Moral Alchemy: Are There Ethics in Higher Education?

Introduction

In 2019 Felicity Huffman, the bright and shining star of the television series Desperate Housewives, served two weeks in prison for paying a bribe, a substantial bribe, to an admissions officer to accept her daughter into college. Huffman typified the all too widespread parental desperation to enroll a child into a prestigious university. In 2017 and still continuing (Greene, 2019) at Michigan State University, fingers pointed both to the athletic department and to the university administration as co-culprits in the horrendous sex-abuse scandal involving some of the nation’s most accomplished Olympic gymnasts. The statue of the venerated coach of the Pennsylvania State University’s football team and the president of that institution, once a rising voice of higher education reform, were toppled after a child sex abuse scandal (Bidgood & Pérez-Peña, 2017). According to the Washington Post (DeVise, 2011) there were at least eight university presidents dismissed in the first decade of the 21^st century: at The University of Illinois for tampering with admissions; at the University of Colorado for allowing alcohol and drugs in recruiting football players; for improper use of funds at American University; for tampering with NCAA rules at St. Bonaventure (and where the chairman of the board committed suicide upon revelation of the infringement); following the downplaying of a murder at Eastern Michigan University; for misappropriating funds at UC Santa Cruz and Montgomery College; and upon revelation of a sordid affair at the conservative Hillsdale College.

Just before the newest decade of the 21^st century, ethical issues and dilemmas, some flagrant such as the Varsity Blues, the aforementioned admission scandal of 2019 (Ethics Unbound, 2019), and some, such as the removal of ‘Silent Sam’, a statue at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, commemorating UNC students who died for the Confederacy during the Civil War (Jacobs, 2019), reverberate with our national moral divisiveness and angst. There are also moral and ethical issues bubbling just below the surface. Those that may erupt include potential ethical nightmares such as the recent decision by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) and the State of California to allow college athletes to be paid for endorsements (Colvin & Jansa, 2019), to how higher education will respond to the almost certain Supreme Court decision that DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) students are in the United States illegally. Not yet fully visible, but clearly coupled, the connections between gainful employment, student debt and academic integrity may soon be brought to the fore.

Higher education, once expected by most people to at least attempt to be more ethical than politicians, is now fodder for the tabloids and Twitter.

This chapter first looks backward through the segments of the previous century to question whether college presidents, universities and colleges once held higher standards. This quest draws on a variety of sources including an unpublished thesis containing a significant annotated bibliography of ethical issues in the academy between 1900 and 1950; a paper published in the Journal of Higher Education Management in 2016, informative as it compares critical ethical issues found in 2006 with the ethical issues of 2016, thus offering a more current continuum; historical essays and articles: and the necessity, even imperative, to include many references within the present-day popular and higher education media as these describe the current ethical and moral landscape of higher education.