Academic Ethics: Problems and Materials on Professional Conduct and Shared Governance (review)

Recent exposés regarding corporate corruption and wrongdoing, as well as an altered context for higher education—including severe fiscal stress, declining state support for institutions and increased calls for accountability—have heightened interest in the work of faculty and its ethical ramifications for student relationships, collegial interactions, and shared governance activities. Academic freedom is under attack from some quarters, and professors have found their names listed on non-university Web-sites as irresponsible purveyors of liberal politics. Hamilton's calm and thoughtfully argued thesis would balance academic freedom with increased professorial attention to the responsibilities accompanying that freedom: the restraint of "self-interest," the promotion of "ideals of public service and professional excellence," and the maintenance of "minimum standards of performance within the peer group" (p. vii). These responsibilities, he explains, are a part of the "unwritten social compact" between society and the academy.

Much of the criticism of higher education for the past three decades has focused on what is perceived as the unbridled self-interest of the professoriate (Sykes, 1988), the failure of the great public universities to live up to their teaching and service roles in a shifting economic context (Fairweather, 1996), and the perceived pernicious effect of the so-called "culture wars" on campuses, which some view as a violation of faculty's standards of performance (Kors & Silverglate, 1998; National Association of Scholars, n.d.). The criticisms, whether shrill and offensive, or literate and urbane, speak to a climate in which distrust of the academy's willingness to preserve the social contract is growing.

Hamilton traces some of the roots of this distrust and the particular social forces which have conspired to create them. He includes among those forces the new market realities impinging on more historical traditions of shared governance; the shifting domains of decision making in universities; the need for multiple models of governance systems fitted to different kinds of institutions with widely varying cultures and missions; and the student consumer movement, which calculates the relationship between student and teacher, or student and institution, as a strictly economic or market exchange.

Hamilton reviews the evolution of the traditions of shared governance and academic freedom, pointing out rightly that both traditions are less than a century old. First sections of the book are devoted to historical and legal dissection of the emergence of those concepts throughout American higher education, including various statements from both the Association of Governing Boards and the American Association of University Professors. He presents analyses of the principles embodied in the several codes from 1915 on, with reference to elaborating statements by faculty, members of the AAUP and AGB, and legal cases.

Chapters 3 through 7 recount ethical problems involving the correlative areas covered in various ethical statements: the duties of individual professors, academic freedom rights for individual academics, duties of the faculty as a collegial body, rights of the faculty in shared governance, and rights regarding academic freedom for students. Each chapter covers cases which have a familiar feeling, as well as cases with which individual readers might have no experience whatsoever. The cases, however, are each followed by questions which guide readers in thinking about appropriate resolutions to the ethical issues embodied in the situation descriptions. Frequently, the questions also suggest appropriate personnel to whom the ethical dilemmas might be directed for resolution—in some cases, a department head, in others, faculty peers, deans, or even higher-level academic administrators, such as chief academic officers.

Hamilton closes the work with the major statements from AAUP, AGB, and the Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students prepared collaboratively by a number of organizations. Having each of these documents readily available for reference in working through the historical development of current statements on academic freedom, shared governance, and the rights of...