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Taking up the notion of engineering as social experimentation, this paper argues that engineering research laboratory directors have a responsibility to inform graduate engineering students who participate in their research projects of the potential broader social dimensions of those projects. Informing engineers-in-the-making of the broader social dimensions of the research they are learning to conduct would help ensure their future capacity to act as ethically responsible social experimenters. The paper also argues that graduate engineers have a right to be informed participants in activities that may have broader social dimensions than are recognized by formal research evaluation or educational processes. The process of obtaining the informed consent of graduate engineering students, if implemented effectively, would thus help ensure both their capacity to act as moral agents and their own moral integrity. Since the eventual outcomes of research can be uncertain, complex, and contested, most traditional institutional frameworks—such as principle-based codes of conduct and risk-benefit frameworks—provide an insufficient basis to inform engineers and citizens. Rather, we recommend an ongoing discursive process that explores a number of different actors, contexts, and scenarios, and that evolves with the social context of the engineering research in question. While this may seem burdensome to the engineering research process, it can be integrated directly into the group research meetings and mentorship activities that typically already go on. Moreover, it can actually be seen to benefit engineering practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite societal expectations that graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines integrate broader impacts into their professional activities, few of them actually receive any formal training in this area. This paper describes a graduate seminar entitled “Broader Impacts of Natural Sciences on Society” taught at the University of Florida in 2006 and 2008. In addition to course goals, recruitment, expectations, format, content, and outcomes, this paper describes challenges and recommendations for others who might want to teach a similar course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article performs a depth hermeneutic of the two senses of 'vocation' that were available to Max Weber when he delivered his complementary lectures to graduate students one hundred years ago: 'Science as a Vocation' and 'Politics as a Vocation'. Both senses derive from the Protestant Reformation, but the relationship implied between the divine sender and human receiver of the 'call' are radically divergent. On the one hand, the Lutheran sense of 'vocation' involves hearing the call from God, recognising it for what it is, and then justifying one's life in terms of it. In contrast, the Calvinist sense of 'vocation' involves neither the certainty nor the submission of the Lutheran call. Instead the call amounts an invitation to wager one's life by venturing into a world of potentially – but by no means necessarily – transcendent significance. Weber associates the academic vocation – as he had previously the 'capitalist ethic' – with the Calvinist sense of calling. The stated and implied critique of conventional academic practice, which Weber saw as tending in a more 'Lutheran' direction, remains of contemporary relevance. Among the topics covered are the relationship between the pursuit of free inquiry and state policy, the status of academic works, and the sense of 'purpose' with which academic inquiry should be pursued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]