Program Tries to Improve Teaching of Moral Choice

About 1,000 undergraduates take Professor of Government Michel J. Sandel's Moral Reasoning 22: "Justice," each year it is offered, but many thousands more learn from his course.

Sandel's class was the subject of a video, which has been distributed to colleges and universities around the country to demonstrate how ethics can be taught effectively in large lecture courses.

"It's been benefitting undergraduates elsewhere...by showcasing outstanding undergraduate teaching of ethics here at Harvard," says Associate Provost Dennis F. Thompson.

The video is part of a larger effort to expose universities to issues of moral choice that has come into being with the Program in Ethics and the Professions.

The Program is one of Harvard's five Interfaculty Initiatives, which attempt to unite the University's varied schools in projects involving joint research and public service.

Established in 1986 by then-President Derek Bok to encourage teaching and research about ethical issues in public and professional life, the Program became one of the elements of Rudenstine's Interfaculty Initiative plan when he instituted it in 1991.

"I like to think of it as 'Ethics and Public Life' or 'Practical Ethics,"" says Thompson, who has been the Program's director since its inception.

At the time, many educators like Bok believed the teaching of ethics in colleges and professional schools had been somewhat abandoned.

"When I first came to Harvard, I felt lonely," Thompson recalls, referring to the lack of faculty in the professional schools interested in ethics. "Now, I can't keep up with what's going on."

Despite the role played by Sandel's course in the Program, Thompson admits that the Program, by its nature, has not had as large an impact on the undergraduate curriculum as some of the other Interfaculty Initiatives.

"This is not the type of field you should concentrate in as an undergraduate," Thompson says. "It ought to be worked into the other courses."

The Program's largest impact on the College curriculum came in 1987 when the American Express Foundation awarded the Program a $1.5 million grant in order to give ethical issues a more prominent place in undergraduate courses. As a result, 44 ethics courses throughout the University were either developed or revised.

The Program

At the core of the Program are the Fellowships in Ethics, which are awarded to between four and eight scholars each year. The fellows are usually selected from faculty at Harvard and other universities.

"The biggest success are the fellows," Thompson said. "We honestly didn't expect the talent to be as exceptional as it has been."

The year-long fellowship--which includes seminars, workshops and study groups--allows the scholars to conduct their own research in ethics.

John Kleinig, professor of philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York, used his fellowship year to begin work on Ethical Policing, a definitive book in the field of police ethics.

"I had piles of information [about policing], but I needed a framework to think about the ethical problems," Kleinig says.

Kleinig, who was a fellow in the Program in 1990-91, says he welcomed the different perspectives of the other fellows.

"We were battling out issues from rather different academic backgrounds. It was very interesting to get that mixed group of people talking about common issues," Kleinig says.

Fundraising Difficulties

Despite 10 successful years of existence, the Program in Ethics and the Professions is still struggling to raise funds to establish itself as a permanent institution in the University.

Current operations of the Program depend largely on financial support from the University's professional schools, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the President's fund, according to Thompson.

"We're still being supported [by the schools]. It could go on indefinitely, but I don't think it should," he says.

Like the other Interfaculty Initiatives, the Program in Ethics and the Professions is seeking to raise $15 million as part of the University-wide capital campaign. But according to the most recent estimates published by the Program, only $100,000 have been raised from individual donors to date.

"It's fair to say that we've gotten some promises but no big gift for the core program to date," Thompson acknowledges. "Fundraising for the ethics has not been as successful as it should have been."

But Thompson says the Program has not needed to raise funds on its own in the past because of support from the schools.

As a result of the Program's lack of financial independence, it has grown little in size over the last 10 years.

"The core size--the budget, the number of fellows--has not changed all that much," Thompson says. "But the dynamic effects [of the Program] make it seem like it's grown enormously."

"There are ways of growing influence without adding more bodies to the program," he says. "The program has a multiplier effect. [The fellows] go out and start centers. They teach their leaders elsewhere."

Thompson points to recent fellows who have gone on to lead ethics programs at other leading universities. Amy Gutmann, dean of the faculty at Princeton, recently founded that university's Center for Human Values, and Elizabeth Kiss is now director of Duke University's Kenan Center for Ethics.

Goals for the Future

For the future, Thompson says he would like to add new dimensions to the Program.

He says he would like to create short-term fellowships for executives like those offered by the Business School and the Kennedy School of Government.

"Many executives can't take a year off, or they are not academics," he says.

Thompson says he would also like to see the Program produce more publications and establish a fund to sponsor ethics-related projects for students and faculty.

Kleinig, a pioneer in the ethics of policing, says he would like to see the Program continue to support applications of ethics to different practical and occupational situations.

"There will be a temptation for the program to stick with business ethics, medical ethics," Kleinig says. "I guess it would be nice for the program to be able to identify new areas in which ethical questions should be raised and developed."