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From the Editor: What's Right?
Ellen Schrecker
Before September 11, this issue of Academe was going to deal primarily with ethics. We wanted to look at those areas of academic life in which students and professors have to deal with matters of right and wrong. We had explored the law in our previous issue, and we wanted to press our investigation into places where legal precedents do not apply. We were in the midst of editing the articles we had commissioned when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck. The world changed, and this issue of Academe did as well.
We quickly asked several academics to speculate about the impact of the crisis on the university. Since the assignment was open ended, the symposium turned out to be more a pastiche than a coherent conversation. Yet certain themes emerged. One was the threat to academic freedom that wartime usually produces. Joan Wallach Scott, the chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, worries that the demand for patriotic conformity may constrict free debate and discussion on cam-pus, although Robert O'Neil, the committee's former chair, is relieved that no serious attack on academic dissenters has as yet occurred, and Melvin Steely is sure that none will. Still, repression remains a possibility if, as Ahmad Dallal notes, scholars of Islam and the Middle East continue to criticize American foreign policy. In a different vein, Stanley Katz recounts the confusion pervading the academy right after September 11, while William Friedheim describes what happened at the Borough of Manhattan Community College a few blocks north of the World Trade Center.
We haven't abandoned ethics, however. After all, how to balance freedom with security constitutes a moral as well as a legal and a political dilemma. Moreover, because preserving free speech on our campuses requires public support, we must address the ethical lapses that seem to be eroding that support. Some of those lapses, like the student cheating Donald McCabe and Linda Treviño discuss, are obvious. Others, however, like the temptation to exploit graduate students and adjuncts that Wendy Roworth cautions us against, pose a more subtle challenge.
In almost every instance, the unethical behavior within academe reflects off-campus pressures. As David Goodstein notes in his discussion of scientific fraud, the increasing competition for research grants and prestige encourages dishonesty even as the imprecise nature of biomedical research (where most irregularities take place) creates opportunities for it. Likewise, the push for big-time college sports not only breeds corruption in many institutions, but also, as John Gerdy explains, compromises their educational missions.
It's hard to remain upbeat, especially when the pressures to cut corners may well intensify if the current recession deepens and diverts resources away from higher education. Past experience offers little consolation. As they review their own careers, both the AAUP's longtime leader Ernst Benjamin and City University of New York's Leonard Quart recall how the cutbacks that began in the 1970s ravaged public higher education by destroying the shared excitement and pedagogical innovation of the previous decade. Undergraduates withdrew from intellectual engagement to pursue narrow vocational goals, while professors like themselves focused on their research and writing rather than on their students or their schools.
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