SECOND THOUGHT

Looking again at news and commentary

From President's Report 1986-87, Harvard University, by Derek Bok

... Many colleges and professional schools do a good job of conveying knowledge and imparting skills. ...

Important as these achievements are, events in the past year may cause many people to ask more of our universities than knowledge and skills. Revelations about the conduct of [certain religious, financial, and government figures] have prompted fresh concern over the standards of behavior exhibited by influential people in our society. Suddenly, ethics has become a national preoccupation able to command even the cover of Time magazine.

At a deeper level, one can detect a parallel shift in the attitudes of the American people. During most of the 20th century, first artists and intellectuals, then broader segments of the society, challenged every convention, every prohibition, every regulation that cramped the human spirit or blocked its appetites and ambitions. Today, a reaction has set in, born of a recognition that the public needs common standards to hold a diverse society together, to prevent ecological disaster, to maintain confidence in government, to conserve scarce resources, to escape disease, to avoid the inhumane applications of technology. ...

In these circumstances, universities ... need to think hard about what they can do in the face of what many perceive as a widespread decline in ethical standards. ...

And universities should be among the first to reaffirm the importance of basic values, such as honesty, promise keeping, free expression, and nonviolence, for these are not only principles essential to civilized society; they are values on which all learning and discovery ultimately depend. There is nothing odd or inappropriate, therefore, for a university to make these values the foundation for a serious program to help students develop a strong set of moral standards.

Reprinted by permission from Derek Bok.

Editors' comment: The call for developing "a strong set of moral standards" is a prevalent sign of our times. The high cost of the decline of ethics in business, religion, government, is becoming more broadly felt. And there's a growing consensus that self-interest and greed will have to be supplanted by honesty and unselfishness and long-range vision. Increasingly ethics are seen as more than social niceties added on to the "knowledge and ... skills" Derek Bok refers to. As he and so many others are saying, ethical values are the bedrock, or "the foundation" of learning, good government, sound business, genuine religion.

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