Systemic reform in undergraduate engineering education: The role of collective responsibility

The aggregate of individual faculty member accomplishments-however well done or prolific seldom fulfills all collective curricular and instructional obligations of an academic program or department. The purpose of this paper is to help those attempting reforms in undergraduate engineering education to better understand the array of systemic factors likely to affect the long-term success of their efforts. We identify the reasons underlying the difficulty in achieving the necessary level of collective responsibility, describe the tensions within academe that affect an individual faculty member's contributions to collective responsibilities and discuss strategies that can be used to meet these collective obligations.