It took a long time for engineers to recognize professional ethics as a necessary part of their training. In the famous (or infamous) matter of San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) and that of the NASA Space Shuttle O-Ring giving way, engineers who spoke up against management practices were punished. At the time, the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) filed amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the punished engineers in court and instituted the IEEE Medal for Distinguished Ethical Practices. Ethics became a required subject in the Engineering Curriculum. This writer has authored the book Ethics for Professionals: An Internationalist, Human Rights Perspective, San Diego, CA: Cognella Press, 2018, and been awarded India’s Institute for Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering (IETE) Gowri Gold Medal for 2015 for work on Professional Ethics as an Ideal rather than an Absolute Standard. Many countries followed suit and today the worldwide Washington Accords has followed ABET in requiring Ethics for accredited degrees.

       Be that as it may, academics have been the fly in the ointment. While accepting the new standards because they have to have their degrees accredited, engineering faculty in many instances have been backward. In many places where the writer has taught, the teaching of ethics has been farmed out to the Arts and Humanities sections. Or as at Peradeniya a visiting lawyer is asked to teach these subjects that the students are expected to know even as there is no faculty member with the know-how or the English skills to teach the subject that students are expected to know.  Where a professor does research on ethics or education and publishes in the IEEE Transactions, the papers count for far less than technical papers in the IEEE Transactions. This overflows into recruitment too.

       For tenure, a grant for work on education or ethics does not count as much as in a technical field. Professors who bring in money but do not publish receive tenure, even as Prof. Bruce Eisenstein (one-time President of the IEEE and Department Head) asserted, “If there is academic merit in a grant it will show in publications coming from it, and I will not double count by counting the grant and then the papers it leads to.” Patents count even though I have shown it possible to patent a monopole.

       There are also more brazen violations of ethics in recruitment. Thesis students of professors succeed as Assistant Professors. In Sri Lanka, at the two big engineering faculties, they advertise but recruit their own graduates. At the new faculties, the Coordinator brings in graduates from his own university and looks to other faculties only because of reluctance of graduates to join the new faculties.

       Universities “game” the measures by which US News and World Report ranks universities, even misreporting the SAT scores of those admitted like when Claremont McKenna College was caught doing, and another was found to meddle with the US News metric for alumni giving by splitting a $25 donation into five $5 gifts over 5 years. Since the number of IEEE Fellows teaching is another metric used by US News, retired alumni from the corporate world who did no teaching were listed as faculty. An example was the famed Simon Ramo, the R of TRW Automotive, who was listed by USC at the age of 94.

       The purpose of this paper is to open our eyes to the ethical violations that we shut our eyes to with the view to making us alive to the violations we do not see and thereby make the university and the profession truly ethical, safe and proud places to work in.