American Universities Are Failing at Ethics; Time, 7/17/15

James Keenan, Time; American Universities Are Failing at Ethics:

"In other forms of professional life, we have long recognized a strong connection between the lack of professional ethics in a particular institutional setting and the lack of an ethical consciousness in that culture.

I believe that the absence of professional ethics is evidence of and symptomatic of a culture disinterested in ethics. For instance, as we come out of the sexual abuse scandals that have ripped apart the churches, we see that the disinterest in professional ethical accountability of bishops and priests was sustained by the church’s clerical culture that was more attuned to advancement than it was to ethical responsibility and transparency.

A similar culture is part and parcel of the contemporary American university.

Simply put, the American university does not hold its employees to professional ethical standards because it has not created a culture of ethical consciousness and accountability at the university. This is in part because of the nature of the contemporary university and because it needs ethics.

The contemporary university functions not as an integrated, transparent community but as a medieval set of fiefdoms in which transparency and accountability are singularly to “the person upstairs”: that is, to the chair, the dean or a vice president. Faculty and administrators are not accountable to any colleague, but only to a higher administrator.

Moreover, this accountability is only one-directional. For all the compliance, accountability and collaborative models that university faculty teach in their ethics courses to physicians, nurses, managers and lawyers, the university itself remains averse to developing any true accountability structures."