Distributed Governance of Engineering Education in the United States: Making Sense of Engineering Education /Out of Control/

• In Event: Sustainability & Transformation in Engineering Education - II: The Narratives & Limits of Engineering Education Reform

Abstract

This paper builds on a historical account of engineering education reform in the United States and ABET’s Engineering Criteria 2000 (Akera 2017). Considering the emergence of new accreditation standards through multiple scales of analysis, this national study addresses the question: Who controls engineering education? This is a central concern for a growing body of scholarship in engineering studies and science and technology studies (STS), which identifies engineering education as a key site for inquiry and intervention (Downey 2009; Downey and Dumit 1997; Noble 1977, Wisnioski 2012). By questioning notions of “control,” an emic category of our colleagues in engineering education, we open our purview to a “new sociology of governance” (Rose 1999). We survey approaches that attend to movements across sites and across different scales of analysis: from the microsociology of organizational contexts to global historical political-economic conditions. The ethnographic approach, particularly taken up in Actor-Network Theory (e.g., Latour 2005), has been criticized for deferring political critique (Bessire and Bond 2014) and mimicking functionalist industrial logics (Fortun 2013; see also Noble 1977). This does not necessarily mean studies of local actions, and especially practices of reform cannot account for changing political-economic circumstances. Thinking of what Harold Garfinkel calls “respectifcation,” calculating connections between knowledge and its social context through the ethnomethological lens of practice enable us to engage in “transdisciplinary critical discourse” and provide critical standpoints from which to map the political and economic dimensions of educational reform efforts (Lynch 1993).

Our approach also draws on STS scholars who have found relief from micro social concerns through Bourdieusian field theory (R. Lave 2012). Beyond the field of STS, in his historical anthropology, Loïc Wacquant uses Bourdieu's field theory to locate actually existing neoliberalism in the State or the "bureaucratic field" (2012; cf. Rose 1999). This approach has instructed our effort to document the everyday ordinary actions of bureaucratic actors—the president of an accreditation organization; delegates representing subdisciplinary interests in a divided profession; program evaluators that must exercise judgment with an established accreditation protocol; and faculty and administration have have learned to circumvent, and through their actions, transform accreditation regimes through unspoken negotiations with accreditation authorities regarding expectations of assessment and accreditation. In this paper, we describe these and other “educational reforms in action” in historical terms to document how the complex institutional ecology for US engineering education was transformed to support the political economic transformations associated with economic globalization during the interval from the 1970s until present.

Authors

• Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Thomas De Pree, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Sarah Appelhans, University at Albany

• Alan Cheville, Bucknell University

• Soheil Fatehiboroujeni, Purdue University

• Jennifer Karlin, Minnesota State University, Mankato

• Donna Riley Riley, Purdue University