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Despite the increase in ethics education offerings of the past few decades, universities struggle to foster desirable ethical dispositions among developing professionals. Part of the reason is that the values implicit in the enculturation of students in higher education cut against the aims of explicit ethics education. To accomplish desirable ethical dispositions among future professionals we ought to broaden our understanding of what the cultivation of ethical professionals entails from a narrow focus on ethics education to a broad focus on ethics enculturation. This paper offers a framework for theorizing ethics enculturation, using examples from recent engineering ethics education literature to demonstrate how the framework captures elements about the development of ethical dispositions and decision-making skills that literature with a narrow focus on ethics education overlooks. 

Numerous studies have shown genetic variation at the LCORL-NCAPG locus is strongly associated with growth traits in beef cattle. However, a causative molecular variant has yet to be identified. To define all possible candidate variants, 34 Charolais-sired calves were whole-genome sequenced, including 17 homozygous for a long-range haplotype associated with increased growth (QQ) and 17 homozygous for potential ancestral haplotypes for this region (qq). The Q haplotype was refined to an 814 kb region between chr6:37,199,897–38,014,080 and contained 218 variants not found in qq individuals. These variants include an insertion in an intron of NCAPG, a previously documented mutation in NCAPG (rs109570900), two coding sequence mutations in LCORL (rs109696064 and rs384548488), and 15 variants located within ATAC peaks that were predicted to affect transcription factor binding. Notably, rs384548488 is a frameshift variant likely resulting in loss of function for long isoforms of LCORL. To test the association of the coding sequence variants of LCORL with phenotype, 405 cattle from five populations were genotyped. The two variants were in complete linkage disequilibrium. Statistical analysis of the three populations that contained QQ animals revealed significant (p < 0.05) associations with genotype and birth weight, live weight, carcass weight, hip height, and average daily gain. These findings affirm the link between this locus and growth in beef cattle and describe DNA variants that define the haplotype. However, further studies will be required to define the true causative mutation. 

In this paper, we explore faculty-leader perspectives on “standards,” established statements of expected ethical behavior at disciplinary levels (see page 5), through the analysis of interviews with faculty from the engineering-adjacent disciplines of computer science and biology as an important mechanism to understand the larger ecology of STEM ethics enculturation in which engineers often find themselves. To situate these interviews, we first discuss the existing landscape of literature around faculty roles in shaping the normative values. Then, we report on a set of faculty interviews that investigate the ethics frameworks (and their underlying values) at work in their departments and programs. Specifically, this paper reports a subset of data that is part of a larger NSF-funded research project (award #2024296) exploring the interplay among individual value foundations and disciplinary ethics frameworks in engineering and STEM education. We conclude by analyzing the conceptual and practical distinctions between responsibility and accountability as they relate to the standards identified by the disciplinary faculty we interviewed. 

This presentation reports on four interviews with faculty leaders across STEM disciplines at a single institution of higher education. The interviews evidence important overlap and divergence in the perceptions of the roles that disciplinary frameworks play in STEM enculturation. Further, they suggest variance in the perceived nature and scope of ethics across disciplines. The presentation argues that this divergence has implications for institutional cultures of ethics, notions of professional responsibility, and participation in team-based science. 

The goal of this project is to argue for ethics as a necessary component of the institutional health. The authors offer an epidemiology of ethics for a large, metropolitan, very-high-research-activity (R1) university in the U.S. Where epidemiology of a pandemic looks at quantifiable data on infection and exposure rates, control, and broad implications for public health, an epidemiology of ethics looks to parallel data on those same themes. Their hypothesis is that knowing more about how undergraduates are exposed to ethics will help us understand to what extent they are infected with interest in ethics literacy, and potentially what immunity they develop against unethical and unprofessional conduct. These data also tell a story about the ethical health of institutions: to what extent its members are empowered to cultivate a culture of ethics and inoculated against ethical missteps. The authors argue that pro-ethics inoculation at research institutions is shaped by issues of complexity (space given to “hard” vs. “soft” skills within curricula), connotation (differences in meaning of “ethics” among and within disciplines), and collaboration (tensions between Ethics-Across-the-Curriculum and Ethics-In-the-Disciplines approaches to ethics). These issues make assessment of where ethics is taught all the more difficult. The methodology used in this project can readily be taken up by other institutions, with much to be learned from inter-institutional comparisons about the distribution of ethics across the curriculum and within the disciplines.