A New Brand of Ethics: NJIT's New Center Trains Tomorrow's Responsible Researchers

Amid the many new lab facilities that have recently risen across NJIT’s campus, Associate Professor of Philosophy Britt Holbrook is laying the groundwork for an initiative he contends will be just as vital in driving impactful research and innovation at the university and beyond for years to come — a center for ethics. 

Working alongside faculty from NJIT’s College of Science and Liberal Arts and Newark College of Engineering, Holbrook directs the university’s new Center for Ethics and Responsible Research (CER2). Its aim is to create a campus-wide culture of ethical STEM that permeates everything from NJIT’s faculty research to its academic programs. 

Holbrook says the new center will be able to provide guidance for faculty researchers, which can be particularly vital for those involved with emerging technologies. In the field of computer vision research, for example, new issues are rapidly evolving within the scientific community over the ethical use of surveillance data and online images of people’s faces to test facial recognition algorithms. 

In its first year, CER2 is also researching and promoting new experiential learning opportunities for students through experimental pedagogical approaches. An example is Holbrook’s 300-level “Engineering Ethics” course, where students are now required to engage with Newark residents about issues in the built environment that affect them, such as the balance between luxury and affordable housing, the placement of incinerators and hazardous waste remediation.

“These decisions revolve around policy and politics, but they don’t happen without engineers. My goal is to broaden the perspective of our students beyond merely technical considerations and to drive home how their future actions as engineers will affect local communities,” Holbrook says. “This starts with listening. When my students discussed traffic congestion and poorly timed traffic lights in one city section, the residents told them in turn about the need to redesign sidewalks. Without their visit, they never would have known about the neighborhood’s priorities.”

Through a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported collaboration with the University of Florida, both schools will compare how students in two groups — an ethics-infused and a regular engineering class — feel prepared at the end of their course to manage ethical issues that are likely to come up in their professional lives — surrounding new transportation infrastructure, for example.

“It is more critical than ever that our students understand and are prepared for the ethical aspects of what they do as they enter extremely demanding, competitive technology-driven fields,” says Atam P. Dhawan, NJIT’s senior vice provost for research and executive director of undergraduate research and innovation. 

Forging connections with other academic institutions and ethics organizations across the country will be key to the venture’s mission beyond the campus borders. 

With the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University and the National Ethics Project (NEP), CER2 was recently awarded a Public Interest Technology University Network Challenge grant. Public interest technology is an emerging field related to the study and application of technology expertise to promote a more just technological future for the public good — encompassing everything from embedding ethical considerations into the study and development of artificial intelligence technology, to launching university sustainability initiatives that benefit the surrounding community. 

Through the project "Evaluating and Assessing Tech Ethics Education," the partners will assess public interest technology education and pedagogy across the three universities. Holbrook has further plans for the collaboration. “The NEP has developed a suite of tools to evaluate the ethical culture of an entire institution, something they call a ‘Campus Alignment Review of Ethics – or CAREs.’ But they have yet to deploy CAREs at a single institution. ... We are eager to serve as the first test case for that.”

Recently, Holbrook and the NEP received a collaborative grant from NSF’s Ethical and Responsible Research program to support NJIT-CAREs, enabling them to gather data to benchmark the current state of ethics at NJIT. The NEP and CER2 will use the data in their application for a follow-on NSF Institutional Transformation grant. 

“If successful, that grant would allow the NEP to provide support for NJIT to make changes and a team that could evaluate the effects of those changes after they are made. Not only will we aim for institutional transformation, establishing a unique NJIT brand of ethical and responsible research, but also, the NEP will enable us to determine if we have succeeded,” says Holbrook.