In the twenty-first century, the urgent problems the world is facing (the UN Sustainable Development Goals) are increasingly related to vast and intricate ‘systems of systems’, which comprise both socio-technical and eco-systems. In order for engineers to adequately and responsibly respond to these problems, they cannot focus on only one technical or any other aspect in isolation, but must adopt a wider and multidisciplinary perspective of these systems, including an ethical and social perspective. Engineering curricula should therefore focus on what (...) we call ‘comprehensive engineering’. Comprehensive engineering implies ethical coherence, consilience of scientific disciplines, and cooperation between parties. (shrink)

A joint effort by the University of California at Berkeley and Delft University of Technology to develop a graduate engineering ethics course for PhD students encountered two types of challenges: academic and institutional. Academically, long-term collaborative research efforts between engineering and philosophy faculty members might be needed before successful engineering ethics courses can be initiated; the teaching of ethics to engineering graduate students and collaborative research need to go hand-in-hand. Institutionally, both bottom-up approaches at the level of the faculty and (...) as a joint research and teaching effort, and top-down approaches that include recognition by a University’s administration and the top level of education management, are needed for successful and sustainable efforts to teach engineering ethics. (shrink)

Financial relationships in academic research can create institutional conflicts of interest because the financial interests of the institution or institutional officials may inappropriately influence decision-making. Strategies for dealing with institutional COIs include establishing institutional COI committees that involve the board of trustees in conflict review and management, developing policies that shield institutional decisions from inappropriate influences, and establishing private foundations that are independent of the institution to own stock and intellectual property and to provide capital to start-up companies.

Humans are powerful and clever, and also more ignorant than they know. As a result, they too often fail to acknowledge or even recognize their limitations, and are more arrogant than humble regarding their capabilities. Education that explicitly recognizes and addresses the context of science and technology, their inherent values and ethical implications and concerns, and their problematic as well as beneficial impacts can potentially rescue the human species from itself.

One of the core problems with engineering ethics education is perceptual. Although ethics is meant to be a central component of today’s engineering curriculum, it is often perceived as a marginal requirement that must be fulfilled. In addition, there is a mismatch between faculty and student perceptions of ethics. While faculty aim to communicate the nuances and complexity of engineering ethics, students perceive ethics as laws, rules, and codes that must be memorized. This paper provides some historical context to better (...) understand these perceptual differences, and suggests that curriculum constraints are important contributing factors. Drawing on the growing scholarship of student engagement approaches to pedagogy, the paper explores how students can be empowered to effect change in the broader engineering curriculum through engineering ethics. The paper describes a student engagement approach to pedagogy that includes students as active participants in curriculum design—a role that enables them to critically reflect about why ethics is a requirement. Including students in the process of curriculum design leads students to reframe ethics as an integrative tool with the capacity to bring together different engineering departments and build bridges to non-engineering fields. This paper argues that students can and should play an active and important role in relocating ethics from the periphery to the core of the engineering curriculum. (shrink)

One of the core problems with engineering ethics education is perceptual. Although ethics is meant to be a central component of today’s engineering curriculum, it is often perceived as a marginal requirement that must be fulfilled. In addition, there is a mismatch between faculty and student perceptions of ethics. While faculty aim to communicate the nuances and complexity of engineering ethics, students perceive ethics as laws, rules, and codes that must be memorized. This paper provides some historical context to better (...) understand these perceptual differences, and suggests that curriculum constraints are important contributing factors. Drawing on the growing scholarship of student engagement approaches to pedagogy, the paper explores how students can be empowered to effect change in the broader engineering curriculum through engineering ethics. The paper describes a student engagement approach to pedagogy that includes students as active participants in curriculum design—a role that enables them to critically reflect about why ethics is a requirement. Including students in the process of curriculum design leads students to reframe ethics as an integrative tool with the capacity to bring together different engineering departments and build bridges to non-engineering fields. This paper argues that students can and should play an active and important role in relocating ethics from the periphery to the core of the engineering curriculum. (shrink)

In order to solve a series of problems brought about by rapid development of science and technology, it is necessary not only to conduct in-depth research on science and technology ethics, but also to strengthen ethics education in science and technology. China’s five technical universities exemplify the specific situation and characteristics of ethics at Chinese technical universities, and can be compared to the situation in South Africa. China’s ethics education in the 5TU emphasizes the use of traditional ideological and cultural (...) resources, and practical cases. The teaching methods focus on combining traditional Chinese ethics with foreign experience and teaching methods, aiming at cultivating students’ ability to solve specific problems in the real world. This paper also evaluates and reflects on the short-term and long-term effects of China’s ethics education in science and technology, revealing some special problems. Ethics education in science and technology at the 5TU is based on the principle of “unity of knowledge and behaviour”. It is hoped that China’s ethics education founded on traditional Chinese thought, can make a valuable contribution to the development of global engineering ethics. (shrink)

The movements to teach the responsible conduct of research and engineering ethics at technological universities are often unacknowledged aspects of the ethics across the curriculum movement and could benefit from explicit alliances with it. Remarkably, however, not nearly as much scholarly attention has been devoted to EAC as to RCR or to engineering ethics, and RCR and engineering ethics educational efforts are not always presented as facets of EAC. The emergence of EAC efforts at two different institutions—the Illinois Institute of (...) Technology and Utah Valley University —provide counter examples. The remarkably successful UVU initiative gave birth to EAC as a scholarly movement and to the associated Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum. EAC initiatives at the Colorado School of Mines, however, point up continuing institutional resistances to EAC. Finally, comparative reflection on successes and failures can draw some lessons for the future. One suggestion is that increasing demands for accountability and pedagogical research into what works in teaching and learning offers special opportunities. (shrink)

In addition to a code of conduct for researchers, it is desirable to implement a code of conduct for funders of research. This is because researchers often behave unethically as a result of direct and/or indirect pressure from funders. The paper provides an expansion of the first proposal for such a code of conduct and includes several elements such as “policy relevant research should not be contracted and supervised by a client with an interest in the outcomes”, and “policy relevant (...) research should always be examined by an independent institute”. (shrink)

In the applied sciences and in engineering there is often a significant overlap between work at universities and in industry. For the individual scholar, this may lead to serious conflicts when working on joint university–industry projects. Differences in goals, such as the university’s aim to disseminate knowledge while industry aims to appropriate knowledge, might lead to complicated situations and conflicts of interest. The detailed cases of two electrical engineers and two architects working at two different universities of technology illustrate the (...) kinds of problems individual scholars face in university–business collaborations. These cases are based on qualitative interviews and additional data and demonstrate that, while value conflicts emerge on the organizational level, it is primarily the individual researcher who must deal with such conflicts. This analysis adds to existing studies in two ways: first, it explicitly addresses normative issues framed in terms of ethical and social values, thereby going beyond the common social-science perspective of university–business collaboration. Secondly, it provides qualitative insights, thereby identifying details and issues not apparent in quantitative studies. In particular, it is evident that university–industry collaborations are prone to value conflicts not only in research but also in education and job training. (shrink)

There is a need to provide an appropriate normative conception of the modern university: a conception which identifies its unifying purposes and values and, thereby, gives direction to institutional role occupants, governments, public policymakers and other would-be institutional designers. Such a conception could admit differences between modern universities; differences, for example, between so-called universities of technology and other universities. Indeed, it is preferable to frame the issue at the level of higher education or university systems rather than at the level (...) of individual universities. According to the teleological normative theory of social institutions, social institutions are organizations or systems of organizations that provide collective goods by means of joint activity; universities are no exception. So what are the fundamental collective good that universities of technology, or the larger systems of which they are a part, ought to be providing and how are they travelling in this regard? This is the question addressed in this paper. (shrink)

The development of the curriculum for engineering education should be based on a comprehensive understanding of engineers’ responsibilities. The responsibilities that are constitutive of being an engineer include striving to fulfill the standards of excellence set by technical codes; to improve the idealized models that engineers use to predict, for example, the behavior of alternative designs; and to achieve the internal goods such as safety and sustainability as they are reflected in the design codes. Globalization has implications for these responsibilities (...) and, in turn, for engineering education, by, for example, modifying the collection of possible solutions recognized for existing problems. In addition, international internships can play an important role in fostering the requisite moral imagination of engineering students. (shrink)

At Universitat Politècnica de València, Meridies, an internship programme that places engineering students in countries of Latin America, is one of the few opportunities the students have to explore the implications of being a professional in society in a different cultural and social context. This programme was analyzed using the capabilities approach as a frame of reference for examining the effects of the programme on eight student participants. The eight pro-public-good capabilities proposed by Melanie Walker were investigated through semi-structured interviews. (...) The internship is an environment in which students can put into practice the knowledge they have acquired in undergraduate studies and to find practical relevance in what they studied. Occasionally, this also entails a critical questioning of what they have learned, a greater awareness of the limits of the contents of their studies and of the way things were taught, and interest in less explored issues that are closely linked to social justice. However, tensions can arise between the pro-public-good oriented perspectives of this programme, and a more instrumental vision. One way to overcome these tensions is to foster consideration of reflexivity, that is, the dynamic relationship between technology and society. To do so, the programme must create space before and during the internship, and upon the return of the students, to discuss and collectively reflect upon their lived experience. Additionally, it ought to engage supervisors in this educational journey, both at the university and in the host institutions, and also involve socially committed organisations in this task. (shrink)

Policies and processes dealing with institutional conflict of interest lag well behind those dealing with individual COI. To remediate this, academic institutions must develop strategies for addressing some of the unique challenges in iCOI, including: clarifying the definition of iCOI that addresses the range of individuals potentially involved; implementing a well-designed electronic database for reporting and managing iCOI across multiple leadership constituencies; and providing ongoing education to appropriate institutional officials that communicates the importance of managing iCOI.

The development of the curriculum for engineering education (course requirements as well as extra-curricular activities like study abroad and internships) should be based on a comprehensive understanding of engineers’ responsibilities. The responsibilities that are constitutive of being an engineer include striving to fulfill the standards of excellence set by technical codes; to improve the idealized models that engineers use to predict, for example, the behavior of alternative designs; and to achieve the internal goods such as safety and sustainability as they (...) are reflected in the design codes. Globalization has implications for these responsibilities and, in turn, for engineering education, by, for example, modifying the collection of possible solutions recognized for existing problems. In addition, international internships can play an important role in fostering the requisite moral imagination of engineering students. (shrink)

A powerful set of projections has constructed post-apartheid higher education in South Africa. Among these is the expectation that technikons would become universities of technology, with a mission to drive the technology of national reconstruction and development. In this paper, one of the new universities of technology serves as a case study to explore organizational structure and to highlight the ethics of university management and leadership. Building a new university provides the opportunity to place ethics “upfront”, rather than as an (...) afterthought, by constructing an organizational framework that makes ethical issues integral to management and decision-making processes. In imagining the structure of a university of technology, the authors were inspired by future scripting methods developed by Bastiaan De Laat, and by Duncan Den Boer, Arie Rip and Sandra Speller. The research process firstly involved the identification of themes related to values and ethics through an analysis of the environment. These themes were incorporated into three scenarios of possible futures for this new university type. Using these scenarios, the ethical issues that emerged, are compared with the original themes. Conclusions are then drawn with regard to management structures that are hierarchical and entrench compliance, or that are traditionally collegiate and expertise-based, or that might enable mutual appreciation and allow for leaders to emerge within any functional space at a university of technology. (shrink)