The Humanitarian Engineering program at Colorado School of Mines has begun leading workshops on the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the education of engineers.
Liberal Arts and International Studies professors Juan Lucena and Jon Leydens, as well as other Mines faculty, will present during the American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference in Seattle June 14-17, 2015.
Leydens will lead a session titled: “Integrating Social Justice in Engineering Science Courses.” Lucena, who is also the director of the Humanitarian Engineering program, will speak in a workshop on “Building Intentional Community Partnerships,” as well as present during the Integrating Social Justice session.
Associate Professor Jessica Smith and her colleague, Nicole Smith, presented another workshop, “Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Development: Exploring Opportunities in Engineering Education,” at the Engineering Education for Sustainable Development conference held June 9-12 in Vancouver.
Both of these presentations expand on the “Corporate Social Responsibility in Extractive Industries” workshop Mines hosted May 14-15. The workshop was funded by the Shultz Family in Humanitarian Engineering and brought together leaders from various fields to brainstorm how to integrate corporate social responsibility into the education of tomorrow’s engineers.
“The workshop was exciting because we brought together people from academia, NGOs, corporations and industry to actually brainstorm CSR and how it is practiced in different places in different ways, and how we can bring those insights into our educating of engineers,” explained Lucena.
Roger Fragua, a member of the Pueblo of Jemez and president of Cota Holdings, presented, as did Will Rifkin from the University of Queensland’s Center for Social Responsibility in Mining. Professors from Stanford University and Missouri University of Science and Technology attended, as well as others from South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Australia. Corporate participants included Shell Co., Enbridge, and Newmont Mining Corporation.
One of the key insights from the workshop called for expanding the concept of corporate social responsibility beyond the moniker of corporate to include the social responsibility of individual engineers.
“A second takeaway was the issue of word choice, with some industry leaders expressing discomfort with the term “social justice” and suggesting alternatives such as “social performance” and “co-governance,” said Lucena. “Others brought up the need to expand CSR beyond just the extractive industries, to include civil engineers who aren’t necessarily working in oil, gas or mining, for example, but whose work still impacts communities. And a fourth insight centered around the issue of risk, how we educate engineers and our society in general, because pretending there are no risks involved means choosing to be naïve over being proactive.”
The Humanitarian Engineering program at Colorado School of Mines was the first in the country. A generous gift from Mines alumni, Chuck Shultz and his family, has revitalized the program, so that it now sponsors a speaker series, five Shultz scholars, and research on sustainability and corporate social responsibility.
Contact:
Deirdre Keating, Information Specialist, College of Engineering & Computational Sciences | 303-384-2358 | dkeating@mines.edu
Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations, Colorado School of Mines | 303-273-3541 | kgilbert@mines.edu
