Jason Liu, Shawn Nirody, Tim Brown, Paulo Fonseca

Additions and revisions to the project proposal after reading the peer feedback:

First, we’d like to answer some questions that were posed in our group’s peer review.  Regarding the “blanket policy” of our  project proposal, we mean that it is difficult to address all the different groups: industry, government, and universities, in a single approach. Rather than trying to approach all the different groups and bringing them together, we believe it is more feasible to approach the groups individually. By targeting select groups, for example, by targeting individual students or small research groups/engineering teams within each of these larger agglomerates, it is more likely for the people targeted to respond to our message. If we targeted a large, mixed population with a single message, the individuals within those populations might not feel so inclined to respond or reply because they might feel their response will be drowned out because there are so many other peoples’ opinions to consider. Therefore, by using different scenarios to target specific groups, we might be able to elicit a better response from our target audience.

Regarding the comment on most professionals’ ethical training, we believe most trained workers in the technical fields do have a significant amount of exposure to ethical issues related to their work. However, we believe that the breadth of this exposure is not very wide because most professionals will only have the interest and time to learn about ethical issues within their own field. Therefore, most professionals, although they may be well versed with ethics and morality within their own division, such as within government work, industry work, or university work, they might be very ignorant of how ethical issues are taken into account in other fields. Therefore, we believe it is important for students and professionals to consider learning some amount of ethics related to other areas of work.

To distribute our flyer, we would like to place them in areas of high engineering and science student traffic. For example, handing out flyers in front of Le Conte, in Cory, Etchtevery, etc. is our plan. We do wish to reach out to all the engineering and science students because we wish for every technically minded person to be aware of ethics outside of their own area of work.

The final project of group 3 focuses on the data privacy on campus.  With many login services being used on campus, there might be a potential issue on the safety of our personal information on schools website. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have been reported to analyze users’ data and sell it to third party companies to make profit. Due to the fact that the schools web services are used by a large amount of students everyday and stores a lot of sensitive information of students such as personal contact information, grades, criminal status, etc. There might be an ethical problem that the schools analyze those data and sell it to another party.

We like the idea that they choose to proposal this concern to ASUC. They plan to set up a committee of both students and faculties to determine the current state of data storage by the University to enforce the transparency of the data usage by the university, which is a clever idea. They also want the university to officially guarantee to safeguard students’ personal information and the data collection against misuse. This is a good idea because this can ensure the university will not misuse students’ private information (of course, if and only if university keep their promise). To reinforce this idea, they also want to establish a cyber security team to monitor ethical use of the data collected by the university. The punishment they set for misuse data is also very effective. Once the committee finds some misuse of personal data, the university should be asked to abolish such practice immediately. They also advocate deleting any personal data that are deemed unnecessary for storage in the university servers, which is a good idea to prevent the university to store extra students’ information than needed and use them other “dirty” purpose.

Group 2’s overall proposal is great, however we found some minor problems in their idea. First, we cannot guarantee that the school does not misuse students’ data just by using this committee. From the interview assignment, I know that most of the tech companies have such committee in their company, but the committee actually does not make any affect on the ethical issue simply because everyone in the company are working for the company and the they only help to make profit for the company not work against the company. Second, I am not sure if the committee has the privilege to read what kind of data is storing on the school’s server, nor to ask the school to delete some of those that are not considered necessary. Third, there are not any legal documents saying what the school should do and should not. The boundary of “misuse” and “deemed unnecessary” are very vague.

In conclusion, the entire proposal is well thought and planed. They spot the potential issue of misuse students’ data by university and offer a working plan to solve this problem. Everything meets the standard of this class and they accomplish what this class expects them to do. Well done.

Proposal:

After our group interviewed various individuals associated with engineering, a common theme that kept coming up was that a lot of company success depends on the personal ethics of individual employees. To support this claim, other groups in our discussion section noticed that most employees say they do not think about ethical issues in their everyday work, but the issues that they do think about are more business related than scientific related issues. It’s apparent that we need to raise awareness among young scientists and engineers about the ethical issues that are prevalent in the workforce and also incorporate ideas about entrepreneurship into the education system.

At UC Berkeley, engineering ethics classes are requirements for only of a few majors in the College of Engineering and not requirements for some sciences, such as physics. It’s surprising to us that majors such as Civil Engineering, Energy Engineering, Chemical Engineering (within the College of Chemistry), and Materials Science Engineering don’t require an ethics class for graduation when these fields have a huge potential for controversy in dealing with the environment, government regulation, and society as a whole.

At a bare minimum, we believe that the College of Engineering should add an ethics class requirement to every major. Ideally, though, we propose that an interdisciplinary Haas-CoE ethics be developed and offered in the near future because it is important for business and engineering students to understand the processes of each other’s trade. In order to appropriately structure the class the best way possible, a committee of business and engineering students and professors that currently teach ethics courses should be formed. In addition to this coalition, we believe that including a few people working in industry (possibly Berkeley alumni or other individuals associated with Cal) on the committee would provide an additional, relevant perspective on ethics. Having a course that would talk about different business management infrastructures and technical related issues would help foster a morally righteous frame of mind amongst students prior to their entry into the workforce. In addition to this frame of thinking, the course would also promote open discourse on how employees, engineers, and managers can safely bring up ethical issues that are not only prevalent to their respective companies, but are also important to them.

Along with the ethical awareness that would be gained from this class,  the networking between the technical and business students that would manifest is a great side effect of this course. Such connections would open up opportunities for partnerships to be formed that promote entrepreneurial and business skills.

The implementation of this course can definitely be achieved within the next five years at little cost. After the committee gathered statistics and attitudes associated with the ethical differences between businesspeople and engineers, the committee could collaborate efforts on designing a curriculum they feel best fills these knowledge gaps between the two disciplines. After synthesizing each respective discipline’s strengths and weaknesses, the committee would have the appropriate information to design a curriculum that would fill in these gaps. Although the process in formulating a class can be costly at times, the only costs associated with this project would be the necessary compensation to the committee for their time and effort.According to the UC Berkeley Academic Senate, in order to implement a new course, the committee must include a week-by-week course schedule, course number, course title, and grade breakdown and receive the department chair or dean’s approval. In the case of our course, this new class would require approval from both colleges’ dean.

Cal has a lot of kids interested in the tech industry and especially in tech startups, so this class’s focus on negotiating the interplay between technology and business should have a large audience. This class would also provide good networking between business and engineering majors. Many students join entrepreneurship clubs for some of the benefits this class provides, but this class will also provide units and fulfill an ethics requirement, so finding student support should not be difficult. In theory, once we get the word out about the class and can demonstrate that their is student demand, faculty support should follow. The letter to the deans of Haas and CoE should sway them to be in favor of this class, and should they be on the edge we could take a poll of engineering and Haas students to demonstrate how many would be interested in this class.

The course will be evaluated on it’s effectiveness and popularity after it has been offered for a year to determine how it needs to be changed. Should the class need major changes, the committee could meet again to make these changes.

In the long run, we hope that this course will accomplish two goals. First, we hope it will make it easier for engineering and business majors to make ethical decisions in what might not be their field of expertise. This is particularly important for the many tech startups that spawn out of UC Berkeley, as the people working for them have no established ethical norms that they can follow, and will likely be forced to make decisions that affect both tech and business. Second, this class is meant to serve as a model of interdisciplinary ethics classes. UC Berkeley currently relies on single major ethics classes, but actual decisions are rarely made in a field contained within a single discipline – they tend to rely on ethics related to multiple different fields.

Class Syllabus:

Engineering C126 / UGBA C126 Syllabus

Prerequisites: None

Units: 2 or 4. The 2-unit version is curved to an A/A- to encourage people to take it, even if they don’t need to fulfill a requirement.

Lecture:
TuTh 2-3pm F295 Haas

Discussion:

    1.5 hour per week, by section

Course Description: Engineering and Business decisions are rarely value neutral and engineers will inevitably encounter moral dilemmas at some point of their professional practice. Furthermore, there is a large amount of overlap in the ethical calls that must be made in engineering and business. The course will cover ethical issues prevalent in the workplace, the pre-workplace planning room, and in the rest of the industry process. Students will learn through standard lectures, hands-on exercises and simulations, projects, and guest speakers from industry.

Logistics:

Class information will be posted on Piazza, and all assignments will be submitted to your personal blog at edublogs.com.

There is no assigned textbook, as assigned readings will be posted on Piazza. Lectures and homeworks will also be posted on EDX.

Objectives:

The primary objective for this course is to prepare students for a real life ethical situation in engineering/business and all the aspects of it that would not be covered by a pure engineering or business ethics class.

Students should be able to:

• Identify ethical issues in a situation and come up with practical solutions for both business and technological parties.

• Understand the positions of both technical and business parties on ethical issues, and understand why they would disagree.

• Mediate disagreements between business and technical parties.

• Recognize the role of engineers/scientists in a business setting, the role of a businessperson in a technological setting, and the role of either in a setting they are unfamiliar with.

• Predict issues that may come up between business and technology in the design process from history and knowledge of the subjects.

• Practice effective communication, mediation, and debate skills.

• Pick a moral stance on a technical issue and effectively argue for it against peers.

• Make ethical decisions in a real life industry setting.

Grade Breakdown:

Participation (10%): Students can earn their participation grade by participating in class discussion, promoting active dialogue on the class blog (edublogs.com), etc. To earn full score on participation, a student must disagree with another (or the teacher) with solid reasoning at some point in the semester, as this fosters dialogue.

Reading Quizzes (5%):  After every assigned reading, there will be a short 5-minute quiz at the beginning of class. There will be true/false questions, along with a few opinion questions, which will not be graded for “accuracy” as they are opinion questions.

Reflections (10%): Students will write a series of 200-300 word reflections on the assigned readings. reflections should analyze readings from both an engineering and business perspective and argue for or against the author.

Individual Interviews (15%): Students will interview someone from the technical side of engineering and the business side of engineering on the ethical decisions they have made. Students will then post a comparison between the two to their blog, either in the form of a writeup, diagram, or other medium.

Debates (15%): Groups of 4 students will debate issues in their discussion sections. Issues will be chosen in class (identifying relevant ethical issues is part of the curriculum as well) and given to groups. One pair of people will argue one of of the issue, and the other will argue the other. Each group will be up for 20 minutes, so each person will be involved in multiple debates.

Simulations (10%): Similar to debates, groups of students will be given a situation and told to act it out as realistically as possible, in order to get them into the mindset of someone in a real workplace situation. Each student should get a turn on the business, engineering, and mediation sides of a simulation. Groups will invent situations for each other rather than their own in order to get students to experience a mindset they may not be familiar with.

Ethics in the News (10%): Students will research a current event in the news that pertains to the conflicts between business/management and science and talk about what class material is relevant to it and helped or could have helped the situation go over well.

Final Project (25%): The final project is a larger scale simulation. Student groups will design their own startup (or pretend they are in an already thriving industry) and identify ethical issues that could occur. For each issue, groups will demonstrate how they would solve the issue in industry, identifying where principals they have learned in the class come into play. Groups will also identify where what their business does could cause conflict with others (e.g. Nuclear power may be morally justified to you, but it is bound to cause conflicts with those that don’t believe in it) and how they would mediate these conflicts.

Letter:

Dear Dean Lyons and Dean Sastry,

We are a group of students from the engineering ethics class E125. After interviewing academic and industry professionals, we noticed that many engineers face a mix of both scientific- and business-related ethical issues in their daily world. Though UC Berkeley offers many business and engineering ethics courses, there are currently no courses that cover the overlap of the two. For this reason, we would like your support towards the creation of a crosslisted Engineering and UGBA ethics course.

Engineering and business decisions are rarely value-neutral and new college graduates will inevitably encounter moral dilemmas at some point of their professional practice. From our interviews, we determined that the majority of ethical decisions relied on an individual’s ethics, rather than institutionally enforced norms. To us, this illustrates the importance of teaching individuals to think ethically through ethics courses. Current ethics courses provide the ability to think morally about one side of industry, but with the current growth of the tech industry and the great number of tech startups Berkeley students are involved in, students will have to make decisions in both sides of industry. Tech startups, in particular, have no established ethical norms to follow, making an ethical knowledge for their workers all the more important.

Open discourse between business and engineering students on these topics will ultimately lead to similar conversations carried out in the real world. In addition to enriching the conversation by bringing together students across the disciplines, it also forms an useful professional network for the business and the engineering students.

It is also important for business majors to understand the needs of engineers in the workplace (and vice versa), as well as be exposed to situations they might encounter early on, so that they have experience in dealing with these unique problems in industry. Lastly, it is important for engineering and business students to join in discussion about ethics in order to find a common language in engineering ethics and to form professional networks, since we continue to see the intersection between business and technology grow.

We acknowledge that there are a number of business classes offered through Haas and the College of Engineering, but our course is unique through its teaching approach and its relationship with a subject that has not been thoroughly explored at Berkeley: technology and business. We think the course should include discussion of current events, as well as simulation, debate, and interaction with people in the industries. The course should ideally cover ethical issues prevalent in the workplace. Attached to this letter is a draft syllabus for the proposed course. Considering the many new startups and businesses in collaboration with engineers and the technology they utilize, business and engineering undergraduates would be encouraged to take this course. However, students outside of these two fields of study are also welcome to sign up.

Our proposed course would be a good opportunity to sensitize undergraduates to different moral situations while incorporating ideas about entrepreneurship. We would love to work with you and your fellow department to make a new class applicable to the 21st century.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Brian Barch, Andrew Davis, Selena Shang, and Kien Wei Siah

Having never heard about B Corporations, I found this proposal both informative and interesting. I think the critique of B Corporations was very insightful, and I found the comparison to Fair Trade to be helpful in explaining the project’s goals. I furthermore completely agree that its approach is problematic, since it only requires a vague and potentially unvalidated pledge of ethicality. However, I disagree with your statement that becoming an ethical company to gain the B Corporations stamp of approval would ultimately hurt the business’ bottom line; products that are USDA Organic, non-GMO, Fair Trade, or Certified Vegan, or donate a percentage of their profits to charity, appeal to specific audiences, and by selling well to these growing niches, the ethical designation often increases profit in the end.

I appreciate that you recognize how incredibly challenging it is to measure something’s ethicality and find the suggestions you’ve brainstormed to be creative and reasoned. Still, I have to wonder whether ethicality is too subjective to be measured at all. You suggest average wage and the origin of raw materials as potential factors, but while one person might claim that high wages and environmentally sustainable sources are markers of ethical soundness, another might claim that freedom, such as the freedom to pursue individual success, is more vital, so wages and sourcing should be determined by the free market. Perhaps more people agree with the first point, but that doesn’t make it the only defensible ethical stance. I find this problem even more significant once the government comes into play, as it would if ethical tax cuts were to be instated. Consider how the different political parties might view the ethicalness of a manufacturer of birth control or a shop that sells assault rifles. Of course, if you’re only considering factors such as the way employees are treated, that won’t be relevant, but that seems unlikely to occur in the political sphere, where appearance and hardline party tactics are so strongly relevant.

I’m also curious to know your justification for stating that “more ethical companies would increase the health of our economy as a whole.” It doesn’t seem to agree with your earlier statement that I addressed in my first paragraph, wherein you claim that becoming more ethical hurts businesses because of the added expense of paying workers fairly and so on.

Summarily, it seems amazingly difficult to determine a company’s ethicality, especially once politics are thrown into the mix, but it’s a very interesting and creative idea, and I wish you the best of luck!

Reposting our original proposal, including some extra material from our presentation; as far as I’m aware, we didn’t receive a group peer review anywhere. I noticed that our proposal was recategorized to the “uncategorized” section, but the link to our post still showed up here.

Lars Gustafson, Ollie Peng, Darrel Weng, Alexandre Chong

We wanted to create a project that would be able to spread the word regarding a topic that we believe should be more heavily acknowledged in the engineering community – conflicts of interest.

The motivation we have for pushing the education of conflicts of interest in the engineering community is based off of multiple interviews of engineers who come from a wide array of disciplines. In each one of these interviews, their personal struggles with conflicts of interest in the workplace came up. If this was not enough to pique our interest, each situation they faced regarding conflict of interest was especially difficult for them to deal with and they felt as if they did not have the necessary resources or education to handle the conflict to the best of their ability. Although each situation had different manifestations, they all pointed back to the fact that education and resources regarding conflict of interest are extremely critical and that they need to be implemented in work environments as soon as possible.

Our goal for our civic engagement, then, would be to increase the level of awareness among our fellow engineering (student) peers  before they enter the work environment. Just like having the technical knowledge and skill is important to finding a job, we believe that having an ethical and conscious awareness regarding conflict of interests, especially when start ups are now so prevalent in the industry, should be equally as important when it comes to preparing for a job. To realize this in an effective and efficient manner, we plan on producing an online survey geared towards exposing common and uncommon situations caused by an underlying conflict of interest. The survey will consist of a series of questions in the form of a hypothetical situation that revolves around a particular conflict of interest, and some questions that will try to get the survey-taker to think critically on the issue. After the hypothetical and questions, a separate page of the survey will (briefly) detail what conflict of interest the hypothetical revolved around, (good) ways the person in the situation could have handled it, and possible resources the person could have turned to in his/her company for help and support. To measure the effectiveness of this approach, we would include at the very end of the survey a question that asks the survey-takers  to rate the level of awareness of the issue of conflicts of interest in the industry that they have now, as well as how important they believe awareness of this issue is (as compared to before they took the survey). In order to keep this method efficient, we would like to keep our survey as short as possible, as we realize that our fellow engineering peers do not have much free time, especially with final projects and midterms coming up.

Our hands on situational guide would look something similar to:

1. John, representing his company, is closing a deal on a sale for a food sterilization machine to a major company, Nestle. He decides to run some last minute test on the machine to ensure it’s functionality, but discovers that out of 25 total test runs, 1 test run failed completely. In response, John declares the machine unsafe for use and uses extra company expenses to ensure that the machine satisfactorily operable before finalizing the sale.

Q1: Was John’s decision to ensure the fidelity of the machine’s operations the right choice? Y/N

Q2: Given the following choices, which do you think would have been the best choice for John to follow through with: a) The 1 fail is an outlier; just go through with the sale. b) John’s choice in this case was the right way to go.

–next page–

John can be seen here as facing a conflict of interest: he could have closed the deal, disregarding the 1 failed test run, thereby quickly finishing the sale, versus his actual choice of delaying the sale and ensuring that the machine operated as intended. He knew that the machine’s failures could potentially impact a large group of people, as Nestle products are very popular. Had John not known what to do, he could have contacted his manager, or his company’s HR department for ethical advice on how to proceed.

2. Larry, a high level manager in an engineering corporation decides to hire a family friend by the name of George. Over the course of a few months, Larry sees that George is performing extremely subpar. Larry decides to have a talk with George reminding him of his responsibilities and the standard that he has to follow. However, a few more months pass by and Larry has to make a decision regarding whether or not to let George go from the company since George has not improved his work performance at all. Eventually, Larry decides that it is in the best interests of the company to fire George.

Q1: Was Larry’s decision to fire George the right decision? Y/N

Q2: If these were Larry’s possible options and you had the chance to decide which one to choose, which would it be? (a) Fire George from the company (b) Remind George once again to improve his performance and give George more grace since they are family friends

-next page-

In this situation, Larry is clearly facing a conflict of interest. He was conflicted whether or not to fire George since he wasn’t performing to the standard the company required of him or whether to let George keep working for the company since he and George were friends and he did not want to ruin their personal relationship. In situations like these, Larry had many resources such as the HR department as well as his executive managers to come towards and ask for advice.

3. Tom works in research and development for Intel, designing new designs for ever faster and more efficient computer chips.  One day, a newly hired employee gives Tom’s research and development team a package containing photographs of each layer of AMD’s latest computer chip.  Whereas Tom’s team could originally only reverse-engineer and analyze AMD’s chip if they wanted a look into the competition’s designs, they now have the option to use the photographs instead, which would allow them to instantly and accurately model the layout of the entire AMD computer chip.  With only two months before Intel announces its newest CPU design, Tom must decide how the research team will spend their remaining time.  Will he take advantage of the photographs, giving the team valuable knowledge about AMD’s designs and more time to develop a faster and better CPU before the deadline?  Will he ignore the photographs but still reverse-engineer the AMD CPU chip, knowing that the team will have less time to actually create their own chip and that the reverse-engineering results would practically be the same as what’s on the photographs anyways?  Or does he ignore AMD’s chip completely and simply tell his team to spend the next two months iterating and improving upon Intel’s existing designs?

Question 1: Imagine you were in Tom’s shoes and needed to decide how your research team will spend the next two months.  Which of the three choices is the most ethically correct?

Question 2: Which of the three options do you think the majority of research and development teams actually choose in real life?

–next page–

           This situation that Tom faces is an example of the conflict of interest that many employees face between themselves, their companies, and the entire industry.  In this particular case, if Tom chose to take advantage of the photographs, he and his team would be more likely to create a much speedier chip than the competition, and thus he and Intel would reap significant financial rewards.  However, this course of action severely damages the industry as a whole by compromising its competitive integrity; if such practices were widespread, than the innovations of smaller companies would instantly be absorbed and produced more cheaply by larger companies, ultimately running the smaller companies out of business.

           Likewise, reverse-engineering a competitor’s chip also dampens innovation in the industry, but to a much less extent than using photographs.  Moreover, keeping tabs on the competition can arguably be a smart business move that prevents one company from overtaking all the others; in a way, this levels the playing field.  Nonetheless, the most ethically correct choice is to only focus on your company’s own designs and disregard your competitors’ designs.

           Unfortunately, such a noble approach is rarely seen in the real world because it puts your company at a severe disadvantage to those competitors who are looking at other companies’ designs; thus, the majority of companies actually do reverse-engineer each others’ chips.  Companies don’t take photographs, however, because not only is it bad for the industry in the long term, it also is kinda-sorta illegal: while companies cannot copyright or patent circuit designs because they are geometrical ideas, almost akin to art, they can apply for GNU General Public Licenses, which are issued by national governments and act like hard-to-enforce copyrights.

4. Edmond is a safety officer for the Electrical Engineering department at UC Berkeley.  A professor notices that he is an exceptional engineer and would love to take him on  as a project lead for one of his research projects. He accepts  the position. Fast forward a few months Edmond is working on an experiment that  emits highly energized particles. The rig isn’t set up yet but the EE professor wants so preliminary results so that they can submit a grant proposal. He warns Edmond that if this goal is not met he is at danger of losing his job. Edmond neglects to install the appropriate safety systems and runs the experiment anyways in fear of disappointing his PI.

Q1. Who is at fault here? Edmond for accepting the position or the professor for threatening Edmond, and/or for offering him the position?

Q2. Was this conflict of interest easily avoidable?

-next page-

In this case the conflict of interest started when  Edmond accepted the job as project lead despite his current position. The professor should have also seen this as a potential conflict of interest and avoided proposing such an arrangement to Edmond. Edmond should have also refused to carry out the experiment without appropriate safety measures and should have reached to higher ups. The professor should not have deviated from protocol by pushing Edmond to run the experiment. This conflict of interest could have easily been avoided at the start and generally there are systems in place to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen.

There will be more situations added later on in the creation of the guide and it will be implemented using an online survey website in order to be able to reach as many people as possible. Through tools such as this hands on situational guide, we believe that conflict of interest education is very feasible and simple. With the response of engineers to a guide like this, we will be able to determine whether or not there is an increase in understanding of conflict of interest. If there is, we hope to improve the guide and push for greater implementation. If there isn’t an increase in understanding of conflict of interest, we will adjust our hands on guide accordingly.

To add on to the previous paragraph, given the responses that we saw from the survey, that our survey appears to be effective. Two major trends we looked for were people coming in not knowing much and increased their understanding through the survey, and those who came in thinking they knew all about conflicts of interest and finding out that they actually don’t know much about it. In both cases we would see an increased awareness on the topic (which was our goal): those who weren’t aware are now more aware, and those who thought they were aware are now aware that it’s more than what they believed it to be.

We have taken Section 101 Group 2’s peer review into consideration, and we agree that our interpretation of our results seem “rushed”. Indeed, to spread awareness through this survey we would require some sort of incentive for the students, and for better results, divide our survey into two parts that are to be taken at separate times. Perhaps one method of implementation for this would be to divide the survey into two and integrate it into the beginning/ending of a course, similar to the survey we had to take at the beginning and end of this course.

For our theoretical applications, when our survey will be in use by companies, we want to make sure it will constantly be growing and changing to make sure that it will be as effective as possible. To do this, we first want to integrate it into the hiring process. This allows the newly hired employee to be aware of conflicts of interest as soon as they begin working, which will hopefully prevent harmful situations from arising. We also want to revamp the survey every year to take into account the specific environmental needs of the company such as creating a more specific survey that would benefit them most. This would also keep possible conflicts of interest on the mind of employees, which is crucial. Another benefit of the survey would be that we would be able to analyze the answers of the employees and find outliers who tend to answer the questions unethically. This would allow us to meet with those employees one-on-one and hopefully clear up any confusion or misunderstanding.

Here is a link to our survey.

If you took this survey, and think that it can be improved in any way, please don’t hesitate to contact us about it so we can revise it, and hopefully have this survey be used as a tool in the future.

Nitin Sadras, Hyun Sung Jung, Jambu Jambulingam , Brett Rapponotti

From taking Engineering 125, we have learned a lot about the ethical dilemmas that engineers face in every day life. Whether it is in the classroom or in the workplace, engineering is a discipline that drives forward innovation, but it is important to take a step back and understand at what cost these advancements come. A key community that faces this dilemma is engineers conducting research on university campuses worldwide. Researchers are challenged to push concepts and thoughts into reality, and test whether certain hypothesis are feasible for real-world applications. Undergraduate students are an important population that contributes to the research efforts of a university, and our group would like to understand what ethical dilemmas undergraduates should be aware of when working in a research lab on a university campus.

Undergraduates are hungry to learn and explore their disciplines, and research is often their first experience doing relevant work in a field they enjoy. A lot of the times, they leap for opportunities that come their way, just to get some experience under their belt and hope to find even better positions in the future. However, it would be very beneficial to be cognizant of the ethical challenges one might face when starting research work. We would like to provide a set of guidelines, proposed by fellow undergraduates involved with research, to help new undergraduates understand the issues at hand. We hope to achieve this by interviewing undergraduate researchers and asking them a set of questions having to do with their first experiences with ethical challenges. Once we conduct the interviews, it is our responsibility to condense and accurately depict the views of the interviewees, in the hope to present this information in a concise manner. By producing a video collage of all of these responses, we hope that students world-wide can learn from current undergraduate researchers before they embark on this journey.

The goal of each interview is to understand the ethical issues that undergraduates encounter while doing research.  To that end, we will question our interviewees about the nature of their research, and from there, inquire about aspects of their work that are ethically questionable.  These need not be directly related to the subject matter of their research; for example, some students may have Principal Investigators that give them unreasonable amounts of work, or make them work longer hours than were initially agreed upon.  Since research positions are highly valuable to undergraduate students, they may not be inclined to question the decisions of their PI’s in order to keep their positions and move upward.  Just like in any job position where you are in someone else’s power, this can lead to an unhealthy working environment.  Another important concern for researchers is attribution of work – undergraduates often do work that is critical to research products, but may not be properly credited for their contributions.  Both of the aforementioned problems are well-known issues in academia, and we would like to know if undergraduate researchers at Cal have to deal with them, and if so, what resources are available to them to resolve them.

Some of the challenges our project requires us to solve are, firstly, finding the right interviewees whose opinions and experiences can be understood by a wide audience. We are only focusing on research in engineering, but the vast amount of research topics in engineering can lead to a very narrow scope unless we choose our interviewees appropriately. The next challenge we face is to combine all of the interviews into a concise video that flows in unison, while maintaining all of the relevant information each individual interview provided. There are no costs associated with this project, but we must pick up the pace to be able to have an effective video by the due-date.

For finding our interviewees, we were fortunate enough that we knew people who were involved in research. It’s a reflection on Berkeley that we have these connections with friends in research. One fact that was brought up when we proposed our project idea in discussion was that we had managed to interview people in varying fields of research. Although we had tried to do this, it wasn’t the main goal: different fields require different approaches to research and ethics as well. The main purpose was simply to try to gather how and what undergraduates felt about research and how and where ethics plays a role, if any, in their field or research as well as what their overseers discuss with them in terms of ethics.

We decided that a video would be the appropriate format for our civic engagement portion, since we had gathered four interview clips. Combining it together and uploading it to a popular video hosting site like YouTube would help garner some exposure. Of course, marketing the video through other social media sites and word of mouth will also help. The dialogue generated from the video, we hope, will show others how undergraduates at Berkeley go about their particular research. Hopefully, the dialogue will be able to extend to graduate students as well, and to those in charge of research who see what those working under them feel about ethics and the ethical implications of their research.

We would like to provoke some thoughts of other undergraduate researchers regarding the topics dealt in the interview such as security and fair representation of credit. We hope them to reflect these thoughts at their work place or at their future jobs facing ethical concerns. We would like to keep track of the feedback of the viewers, however this plan is realistically impossible beyond the level of checking the replies on the video hosting websites or SNS.

Note: We incorporated Courtney’s and our peer reviewer’s feedback and added three paragraphs to the end of our original proposal to address all the points that were made.

Our interviews with various professionals in the science industries suggested that certain industries (e.g. biological research, bioengineering, etc.) tend to face ethical dilemmas more often than others. As a result, some industries have many resources for ethical counseling where others do not or rarely incorporate ethics resources in their training. Case in point, our interview with Ling Wang at Boeing highlighted the shortfalls of ethical training in large corporations where production involves largely uncontroversial goods in today’s society. When asked about what she could do if a perceived ethical problem was uncovered, she said it would be basically up to her superiors how to proceed. The sheer size of Boeing has been an advantage in this aspect because it is highly unlikely an unethical proposal will make it extremely far up the approval stages. When asked about the resources that were available, she said that there was ethics “training” which involved a single session that all new employees had to participate in where they learned more about company policies and etiquette (photography, etc.) rather than ethics in the sense of what we are discussing in class.

Our interview with Ling was eye opening and a bit troubling to us because we believe that any company should have a strong emphasis on employee ethics regardless of what is being produced. Airplanes may not be as hotly contested as genetic manipulation, but the impact of an unethical act that makes its way to production can be just as devastating. We think that an ethics resource that fosters ethical thought and resolves ethical debates will be beneficial to Boeing and other companies because it would ideally lead to a more unified and thorough knowledge base spread among its employees, thus leading to engineering that would more naturally consider the greater good of consumers and customers alike.

As a result of how we interpreted the problem, we determined that the solution was to be twofold. First, it’s imperative that there is a space which can be devoted exclusively to the discourse of ethics. Hence, we would propose a meeting consisting of a single representative from each department for a few hours on a monthly basis. This would be an arena where the ethical issues from each respective department would be considered and open to discussion or debate to the rest of those in attendance. In the event that a specific issue was considered controversial enough, the passage of the corresponding company action would be put to a vote, where each person at the meeting would receive an equal say regardless of their normal standing within the company. Consequently, the vote on this action would not be privy to overrule by higher-ups. Moreover, to ensure an all-encompassing discussion, any employee of the company would be free to submit topics or issues for consideration at the meeting. To allow for impartiality, the ‘representative’ from each department who attends the meeting would change every month, such that each meeting is composed of an entirely different set of people.

Second, we would require that every project proposal contain a short section on ethics outlining the debate on both sides of every conceivable ethical issue. This could be appended to the entire proposal, or included in each section that poses a potential ethical issue – i.e. cost, materials, scope, risks, etc. This would then be reviewed by an independent third-party public relations contractor that would then decide whether the ethical issues constituted enough to submit to the aforementioned ethics monthly meeting. This contractor, since not directly involved with the company, would not have the authority to give a verdict on whether the proposal would be approved, but would simply have the power to recommend that further discourse take place regarding said proposal.

In addition, if groups find that there is little to discuss for one reason or another, members can choose to bring in controversial technology topics from general news sources to discuss, much like we have done with Ethics in the News in discussion section. What we have found as a team is that regardless of the topic at hand that was brought up, we each learned to consider a different viewpoint on a topic that was once pretty clearly laid out in our minds. Just this act in itself develops a greater sense of understanding of the ideas that exist in the world. We believe that even though projects at Boeing may not directly be impacted by discussing unrelated news, the engineers will be able to expand their thought horizon and benefit the company and progress indirectly by participating in an Ethics in the News of their own.

Finally, during Jonathan Ma’s interview with Allison Ryan, he learned that genetics have a specialized counselor that consulted both the geneticists and the patients on ethical dilemmas that they may face. We believe that this addition role could be beneficial to other fields as well. Any employee with ethical dilemmas can now talk to a person who is trained in resolving these dilemmas. We believe that many employees do not talk about ethics because they do not know where to go, or perhaps just do not think about ethical problems because their co-workers do not bring up the topic. By introducing an employee specialized in solutions to ethical problems, not only will employee have that place to go, but the presence of this specialist may cause employee to take the first step in working out any ethical dilemmas they may face; realizing that said dilemmas exist and are important to talk about.

We expect the implementation of this new practice to cause multiple positive effects on the employees at Boeing, and maybe even spread to other companies. The first and most likely outcome we foresee is the creation of a more inclusive community. Opening these topics of conversation among all employees regardless of their position in the company will allow workers that are lower in the corporate hierarchy to voice out their ethical concerns related to the company’s products. This practice can help Boeing integrate its employees and unify them in goals and expectations, therefore establishing a more transparent working environment clear of uncertainties regarding the ethical implications inherent in their products.

A second effect we expect is an active practice and examination of ethical issues existing within Boeing. In engineering, ethics is unfortunately a topic that is often brushed under the carpet. The interview with Ling showed us how even in large companies ethical resources are sparse. We hope that by keeping these meetings available Boeing will integrate the ethical view of its workers creating more ethically conscious culture. Even though the products that the company works with does not provoke many ethical issues, we think that if the engineering teams execute more ethically conscious decision in their projects they will gain more trust from their customers since it shows the customers the level of caring of the company.

Lastly, depending on the effectiveness of this practice at Boeing we hope that it will be adopted by other companies increasing the overall consciousness of ethics in industry. Eventually, the ideal outcome is that this practice becomes part of the standard in companies like Boeing when interacting with their employees and customers.

We think that at first there may not be too many topics to be submitted for consideration at the meeting, not necessarily because there aren’t ethical issues that exist, but because the concept would still be new and many might be uncomfortable with the idea. However, as the topic becomes more of a staple of company business, we hope that such an installment would successfully create a safe space where ethics can be discussed, since — according to our interview findings — there isn’t exactly one currently in place.

We very much like and appreciate how well you thought out your proposal for monthly meetings. It seems like such inter-departmental ethical discussions, with rotating members for equal representation, would be a very effective way for employees to resolve issues without worrying about pressure from higher-ups. Your emphasis on an equal voice for all employees regardless of their standing in the company is crucial in making sure that nobody feels pressured to keep quiet about any issues they may face. However, we believe that a group vote may not be the most effective way to decide on the course of action – in the end, the decision should be up the person facing the issue, and the group would serve as an advisory entity, rather than one that would make executive decisions. This in itself would be immensely helpful – it is far easier to make an objective, level-headed decision after discussing it with peers who may have faced similar situations in the past.

Seeing as Ethics in the News was definitely the most interesting and thought-provoking aspect of E125, a similar system at Boeing would be a very effective tool to stimulate ethical thinking and conversations, and if the topics brought up are engineering-related, they will almost certainly help employees make decisions regarding when issues do inevitably come up. This would probably be most effective if different teams looked into ethical issues in the news that are relevant to their line of work. However, this may not be practical due to how specific some technical jobs are – it would be sufficient to discuss both the ethical and technical aspects of issues in the same general field of engineering.

The issues that you saw in Boeing definitely apply to many other companies as well, and it would be a big step forward if this system was implemented in other large corporations. This well thought-out project plan deserves an A.

Overall I think group your group was the most impressive out of those that made an app for ethical issues. Your presentation was well explained and your proposal, in my opinion, has the right amount of detail.

I like the fact that this app is open to everyone and not just engineers. Also I feel you guys could publicize the app in more ways as part of your civic engagement process. Maybe a good place to start could be on campus. Proposing the idea to a recognized professor so he could get his colleagues to download and start using it might be positive. Or maybe promote it on social media like pages on facebook. I feel the civic engagement aspect deserves more importance in your proposal.

The way the app works I feel is great but a comment bar under a question would be more favorable. This has its downside as people can begin to abuse the app, however, it opens room for discussion. If the comment bar is supervised by an admin who ensures no disrespectful behavior is displayed, this idea could be beneficial for your project. The reason I feel ethical issues should be discussed as not all problems have a yes or no answer. Hearing other people’s opinions can change someone’s mind for the better.

The reasons for starting your project and the benefits of your app in your proposal are highlighted well. As a group, we agree that your group deserves an ‘A’.

Our group is proposing a project that takes a current issue on campus and attempts apply the basic ethical principles and ideas that have been presented in this class towards an equitable solution and a model of unethical conduct to be avoided in the future while dealing with opposition.

Recently the trees behind Soda hall were cut down to make way for the Jacob’s building for design. These trees are endangered and their cutting down was met with strong opposition from the group Ridge Redwood. The approach of Ridge Redwood to the UC Campus and the reaction of the UC Campus in our opinion were inappropriate. No decision was reached and the trees were cut down without any discussion. We as a group decided to make this a model for future engineers to avoid ethical issues in dealing with opposition.

We are attempting to unite the students and the governing body of the campus through our solution. The group Ridge Redwoods that has been protesting the removal of Redwood trees that the Jacobs institute proposal to remove in their donation 20 Million dollars to construct a building for Berkeley engineering students. Ridge Redwoods began their protest close to the start of this semester and has continued after the trees have been removed. Our groups also wants to shine light on the ethical issues associated with this case and treat it as a model for the future to create awareness of the topic in the greater academic community both on and off campus.

By coming up with a solution our group can make a difference on campus and last to show other students how we can use the Chancellor and Deans of our university as colleagues instead of opposition. In doing this we believe that this will connect with other people who are equally motivated to pursue an ideal; one which will develop a more forward thinking, and innovative process in our time at Cal. Both sides may have crossed ethical boundaries in the handling of the situation but in an attempt to come up with a quick analysis and discussion of the situation, we hope to show how this could have been avoided. In brief summary the Ridge Redwoods group is making a valid point, why are these trees being cut down? The UC campus is also justified in building what ever they please on their land. However the cold shoulder the campus gave the opposition as well as the reaction of the Ridge Redwood group on social media was unjustified. This ended up in a lose-lose situation where the Redwoods were cut down and the UC campus received bad publicity. What can be done now is to discuss and determine the unethical nature of both group’s approach and how a more ethical manner could have improved the outcome of the situation.

Our motivation for this project was to shine light on an issue we feel displayed ethical misconduct while dealing with opposition and want to spread awareness by treating this situation as a model and taking large scale surveys from students on campus. This issue is very relevant due to the fact that the UC campus is going to make several changes from now to the year 2020 which are part of its Long-term development plan. This includes replacing Evans with two smaller building and clearing many trees to make more open spaces and glades. Many students are unaware of these changes and more protesting groups will oppose the campus’s actions. Due to the future circumstances relating directly to what went on with the cutting down of the trees behind Soda Hall, we hope to make everyone aware, including the campus, of the importance of dealing with opposition in an ethical manner to work out a solution.

Our aim is to spread awareness of the issue to both engineers and non-engineers on campus about this issue. We hope to do this through our civic engagement process, which includes a short survey and a discussion on two subjects; who was at fault, and how can this be avoided in the future? Once we are able to carry out this survey among a large student body we hope to reach out to the Dean/Administration and express the views of the students in need for more of an ethical approach by the campus in further dealings with opposition. This way a friendlier environment for students on the campus will be created as well as the fact that the UC Berkeley as well can serve as an example for its ethical dealings. This approach will not only solve issues in a more amicable and practical manner but also encourage people to consider ethics and instill ethics as a major factor in all their fields of work in the future.

The logistics of our proposal includes mainly the time that will go into surveying such a large group of students, which could take up to 50 hours if we survey 20 people an hour. The costs (economically speaking) would be us forgoing work we need to get done which would be missed out. Therefore, we aim to finish a small portion of our civic engagement this semester and continue where we left off in the fall semester and interview people in the library as opposed to Sproul where it is almost impossible to stop and talk to someone.