“It’s not about students finding their voice, they have a voice. It’s about giving them an opportunity to make their voices heard.”
Running a business responsibly is a collective effort and, as we established before, responsible businesses need ethical leaders to make sure their actions don’t harm the environment they operate in.
Meet BEAST, as in Becoming Ethically Aware Students, not a wild animal – though its members are just as fierce. It’s the first student-led ethical STEM movement that raises awareness of the importance of ethics at three universities, Imperial College London, École Polytechnique and HEC Paris. We spoke with Héloïse Rozès, one of the co-founders of BEAST as well as an Imperial College graduate and HEC Paris postgraduate student, about the role the next generation has to play in driving ethical change.
Héloïse, thank you for taking the time to have a chat with us. First things first: What is BEAST?
BEAST is a network of student associations that challenge it’s members’ attitudes regarding ethics. There are many ethical questions that arise from STEM. Should you be able to choose your baby’s eye colour? Should you take money for your research from an institution that doesn’t stand by your values? How do we make sure algorithms are fair, especially when they are owned by private companies?
There are no right or wrong answers but it’s important to expand student’s knowledge to make them more comfortable and methodical with thinking ethically.
What was the key trigger to launch your association?
Well, BEAST was founded after a chat over coffee with one of my co-founders, Patrick. We were talking about an experience one of my friends had at a hackathon. Heis an engineering student and the goal of this hackathon was to build a train. The challenge was to design the fastest train possible that could take the maximum number of people from A to B in the cheapest way possible.
After the teams had worked on this for 24 hours there was an award ceremony at the end, as usual. But at the end of the ceremony, at the closing speech, the director of the university called attention to the fact that none of the participants actually asked why the organisers wanted them to build this type of train. It was then revealed that the participants had essentially come up with a prototype for the trains that were used for deportation in The Third Reich.
The fact that students didn’t even question what their skills were utilised for really struck a chord with Patrick and me and we decided to do something about it.
How did you start out?
At first, we wanted to raise awareness through writing articles in the student newspaper of our university. We contacted professors at the university to find out more about how ethics related to their own work, which is how we got in touch with Sara Rankin, who’s a professor of Leukocyte and Stem Cell Biology.
She told us writing an article is good, but wouldn’t it be great if we found a way to empower students to have an actual ethical impact on their own department? And that’s how we came up with the idea of hosting a conference. This was in November 2019.
We held the conference in February 2020 and at that point, we had met a lot of great people at Imperial College that were really supportive of our initiative. We had professors from Cambridge University and other researchers representing different fields.
Where do you see the connection between STEM, business and ethics?
When people hear “business ethics”, they often think of things like corruption but it goes way beyond that in my opinion. Ethics are important in essentially every aspect of an organisation. Ethics is an interdisciplinary issue and you hardly find an aspect of business where it’s not relevant.
One of the most obvious instances where ethics comes into play, especially in STEM, is when financial decisions are made. Money for a business is what blood is for us humans, it keeps everything going. And we need to make sure that the right projects, ethical projects, can thrive.
So what approach would you say universities have to ethics as of now?
I’m a biomedical engineering graduate and my co-founders also have degrees in STEM. At an undergraduate level, we were confronted with all kinds of different disciplines from nuclear engineering to physics. Ethics is something that plays an important role in all of this but we didn’t engage with the topic in any meaningful way.
I literally had one lecture about ethics in one of my courses, in my four years of study! My co-founder and I really felt strongly about the subject. We felt that if we’re being equipped with the tools to design incredibly innovative technology, why is nobody educating us about the possible consequences of our inventions? You can’t just give somebody the means to change the world and not have them reflect on ethics!
What is the solution then, from your perspective?
For me, it means that students learn to think before they act. Going back to the example of the hackathon, I think students need to be aware of the complementarity between their knowledge and their actions and know the history of the technology they are creating.
To be honest I think this is something that should come up way earlier than at university. Starting from kindergarten kids should ask themselves what consequences their actions could have. On a university level, the way to go would be to make students feel engaged and let them know that their opinions matter.
It’s not about students finding their voice, they have a voice. It’s about giving them an opportunity to make their voices heard. And this isn’t just something relevant for social sciences, every single university programme should adopt this, including STEM.
What was your best moment so far?
I just gain a lot of happiness from seeing other people engage with ethics and meet us halfway. No, actually a lot of our audience meets us “the full way”. A lot of people my age are thinking about STEM and it’s crazy that we don’t have any outlets to develop these thoughts. I’m a person that sees the glass half full but it was a very validating experience to see that there are a lot of people out there who share my enthusiasm for ethics.
And what was your biggest learning up until this point?
Hmm, I think scaling BEAST in a different country was definitely a learning experience. It’s an ecosystem with a different language and completely different publics. I like to use the metaphor of a glove that you turn inside-out: same shape but completely different complexion.
All of our branches have the same goal, raising awareness within students, but everybody has different means to achieve this. Respecting the differences between two ecosystems, two environments is incredibly important. Learning how to truly delegate tasks was also something that I had to adapt to.
What are the next steps for BEAST?
Making BEAST into a global network that spans different universities across Europe! We are now focusing on five specific areas: finance, bioengineering, military, data science & AI and environment. There are a lot of synergies in these fields and a lot of opportunities for collaboration.
Ultimately our goal is to foster discussion. The vision is to build a platform that enables discussions between experts and students to raise awareness about ethics. We want to be the first ethical think tank led by students, for students.
We’re also launching our weekly newsletter next week, you should definitely subscribe if you haven’t done so already!
A lot of students aren’t used to asking questions about the ethics of their actions. But we want to give them the opportunity to delve deeper into this topic and find answers to pressing issues from their own perspective – with valuable input from our side.