Ethics and the Professions Celebrates 10th Annniversary

At a University where the emphasis lies on individual, competitive achievement, the time to reflect on ethical issues is almost non-existent.

Hence, in 1986, then-President Derek Bok founded the Program in Ethics and the Professions, which was intended to encourage teaching and research on ethical issues in public and professional life.

As the program celebrates its 10th anniversary with a conference at the Kennedy School this weekend, its influence over the study of ethics at the University and across the country is uncontestable.

The program became the first of the University's five inter-faculty initiatives at President Neil L. Rudenstine's accession in 1991.

"The program has been...international in scope, [faculty trained by the program] have gone back to their home institutions where they have helped teach other faculty," says the program's director, Dennis F. Thompson. "It has been a missionary movement."

In addition to its outreach to the international community, the program has expanded its web to touch most of the University's professional schools, using a cross-disciplinary approach that mixes the teaching of ethics with professional training.

But faculty and financial support for this approach--which promotes the study of ethics in a wide host of classes--sometimes has been lacking.

The Program

At the center of the program are the Fellowships in Ethics, which are awarded to between four and eight faculty members each year. The fellows are usually faculty members from Harvard and other universities.

These year-long fellowships allow scholars to conduct their own research in ethics while attending seminars, workshops and study groups.

Graduates of the program have taught in subjects ranging from philosophy to medical ethics in places ranging from Cambridge to Cape Town, South Africa.

The success of these fellows was integral to earning respect for the program as a whole, says Thompson, who is also associate provost and professor of government.

"At the beginning there was a lot of skepticism....I could make all the arguments at the abstract level, but what really had an effect was bringing first-rate people," Thompson says.

Alumni of the program include Amy Gutmann, dean of the faculty at Princeton, who founded its Center for Human Values, and Elizabeth Kiss, who is now the director of Duke University's Kenan Center for Ethics.

In 1990, with support from a grant by the American Express Foundation, the University added a program for graduate fellows as well.

A New Way of Teaching

The history of ethics in universities is one dating back to the 19th century. At the time the job was usually handled by the College president, who presented lectures on the proper morals of the day.

But as America became more diverse and relativistic in its outlook, this approach became untenable.

Meanwhile, some professional schools continued to teach ethics, but the subject was often downplayed in favor of the necessary professional training students needed to receive.

As time passed, and the country felt the impact of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, it became clear that ethics needed to be reincorporated into the curriculum.

In 1976, Bok wrote an article for Change magazine titled, "Can Ethics Be Taught?" which argued that ethical training was well within the mission of a University, and that the rote methods which had been used in the past were not the answer for leaders of the future.

"We started [the program] because there were major ethical issues in all of the professions, [and] there was no serious attention being paid to them at the time," Bok says.

Thompson, a political theorist who designed one of the country's first courses on ethics and public policy while teaching at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, says that ethics are an integral part of all professions.

"Ethics is about being thoughtful and reflective," says Thompson. "When you are placed in a complex situation like a lawyer [is] you are bound to encounter difficulties you haven't thought of before."

At the undergraduate level, this commitment to ethical training has resulted in the revamping or creation of 44 courses, sponsored by a $1.5 million grant secured from the American Express Foundation in 1988.

The Economics of Ethics

Despite its 10-year history, the program still has trouble raising the money it needs to survive.

Currently, the operations of the program depend largely on funding from the professional schools, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the President's fund, according to Thompson.

"Even apart from the campaign we are certainly secure, but the long term of any program like this really does depend on securing independent funding," Thompson says.

Like its efforts for the other five inter-faculty initiatives, the University is seeking to raise $15 million as part of the University's capital campaign.

While exact figures were not available, Thompson says that the program has raised less of the percentage of its goal than almost any other part of the campaign.

Thompson partly attributes this shortfall to the difficulty of finding donors with specific loyalty to the project.

"The inter-faculty initiatives don't have alumni in the same sense [that] Harvard College or Harvard Law School [do]," Thompson says.

Professional Schools

Nonetheless, during its 10-year history, the program has clearly had its greatest impact on Harvard's graduate schools.

Under the leadership of Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law David B. Wilkins, the Law School has expanded its offerings on ethics from the "Legal Professions" course which is required by the American Bar Association.

"Wilkins has invited many of us to develop portions of our courses [to reflect ethical questions]," says Professor of Law Martha L. Minow.

Minow, who was the acting director of the program in 1993-94, says the changing conception of ethics in the legal profession has aided the movement at Harvard.

"When I started teaching, [ethics] was thought to be an obligation," says Minow. "For many reasons, people now understand it to be relevant to the practice of most firms.... The conception of ethics has been broadened to include the issues of race and gender."

The Division of Medical Ethics is another addition to the study of ethics at Harvard. The division includes about 25 faculty members on its roster, and since 1993 it has sponsored a fellowship of its own.

Lynn M. Peterson, director of the division, says he agrees that the program has been a success but thinks that the cross-disciplinary field of ethics often does not get the support it deserves.

"We are hampered by a lack of funds, we have a lot of faculty interested in ethics, they need more support, because money creates time," says Peterson, who is also an associate professor of medical ethics.

In particular, the teaching in hospitals and the academic world of medicine is especially divided, he says.

"Teaching has to go across both, creates a problem for us, because we are not within either structure, we don't get enough attention from either school," says Peterson.

Thompson sees this problem as not one unique to medicine but true for the field of ethics as a whole because "ethics stands between theory and practice."

"It is frustrating because it makes it difficult to get financial support, political support, promotions..." says Thompson. "If I were sitting down there I would feel the frustrations, but that's what gives them the independence to challenge the customary way of doing things."