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I have no doubt that your husband is a patriotic and talented engineer, but an engineering degree does not necessarily prepare one to make decisions about sophisticated matters involving politics and history.

GA Tech should stick to what it does very, very well: train students as engineers and leave politics to Georgia, Emory, Georgia State, or Mercer.

So, by getting an engineering degree a person cannot become well informed in the (much more sophisticated) areas of politics, government, foreign policy, etc.?

Don't tell my very well informed family members who are engineers or studying to be engineers and also manage to have a very good understanding of those areas.

I think people who are intelligent enough to make it through an engineering degree probably have enough brain power left over to contemplate politics.

I did not say that an engineer could not become well informed as to other subjects.
However, engineering - as is medicine, law, or accounting - is as much a method of thinking as it is the technical aspects of the subject matter.
Perhaps you remember the movie "The Paper Chase". The aged professor of tort law tells the first year student that law students teach themselves the law, but professors teach students how to think like a lawyers.
Or if you want a real life example, try this. When Adm Hyman Rickover was on active duty, so great was his influence over the Navy that - I'm told - the curriculum of the Naval Academy was 85% math, science, and engineering. More than one person observed that Naval officers were extremely well trained in technical matters but were sadly lacking in knowledge that could not be quantified.

Mere brain power is no substitute for wisdom. As Mortimer Adler observed about Albert Einstein: he was a brilliant theoretical physicist but his knowledge and opinions about politics were childlike.

I'm certain that your family members are well-informed about politics, but I'd bet they didn't learn about it
in a class on thermodynamics or aeronautics.