Ethical Challenges Facing Today's Professoriate

Professors at U.S. colleges and universities continually grapple with intellectual and ethical dilemmas about professional responsibility to their students, their disciplines, the university, and the broader community. Henry Rosovsky (Harvard University) has convened an Academy group to examine whether it is possible to create standards that would help professors navigate this complex terrain. The group has commissioned case studies on two of the more vexing problems facing professors: grade inflation and the parallel "inflation" in letters of recommendations for students and colleagues. In both areas, professors are faced with legal, demographic, and institutional challenges. Charles Fried (Harvard Law School), a member of the group, observed, "professors have an ethical obligation to be accurate, rigorous and courageous." The project has also commissioned a bibliographic search of existing codes of conduct in universities and colleges, and a series of interviews with leaders in higher education about the effectiveness of such codes.

Back to the November 2000 Newsletter