Ethics and the Academy: Lessons from Business Ethics and the Private Sector

Abstract

Most academics recognize that universities, as institutions, have an obligation to account rigorously for financial expenditures. There is less agreement about teaching and research wherein issues of autonomy and academic freedom enter the debate. Yet here too, demands for accountability are being pressed on the academy. In recent years, the demand for accountability also has been directed with considerable force to the private sector with what appear, in a number of cases, to be dramatic effects. Equally dramatic has been the extent to which the public debate and the response of the private sector to public criticism have linked issues of accountability to ethics. Of particular interest is the idea that accountability is not just a managerial, organizational or political concept. It is also a moral concept, a concept, furthermore, that is central to understanding the status and legitimacy of the modern corporation. My purpose in this paper is to explore this insight and to develop its relevance for understanding and responding to the crisis which contemporary university systems are currently experiencing. I do so not with the idea of persuading the reader that universities should be understood to be, or managed as though they were, private sector corporations. To the contrary, close study of the sort I propose should help to identify important similarities, but also key differences. Both are central to understand- ing what accountability requires for the contemporary university.