’t know what office he held – who gave us our charge was Don Vestal so we were sometimes known as the NEE Jerks and sometimes as Vestal’s Virgins. At any rate, we kicked off the NEE activities which have continued in some sense ever since.

During this same period, I was a member of the Campus Liaison Board and the Campus Activity Coordinator Affairs Committee. I later went through the offices of the Electrical Engineering Division and membership in and chairmanship of a host of committees and boards.

In 1982, I was elected Chair of PIC I and entered into a series of national offices; PIC I Chair, 1982-84; VP Finance, 1994-95;,President-elect, 1996-97; President, 1997-98; Past President, 1998-99.

My last major involvement with ASEE came when I was asked to serve as Interim Executive Director for several months in 2011-2012. Currently, I chair an award selection committee and chair the Prism Editorial Advisory Board. Beyond that, I hang around and provide an opinion when called upon to do so. Or sometimes without being asked.

Other Professional Activities

Most of my other professional activities have been with IEEE where, at various times, I served as President of the IEEE Education Society, Vice President for Education, member of the Board of Directors and member and/or chair of a plethora of boards and committees. I have also been active with the IEEE Foundation, a separate corporation, serving as a board member, Vice-President and Secretary.

I have also served as president of the South Dakota Renewable Energy Society, the Association of Engineering Colleges of New York State and, somewhat less professional, the Black Hills Oenological Society and the Heron Point Resident Association.

In the area of accreditation, I was an ABET engineering program evaluator intermittently for some thirty years, including visits to many universities in other countries. I was a member of the Engineering Accreditation Commission from 1987 to 1991 and of the ABET Board of Directors from 1991 to 1997.

I am a Fellow of ASEE, IEEE and NSPE and a Registered Professional Engineer, now in retired status. I am also a Director Emeritus of the IEEE Foundation.