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How an academic community developed a Statement of Values

15 January, 2016 - 09:10
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/05c97be4-3ad0-47f2-b5a7-a75d0ad90ab7@3.72

A False Start

The faculty of the Arts and Sciences College of University X decided to form a committee to write a code of ethics. This committee met several times during the course of an academic semester to prepare the first draft. When they finished, they circulated copies throughout the college. Then they held a series of public hearings where interested members of the College could criticize the code draft. These were lightly attended and those attending had only a few suggestions for minor changes. However, when the code was placed before the faculty for approval, considerable opposition emerged. For example, a provision discouraging faculty from gossiping was characterized by opponents as an attempt by a hostile College administration, working through the committee, to eliminate faculty free speech. Several opponents expressed opposition to the very idea of a code of ethics. "Does the administration think that our faculty is so corrupt," they asked, "that the only hope for improvement is to impose upon them a set of rules to be mindlessly followed and ruthlessly enforced?" At the end of this debate, the faculty overwhelmingly rejected the code.

Reflections on "A False Start"

  • Should codes of ethics be democratically developed from the "bottom up" or should they be authoritatively imposed from the "top down?" Or does this depend on certain characteristics of the community? Maybe corporate managers should have lawyers draft their codes to meet the Federal Sentencing Guidelines; these completed codes should then be implemented throughout the company at all levels. Maybe academic communities should democratically determine their own codes, and if they are unable to do so, then so much the worse for the "very idea" of a code of ethics.
  • The Ethics of Team Work module presents three ways that lead groups to go off the tracks: Group Polarization, Groupthink, and "Going to Abilene." Do you think that any of these would explain false starts in developing a code of ethics? How can these group pitfalls be overcome?
  • Groups are often polarized around different and conflicting ideologies or paradigms. Thomas Kuhn discusses paradigms in the context of scientific debates. When these debates are fueled by conflicting and incompatible paradigms, they can turn acrimonious and prove extraordinarily difficult to resolve. For Kuhn, paradigms articulate and encapsulate different world views; the meanings and experiences shared by one group operating under one paradigm are often not shared by those operating under different paradigms. Members of the Arts and Sciences faculty of University X may have disagreed about the provisions proscribing gossiping because they were operating under different conceptual systems brought about by incommensurable paradigms. If faculty members assumed different meanings for 'gossiping', 'code', and 'discipline', then this would fuel the polarization of non-agreement like that which occurred at University X.
  • Cass Sunstein proposes that communities work around ideological or paradigm-driven disputes by developing, in special circumstances, "incompletely theorized agreements." These agreements are brought about by bracketing commitments to a given ideology or paradigm. This allows one side to work on understanding the other instead of marshaling arguments to defend the set of views entailed by its paradigm. So Sunstein's recommendation to the College of Arts and Sciences of University X would be to suspend commitment to defending the core beliefs of the conflicting ideologies and try to hold discussions at a more concrete, incompletely theorized level. This makes finding common ground eas ier. When shared understandings are forged, then they can serve as bridges to more complex, more completely theorized positions.
  • Looking at this problem from a completely different angle, do codes of ethics require a background of trust? If so, how can trust be built up from within highly diverse and highly polarized communities or groups?
  • Finally, can codes of ethics be abused by more ruthless groups and individuals? For example, as those in the College of Arts and Sciences claimed, can codes of ethics be used by those in positions of power to strengthen that power and extend control over others?

A Success Story

  • Three years later at the same university, another faculty group set out to construct a code of ethics in order to respond to accreditation requirements. They began with the idea of constructing a stakeholder code.
  • First, they identified the stakeholders of the college's activities, that is, groups or individuals who had a vital interest in that community's actions, decisions and policies.
  • Second, they identified the goods held by each of these stakeholders which could be vitally impacted by the actions of the college. For example, education represented the key good held by students that could be vitally impacted by the activities and decisions of the College.
  • Working from each stakeholder relation and the good that characterized that relation, members of the college began crafting code provisions. Some set forth faculty duties such as keeping regular office hours, grading fairly, and keeping up to date in teaching and research. Others emphasized student duties such as working responsibly and effectively in work teams, adhering to standards of academic honesty, and attending classes regularly.

Because stakeholder codes embody a community's values, the individuals in charge of drafting the code decided that a more direct approach would be to identify the embodied values and refine them into a Statement of Values. This formal statement could later be developed in different directions including a more detailed compliance code.

Turning their efforts toward preparing a Statement of Value Process, the Business Administration com munity went through the following steps:

  1. They discussed a flawed document, the Pirate Credo. This brought about three positive results: participants came to see how codes embody values, that codes serve different functions, and that codes clarify relations between the insiders and outsiders of a community.
  2. Participants examined "bona fide" codes of ethics such as academic codes, codes of honor, corporate codes, and professional codes. Since codes embody values, they developed lists of the values these codes embodied.
  3. The sample provisions crafted in the earlier stakeholder code effort were presented so that participants could identify the values these embodied. Previous efforts in developing a stakeholder code could be benchmarked against the codes studied in the previous step. Convergences and divergences were noted and used to further characterize the college's community in terms of its similarities and differences with other communities.
  4. In this step, faculty members were asked to reduce the values list to a manageable number of five to seven. This led to the most contentious part of the process. Participants disagreed on the conception of value, the meaning of particular values like justice, and on whether rights could be treated as values.
  5. To resolve this disagreement, discussion leaders proposed using ballots to allow participants to vote on values. This process was more than a simple up or down vote. Participants also ranked the values under consideration.
  6. After the top five values were identified, efforts were made, in describing each of the remaining values, to find places to include at least components of the values left out. For example, while confidentiality was not included in the final value list, it was reintegrated as a component of the more general value of respect. Thus, the final values list could be made more comprehensive and more acceptable to the faculty community by reintegrating some values as parts of other, more general values. Another way of picking up values left behind in the voting process was to combine values that shared significant content. Values that did not make it into the final list were still noted with the provision that they could be integrated into subsequent drafts of the Statement of Values.
  7. A committee was formed to take each value through a value template. After describing the value, they formulated a principle summarizing the ethical obligations it entailed, crafted sample provisions applying the value, and posed different challenges the value presented to help guide a process of continuous improvement.
  8. The committee presented its results to the faculty who approved this first draft Statement of Values
  9. The faculty then developed a schedule whereby the Statement of Values would be revisited, expanded, revised, and improved.