When the Hurly-Burly's Done, of Battles Lost and Won: How a Hybrid Program of Study Emerged from the Toil and Trouble of Stirring Liberal Arts into an Engineering Cauldron at a Public Polytechnic

This paper examines the process of putting a new interdisciplinary program into place that combines study in the liberal arts with traditional engineering study at a traditional state university to create a new, hybrid program of study. The program is called the Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies (LAES) program and it was built at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The LAES program is one of only a few programs in the USA to successfully combine liberal arts with engineering study into a comprehensive Bachelor of Arts degree. The authors discuss the conflicts involved with the process of permanently adding this hybrid form of study to the university's curriculum and offer their definition of hybrid study using this new program as their central example.