- So here's a joke that engineers like to tell each other about the profession.
A priest, a lawyer, and an engineer are scheduled to be executed by guillotine
the priest is first and he puts his head on the chopping block,
the executioner pulls the cord and nothing happens.
"Divine intervention" cries the priest, "you have to let me go" so they let him go.
The lawyers is next, his head is on the chopping block,
the executioner pulls the cord and again nothing happens.
"Double jeopardy" cries the lawyer, "you have to let me go" and they let him go.
So now it's the engineers turn and he gets up to the chopping block
and just as the executioner is getting ready to pull the cord
the engineer says "Wait, I think I see your problem".
Engineers tell this joke to each other as a way to play up a stereotype about engineers
as altruistic, willing to help,
and also means that we're so focused on the technical aspects of solving a problem,
that we don't recognize our social surroundings and we don't have a critique of what's happening around us.
So as an engineering educator, one of the things that I try to do with my students
is help them align their values with what they're learning in the classroom,
to help them not think of engineering as purely objective,
but to realize that engineers operate in social settings
and the technologies that we create are impacted by society just as much
as they in turn have social impacts.
Social justice is a very difficult thing to define.
It's much easier to define social injustice,
and one big question that social justice advocates might ask is,
"Who gets to define what social justice is?"
So social justice then ought to be defined by people who are experiencing injustice
and that might lead us to a set of issues where we could just oppose engineering and social justice
and begin to ask how is it that engineering has contributed to different kinds of injustice in the world
and if we ask that question one of the first things that might come to mind
in the United States, in particular, is militarism.
When you think about a list of the top employers for engineers in the country
and you think about the top list of defense contractors, there's a lot of overlap between these two lists.
Engineers are heavily involved in developing military technologies.
Second we might ask about engineers involvement in Corporate America
and in serving profit motives over people.
And third, we might think about who is allowed to do engineering and who is engineering done for?
when we ask who does engineering, we're reminded that engineering has for decades,
had a problem of under-representation of both women and minorities in the profession.
So once we've enumerated all of these ways that engineering can contribute to injustice,
it's important to remember that it doesn't have to be this way,
then in fact the profession of Engineering has great potential to work for social justice ends.
And one of the ways that we might think about doing this
is to look at other professions and see what lessons we might learn from how they operate.
Social Work is a profession that has organized itself around social justice as a goal
and we've seen even in more traditional professions like medicine and law,
there have been movements within those professions.
In medicine, for example, thinking about public health and thinking about access
to medicine among for those who can't afford medical care and thinking also in
the case of law there's both legal services which extends access to the
profession to others who might not otherwise afford it or we think about
public interest law which serves social justice ends in engineering we might
similarly think about what would Public Interest engineering look like or how
could pro bono Engineering allow those who cannot otherwise afford engineering
to experience some of the benefits of engineering so we might imagine a
tradition in which engineers do pro bono work and begin to serve other
communities we're starting to see a trend in the United States where
engineers are forming nonprofit organizations to do work for communities
that are suffering from poverty lack of access to clean water and energy in
communities both in the United States and around the world
another way that engineers can contribute to social justice is thinking
about national priorities and actually getting
involved in the public debate about those priorities right now we're seeing
a conversation about whether we might decrease our defense spending as we pull
out of the wars abroad and think about increasing spending on green energy as a
way of creating jobs and spending money on restoring our infrastructure these
are two areas where engineers can be heavily involved in the design and
construction of new projects another way that engineers have been involved in the
fight for social justice has been in corporations where they're working one
thing that engineers have done is blown the whistle when they have access to
information that they believe the public ought to know but there are other forms
of working for social justice in corporate settings that might also be
effective but less dramatic than whistleblowing that is working for
change from within I hope for my students is that they will ultimately be
able to find jobs that align well with their values and that those students
that are committed to social justice can find opportunities that are outside of
the status quo of serving either military or corporate ends and allows
them to fulfill their commitment to build a more socially just world
you