2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This evidence-based practice full paper examines moral injury as an emerging lens for understanding ethical dissonance, value conflicts, and character strain in higher education—particularly within engineering education. While engineering programs increasingly emphasize ethics, character, and professional responsibility, less attention has been given to the emotional and moral harm that students, faculty, and academic leaders may experience when institutional structures, cultural norms, or professional demands conflict with deeply held values. This paper uses the concept of moral injury to illuminate how educational practices and systems can unintentionally erode integrity, empathy, and moral agency within academic contexts.

Rooted in the moral psychology and professional ethics literature, moral injury describes the psychological, emotional, and spiritual distress that occurs when individuals perpetrate, witness, or are complicit in actions that violate their moral beliefs or values. While extensively studied in military, medical, and nursing professions, moral injury remains underexplored in engineering and higher education more broadly. Yet, the same structural and ethical tensions—between efficiency and care, compliance and conscience, metrics and meaning—pervade academic life.
This work investigates how moral injury manifests in engineering education through real-world situational judgment exercises developed to probe moral awareness, ethical reasoning, and emotional response among students, educators, and academic leaders. Participants engaged with authentic scenarios drawn from academic and professional contexts—such as team conflicts, institutional policies, and pressures to conform to unethical norms. Through facilitated reflection and debriefing, participants examined how institutional expectations and professional identity formation interact to create conditions of moral compromise or silence.

Data were analyzed using a mixed-methods approach of institutional documents and programmatic documents combined with qualitative thematic analysis to identify situations that lead to moral injury within engineering education and higher education contexts. Findings reveal recurring patterns of moral tension: students and faculty reported feeling powerless in the face of institutional injustice, pressured to prioritize grades or performance metrics over integrity, and discouraged from voicing ethical concerns that challenge authority or cultural norms. Evidence suggests that moral injury in engineering education often arises not from overt wrongdoing but from systemic dissonance—between who leaders, educators, and students aspire to be and what the educational environment requires them to do.

This paper contributes to emerging conversations on ethical resilience, moral repair, and character formation in engineering education. It offers evidence-based strategies for mitigating moral injury through reflective pedagogies, community dialogue, and institutional practices that honor moral courage and authenticity. Ultimately, understanding moral injury allows educators to reframe ethical education not simply as compliance or decision-making but as the cultivation of moral integrity within complex systems that often test it.

Keywords: moral injury, engineering ethics, higher education, situational judgment, moral resilience, character education