One World, Several Ethics - Governance Paradoxes in Higher Engineering Education

Education is one of the sustainable-development-goals(SDG) in the United Nations guidelines. However, as public funding for education decrease, a conflict occurred, whom and which institution should be funded [1].

The research question is: How does the literature on social aspects of higher education of engineering reflect this issue of neoliberalism? The method is literature survey. 345 papers appear in Scopus with the keywords “Higher education”, “engineering” and “ethics”. The results show that this issue became significant from 1999, mainly due to the effort of IEEE and American Society for Engineering Education. There are several reasons: The falling wall and uprising countries flooded researchers on the job market. After the 2008 crisis research investment became restricted, utilitarianism occurred. In such a atmosphere of confrontation, competitors try to get any selfish advantage even with deploying dark pattern [2], such as isolation, mobbing[3], gossips[4] etc. Several psychological paradoxes can be noticed: Students, who demand best instruction, learn less than the active ones. A professor who demands much from his students, will get less due to the nature of curiosity-driven creativity[5]. Longest staying faculty staff has gained most trust, but suffers highest temptation to deploy harassment, as knowing the loopholes best. Politicians are attempted to follow the newest technology trends in financing education, but then they weaken the base of long-term-stable education on basic STEM subjects[1].

Conclusions for best scientific practice [6,7] are:(1) enforce better legal, structural, or organizational countermeasures, preferential through cooperation [8], (2) educate young researchers to better awareness and adaption, or (3) encourage the mobility and transfer to other jobs in higher education.

[1] U.Teichler, High Educ.56(2008)349–379. [2] S.Sorooshian, Sci.Eng.Ethics23(2017)[2]623-624

[3] M.A.Cassesell, Contemporary_Issues_Edu.Research4[5](2011)33-44

[4] M.Feinberg, etal. Behav.Brain_Sci.35(2012)25.

[5] W.Wunderlich, “Creativity Requires Ethical Balance”, ISA_Vienna_2016

[6] DFG doi:10.1002/9783527679188, [7] JSPS http://www.meti.go.jp/policy/innovation_policy/bayh-dole.pdf

[8] L.Gratton, Human Resource Management44(2005)[2]151–158.