Byron Newberry

Acclimating International Graduate Students to Professional Engineering Ethics

This article describes the education portion of an ongoing grant-sponsored education and research project designed to help graduate students in all engineering disciplines learn about the basic ethical principles, rules, and obligations associated with engineering practice in the United States. While the curriculum developed for this project is used for both domestic and international students, the educational materials were designed to be sensitive to the specific needs of international graduate students. In recent years, engineering programs in the United States have sought to develop a larger role for professional ethics education in the curriculum. Accreditation requirements, as well as pressures from the private sector, have helped facilitate this shift in focus. Almost half of all engineering graduate students in the U.S. are international students. Further, research indicates that the majority of these students will remain in the U.S. to work post-graduation. It is therefore in the interest of the profession that these students, coming from diverse backgrounds, receive some formal exposure to the professional and ethical expectations and norms of the engineering profession in the United States to help ensure that they have the knowledge and skills—non-technical as well as technical—required in today’s engineering profession. In becoming acculturated to professional norms in a host country, international students face challenges that domestic students do not encounter; such as cultural competency, language proficiency, and acculturation stress. Mitigating these challenges must be a consideration in the development of any effective education materials. The present article discusses the project rationale and describes the development of on-line instructional materials aimed at helping international engineering graduate students acclimate to professional engineering ethics standards in the United States. Finally, a brief data summary of students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the content and instructional interface is provided to demonstrate the initial effectiveness of the materials and to present a case for project sustainability.

Katrina: Macro-Ethical Issues for Engineers

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst disasters in United States history. Failures within New Orleans’ engineered hurricane protection system (levees and floodwalls) contributed to the severity of the event and have drawn considerable public attention. In the time since Katrina, forensic investigations have uncovered a range of issues and problems related to the engineering work. In this article, my goal is to distill from these investigations, and the related literature that has accumulated, some overarching macro-ethical issues that are relevant for all engineers. I attempt to frame these issues, using illustrative examples taken from Katrina, in a way that might be of pedagogical use and benefit for engineering educators interested in engaging their students in discussions of engineering ethics, societal impact of engineered systems, engineering design, or related topics. Some of the issues discussed are problems of unanticipated failure modes, faulty assumptions, lack or misuse of information, the importance of resiliency, the effects of time, balancing competing interests, attending to the details of interfaces, the fickleness of risk perception, and how the past constrains the present.

For the Benefit of Humanity: Values in Micro, Meso, Macro, and Meta Levels in Engineering

The goal of this essay is to sketch a taxonomic outline of values within engineering. Any desire to understand the technology-society relationship would presumably benefit from investigating the values that inform engineering work, since that work is largely proximate to the production of technologies. More specifically, an understanding of the values constitutive of and operating within engineering at a multitude of levels can potentially aid in understanding how engineers go from thought to thing in the processes of design and manufacture. I propose a four-level hierarchy of engineering values, at the micro, meso, macro, and meta levels. Values at the micro level correspond to those values operative at the level of specific, detailed engineering tasks. Meso level values are those values operative in the process of translating functional descriptions of designs into structural descriptions – that is, at the creative level of engineering design. At the macro-level, I refer to the values operative for engineers at the economic/organizational level – that is, at the level at which engineers intersect heavily with non-technical interests. Finally, the meta level comprises overarching values that presumably inform all of engineering work.

The Role of Research in Academic Drift Processes in European and American Professional Engineering Education Outside the Universities

‘Academic drift’ refers to a long term process induced by educational systems’ dynamics whereby vocationally and professionally oriented post-secondary education institutions with a focus on professional training, teaching, and learning strive to become like universities by incorporating university structures and emulating their values, norms, symbols and practices. In this process they increasingly aspire to research and scholarship. However, the role of research in academic drift processes in professional non-university engineering education has attracted relatively little attention in the literature on academic drift as the focus has up till recently largely been on the introduction of more theory in the curriculum at the expense of practice, on the vertical extension of study programs, and on the introduction of university courses in the engineering college sector. In this chapter we will examine three examples of research drift that have taken place in professional non-university engineering education institutions in Ireland, The Netherlands, and the United States, respectively, from the massive expansion of higher education in the 1960s to the present. More precisely we will examine and compare research drift in Irish Institutes of Technology, Dutch Hogescholen, and three American institutions – a public technical institute, a state teacher’s college, and a sectarian liberal arts university, and with an eye to recent developments in Denmark. In reviewing the literature, we have the following questions in mind: What are the driving forces behind academic drift in non-university engineering education in Europe and the United States? Are these driving forces of a similar nature or do they differ? Is academic drift desirable for vocationally and professionally oriented programs, and if not, can it be avoided? What research mission are former designated non-university engineering education institutions in Europe and the United States aspiring to fulfill? What kinds of tension and dilemma does this new mission create in the above-mentioned kinds of institution?

The engineering adjective, and why it might matter

With their proposal for a Liberal Studies in Engineering (LSE) degree program, Bucciarelli and Drew seek to effect a panoply of outcomes, including at least (i) promoting critical analysis of engineering education, (ii) transforming engineering education from a more instrumental to a more reflective and socially conscious enterprise, (iii) providing an alternative educational pathway to engineering for the more broadly inclined and as yet undecideds, (iv) providing an educational pathway for those who wish to make engineering an object of study from humanities and social sciences perspectives and (v) helping to attract more students to engineering from underrepresented groups. All of these are goals I enthusiastically support. Yet, achieving such diverse objectives is ambitious, and I fear there are formidable systemic obstacles to be navigated. But, fortune favors the bold, as they say, so I hope Bucciarelli and Drew make good headway in realizing the kind of program they envision. In what follows, I will offer one particular observation about engineering education vis-à-vis achieving Bucciarelli’s and Drew’s desired outcomes. As my point of departure, consider a comment voiced by a participant in the January 2015 workshop on LSE led by Bucciarelli and Drew, held in Washington, DC. The discussant essentially argued that the name liberal studies in engineering may not be the most inviting title, since liberal studies may connote a morass of unproductive ambiguities to the engineering-minded, while engineering may connote a morass of sterile hyper-technicalities to the liberal studies-minded. Whether or not this concern has merit, there is, I think, an important underlying point: names are powerful framing devices, so it matters what we call what we are doing. With that in mind, I want to call attention to the nature of the adjectives that routinely precede engineering. There are (oversimplifying) two types of adjectives used with engineering. I will call these thing adjectives and issue adjectives.1 Mechanical and electrical are thing adjectives. Thus, ME is about mechanical things, machines and mechanisms, and EE is about electrical things, circuits and electronic gadgets. Environmental and biomedical are issue adjectives. Thus, EnviroE and BME are about issues – the earth’s environmental quality and human healthcare, respectively. To get a sense of the power of an adjective to engender a mindset, consider the following definitions by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.2 ‘Mechanical engineers research, design, develop, build, and test mechanical and thermal