In September of 1990, CSEP Director, Vivian Weil, began a nine month leave of absence to serve at the National Science Foundation as Director of the Program in Ethics and Values Studies in Science, Technology, and Society. Robert Ladenson, Professor of Philosophy at IIT and CSEP Faculty Associate, is currently serving as Acting Director.

Michael Davis, Senior Research Associate at the CSEP, has received a $211,464 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a model Ethics-Across-the-Curriculum Program. Davis will work with IIT faculty to develop and implement the program over the next four years.

Educators generally agree that professional ethics will not be learned unless it is taught, and that most undergraduate programs in science and engineering are not doing enough to teach professional ethics. The problem has been how to teach professional ethics. Most curricula do not have room for a separate required course in professional ethics.

The best way to get ethics into professional programs seems to be to include it in ordinary technical courses. When scientists or engineers teaching substantive courses in their professional field integrate ethics into their courses, the implicit message is that ethics is an integral part of the profession.

Unfortunately, few professional faculty are trained to teach professional ethics. They are therefore naturally hesitant to try it. IIT's Ethics Across the Curriculum is designed to overcome this hesitancy in three steps.

The first step is to develop and offer a workshop for IIT faculty in how to teach professional ethics in their technical courses. While this 30-hour workshop will include some ethical theory, its primary focus will be on classroom practice. How do you raise an ethical issue? What objectives should you have? What works? What doesn't? About half the workshop will be devoted to preparing, trying out, and evaluating materials for technical classes to be taught in the fall semester. Fifteen faculty will participate in each workshop. The participants will receive a stipend.

The second step will provide institutional support for faculty who include ethics in their technical courses. Such support will include a continuing seminar for workshop participants and other interested faculty. The grant also allows CSEP to expand its library.

The third step will be a pilot redesign of some senior design courses to make them both more realistic and more likely to be ethically instructive. Faculty from two departments will be provided support to work together to develop ethically complex problems requiring cooperation among students in two or more professional fields.

The NSF grant includes funds to make available to the wider professional community updates on the IIT program. In the grant's second year, there will be a day-and-a-half working conference for staff and volunteers in continuing education programs of professional societies. In the grant's fourth year, there will be a week-long version of the workshop for faculty of other universities. Watch for announcements.