Culture Shock
Richard Tapia didn’t mince words in his July address to the National Science Board, decrying the tiny proportion of underrepresented minorities on university science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) faculties. The National Science Foundation “can and should play a strong role here,” said the Rice University mathematician, a Mexican American who received the NSB’s prestigious Vannevar Bush Award for 2014. “Departments should be the unit of accountability.” His message of where change needs to happen is getting through. Witness NSF’s $12 million Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) initiative, which aims, as Mary Lord reports in “To the Barricades,” to enlist entire departments in tackling cultural barriers that deter faculty and students from different backgrounds, including women and underrepresented minorities. RED goes a big step further, in fact, to “develop radically different four-year experiences that stress creativity, teamwork, and connections to professional practice,” Lord writes. The result may be a better-trained and yet more diverse workforce, illustrating Tapia’s point that “excellence comes in all flavors.”
Engineering departments aren’t the only places deemed ripe for a cultural shake-up. General Motors “maintained a corporate culture that emphasized cost-cutting and discouraged lower- and middle-level managers from raising problems or concerns that they thought might get them into trouble and spark retaliation by higher-ups,” Art Pine writes in our cover story. There was also the “GM nod,” described by one executive as “when everyone nods in agreement to a proposed plan of action, but then leaves the room and does nothing.” It took a crisis like a faulty ignition switch, blamed for numerous fatal crashes, for systemic change to occur. The tragic episode offers important lessons for engineering students preparing for corporate careers. And students are eager to absorb them while they’re still timely, the University of Wisconsin’s Laura Grossenbacher tells Pine. “If we want to keep ethics education alive, we need to emphasize that this isn’t about some bygone era; it’s about something that is happening now.”
We hope you’ll find this month’s Prism interesting. As always, we welcome your comments.
Mark Matthews
m.matthews@asee.org