Summary comments:
This terrific essay is for all of us, not just engineering academics. Through addressing shortcomings in engineering education programs, and recommending specific solutions, it illustrates how to structure a dimension of life within a holistic vision of caring for the general good, and the urgency of doing so.
After outlining the destructive effects of lionizing innovation in engineering education programs, the authors suggest an alternative set of values that are grounded in an ethics of care, illustrate how those values could be reflected in engineering programs’ structure and goals, and close with a compelling argument for the exigency of making those changes.
The import of the essay for engineering academics is obvious, and this non-engineer / non-academic won’t linger there, but will instead highlight the (likely unintended) bonus — the essay is for all of us.
The import for the general reader rests on three points:
The essay: 1) renders an ethics of care in accessible language in an accessible context, 2) is effectively a case study in how that theory can manifest on the ground; and 3) communicates the pressing need for a holistic vision of caring for the common good to shape how all of us structure and conduct our day-to-day lives.
The expanded version of the above summary comments by a non-engineer / non-academic, life-long fixer of this and that around the house, and repair enthusiast:
Does the Ivory Tower have anything useful to say to regular people going about their business in the world?
Can there be productive conversation between scholars and practitioners?
An “Ethics of Care”.
Sounds good. Who isn’t behind the idea of “care” and trying to be ethical?
Wikipedia has this to say about an Ethics of Care:
“The ethics of care is a normative ethical theory that holds that moral action centers on interpersonal relationships and care or benevolence as a virtue. EoC is one of a cluster of normative ethical theories that were developed by some feminists and environmentalists since the 1980s. While consequentialist and deontological ethical theories emphasize generalizable standards and impartiality, ethics of care emphasize the importance of response to the individual.”
Wait … What?!
What does that mean and what bearing can “Ethics of Care” possibly have on the particulars of the average person going about their day?
Andrew L. Russell (SUNY Polytechnic Institute) and Lee Vinsel (Virginia Tech) open their essay noting that in their 2016 essay in Aeon, “Hail the Maintainers”, they had “laid out a critique of innovation-speak and proposed an alternative vision of technology-in-society with maintenance at the center.” In the essay at hand, "Make Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care", they develop this idea more fully and direct it at standard engineering education in American universities. Grounding their argument in an ethics of care theoretical framework, they articulate an alternative conceptual and practical approach for shaping engineering programs in American universities.
They make sense, and for this non-scholar, as they lay the foundation for and propose solutions, a sense of ease rises akin to witnessing disarray or breakage being put into a working order resonant with values I know to be “right and good”.
Were this the sum total of the essay’s value, it would be important enough … but there’s more here for this non-engineer/non-academic:
The essay offers a 35,000 foot sketch of the 1980’s/90’s feminist theorists’ framework “ethics of care”, and presents what is effectively a case study in its application and relevance for all of us regular people going about attending to our day-to-day business. An ethics of care is made comprehensible in broad strokes, and its articulation in the world is shown to be incontrovertibly urgent. The essay’s title (suggesting an audience of engineering academics) notwithstanding, it is both accessible and important for a general readership.
The early section of the essay outlines how innovation became a value in and of itself in American society over the last two centuries, and describes how engineering education now turns around it, and to what effect.
Universities have…come to accept that it is their core mission to create innovators…students are ‘empowered’ to value discontinuity, novelty, and change rather than continuity, tradition, and care. They go down this path of disruption with little reflection on what ends such changes are meant to accomplish.
The authors note that the subsequent careers of the vast majority of engineering graduates concern maintaining existing systems, and they highlight that this is essential, largely invisible and uncelebrated work.
An example that forcefully communicates their point: keeping the power grid in good working order. We do need innovation in power distribution, but most of all we need the grid up, all the time, without fail, come rain or shine or whatever increasingly unexpected condition the weather serves up. As long as engineers do their jobs well, few people give them a thought. It’s only when under-maintained systems fail that they suddenly become seen, and seen as valuable workers.
Vinsel and Russell then turn to an ethics of care.
The ethics of care is rooted in a few basic ideas. First, we are fundamentally dependent on one another …, Second, our decision-making must first attend to the marginal and vulnerable… Third, rather than being rooted in abstract principles, our moral choices should attend and respond to the immediate conditions of our context…
An effect:
The ethics of care reorients us to thinking about ends rather than means…[and] pushes us to have explicit conversations about values.
The authors dispense with innovation in and of itself as a wholesome and worthy value and goal, and, in its place, center an ethics of care — stewardship of what we have received, and cultivation of the well-being of all. They are quick to affirm that well-being is sometimes served by innovation, but it is, more often than not, served by maintenance — that is, caring for what we have, in the broadest sense
Engineering is fundamentally about caring for technological systems, the humans that rely on them, and the natural environments that surround them. Innovation is but a small part of that overall process of stewardship.
The essay calls for restructuring engineering education to privilege general well being, to train for the work that supports the common good — maintenance and innovation, and to celebrate the work that 70% of engineers actually do after graduating: maintenance.
The authors approach their conclusion with a position that calls for quoting at length:
In the end, the ethics of care probably requires engineering students to be educated in the politics of technology and society — something that the relatively apolitical engineering tradition might find hard to swallow. This is not about indoctrinating students into any particular political view. We find aspects of the Maintainers both in certain forms of conservatism, which argue that we have a moral duty to care for what we have inherited from our ancestors, and in certain forms of progressivism, which assert that healthy capitalism requires active intervention particularly around issues such as pollution, safety, and the well-being of public works. Care requires holistic, or systems, thinking that goes far beyond the individualist fantasies of innovation-speak with its pantheon of great white men: Gates, Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk. It requires us to realize that we are dependent on each other and on the technological systems and infrastructures that many, including those who have come before us, have erected; these systems and infrastructures now require our attention and safekeeping, even when such work bores our pants off and pales in the light of nifty, new, glittering gadgets.
In conclusion:
From the outside looking in, the essay appears to be essential reading for engineering academics.
And, important for this layperson — Through the specificity and accessibility of their analysis, and through their grounding proposed solutions in a set of values distinct from current norms, the essay is effectively a case study in applying those alternative values to life in any dimension. It offers a model for identifying and calling out destructive norms, legitimizing an alternative set of values and goals, and centering a holistic vision of the common good as the goal and measure of how we approach and structure our lives.
The nation faces a vital moral imperative to make maintainers.
The clarity of their clarion call communicates the urgency for all of us to live into that vision, engineer or not.
"Make Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care", by Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel, is a chapter in Does America Need More Innovators?, MIT Press 2019.