We went through this a month or so ago. Yeah, it’s a department in their school of engineering. The idiots’ department. They’re training future high school teachers. That’s almost as frightening as if they were training actual future engineers.
Based on the description at Purdues’s web-site it appears to me that this “department” is involved in the education of first-year (freshman) engineering students.
This would be the curriculum which used to be called “Fundamentals of Engineering” back when I was a student in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, several decades ago.