The academic ethic: Politics and academic citizenship

Abstract

Is there such a thing as "academic ethics"? Certainly not in the sense that the community of scholars gathered at a university have at their disposal a body of ethical principles fundamentally different from those of the rest of their fellow-citizens. Rather, "academic ethics" is something like an application of ethics in general to the special situation of a particular profession, as well as to the institution within which the profession is carried on. Hence, there certainly does exist something like "academic ethics" in the way in which we speak of "medical ethics" or "political ethics". In order to discover the basic tenets of the "academic ethic", one first has to define an academic community. Since universities and university systems vary from country to country and have different traditions in terms of which they define themselves, I would like to make it clear that my analysis deals with the European and, more especially, the German universities. I cannot but be influenced by my experience as rector and then president of the largest university in Germany. However, since for many years I have also taught at Notre Dame University in the United States, I hope that some of my reflections might apply also to British or American universities. After all, European and American universities are rooted in a tradition which grew out of the universities of the Middle Ages, and which have been influenced by the ideas associated with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt. This kind of university combines three different, if related, ideas. First, it is a school in which the teachers are active scientists and scholars. There are many kinds of schools: primary, secondary and professional. What distinguishes a university is the fact that its teachers are not teaching subjects in which the stock of knowledge is complete and there is nothing more to be known. They pursue the specific activity that we call "research". "Research" is, of course, a very ambiguous term; what a high energy physicist discovers on his cyclotron differs from what a professor of Romance languages does when he offers a new interpretation of Mallarme's poems. In the first case, something hitherto completely unknown is put forward; in the second, the scholar rephrases for his contemporaries something with which they were already familiar. Still, there is something common to all research: ideas either unknown, or forgotten, or never said just in that way, are being advanced, published and thus submitted to other scholars and to mankind at large. University teachers also bring into their teaching the results of the research of other scientists and scholars, even if their own research is too meagre or too specialised to be taught to young