Over the past 15 years, society has developed an expectation that engineers, as practitioners and managers, are aware of those activities over which they have control and which could adversely affect the public's well‐being. Specifically, due to incidents such as Love Canal, Times Beach, Bhopal, and Chernobyl, and the pollution of groundwater, the public now recognizes that technology, which is within the control of others, can, if mishandled, jeopardize the health and well‐being of thousands of innocent people. This realization will undoubtedly place increasing pressures on engineers to be more aware of the potential adverse consequences of their work. This paper discusses why schools of engineering have a responsibility to prepare engineers to meet these expectations and recommends an approach to meeting this challenge. An undergraduate engineering course applicable to all disciplines, which would help fill this gap, is discussed.

Most practicing civil engineers are licensed to practice their profession in at least one licensing jurisdiction. Licensees tend to take the licensing requirement for granted because the requirement has been with us since 1907. Engineers are reluctant to communicate with their licensing boards either in a positive or negative manner. A good working relationship between a board and its licensees can lead to a more effective and efficient regulation of the profession.

Engineering is a social enterprise. What makes this enterprise worthy of public trust? A model is developed to explain how disciplinary communities within engineering evolve credible bodies of knowledge. Such bodies of knowledge constitute the “expertise” of professionals. If respect for such bodies of knowledge is lost, then respect for the expertise of individual professionals will also be lost. Professional respect thus depends upon the integrity of those social processes through which bodies of knowledge develop. If such social processes are deficient, the trustworthiness of a profession will erode. This paper describes how such erosion of trust can occur and what corrective actions might be taken.

The National Science Foundation is a major source of support for fundamental research in civil engineering. In the past five years, the Engineering Directorate of NSF was extensively reorganized. In particular, the Civil and Environmental Engineering program was discontinued and its research support activities divided among a number of new or continuing programs. This paper examines trends in NSF support for civil engineering research, especially in light of the recent reorganization and inauguration of new programs. The amount of research support for civil engineering has continued to grow, although not as fast as for other engineering disciplines. However, the focus of some research support has been changing.

New philosophical viewpoints emerging from the engineering academic community suggest that engineering is not a science (nor an art) of any kind. The motivation for this paper, then, is concern for whether these new ideas about the nature of engineering serve to differentiate any moral responsibilities of engineers from those of scientists. Questions like “What are the moral responsibilities of engineers?’ from the point of view that engineering is not a science are reexamined. The main argument (or thesis) put forward in this paper is that engineers should inform the public of the limits of scientific knowledge residing in engineering judgments, and the degrees to which nonscientific practices influence these judgments. In order to establish a moral basis for this argument, focus is placed on engineering judgments about the fitness of hazardous technologies for public consent of exposure.

Economic growth in developing countries requires application of appropriate technology and effective management. Choice of appropriate technologies can generally be made from among those already known, with the adoption of “high‐tech” having only marginal utility. Application of innovative management in five developing countries is described.

A 4‐yr study of environmental management practices in industry reflected three approaches: (1) Crisis management, where the law is kept minimally, regulations are often resisted, and little is done until a crisis develops; (2) cost‐oriented management, where regulations are carried out as cheaply as possible, with mostly short‐term considerations taken into account; and (3) enlightened management, which looks to the long‐term good of the firm and to the spirit, as well as letter, of the law, so that long‐term environmental safety and corporate profits are maximized. A follow‐up check of 32 firms revealed that about 1/4 of the firms had improved the quality of their environmental management practices.

Is civil engineering a professional career or just a pretty good job? The golden era of civil engineering stretched roughly from the 1850s to the 1950s, when civil engineers were credited with many large public works projects and technological advances. With the change in public philosophy about engineering and technology starting around the era of the atomic bomb, the engineer became the identifiable party who could be blamed for all manner of supposed evils resulting from technology. Only unanticipated large‐scale changes in public perception of the value of the engineer and technology can restore the prestige and economic rewards of the civil engineer of the golden era.