Universities, Ethics and Professions

Debate and Scrutiny

John Strain, Ronald Barnett, Peter Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415991193
• eBook ISBN: 9781135853037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Every business and organization today needs to impress stakeholders with its ethics policy. Universities, Ethics and Professions examines how this emphasis on ethics by the professional world is impacting universities, institutions that have long been key contributors to ethical reflection and debate, and shapers of ethical discourse. Changing objectives, globalization, and public concerns continue to bring professionalism, and commercialization, into the dialogue about what ethics mean on campus.

Universities, Ethics and Professions offers an in-depth examination of the changing landscape of academic ethics, with case-study analysis from sociologists, educationalists, management specialists and philosophers. As professionalism becomes an integral part of university teaching, training, and research, this book considers the impact on the ethical practices of academics, and explores the importance of universities remaining sites of open discourse on ethics in the future.

1
Introduction

JOHN STRAIN
University of Surrey

RONALD BARNETT
Institute of Education, University of London

PETER JARVIS
Formerly of the University of Surrey

This book is about the impact on the ethical character of universities from the widespread emphasis placed on professionalism, by stakeholders of every category. It is about the impact of the appeal, widely shared by businesses, governments as well as by students and their parents, for universities to train students for the professions in a global economy. It is about the impact of the encouragement given to academics to regard themselves, in various ways, as professionals in this global economy. It is about the struggle between universities and professional bodies over who are the appropriate guardians of ethics in public life and the professions.

Our aim in this introduction is threefold. First, we outline our motivation for the project of the book. Second, we outline an initial architecture of how the concepts of academic life, ethics and professions relate to one another. Third, we describe the architecture of the book itself.

Academic Life, Ethics and Professionalism

The foundation of America’s first university, Harvard College in 1650, proclaimed a mission that was as explicit about ethics as it was about progress in learning and knowledge. According to its charter, the college’s benefactors made their gifts ‘for the advancement of all good literature, arts and sciences … that may conduce to the education of the English and Indian youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness’ (quoted in Lewis 2006:25).

In our more secular age we might value an education in ethics more highly than one in godliness. How permanent this particular change proves to be depends in part on how significant is the phenomenon that Peter Berger (1999) calls desecularisation. As for the inclusion of ‘Indian youth’, whether it was a godly or an ethical pursuit, it was a poignant precursor of the ethics of equity and diversity in universities, although black students did not enter Harvard in significant numbers until the 1970s and women students were almost as long confined to the neighbouring Radcliffe College. Nevertheless, the quotation remains a reminder that universities have long been engaged in activities in which the pivotal measures of success have focused on two questions: is it ethical and does it promote excellence in learning and the pursuit of knowledge?

The tradition that a major role for universities lies in the moral formation of students has had a particular resonance in the USA. This aspect of university education may be undergoing significant transformation today. A key feature of Harry Lewis’s lament at what he believes Harvard had become when he left in 2003 is that ‘universities have forgotten their larger educational role for college students … to help them grow up, to learn who they are, to search for a better purpose for their lives, and to leave college as better human beings’ (Lewis 2006: xii). But this concern is not just an American one. Lord Dearing’s review of UK higher education in 1997 was no less explicit about values in higher education when he quoted from the poet John Masefield addressing Sheffield University in 1947:

It is a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see; where seekers and learners alike, banded together in the search for knowledge, will honour thought in all its finer ways, will welcome thinkers in distress or in exile, will uphold ever the dignity of thought and learning and will exact standards in these things.

Today, there is a third measure of success: is it professional? For students who will eventually survive outside academe what also matters is competence at a job. There has never been a time when students went to university unmindful that whatever else they, and their parents, sought for their off-spring in a college education, it included the capacity to acquire a good job at the end of it. For all the emphasis sometimes given to universities to focus on knowledge for its own sake, to be somehow above the world of work and business, the emphasis, taken by itself, is a chimera. For all Cardinal Newman’s efforts in 1855 to defend the ethical integrity of the university against the demands of the bishops, he was well aware that his students were acquiring skills that would fit them for the professions, as architects, as engineers or as teachers (Newman 1990).

The tension between the ethical integrity of academic life and the demands of the professions to fill their ranks with educated novices is, therefore, in some respects at least, nothing new. But we wish to suggest there is something new about the way in which ethical standards exert themselves upon contemporary universities. Our suggestion is, and in this introduction it is no more than a suggestion, explored in greater detail in successive chapters, that contemporary universities have lost a certain primacy, a certain position of widely accepted respect, in ethics. Peter Jarvis, in Chapter 2, is perhaps the most fervent protagonist of this thesis, but the question he addresses is intended to resonate throughout our book. All three editors believe it is a question whose examination is necessary to understand the significance of universities today.

Universities are products of the wider Western and Middle Eastern world forged within Christian and Islamic traditions, and, some centuries later, by the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment. It is hard to imagine a time in their history, when ethics have been proclaimed so intensely outside the boundaries of either widely recognised religious authorities, Jewish, Christian or Islamic; or of universities themselves. Religious authorities and universities, together with the literary cultures both have sustained, have been primary actors in the debate about what it is to be ethical until the twentieth century.

It is no longer the case. The call to be ethical comes from diverse components in society. Here is not the place to explore the various rivals for ethical authority that have challenged universities. Political parties, Green parties, socialist parties and liberal parties, all of them guardians of specific ideologies, have no doubt played their part and universities have had important roles in providing the underpinnings of knowledge about the environment and about human rights violations. Bauman (1993) describes the complex ways in which ethics is conceived today. But in his analysis it would seem, ethics is something that academics may study in others, not generate themselves. It goes further. In so far as academics are to be ethical, it might appear that they will be told by others how to be so. In the UK, there has been a call for universities to develop codes of ethics for themselves in a manner developed by businesses for businesses, a call spearheaded by a Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE 2005). It might be seen as an emblem of the concern of this book that no longer are universities offering leadership in the examination of ethical conduct. Rather, business is showing universities how to be ethical. Robinson explores this further in Chapter 11.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, we want to suggest that some of the key challengers to the ethical authority of universities have been the professions, the professional bodies that have sustained the professionals and the culture of professionalism that has been extensively fomented beyond the ranks of the professionals themselves. This is not to suggest that the professions have acted independently of the views of their clients and customers. Our concern in the book is the relationship between professionals and the changing notion of ethical integrity in universities. Our question is: should we be concerned at the influence of professionals outside universities on how academics understand ethics in universities?

Academic Life, Ethics and Professionalism: Examining the Concepts

Academic life relates to professionalism in, at least, three ways. First, in societies where to be ‘unprofessional’ is to fail against common standards of workmanship, there is a need for all academics to conform to their own professional standards. It might be noted that this is a new notion of professionalism. Time was when not to be ‘professional’ was simply to work outside a strictly limited number of occupations. But the contemporary demand on all academics to be professional, as academics, presents a difficulty for many. The ubiquity of professionalism entails that many academics will be members of a profession associated with their discipline. Teachers of engineering, psychology, and nursing, to give only a few examples, may well conceive of themselves primarily as members of the professions in which they teach, rather than as professional academics.

There is a second way in which academic life relates to professionalism. Universities prepare students to be nurses, engineers and psychologists. They prepare students to meet the competencies demanded by the professions of their members; and in societies increasingly concerned with ethics, the universities prepare their students to meet the demands of the codes of conduct and other ethical standards of the professions. Each profession will have its own different version of ethical standards. Some will have strictly defined rules in codes of conduct. Others, medical practitioners, for example, will have a more complex array of tradition, legal precedent and ethical theory (see, for example, Beauchamp and Childress 2001). One consequence of this complex variety of ethical standards is that the academics find themselves teaching a not altogether coherent set of accounts of ethics. They face this predicament at a time when they are encouraged to define their own coherent standards of ethics as an academic community. They are encouraged in this by external agencies, eager to understand how academics should be regarded as accountable.

There is a third way in which the world of professions impacts upon academics. Those who fund research in the universities are increasingly required to ensure that the research they commission conforms to ethical standards of research. These will include the requirement to meet standards of confidentiality and to gain the informed consent of participants in research. For academics to meet many of these requirements will simply be a natural component of their own professionalism. But there are occasions when academics will have a different understanding of what is ethical in research from those commissioning research. They may feel that the benefits of gaining information about potentially harmful practices by covert observation may outweigh the desirability of gaining the consent of those being observed. The alternative to acceding to the views of those commissioning the research is to lose the research contract to another university. In such cases there are grounds for asking whether the paymasters are using powers to frustrate the academic community in decisions which are more properly made by academics than by research commissioners. Bulmer and Ocloo pursue this further in Chapter 10.

But what is it about ethics which might in some way be properly the business of academics to make decisions on? We opened our introduction with a reflection on Harvard’s origins in the seventeenth century. Universities today face different challenges and occupy different circumstances from those of the seventeenth century. What connects them is the link between the seventeenth-century concern with godliness and truthfulness and the contemporary concern with the ethical character of the pursuit of truthfulness in science and scholarship.

Whether we are persuaded or not by Richard Dawkins’ (1989; 2006) account of either theology or genetic activity, he is accorded respect because he belongs to a community of scholars in a university. It is assumed, on account of his being a scholar, that he is not just spinning us a line that might persuade us to buy some product or service that he has a stake in; or cajole us into joining a political party. He wants to do more than make money from a popular book. What he has to tell us, we assume, on account of his being an academic, is related significantly and logically to some expert knowledge he has acquired on account of his being a scholar. These are not just the values of being a scientist. It would be the same if he were considering the work of a noted Shakespearean scholar. There is an aspiration towards truthfulness that is maintained with personal integrity. It is not quite the same pursuit that we expect of those who design clothes for us and persuade us to wear them. Nor is it quite the same standard of truthfulness expected of politicians or even of priests. When the news channels want an independent view of what underpins events in the world, t...

Table of contents

• Key Issues in Higher Education Series
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• I The Debate
• II Ethical Concepts in Academic Practice
• III Universities, Ethics and Professions
• IV Departures
• Contributors
• Index