"When everybody is teaching ethics, nobody is teaching ethics," says Gary Edwards, director of the Washington-based Ethics Resource Center, adding that education about ethics must be addressed in a structured, "very practical and pragmatic" way. At Harvard, ethical approaches have been developed separately at the schools of law, business, government, medicine and education, and at the College.

Thompson's new program may change centralized ethical education more at Harvard, but until then the university will continue on its present, divergent courses.

Morality of the Core

When the Core Curriculum program was instituted at the University a number of years ago, a moral reasoning component was introduced. Undergraduates are now required to take a semester-long course on topics ranging from "Justice" to "Ethics and International Relations." The Philosophy Department also offers undergraduate courses on ethical theory.

Premised on the hope that "students will not only be aware of moral tradition, but will have begun to understand themselves as reasonable and moral people, who begin to think about their own choices," the Moral Reasoning Core requirement attempts to teach modes of thinking about ethics, says Thomas Professor of Divinity Harvey Cox, who offers a Moral Reasoning course.

Dillon Professor of French Civilization Stanley Hoffmann, who also teaches Moral Reasoning courses, says that although the creation of the Core requirement was "a very good thing," ethics "ought to be a part of the teaching of every topic." Hoffmann's statements echo the concerns of teachers and administrators at the professional schools, as they grapple with the question of how to integrate ethics into the curriculum.

While the Kennedy School has recently started offering courses on the inter-relationship between value systems and professional responsibility, their efforts are not broad-based. Part of the problem is that standards vary from field to field; both the Law School and the Medical School have well-established ethical training components, whereas ethics have not traditionally been emphasized at faculties like the Business School.

Medical schools went through debates similar to the current B-School conflict 10 to 15 years ago, according to Edwards, who says that every medical school in the country now includes at least one ethics course in its curriculum. "It's impossible to practice good medicine without practicing ethical medicine," says Kenneth J. Ryan, Ladd professor of obstetrics and gynecology, who is one of the senior ethics fellows.

Harvard's Medical School aims to instill professional ethics in its students from a variety of perspectives. The ethics courses in the curriculum are supplemented through programs at Harvard's teaching hospitals, including ethics rounds, ethics committees in all of the hospitals and staff bioethicists at some of the facilities, says Lynn M. Peterson, assistant professor of medical ethics and a member of the inter-faculty ethics committee.

Even as public interest in ethical issues waxes and wanes, Harvard faces the difficult task of applying the models developed in the professional schools and the College into a comprehensive method for teaching ethics. The University-wide program headed by Thompson may accomplish that task, but for now Harvard will have to continue to struggle with the role of ethics in a university education.

Teresa A. Mullin contributed to the reporting of this story.