Petition posted on Change.org for increased integration of ethics in engineering courses.
A petition for increased integration of ethics in engineering courses at the University of Colorado Boulder is garnering attention from students and staff in the College of Engineering and Applied Science.
The petition, posted on Change.org, was created on June 13, 2025 by Anahita Khorashahi, a sophomore biological engineering student at CU Boulder. She’s also a senator for the University of Colorado Engineering Council and vice president for CU Student Government legislative council.
According to Khorashahi, the aim of the petition is to gauge student opinion on the matter, and to see whether or not she can garner the support needed to make a case to the faculty.
“It is very important that we have these ethical reasoning skills so that we can navigate real world challenges that we might not interact with as students,” she said.
The Harvard Business School article cited in the petition refers to the National Society of Professional Engineers’ code of ethics, which includes the values of public safety, performing within qualification, honest communication, trust in employers and integrity.
Khorashahi’s petition aims to bring these principles to their fullest potential at CU Boulder, but it isn’t the only presence on campus advocating for ethics in engineering. The Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics and Society has been fighting for ethics education at CU Boulder for over twenty years.
The Herbst Program, led by Director Anja Lange, dedicates itself to expanding the ethical literacy of Engineering students through exposure to relevant literature, film and conversation. All Herbst Program classes count towards the humanities and social sciences general education requirements for engineering students.
According to Khorashahi, however, the Herbst Program is limited in its reach.
The current state of ethics at CU Boulder
“I’ve spoken with Dr. Lange and she said that specifically they only reach a little over 50% or so of engineering undergraduates,” Khorashahi said, adding that there is no blanket requirement for ethics instruction in place for students in all engineering disciplines.
The Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science, Keith Molenaar, explained that the college is accredited through the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology.
“They set a minimum of standards for ethics in an exam— it’s called our Fundamentals of Engineering exam. We look at that each year, and if we’re not passing that, we change our curriculum,” Molenaar said.
The Fundamentals of Engineering exam is the first step in acquiring licensure for engineering students and is typically taken prior to graduation. Despite the required “ethics and professional practice” section, however, students like Khorashahi remain adamant about improving the current curriculum.
“I think we definitely already exceed the minimums,” said Molenaar, yet he remained supportive of the students who want more from their department and curriculum. The students’ cause and the momentum of the petition, he affirmed, “is a really exciting thing.”
Concerns in aerospace
A considerable ethical question for the engineering department is about the pipeline from CU Boulder to defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, one of the top employers of aerospace engineering graduates out of college. Last October, pro-Palestine activists launched a protest at a University Memorial Center career fair for hosting Lockheed, ending with three student journalists banned from campus and charged with code of conduct violations.
“There is a reasonable amount of this petition that does also come from concerns of that pipeline,” said Khorashahi. “I will say however, my position and my role is not to tell students or aerospace engineers that they should not be working at Lockheed Martin…it’s to make sure that they are provided with the tools and the conversations and the importance of having an ethical mindset, having ethical integrity or literacy and making well informed decisions.”
Khorashahi pointed towards the aerospace department as a place where increased ethical consideration could be impactful, as she claimed to have been told by students in the program that they are lacking in their ethics education.
“I was even told by a graduate student that they were surprised I was able to get my TV ad in their building,” she explained.
Molenaar expressed a different perspective. According to him, aerospace and national defense isn’t solely in the engineering business— it’s a campus-wide affair.
“It’s not just engineers working for Lockheed Martin, it’s business, it’s economists, it’s our social scientists,” he said.
Molenaar pointed to students who enter the defense industry and have a family history of national service as one of the cases in which engineering students may gravitate towards Lockheed.
“I think our students who choose to go in there do that ethically and uphold those principles,” he said.
The way forward
Despite the current climate, Khorashahi and her colleagues are enthusiastic about the petition’s potential, but it doesn’t come without its challenges. The biggest challenge so far has been finding the best approach.
“Initially, the idea was to require a course having a blanket requirement for all majors, because there are already some requirements for some majors,” she said. She pointed to the six credit “Logic and Ethics” requirement for computer science majors as an example.
However, due to the already heavy course load of engineering students, which often exceeds 128 hours, compared to the minimum CU Boulder requirement of 120, this idea didn’t bode well for support. Khorashahi looked for her next approach.
“For engineering students, we generally require 15 to 18 history and social science credits. The initial thought was to make one of those classes be required as a Herbst engineering course, so you still get to choose out of the remaining classes, and you still get to have that flexibility,” she said.
But this idea didn’t pan out either. The problem was that, by taking up history and social science requirements, they would further restrict engineering students in their already confined credit requirements, not to mention the already limited opportunity to interact with students outside of the discipline. The idea of a Herbst requirement was abandoned as well.
Eventually, Khorashahi came to a conclusion.
“Maybe the best thing is to encourage the people who decide or build and work on course curriculum to include ethics specific discussions,” she said. “Whether it be foundational principles in our early courses to more complex dilemmas in our later courses, just to have some way that there can still be this kind of ethics integration without it being a formal requirement.”
The challenge with this approach lies in the difficulty of changing a curriculum. According to Khorashahi and Molenaar, most administrators have no say over curriculum change. Khorashahi further explained that changing a curriculum also costs money, and an extended curriculum likely means a higher workload in an already cramped academic year.
“The faculty creates the curriculum,” said Molenaar. “And so what the students will need to do is make a clear and logical argument for why we need to change the curriculum, and the faculty need to enact that.”
This is the official strategy of the proposal— or, as Khorashahi said, “trying to find the most reasonable and logistically appropriate approach, and try to leverage the data that we’ve collected and student support and opinions to argue a case and see how we can compromise.”
“I think the students are going about this in the best way,” said Molenaar. “I can tell you that the faculty will be much more swayed by the student voice than an administrator’s voice.”
In an effort to garner more support, Khorashahi and Colorado Engineering Activists president Tatumn Short are holding an “Engineering Ethics Bowl” to promote the cause for increased integration of ethics in CU engineering courses. For information on the Ethics Bowl as well as the broader Ethics initiative, visit the CEAS Ethics Initiative website here.
Correction: The article was updated to clarify that Khorashahi is a senator for the University of Colorado Engineering Council and vice president for CU Student Government Legislative Council. In the third-to-last paragraph, “proposal” was added to more accurately reflect the broader strategy.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Dominic Leading Fox at dominic.leadingfox@colorado.edu
