Ethics in Education

In a formal sense, being a university lecturer is about teaching, tutoring, assessing and counselling students. It is also, for many, about administration and doing research. However, beyond the technical requirements of the job description it is about coping with a far more complex reality: facilitating discussion in a classroom environment, trying to decide when it is fair to extend an assignment deadline, responding to student evaluation of teaching, investigating when a student is suspected of cheating, running difficult meetings, dealing with complaints about colleagues and so on. Indeed, the changing nature of modern higher education is having a significant impact on the ethical challenges which teaching academics confront.

Higher education also demands attention as a 'special' educational context. University life is traditionally associated with great privileges - of expression, curriculum design, research and teaching methods - but demands a high level of professional integrity if these freedoms are not to be too easily taken for granted. As Donald Kennedy has rightly pointed out, the flip side of academic freedom is academic duty. It is, perhaps, revealing that while the rights of academic staff are often debated there has been comparatively little attention paid over the years to their responsibilities. As an illustration of this bias, there are many books and articles about the concept of academic freedom but comparatively few that focus on ensuring that this principle applies equally to students.

It is also important that the role of ethics is given sufficient attention in the context of the recent growth of interest in teaching and learning issues in higher education. Here, there appears to be a growing 'pedagogic gap' opening up between the burgeoning, technique-led literature on teaching and learning in higher education and books and articles focusing on the broader social, political, economic and ethical context of higher education.

This phenomenon is in danger of divorcing ethics from the educational and professional development of the university teacher. While so-called massification is long established in some higher education systems, such as the United States , it is a comparatively more recent development elsewhere, such as the UK and Australia .