ethics news & views

Commercialization of the academy: Reconciling Emory's mission and economic interests

Just as ethics includes the "ethics of character" in personal terms, there is also a kind of ethics of character that applies to institutions. During last month's Reconciliation Symposium I was asked to participate in a panel on "Commercialization of the Academy: Reconciling Emory's Mission and Economic Interests." I shaped my reflections on the strong ethical guidelines included in several passages from Emory's 1992 mission statement. Let me quote:

"Emory University's mission lies in two essential, interwoven purposes: through teaching, to help men and women fully develop their intellectual, aesthetic and moral capacities; and, through the quest for new knowledge and public service, to improve human well-being. These purposes rest upon the premises that education is the most powerful social force of our time for enabling and ennobling the individual, and that the privilege of education entails an obligation to use knowledge for the common good…

"Beyond the demand that teaching, learning, research and service be measured by high standards of integrity and excellence, the university aims to imbue scholarship at Emory with certain special qualities, including:

• A commitment to human teaching and mentorship and collegial interaction among faculty, students and staff;
• Permeable disciplinary boundaries that encourage integrative teaching, research and scholarship;
• A commitment to use knowledge to improve human well-being; and
• A global perspective on the human condition."

These statements of purpose can be seen as a set of defining principles that provide a framework within which to evaluate our educational priorities and practices. As an ethical frame it is not sharply deontological, that is, seeking to establish rules or ethical principles that are inflexible. Nor is it excessively utilitarian, running the risk of affirming that worthy ends might justify or over-rule the evaluation of means. Rather, this framework's value and power lie in defining the educational purposes of the University. One might say that it characterizes a tensional balance among the desirable "goods" we seek to pursue as an institution committed to excellence in teaching, learning, research and service.

There are and will continue to be tensions in the ways we implement this matrix of ethical values. Likewise there are and will be temptations to neglect some dimensions of this moral vision and to over-emphasize others: Let me acknowledge and point to some of these tensions:

1) Not every faculty member or department works out an ideal balance between these four essential areas. At different times in the career of a long-term faculty member, the balance of contributions in teaching, research and service may change. In some schools or fields appointments may be made with prior agreement that teaching and service, as traditionally understood, may claim limited amounts of the time and effort of a new faculty hire, a department, or a discipline. As an institution, and as schools and departments, however, this balance of excellence in teaching, learning, research and service serves as a defining matrix of values, if we are faithful to our mission.

2) With our undergraduates we struggle to maintain a balance between preprofessional specialization, on the one hand, and explorative experiences of integrative study, service and learning, on the other. Undergraduates come with varying degrees of clarity about what they want to pursue. Some may come with firmly fixed professional goals, based upon personal choice or familial encouragement. Others come with an openness to test and try various directions. Students must determine what is inviting and interesting, and what is worthy, valuable and important to them. These choices also involve testing and discovering personal gifts and abilities. Involvement in service learning and theory-practice studies provide useful contexts for making discoveries about a third important ethical consideration: discovering and claiming "what the world needs to have done."

Different parts of the University face these challenges to the balance of our ethical commitments in different ways. Changes in higher education, in technologies, in the sciences, mean that we must work continually to maintain an ethical audit regarding the balances we shape. This audit process must be both personal and institutional. It must go on in our administrative offices, our faculties, our schools and colleges. It needs to be pursued in our research centers and in our institutions of healthcare provision. The mission of the university calls us to attend to the ways that the potential rewards of research, and the potential applications of the products of our work, all bring new opportunities as well as new moral hazards. Continuing change requires that we try to keep the tensional ethical commitments of the university in balance.

The following represent some areas in where it seems important to pay special ethical attention to the question of maintaining our balance:

• In allowing large percentages of our undergraduate population to settle quickly into pre-professonal majors, are we missing the opportunity to develop and preserve a broader form of paideia? Are we encouraging students to undertake a wide enough range of intellectual, experiential and service opportunities to form a broad base of knowledge and experience? Are we enabling them to test not only their abilities, but their interests, their values, and their vocational gifts—their learnings and their yearnings?

• In Emory's pursuit of "pre-eminence" in biomedical research—a word I find almost as slippery and indeterminate as "excellence"-are we in danger of over-building research and treatment capacities in this new century? What do we need to learn from the over-expansion of our health care sector in the last decade? Are we moving wisely in our concentration on, and investments in, developing biotechnology transfers?

• In this time of managed care's restriction of compensation for medical and hospital care, are we putting enough money into support of faculty in our schools of medicine and nursing? Are we running the risk of compromising teaching in our medical and nursing education, our clinical standards, and our hospitals' quality of care?

• Are we as a university paying adequate attention to the questions posed by the commercial potentials of intellectual property? Here there is significant potential for lucrative rewards for some faculty members and their departments or schools. On the other hand, the "spirit of capitalism" as Max Weber called it, can be a distorting factor in hiring and promotion of faculty. It can reduce the rewards of excellent teaching and mentoring to the status of idealistic vestiges of an earlier era.

• Are we giving adequate attention to the development of professional ethics in our graduate professional schools? Are we adequately equipping and motivating our graduates and undergraduates well enough to be ethical leaders in their professions?

These are not meant to be either accusatory or self-critical questions. Rather, they invite serious reflection as we consider the worthy goals to which we aspire in Emory's Mission Statement and the principles on which they rest. The ethics of character—whether in relation to persons or to a great university—requires ongoing attention to such questions.

[ Posted by James Fowler at April 1, 2001 07:49 PM | More Opinion articles ]

© 2000-2001 by the Center for Ethics, Emory University. Some rights reserved.