The Virtual Graduate Program in Bioethics: The Mission, the Students, and the Hazards

The American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Status of the Field Committee (ASBH) report on graduate education raises a number of issues in a most provocative way. Such issues include adequate academic preparation for bioethics work, placement of graduates, and the growth of "interdisciplinarity." There is a temptation to reflect in an open-ended way about the status of "bioethics today" and fail in our responsibility, both as bioethicists and as initiators of an innovative Web-based M.A. program, ¹ to interpret the results and try to build on the lessons learned. To avoid succumbing to this temptation, we will confine ourselves to two points:

1. The growth of master's programs in bioethics reflects the burgeoning interest many have in this field. Although we as faculty work primarily in bioethics, there are many who work in bioethics at an ancillary level. We believe that the main aim of most terminal M.A. programs in bioethics should be to robustly integrate master's students into the national "bioethics community." Although fellowship programs do this at a certain level, master's programs offer more structured and rigorous coursework, are usually longer in length, and offer serious students of bioethics an opportunity to pursue doctoral studies in the field. Thus, graduate and professional training is not merely the transmission of arcane knowledge from instructor to student. Rather, it is a dynamic socialization process that provides students a distinct professional and intellectual identity. It is the need for access to resources and for comprehension of evolving clinical standards that brings many persons to bioethics. Ongoing access to the bioethics community is the best way to achieve this goal.
2. The Web and other distance technologies afford an enormous opportunity to meet the need for access to the national (and international) bioethics community. These technologies help facilitate not only filial relationships between teacher and student, but they also facilitate collegial relationships between teacher and student, and (perhaps most importantly) among students themselves (May 2001, 258). Thus, a bioethics program that transcends the traditional classroom by offering all or significant amounts of coursework online is, in some ways, superior to traditional programs. It is certainly reasonable to claim that all bioethics degree programs should include information access skills as a core competency of the program (in addition, of course, to important critical thinking skills).

We believe that the nature of the evolution of M.A. bioethics programs in the United States supports our beliefs about the goals of the programs and approaches to meeting these goals. That is, the report points out that M.A. programs are not proliferating in traditional philosophy and theology departments but mainly in environments that lead to flexible, multidisciplinary, clinically relevant programs. This suggests to us that the concerns of persons enrolling are fairly practical in nature and likely to be ongoing. Thus, we will focus on how to meet the needs of such students.

How We Got Here from There

The current data give us a snapshot in time. Nevertheless, they seem to support the main story many of us have been telling. That story goes something like this: When ethical issues in medicine became an increasing focus of attention, bioethics (or, more traditionally, "medical ethics") programs sprang up as "tracks" in M.A. programs in traditional humanities departments such as philosophy, theology, and religious studies. Those who designed the programs believed that the enrollees, being primarily clinicians, wanted a foundation in the traditional aspects of the particular discipline in which the program was located. So, the student would take most of his or her coursework in common with the other graduate students, and a couple of specialized courses in bioethics would be created for this particular track. (A sidebar to this main story was the practically oriented humanities student who...