The Ethics of Ethics
I am in a bit of an ethical funk at the moment and its about my ethics course, which I just finished and which I am preparing for next semester. For all the years I have been teaching (since 2007 to be precise), I have wanted to teach ethics at the graduate business school level. I suppose ethics in Kindergarten, Grade School, High School and Undergraduate is not so very different, but, as a storyteller by nature, I know that my best ethical stories revolve around my time in the business world. During this past semester, I went through the process of examining (with the class) the foundational causes of ethical issues. My original list of those was Money, Money, Money (for emphasis, since it is the root cause of SO many ethical issues), Power/Control, and Ego/Love/Emotion. In discussing the issue last year with my friends Gary and Oswaldo, they suggested adding Fear as a separate cause, and the examples like the guards at a concentration camp, made for a reasonable argument to include it on the list. Then, this semester’s discussion was whether to add two that were suggested by students as Justice and Sex (separately). I found myself being more compelled to agree with Justice as a standalone causality and though of Sex more like a subset of Ego/Love/Emotion, but I chose to add both because there were reasonable arguments and examples of both that at least justified a conversation. I concluded that where this semester there was a shorter list to be added to as the basis of a class discourse, next semester I could use the longer list as the basis for a similar discussion with the objective of winnowing the list if necessary.
But that is all perfunctory didactic machinations (testing out different teaching techniques since ethics is a discussion sort of course). The ethical funk for me is one more fundamental and it involves how I should feel about teaching ethics, or feel about teaching at all. I am not, nor should any teacher be, disconnected from what students want. I have somehow convinced myself that especially with graduate-level students, since they generally are paying their own way and choosing to buy educational content, I should be delivering them what they want. That said, the school has certain mandatory criteria and one of them is that every MBA student must take the Law, Policy and Ethics course that I teach. They do not necessarily need to take it from me (there is at least one alternative instructor each semester), but they must take the course during their normal two-year run of program. That requirement is some combination of academic righteousness (students NEED to learn about ethical standards), religious compulsion (USD is a Catholic University historically and still posts a crucifix in every classroom), and societal pressure (any school that is going to teach students about business better be sure to teach them about ethical guidelines at very least). There is even a true business imperative in that increasingly, the business of managing business involves an intertwining of ethical issues in the blend of legal and policy considerations that managers face every day.
All that institutional angst does not really affect me since I know very clearly how I feel about the value and importance of students learning about the intersection of law, policy and ethics. I know it is important. What does concern me, however, is the same thing that probably concerns any teacher on any subject, only a bit more so. In my finance course, I care about how students feel about my teaching methods, the work load, the way in which they learn. But in my ethics course, I have all of that but also the feeling that students have about being forced to consider and divulge their inner thoughts about topics that are fundamentally painful or perceived as private. To discuss ethics is to discuss societal and personal judgements and that is a sensitive issue unto itself for many students. Additionally, as a teacher, I cannot perfectly straddle the ethical fence perfectly at all times. Being a mere facilitator to a dialogue is simply not as impactful as being a teacher who injects a controlled amount of judgement into the equation. Even if the teacher keeps and invites a very open mind about divergent views, the mere suggestion of a point of view has the potential to offend some. I can’t tell you how much time I spend thinking about how to strike the right balance in all of this. When I had a Spanish ethicist speak to the class, I found myself being surprised about how decidedly biased he seemed to me, in what I would call a strong ethically-superior manner. It was exactly what I try not to do, and yet I saw very little push back from the students. It made me wonder whether this was a case of students not wanting to be told how to think and yet when told what to think, being willing to accept the direction.
This past semester I had 17 students in my ethics course, which is half the number I had last Spring. I doubt that had anything to do with the course evaluations from the Spring, but it may have. The point is, next semester I already have 46 students enrolled in my course and the students only have that old evaluation on file since there are no updated evaluations available to them yet. I got evaluations from 16 of the 17 but I do not yet know the outcome of those evaluations. Those evaluation results are available to the school administration (that would be the same administration who has not attended one minute of my classes, but has seen my course materials and syllabus…both of which have been approved) and should soon be available to me. As I prepare my syllabus for next semester while this past semester’s successes and failures are fresh in my mind, I reached out to my Department Chair for her reaction. She got back to me and mentioned that she had reviewed my current evaluations (the ones I have not yet sen). Her comment was that “the majority of the class was happy but one or two students took issue with some things that were said”. Boom, my day was suddenly ruined.
I guess I am either too sensitive or care too much or am too unable to take criticism, but I don’t think that’s the problem. I think I just need to figure out in the context of an ethics course, how much I should try to “please all of the people all of the time”. For all the reasons I have mentioned, some people just don’t want to take this sort of course and perhaps just don’t want to participate in an open debate where their views or lack thereof are on full display to their peers. I simply don’t know how to thread that needle better than I have. And that is my conundrum. I can’t take a “take it or leave it” approach because that sort of petulance or pouting is not helpful. I also cannot keep bending to the will of each and every student because that will never lead to any sort of unanimous solution.
My first reaction to put on a hair shirt and suggest that I should alter my approach for this semester (the alternative to quitting and leaving the school in the lurch a month before the next course starts is simply not an option). I expect that the big decision point for my teaching ethics more will come next summer when everyone has time to consider the new 2023/24 school year. In the meantime I will alter my course in the best way I have learned to and do so for the understanding that I will have a class of 46, which is a group perhaps too big for the same sort of dialogue that we had with 17. Maybe that will help or maybe that will hurt. I am not sure I am enough of an educationalist to figure that out a priori. In the mean time I will have to just live with my own version of the ethics of ethics.