IN AN HISTORICAL STUDY of post-Watergate writings, President Bok's "Can Ethics Be Taught?" would probably merit several entries. You can see Watergate's imprint throughout this five-page essay in last month's Change magazine. Bok has thought deeply about the motivations and mistakes of the Watergate criminals. He has wrestled with the public opinion polls showing little confidence in our leaders, lawyers and doctors. And he has decided that his contribution in stemming that tide should be to instill a sense of ethics in college and graduate students. "Can Ethics Be Taught?" is a defense of that mission.

The essay begins with a brief history of the rise and fall of ethics instruction in universities. From there, Bok finds various ways of answering an emphatic yes to the essay's title question. Bok argues that courses in ethics can be integrated into the curriculum of colleges and professional schools. These courses, he writes, can accomplish three objectives: they can help students become more alert in discovering the moral issues that arise in their own lives, they can teach students to reason carefully about ethical issues and they can help students clarify their moral aspirations.

Bok concedes that arguments against incorporating ethics into the curriculum may have some force. He respects the claim of one Business School spokesman who, in explaining why there are no ethics courses in that school, said: "On the subject of ethics, we feel that either you have them or you don't." He notes that "formal education will rarely improve the character of a scoundrel."

But Bok is the first to admit that the contribution universities can make in building character is limited. In fact, his argument for inclusion is strongest when phrased in terms of lower expectations for the value of teaching ethics: "It is one thing to acknowledge the limitations of formal learning and quite another to deny that reading and discussion can have any effect in developing ethical principals and moral character. The basic value to be gained from any course that forces students to think carefully and rigorously about complex problems cannot be denied."

THERE ARE OTHER PROBLEMS, however, that must be reconciled before the true value of teaching ethics can be determined. Inconsistencies within Harvard itself make a good case in point. In the law school, for example, it is difficult to understand how a brief course in ethics will stand in the way of a curriculum geared largely towards sending students to corporate law firms. These law firms often work for the highest bidder, no matter how unethical that bidder may be. Also, it is not clear how students in law school will be able to grasp the situations in which they will have to make ethical decisions without first experiencing the situations themselves. Without feeling the pressures that color the real situations, things tend to look black and white.

Bok mentions that accomplishments in ethics "will probably depend more on what goes on outside the classroom than on the curriculum itself." He writes that Harvard students can profit more from the example of Archibald Cox than they could from a course in ethics. Similarly, we must wonder how much value ethics lectures from University administrators can have when those administrators do not bother to consider the ethics involved in their own decisions. Two issues at Harvard immediately come to mind. Administrators have not conducted any serious debate about whether the University should engage in recombinant DNA research, although that may lead to larger ethical questions about genetic engineering. Likewise, there has been no discussion about the ethics of the University's continued participation in projects in Iran despite that country's dictator's barbarous suppression of any opponents.

Perhaps more distrubing than arguments about the University's hypocrisy is the basic danger that ethics professors would attempt to instill a set of values that some may not consider ethical. Bok comes to terms with this problem in two ways. First, he warns that the courses should be taught in problem-oriented fashion so 'as not to persuade students to accept some preferred set of moral values." Second, he admits that the problem of incompetent or misguided instruction is great, but not insuperable. He claims that universities can find instructors who can locate useful readings, have an adequate knowledge of human affairs and conduct a rigorous discussion of issues. But the way that the instructor frames the discussion of those issues makes one skeptical of the professors' ability to lead an ethics course that won't degenerate into a preferred set of ethical principles.

MAYBE THE DEEPER PROBLEM HERE is Bok's logic as well as other messages derived from a post-Watergate mentality. In Watergate the issues were fairly black and white. There was no great difficulty in discerning who the evil forces were and what immoral decisions were made. If, say, a school in public administration were to discuss case studies of the Watergate break-in and Nixon cover-up, the ethics of the matter would be clear. But what if the course's instructor tries to tackle a more complex and important issue, such as Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia? Would the instructor frame the discussion around the ethics of bombing people into submission or the ethics of keeping such bombing secret? In either case it is clear that the instructor's private prejudices would have to surface. Perhaps simply talking about such cases can be beneficial. But it is a rare professor that can subordinate his or her own views on such matters, and an even rarer student that can look upon those views with objectivity.