As you probably know, March is National Engineering Month in Canada. The goal of NEM, according to NEM Ontario is to “celebrate engineering achievement; inspire the next generation of engineers, technicians and technologists; and contribute to a new direction for the profession.” In my opinion, NEM is a tokenistic gesture marked by a few posters, events, and trinkets given away. If it hopes to fulfill its mission, it must strive for more meaningful changes. Specifically, I think that engineers must become more comfortable with becoming advocates for political and social change if they are to truly apply science to serving society. While scientifically-based policy alternatives exist to pressing social issues, the most political NEM gets is publishing letters of endorsement from the prime minister and governor general on its website.
As anyone who has taken a 100 level course or solemnly slipped on an iron ring on knows, engineers take upon themselves at a personal and professional level a responsibility to serve and protect society. Although engineering law has a definite voice on what constitutes this duty, engineers often go beyond this status quo and design and implement technologies that inspire us as they improve our quality of life. Technical achievement is something that is done as much out of personal drive as for lucrative patents.
We know however that just as environment doesn’t stop where the pavement starts, society doesn’t end where machinery starts. Engineered technologies are inextricable from the social systems that necessitate them. This goes beyond the physical realm of just ergonomics; the tools we decide to create to empower ourselves are driven by core values of what it means to be human or a member of a society. If we can accept that engineers are at once as much involved in society as technology, we can start looking at the role of the engineer to serve society in a more direct way.
Efforts to change society always require a political stance and can lead to contentious arguments propped up with select facts carefully placed within an ideologically-driven argument. Researching this article, I came across some formidable flame wars and I can tell many stories about people simply refusing to talk to me about issues no more political than trade and labour standards. Not every social problem can be fixed with a technological solution. In fact, very few can be mediated so simply and objectively. For an example close to Waterloo, Engineers Without Borders, the organization I am now writing for, was founded by two Waterloo mech eng grads who believed in “human development through access to appropriate technology” for quite a few years until they realized that such a narrow scope of problem-solving wasn’t getting them anywhere. They now don’t actually build any physical infrastructure anymore, and instead focus on applying engineering skills to create change, through things such as market facilitation of smallholder farmers and incubating startup social ventures.
Seeing the navigation of political and social issues as a minefield is a bit of a straw man. There are such things as research in economics and policy that can inform decisions in an objective way. However, this objective analysis is largely missing from politics; there are only 2 engineers in federal parliament, and even institutions as big as the World Bank pursue policies not held up by substantial evidence (for example, that austerity policies can stimulate economic growth in GDP-poor countries). Although there are many highly-contentious issues in politics, there are also many scientifically-justified, “no-brainer” ideas that don’t get through parliament due to a lack of political leadership by people more concerned with propagating an ideology than doing something useful. This ignorance of science was protested this past summer by scientists across the country following the federal budget bill, notably with the “Death of Evidence” demonstration on Parliament Hill (which Waterloo students were part of organizing).
In 1959, in the thick of the Cold War and repressive McCarthyism, Paul Lazarsfeld conducted one of the first big studies on the political orientation of university professors in The Academic Mind. I concede that the majority of engineers and certainly P.Engs work outside of research, but this was an interesting study as it spurred a whole subfield analyzing how “subjective” political leaning was related to “objective” scientific progress, and that it was given heavy weight given the political atmosphere on campuses at the time. Note also that although the 60s and 70s are largely idealized as a golden age of activism (especially campus activism – immortalized by such event as the Kent State Massacre), the 10th anniversary of the largest anti-war protest in history was just last month (over 3 million demonstrated against the US-led invasion of Iraq in Rome).
A 1972 study in Science by Lad and Lipset following in the tradition of Lazarsfeld found that engineers are typically more conservative than natural scientists who were more conservative than social scientists, but that generally the more successful and influential scientists and engineers are more liberal than their peers. Nearly 30 years later, a 2005 paper by Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte published in the Berkelely Forum finds that the rankings haven’t changed much, with percentages of professors declaring a left-leaning allegiance as: humanities: 81%, social science: 75%, engineering: 51%, and business: 49%. When I think of conservatism, I think of caution, safety, and reliability – all things integral to designing things with public safety in mind. Similarly, the sciences can afford to be more liberal because they are not directly involved in affecting the public. However business is a field that is just as politically conservative yet gambles a lot more than engineering can afford to.
The issue is obviously much more complicated than a bipolar spectrum can explain, but given my experience around engineers, engineering profs, and engineering students, engineering as a profession feels safer leaving politics and social issues up to other people and focussing on things we know we have been good at in the past. On one occasion when EWB was first attending an event in the E5 student design centre as a student design team, another student team remarked that the main difference between our teams was that theirs didn’t brainwash you. Although this was probably not intended maliciously, I think it shows the tip of the iceberg that engineering students don’t feel like they have any place engaging politically.
Similarly, with NEM, I feel like “a new direction for the profession” was taken in a pretty tokenistic way, just one more thing to make posters about and throw cheap plastic knickknacks at. I think NEM has the potential to be more than just adspace on posters and pens that are pretty cool but are going to break and get thrown out in a few weeks, but it would take a concerted effort by the profession. If the most successful engineers in technical advances get there by going against the grain and striving for something new, can we not seek to be similarly active in social spheres?
Unlike businesspeople or scientists, engineers are bound by a professional code charging them to make decisions in the interest of society. This gives a legal argument for making the decisions above the status quo that need to be made to change society for the better. Currently, engineers aren’t typically sued for malpractice beyond technological design failures, but what if the public became a lot more critical of engineered solutions and precedents were set for prosecuting engineers that didn’t think holistically about their designs – not considering the carbon footprint of a building, economic effects on working people when building a new condo in a downtown neighbourhood, or the mental health effects of the layout of a school? Currently, the only things that compel engineers to act on these more social dimensions are government regulations and orders, contractual agreements, and professional liability. None of these mechanisms are currently enough to force engineers to speak against the status quo and for new directions required by society. It is true that some people choose to develop and hold to strong ideals in their work, but without solidarity across the profession, those who stand out will simply get bumped out for the lowest bidder. The choice is entirely ours as to whether the next generation of practicing engineers will push the envelope for designs that perform as well socially as they do technically and establish a new legacy of professional conduct.
Rob Reid
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