Systemic reform in undergraduate engineering education: the role of collective responsibility

Traditionally, members of a department faculty value their autonomy. But their home department has a set of collective responsibilities involving other departments in the college, the university, and external constituent groups. Consider the following scenario. In a certain department faculty are judged individually to be very well qualified. Each person's academic and other scholarly achievements can clearly be documented as meritorious. However, the collective activities and achievements of these individuals fall measurably short of their department's collective responsibilities. More specifically, an individual might bring highly innovative concepts into an existing engineering course that are highly valued by external funding agencies, by peer institutions, and by the employers of the department's graduates. Yet these innovations are lost once this person is no longer the course instructor. This paper examines the relationships among faculty autonomy, the collective responsibility of the department faculty, and systemic reform in undergraduate engineering education.