Christianity and Engineering Ethics

Presented to the "Christian Scholarship Conference,"
Ohio State University October 22, 1999
Columbus, Ohio

1. Introduction

*On leave 1999–2000 at Dept. of History, Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX 78712

2. Case Study of Christian Scholarship in a Secular Setting: Survey of Engineering Ethics Education

2.1. Survey Results

While the fields of medical and legal ethics are established disciplines of scholarly endeavor with their own academic departments and journals, the same cannot be said of engineering ethics. One reason for this is the relative youth of the engineering profession itself. The first schools of engineering were established in France in the late eighteenth century. The world's oldest professional engineering society, the British Institute of Civil Engineers, was founded only in 1818. Engineering as a separate profession is a child of the Scientific Revolution. It inherited the empirical Baconian attitude expressed by a motto engraved above the entrance to the Kirkaldy Testing Station in London, where the first engineering strength–of–materials measurements were made after a disastrous bridge collapse. The motto reads, "FACTS–NOT OPINIONS."

Answers to questions of ethics tend to be categorized as opinions rather than facts. Accordingly, most engineers in academia feel more comfortable when they deal with hard, empirical facts provable by mathematical logic, experimentation, or other classical scientific methods. Conversely, many engineers tend to avoid "soft" subjects such as politics, history, sociology, and engineering ethics.

The typical undergraduate engineering curriculum reflects the scarcity of engineering ethics activity in research and scholarship. Engineering is unique among the major professions in that a professional degree can be obtained after only four years of college study. With the constantly increasing body of new technical information, this constraint makes for an extremely tight curriculum with little room for "extras" such as ethics. If the U. S. Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) had not insisted for the last twenty years or so on maintaining a minimum credit–hour content of liberal arts courses that amounts to about one course per semester, the undergraduate curriculum of many engineering schools might be completely technical, as it is in many European countries. Even with this minimum ABET requirement, the requirements for coverage of non–technical subjects such as engineering ethics are left largely up to the individual school, and vary widely.

On Nov. 1, 1998, the ABET Board of Directors approved the present version of the new accreditation criteria known as Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000). Criterion 3 (f) requires institutions to demonstrate that their graduates have "an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility." [1] This new criterion is more strongly worded than earlier versions, and may attract more attention to the issue of engineering ethics education at the undergraduate level.

The new criteria were publicized for some time before their formal adoption, and contributed to my decision to do a survey of engineering ethics education in the U. S. As associate department head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I presided over an extensive curriculum revision of both our Electrical Engineering and Computer Systems Engineering programs in 1997. I used the experience I gained in curriculum design and analysis to perform a study of 254 college catalogs from virtually every engineering school in the U. S. My goal in conducting the survey was to answer the following questions about each institution:

1. According to published catalog descriptions, must every engineering graduate of the institution take at least one course whose description states or implies that the subject of ethics is treated? (For institutions with more than one program, if only one of several programs fails to have an ethics–related course, the answer to Question 1 is "no.")

2. If the answer to question (1) is "yes," which of the following descriptions best applies to the program's requirements in this area?

A. The topic is treated as the primary subject of two or more required courses.

B. The topic is treated as the primary subject of one required course.

C. The topic is treated along with one or more unrelated topics in one required course.

In reading the catalog course requirements, I used a liberal definition of "ethics" to include required courses in religion, theology, or philosophy, as well as general ethics and engineering ethics. My intent was to give schools the benefit of the doubt in case engineering ethics was not taught at a particular school, but general ethics or religious ethics was.

The study took approximately two man–months of my time in the summer of 1998. Some of the results are summarized in Fig. 1 and Tables 1, 2, and 3. In the tables, the institutions with at least one required course relating to ethics are sorted into categories A, B, and C corresponding to the descriptions above. Institutions without any such requirement for all engineering undergraduates were placed in Category D, and those for which information was unavailable were placed in Category E.

Fig. 1 shows graphically the number of institutions in categories A (two or more required courses in an ethics–related subject), B (one required course), C (one course that includes ethics along with other subjects), D (no such course required), and E (no data available). As Fig. 1 shows, more than half of all U. S. engineering schools and colleges do not require all their undergraduates to take a course whose catalog description even mentions ethics. Of course, many of these students are free to take an elective course in philosophy or ethics, and some do. But the purpose of this survey was to explore the "worst–case scenario" of minimum catalog requirements. To do a statistically accurate sampling of elective courses in ethics–related areas which are actually taken by engineering undergraduates in the U. S. would require a much more extensive investigation, which I did not have the resources to do. This would be an excellent subject of investigation for future research, however.

If we look at the schools in Categories A, B, and C which do require some form of ethics instruction (only 26.7% of the total), some interesting patterns emerge. The Category A schools all turn out to have present or historical connections with religious denominations, as Table 1 shows. They tend to be small programs. The only schools in this category that graduated more than 200 engineers each in the 1996–97 year were Brigham Young University, associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter–day Saints; Marquette University; and the University of Notre Dame. (Both of the latter, of course, are Catholic institutions.) None of the schools which require two or more courses in ethics or related subjects are typically ranked in the top 25 engineering schools by widely accepted measures, such as the annual U. S. News and World Report ranking.

The schools in Category B require one course on ethics or a related subject for all engineering undergraduates. As Table 2 shows, this category is a mixture of religious and secular institutions. The largest program (measured by the number of 1996–97 graduates) is the Colorado School of Mines, a private non–religious institution. Five or six institutions in Category B have present or former ties to religious denominations. One institution in Category B, Stanford University, is consistently ranked among the top three or four engineering schools in the U. S. This shows that it is possible to have a top–ranked curriculum, which also includes an entire course devoted to ethical and societal aspects of technology.

Category C schools are listed in Table 3 and include several land–grant colleges, the largest program being Texas A&M's, with over 1000 engineering graduates in 1996–97. North Carolina State University and the University of Michigan also appear in Table 3, with over 800 graduates each. These three schools usually appear in the top 25 engineering schools in the U. S. News and World Report rankings. But the great majority of the 25 top–ranked schools fall into Category D of the survey, which means they do not require an ethics–related course for every undergraduate.

In sum, my survey disclosed that an across–the–board requirement to take a course involving ethics, even when broadly defined, was a rarity in engineering undergraduate education. The schools which required two or more such courses (as defined above) were all religious ones, and none of these were top–ranked engineering schools. A few top–ranked schools required either an entire course or a partial course dealing with engineering ethics, but most did not.

I should note that many individual engineering programs (for example, electrical engineering at Ohio State University) require one or more ethics courses, but this requirement is not always uniform across the institution. Even one program which fails to have such a requirement at an institution exercises "veto power" and puts the institution in Category D, even if all the other programs at that institution have ethics requirements. So although the situation may not be as bad as this survey indicates, it is impossible to tell without doing a much more detailed survey at the program level.

2.2. Presenting the Results: Review by Engineering Referees

I felt that the results of my survey would be of interest to engineering educators, since it would furnish a baseline of data from which to measure future progress in developing ethics–related curricula. Accordingly, I wrote a paper of 16 manuscript pages (about 5400 words) and submitted it to the Journal of Engineering Education, a scholarly quarterly published by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). There is not space here to go into the rather checkered past of this journal, which was founded before 1900. Since about 1980, the editors have tried to establish it as the premier scholarly publication for U. S. engineering education, with some success. One of the difficulties facing the journal is that traditionally, most engineering educators (especially those at research institutions) have been evaluated for tenure and promotion primarily on the basis of publications in their technical field of engineering specialization, not on the basis of their contributions to undergraduate education and related scholarship. By contrast, the Journal of Engineering Education has a definite social–science tone, and publishes papers on cognitive science, philosophy, and other comparatively "soft" topics. Consequently, its readership and contributors are mostly tenured engineering professors and educational administrators who have the time to devote to professional issues involving engineering education.

I regarded this journal as the ideal venue for my paper, and boldly entitled it "The Invisible Topic: A Survey of Ethics–Related Instruction in U. S. Engineering Programs." Besides the factual data, I included some recommendations for future action such as this: "Although the present situation is not encouraging, I recommend . . . an ideal format of ethical instruction for engineers which would include foundations in religious or philosophical principles and application of these principles to practical engineering cases."

After the usual interval of several months, I received the anonymous reviews of my paper. One reviewer was largely favorable, but the other two reviewers found conceptual and stylistic problems with the paper. One of the negative reviewers objected to the title phrase, "The Invisible Topic" on the basis that it implied something akin to negligence on the part of engineering educators. None of the reviewers mentioned religious issues in their objections. There was no hint that the problems they had with my paper were based on an anti–religious bias. But they attacked my conclusions and recommendations as unwarranted by the evidence, which was termed "anecdotal."

Based upon these reviews, the journal's editor said that he would accept the paper if it were condensed to an "educational brief" of 2500 words or less. Accordingly, I cut the paper by more than half. In the abbreviated version, there was only enough space to treat the factual material of the survey itself and almost no room for recommendations or discussion of broader issues. The abridged paper was accepted and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Engineering Education. [2]

3. Two Results and Two Audiences: Christian Scholars and Engineers

Scholarly papers are rejected (or accepted) for all kinds of reasons, including space limitations, the mood of the reviewer, and many other factors that have little to do with the intrinsic merit of the paper. But I think the story of my survey and its fate tells us something about the challenges of doing scholarship that is both informed by a Christian perspective, and also of value and interest to the wider scholarly community.

Up to now I have not discussed the connection between my Christianity and my motivations for doing the survey. Briefly put, I wondered whether Christian schools were doing a better job of teaching engineering ethics than secular schools. I did find that all the schools, which require all their engineering undergraduates to take two or more courses in ethics, philosophy, or religion, are (not surprisingly) religious institutions. But I feel that I still do not have an adequate answer to the original question, because (as one of the reviewers of my paper pointed out!) the mere fact that students must take a course in ethics (or religion or philosophy, for that matter) does not automatically imply that the school does a good job in teaching engineering ethics. For that matter, I do not know whether anyone has defined adequately what it means to do a "good job" of teaching engineering ethics, although there have been attempts to measure this. [3] When I chose an objectively measurable set of course requirements to study instead, I hoped to come up with some data which could be used to make an educated guess about the true state of engineering ethics education in the U. S.

This gap between the subjective data one is trying to measure and the objective data one is able to measure is sometimes called the proxy problem. Because I could think of no simple way to measure the state of ethics education in engineering graduates at large, I chose instead to measure the course requirements in ethics, and argued that there must be some relation between the two. The proxy problem shows up in many contexts, most often in the humanities and social sciences. It is one factor that contributes to the failure of the law–like generalizations of the social sciences to have anything that approaches the predictive power of the physical sciences, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out in After Virtue. [4] In line with MacIntyre's call for humility on the part of social scientists, I do not claim that my data show anything quantitatively definite about the state of engineering ethics itself. But I believe it does show something significant about the way engineering educators deal with the subject.

To a Christian scholar interested in the state of Christian higher education, my survey is of interest because it reveals that many of the historically Christian schools (I include Catholic institutions in this) still require their engineering undergraduates to take one or two courses in religion, philosophy, or ethics. However, to an engineering educator who either has no particular religious affiliation, or who compartmentalizes that affiliation separately from professional matters, the fact that all of the Category A schools were religious institutions is just a trivial artifact of the way my survey questions were worded. While I am sure most of these institutions operate good engineering programs, their contribution to the overall pool of engineering talent is not remarkable either in quantity or in quality. The finding of my survey that is most significant to the engineering community is that most schools, whether large or small, public or private, do not have an across–the–board requirement for ethics education that appears in their catalogs. This may or may not be a problem, but the reviewers of my paper felt that it was not for me to say whether it was. Rather, they preferred that I simply present the data and allow the results to speak for themselves.

Ultimately, the situation was resolved with a compromise: I did get to publish my data, but without most of the interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations that I hoped to include along with them. Any Christian scholar who wishes to deal with engineering ethics will have to learn the art of making practical compromises without losing one's integrity and philosophical commitment to principles of Christian scholarship. The final part of this paper is devoted to a brief description of how one Christian scholar has achieved this in a course on engineering ethics.

4. Staudenmaier's The Politics and Ethics of Engineering

John Staudenmaier is a professor of history at the University of Detroit Mercy. For the last several years he has also been editor of Technology & Culture, the journal of the Society for the History of Technology, and has published extensively in this and related fields. His institution operates a sizable engineering school for undergraduates, and all of them must take 5 or 6 credits in ethics and sociopolitical problems. To meet this requirement, they enroll in Staudenmaier's engineering ethics course entitled "The Politics and Ethics of Engineering," which he has taught since 1983.

Recently, Staudenmaier obtained some funding to assemble his course notes in a booklet form with readings, and this is the source I have drawn upon for the description that follows. [5] The format of the course follows a typical liberal–arts pattern: weekly readings of a text chapter and supplemental readings along with class discussions, written essays, and exams. Some idea of the wide scope and historical grounding of the course can be gained from titles of some of the eleven chapters: "Successful Technologies and Their Constituents," "The Myth of the Middle Landscape as a U. S. Technological Ideal," "The Engineer: Professional or Engineer?", "The Seduction of the Engineer," and "An Ethical Framework." In the eleven chapters, Staudenmaier conducts a guided tour of the engineering profession in the Western world from the early days of the American republic through World War II.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the geography has the perverse characteristic that to arrive at a particular place, you must turn your back on it and walk in the opposite direction. Staudenmaier has performed a feat of this kind in his engineering ethics course. One might suppose that a Jesuit scholar teaching engineering ethics at a Catholic institution would start out with some heavy–duty ethical theory from Augustine or Aquinas, but that is not what he does. Instead, he lets the students' natural curiosity about the world of engineering attract them to stories of engineering and engineers at critical moments in the history of technology. These range from the life and times of John B. Jervis, a largely self–taught canal engineer active in the Northeast U. S. in the early 1800s whose integrity served as an example for later engineers, to the grim tale of collaboration between the Nazi regime and the Association of German Engineers during World War II, all recounted by highly qualified historians. Throughout the course, he shows the complexity and open–endedness of the human side of engineering, an aspect that is rarely if ever addressed in technical engineering classes.

Staudenmaier does not neglect ethical principles, but he addresses them in a natural, contextual way that fits in smoothly with the topic at hand. For example, in a chapter entitled "Technology Transfer and the Educable Engineer" he introduces the story of how tractors built in the U. S. were introduced to collectivized farms in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and goes on to discuss issues of technology transfer between very different cultures. In the process, he gives what he calls a "checklist for assessing the health of a culture":

Staudenmaier leaves it up to the student to apply this checklist to the culture of interest, including one's own. Most Christian ethicists would agree that this checklist embodies principles that they can agree with, but Staudenmaier has not felt the need to label his list with a Christian pedigree and footnotes. Engineers (and engineering students) are practical people, and credentials of ideas are not as important to them as their usefulness.

Staudenmaier recognizes this, and reserves his only explicit discussion of ethics to the last chapter of the text, An Ethical Framework. He emphasizes the importance of having a set of personal ethical principles worked out well before critical decisions must be made. But he refrains from recommending any particular creed or ethical theory. He ends the course with a set of practical recommendations for students to follow in ambiguous ethical situations.

Staudenmaier's course achieves two things that I hope other Christian scholars will attempt to do in the future as well. First, it presents material that is solidly grounded in excellent scholarship. Second, Christian principles serve as a hidden armature or skeleton for the philosophical and ethical concepts Staudenmaier presents. One need not be a Christian to take the course and benefit from it, but few Christian students will find anything in it that is in fundamental conflict with his or her basic beliefs.

To those who might wish to see a more explicit connection between the ethical principles in such a course and the Christian religion, Staudenmaier's approach may seem like camouflaging or concealing, even "being ashamed of Christ." On the contrary, I believe his approach to be a wise compromise between the fact of his own Christian principles and the reality of the conditions under which most engineering education is conducted today. This reality is reflected vividly in the statistics on engineering ethics education presented in the first part of this paper. Data not reported here but contained in my Journal of Engineering Education paper shows that only 3% of all engineering graduates in 1996–97 came from the Category A schools listed in Table 1 of this paper which have religious affiliations. It is reasonably safe to say that a course or textbook in engineering ethics which ties ethical behavior explicitly to faith in Christ could be taught without controversy only in these schools, and perhaps not even in all of them, either. On the other hand, an ethics course whose underlying philosophical framework is compatible with Christianity, but which makes no explicit mention of Christianity, can potentially be used in any of the over 250 engineering schools in the U. S., and possibly elsewhere in the world as well.

Staudenmaier is currently seeking a publisher for his text. If it is published and adopted widely, the "salt and light" embodied in it will appear in many secular institutions. This could not happen if he had chosen instead to write a manual of explicitly Christian ethics for engineers. Such a book might find some use among the 3% of engineering students who attend explicitly Christian (or Mormon) institutions, but would probably not attract attention outside this small group.

5. Conclusions and Challenges

I have shown how a survey motivated partly by my interest in the interface between Christian higher education and engineering education was reviewed by members of the engineering community who were more interested in the data itself than in conclusions I wished to draw from it. This is an example of the challenges that Christian scholars will face in bringing the results of their scholarship before a wider community of professionals or other interest groups outside the community of Christian scholars. The diverse community of engineers presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Christian scholars. The challenge lies in the fact that modern science–based engineering education often has an undesirable side effect: it trains engineers to disregard the non–quantifiable as irrelevant to the practice of engineering. Fortunately, the profession itself is beginning to understand that this type of training produces people who can be unhealthily narrow in their interpretation of what an engineer should take responsibility for. The recent heightened interest in engineering ethics education stimulated by changes in accreditation requirements presents a new opportunity for Christian scholars to address questions and issues of interest to engineers and technologists. Some examples that come to mind are genetic engineering, the Internet and its implications for global changes in communications and commerce, environmental problems on local and global levels, and the future of threatened cultures in the increasingly technological world we will live in as we begin the third millennium after Christ.

6. Acknowledgments

I wish to thank John Cogdell of the University of Texas at Austin for bringing my attention to this conference, John Staudenmaier for sharing information about his course in engineering ethics, Carl Mitcham of the University of Pennsylvania for comments on the survey of engineering ethics education, and Bruce Hunt of the University of Texas for the concept of the "proxy problem."

Endnotes

[1] Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology, Engineering Criteria 2000 (ABET website http://www.abet.org/eac/EAC_99–00_Criteria.htm#EC2000).

[2] K. D. Stephan, "A Survey of Ethics–Related Instruction in U. S. Engineering Programs," to appear in Journal of Engineering Education.

[3] Self, Donnie J., and Elizabeth M. Ellison, "Teaching Engineering Ethics: Assessment of Its Influence on Moral Reasoning Skills," ASEE Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 87, no. 1, Jan. 1998, pp. 29–34.

[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition (Notre Dame, Indiana: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 88–108.

[5] J. Staudenmaier, S. J., The Politics and Ethics of Engineering (Detroit, MI: Univ. of Detroit Mercy, n. d.). Also see the course website at http://www2.bc.edu/~staudenm/ (valid at least through May 2000).

[6] Staudenmaier, The Politics and Ethics. . . . p. 85.

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