Where are the Faculty? The Missing Perspective on Teaching Socio-ethical Competencies in Computer science

The last decade has seen a rising awareness on computing's social and ethical impacts. If the ambition is for computing disciplines to reposition themselves to be able to educate about these impacts, however, we have to wonder whether we are duly training all the change-makers: not only the students, but also their teachers. While recent computing curricula such as the ACM/IEEE CC2020 and CS2023 have evolved to include Social, Ethical, and Professional (SEP) competencies, the shift has exposed a gap: students are expected to develop these competencies during their degrees, but these learning goals are supposed to be filled by faculty with limited preparation and support.In this paper we argue that, as a community, we are underexploring systematic discussions, research, and practices about the development of faculty SEP competencies. In the status quo, faculty teach SEP through a hidden curriculum: our curricula take socio-ethical stances, but they do so tacitly, implicitly, or with limited awareness. We call for direct action in building SEP competencies by proposing systemic, local, and individual actions such as creating incentives, establishing communities of practice, and promoting reflective practice. Our hope is that, by developing new practices, we can build sufficient critical mass in our community to reorient computing towards the social. Our wish for this paper is that it may serve as a call to action for the computer science education community to invest in its educators as the architects of hope for a socially responsible computing profession.