Ethics in the Curriculum
Richard M. Perloff
To the Editor:
In "The True Scholar" in the January–February issue, Robert N. Bellah wrote that ethics are needlessly separated from training in cognitive judgment in our curriculum. I agree with him. Having been an undergraduate philosophy major, I appreciate his point that ethical inquiry has been pushed into the margins of university education. So why do I find myself disgruntled at various portions of his article? I think it is because he ends up sermonizing rather than offering constructive ways to deal with our current curricular problems.
My sense is that, for all of Bellah’s intriguing ideas, it is much easier to bemoan a lack of ethics in university curricula and to disparage material preoccupations if you are sitting high on the perch at the University of California, Berkeley, than if you are teaching at any of the hundreds of good urban universities, such as my own, or at a community college. Students at urban universities welcome ethical discussion, and I try hard to include it in my courses, but they also want more than anything training in what Bellah calls phronesis (cognitive skills) so they can get ahead and live happier, stress-free lives.
Aren’t these students entitled to receive training in phronesis that is sometimes not as tied as it ideally should be to ethical principles? I suspect that if my students read Bellah’s article, they would experience it as criticizing their desire to live more comfortably in what he calls the Age of Money and perhaps as demeaning their values.
It might be argued that student preference for curricula oriented toward cognitive judgment is precisely the problem with the university, a result of administrative decisions to adopt a consumer model of education. Perhaps—but how ethically do you tell people that they should not want what they do in fact desire?
Granted, universities place more emphasis on honing intellectual judgments than on teaching ethics. But the difficult question is how to combine a desire to teach ethics with the need to help students actualize aspects of their potential they believe to be most important. This is the challenge we face as teachers and academics. It is a daunting challenge, one that deserves discussion by Bellah and other thoughtful critics of academia.
Richard M. Perloff
(Communication)
Cleveland State University
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