Training the Next Generation: Ethics and Education

President Bok tried to woo the young professor of ethics away from Princeton seven years ago, but he couldn't convince Dennis F. Thompson to accept the Kennedy School post he offered.

In January of 1985, Bok decided to try the elusive ethicist one more time, spurred by the recommendations of an advisory committee which advocated instituting a University-wide ethics program to train young ethics teachers at Harvard's professional schools. And this time Thompson, who was on leave in California, accepted Bok's invitation and a lifetime post as Whitehead professor of political philosophy at the School of Government.

While Bok has made the teaching of ethics a priority since his installment in Massachusetts Hall 16 years ago, the University-wide ethics program which Thompson now heads and the establishment of an undergraduate Moral Reasoning Core requirement are Harvard's only comprehensive programs to integrate ethics into the curriculum.

But some say Harvard has done too little, too late on keeping abreast of ethical education, and these programs do not fill the gap sufficiently. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett has attacked Harvard's stance on ethics several times this year, once from the podium of Sanders Theater as he delivered an address in celebration of the University's 350th anniversary.

Even insiders admit Harvard has been lax on this issue. "We've been struggling with this program. We would have been much better off as a university if we had instituted the [ethics] program five years ago," says Kennedy School Dean Graham T. Allison. "Harvard has not done as well as we should in this domain."

And more and more people have blamed Harvard for failing to train the next generation of leaders, as national scrutiny of ethics increased after the Iran-contra scandals and the Wall Street insider trading cases. "Whatever the ills of the society are, somebody will find a way to relate them to Harvard," says Allison, adding that, in New York and Washington, Harvard is perceived as churning out graduates who are interested only in "getting rich quick."

Bok has responded to these challenges, however, with a fervent defense of Harvard as the nation's foremost center of ethical learning. In addition to the University-wide ethics program instituted last fall, ethical considerations at Harvard were enhanced by the Business School's receiving a $30 million endowment--including a $20 million donation from outgoing Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman John S.R. Shad--to fund a comphrehensive ethics program.

Within Harvard's extensive network of professional schools there is widespread concern about the B-School's new funds and, more important, Harvard's role as a leader in ethical education.

Traditionally, ethics has been a decentralized issue at Harvard, with each of the professional schools and the College teaching ethics in accordance with standards of the profession and the whims of their respective administrations. For instance, the Law School has had a structured ethics component in its curriculum for years, mostly because of the complicated set of questions which arise from the practice of law and its application.

In 1984 Bok created the Rupp Committee, an advisory body, to study how the University could better use its resources for the teaching of ethics. Named for its chair, Rice University President George Rupp--then a Divinity School Dean, the committee recognized the flaws in the system and recommended that Bok form a University-wide program similar to the one he eventually established last year.

The central problem, as the committee defined it, was to train professionals with a background in both the culture of their respective professions and in the basics of ethical theory. "The committee concluded unanimously that there were very few people who were both well educated in the history and philosophy of ethics and who had also absorbed the culture of a profession, and we tried to address that problem," Rupp says. "We wanted to prepare people best suited to do either."

Which is where Thompson steps in. As director of the program which arose from the Rupp Committee's referendum, he coordinates the activities of an inter-faculty committee and a group of senior fellows from the various faculties who are responsible for orchestrating the program. Next fall, a group of four outside scholars will be the first ethics fellows sponsored by the program.

Thompson explains that the goal of the program is to transcend the limits of individual disciplines like law and medicine in producing ethically complete teachers. "Ethics is a discipline that requires some study and competence. There is a confusion sometimes between acting ethically or being an ethical person, which may not require any ethical training at all, and ethics as a discipline or subject to be taught, which does require some specialized knowledge," Thompson says.

"It's a small distinction, but it's surprising that some of the resistance as well as the enthusiasm about ethics teaching assumes that everybody could do it," he says.

Because of the decentralized approach Harvard has adopted in the past, problems--which the University-wide ethics program aims to rectify--have arisen with insuring that students receive sufficient ethical training. Trying to integrate ethics into the curriculum as a whole, the plan favored by deans and faculty at the B-School, is a worthy goal, but may fail in the execution, say experts on ethics. ethics into the curriculum as a whole, the plan favored by deans and faculty at the B-School, is a worthy goal, but may fail in the execution, say experts on ethics.

"When everybody is teaching ethics, nobody is teaching ethics," says Gary Edwards, director of the Washington-based Ethics Resource Center, adding that education about ethics must be addressed in a structured, "very practical and pragmatic" way. At Harvard, ethical approaches have been developed separately at the schools of law, business, government, medicine and education, and at the College.

Thompson's new program may change centralized ethical education more at Harvard, but until then the university will continue on its present, divergent courses.

Morality of the Core

When the Core Curriculum program was instituted at the University a number of years ago, a moral reasoning component was introduced. Undergraduates are now required to take a semester-long course on topics ranging from "Justice" to "Ethics and International Relations." The Philosophy Department also offers undergraduate courses on ethical theory.

Premised on the hope that "students will not only be aware of moral tradition, but will have begun to understand themselves as reasonable and moral people, who begin to think about their own choices," the Moral Reasoning Core requirement attempts to teach modes of thinking about ethics, says Thomas Professor of Divinity Harvey Cox, who offers a Moral Reasoning course.

Dillon Professor of French Civilization Stanley Hoffmann, who also teaches Moral Reasoning courses, says that although the creation of the Core requirement was "a very good thing," ethics "ought to be a part of the teaching of every topic." Hoffmann's statements echo the concerns of teachers and administrators at the professional schools, as they grapple with the question of how to integrate ethics into the curriculum.

While the Kennedy School has recently started offering courses on the inter-relationship between value systems and professional responsibility, their efforts are not broad-based. Part of the problem is that standards vary from field to field; both the Law School and the Medical School have well-established ethical training components, whereas ethics have not traditionally been emphasized at faculties like the Business School.

Medical schools went through debates similar to the current B-School conflict 10 to 15 years ago, according to Edwards, who says that every medical school in the country now includes at least one ethics course in its curriculum. "It's impossible to practice good medicine without practicing ethical medicine," says Kenneth J. Ryan, Ladd professor of obstetrics and gynecology, who is one of the senior ethics fellows.

Harvard's Medical School aims to instill professional ethics in its students from a variety of perspectives. The ethics courses in the curriculum are supplemented through programs at Harvard's teaching hospitals, including ethics rounds, ethics committees in all of the hospitals and staff bioethicists at some of the facilities, says Lynn M. Peterson, assistant professor of medical ethics and a member of the inter-faculty ethics committee.

Even as public interest in ethical issues waxes and wanes, Harvard faces the difficult task of applying the models developed in the professional schools and the College into a comprehensive method for teaching ethics. The University-wide program headed by Thompson may accomplish that task, but for now Harvard will have to continue to struggle with the role of ethics in a university education.

Teresa A. Mullin contributed to the reporting of this story.