Staging Professional Ethics in Higher Education: a Dramaturgical Analysis of “Doing the Right Thing” in Student Affairs

Abstract

Scholarship about ethics in higher education often focuses on wrongdoing: cheating, incivility, and a host of other misdeeds. We focus, instead, on ethicality as the enactment of integrity across everyday work life. This approach is particularly true in student affairs where administrators, faculty members, staff members, and students intersect multiple social and professional arenas. Continuing the analysis of data from a previous study, we examined what it means “to be ethical,” especially in relationship to institutional and professional standards. We use theatrical metaphor techniques to explore scripting, staging, performing, and interpreting. Discussion centers on the spectacle of ethics in student affairs.