“ The French higher education system ’ s response to the call for a preparation for social responsibility ”

For the past twenty years, some French institutions have appealed to the engineers’ sense of social responsibility: the Conseil national des ingénieurs et scientifiques de France (CNISF), which represents the engineering profession, through its code of ethics (CNISF 1996, 2001), the Commission des titres d’ingénieurs (CTI), the regulatory body of engineering education a in its guidelines (CTI 1995); the trade union Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), which have sought to define how the teaching goal of engineering education could take into account social responsibility. Nevertheless, this call is scarcely heard: the CNISF has no means to enforce its code of ethics, and the vast majority of French engineers do not know about the existence of its code; the CTI’s guidelines do not include the possibility to specifically alter the program, but only to give recommendations; and the CFDT document was conceived as food for thought, but did not lead to anything definite in education (Didier 1999, 2000).