There is a growing feeling in engineering curricula that ethics should have a more important place. This feeling has shaped various actions in different places. At Delft University of Technology, the majority of engineering curricula at the Bachelor's and Master's level now have a compulsory ethics courses. At UC Berkeley, an NSF grant was awarded to Mary Sunderland, William Kastenberg, Joonhong Ahn and Cathryn Carson, in order to research and expand on engineering ethics education. UC Berkeley also has a program called the Minner Fellowship through which professors have means to further ethical and social aspects of their research. While these are all laudable and necessary initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic, there was an unshakeable feeling during the Global Perspectives in Ethics and Engineering workshop at UC Berkeley in August 2013 that it was not enough. Throughout our weeklong discussion, ideas of how to do things better were plenty, but so were barriers to overcome. Indeed, one participant said at some point, ‘You would need a huge scandal for things to change … ’ This sentence particularly shook me because the vibrancy of ideas we were sharing in the room then seemed to be contained to that room only, as barriers were fixed in institutions of academia on many different levels. I would like to elaborate on two of these barriers, the first one being how to do interdisciplinary work, and the second one being on the low value of teaching activities in an academic career.
One of the goals of the workshop was to collaborate between engineering and ethics PhD students in order to foster interdisciplinarity. While it is becoming more and more common to have multi-disciplinarity in research, i.e. several people working on the same question from different angles, interdisciplinarity remains challenging. Contrarily to multi-disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity means to have these different angles in one single research question and research design. During the week at Berkeley, I worked with an engineering PhD student who had a wonderful research project concerning the installation of turbines in Nepal. Being at the Global Perspectives program, my workshop partner had social and ethical concerns as well. While we could discuss what these were, we had difficulty formulating a common question that would have allowed us to pursue research goals relevant to both of our fields. I believe this difficulty lies partly in our lack of experience with such endeavors. However, the major problem in my eyes was the lack of embeddedness, which leads to a lack of mutual understanding. What I mean with embeddedness is a lack of a shared language, a lack of shared experience and maybe sometimes simply different interests and expectations with regard to the collaboration. This means that it takes time to create a shared agenda, language and experience. In other words, it takes time to develop a skill scholars call ‘interactional expertise’. Moreover, there needs to be an equal footing in interdisciplinary endeavors. One perspective is as important as the other and we need to be humble about our goals and capacities. We also need to be able to put ourselves in the other's shoes and meet somewhere that is not the middle between two positions, but a whole new question that we could not have thought of on our own. This, I believe, is one major goal for achieving a better future: asking new relevant questions looking at the big picture. Developing shared projects requires more time, as Sunderland et al.'s paper in this issue also stresses.
The other major barrier I perceived has to do more with my own experience after the Global Perspectives workshop. I left Berkeley invigorated with ideas of creating a course on social justice and biotechnologies. However, I was met with many institutional barriers. First of all, as a PhD student, I have not only to do my research, but also I have a heavy workload as a teaching assistant. There is no room for me to lessen that load in order to pursue the development of a new course. Second, if I were to do this, I would have done it with a colleague from another faculty and this brings about some practical problems for the administration. These two issues are not insurmountable but the next one I will mention is a true disincentive for any PhD student wishing to pursue a career in academia. When applying for personal grants, which is an important step in one's academic career, most grant givers are not interested in teaching experience and do not put any emphasized value to developing better teaching methods. Wishing to finish my PhD in time and understanding what is expected of me as an aspirant academic, I decided to let my course project rest for a few years until I would be in a better position to pursue it. Meanwhile, I am still tutoring in engineering ethics, and I have room, albeit limited, to experiment with how to better it. However, it would be much more beneficial to have the right incentives to actively experiment in teaching and explore how to do interdisciplinary work. If we are, however, discouraged from even beginning those experiments in teaching, then the start will be slow and difficult.
I hope that my colleague at the workshop is not right when saying we will need a huge scandal for engineering ethics education to change. I hope that administrators and academics see the value in exploring how to work in interdisciplinary ways in order to encourage responsible innovation. This can be achieved by trying out new forms of courses, such as the one the Global Perspectives workshop initiated, and by giving more time and space to experiment with interdisciplinarity.
Notes on contributor
Zoë Robaey is a doctoral candidate in Ethics of Technology at Delft University of Technology. She works on moral responsibility for hazards of biotechnologies in the project ‘New Technologies as Social Experiments’ and is involved in teaching graduate students engineering ethics. Her participation in the Global Perspectives Course was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (grant number 016.114.625).