About 1,000 undergraduates take Professor of Government Michel J. Sandel's Moral Reasoning 22: "Justice," each year it is offered, but many thousands more learn from his course.

Sandel's class was the subject of a video, which has been distributed to colleges and universities around the country to demonstrate how ethics can be taught effectively in large lecture courses.

"It's been benefitting undergraduates elsewhere...by showcasing outstanding undergraduate teaching of ethics here at Harvard," says Associate Provost Dennis F. Thompson.

The video is part of a larger effort to expose universities to issues of moral choice that has come into being with the Program in Ethics and the Professions.

The Program is one of Harvard's five Interfaculty Initiatives, which attempt to unite the University's varied schools in projects involving joint research and public service.

Established in 1986 by then-President Derek Bok to encourage teaching and research about ethical issues in public and professional life, the Program became one of the elements of Rudenstine's Interfaculty Initiative plan when he instituted it in 1991.

"I like to think of it as 'Ethics and Public Life' or 'Practical Ethics,"" says Thompson, who has been the Program's director since its inception.

At the time, many educators like Bok believed the teaching of ethics in colleges and professional schools had been somewhat abandoned.

"When I first came to Harvard, I felt lonely," Thompson recalls, referring to the lack of faculty in the professional schools interested in ethics. "Now, I can't keep up with what's going on."

Despite the role played by Sandel's course in the Program, Thompson admits that the Program, by its nature, has not had as large an impact on the undergraduate curriculum as some of the other Interfaculty Initiatives.

"This is not the type of field you should concentrate in as an undergraduate," Thompson says. "It ought to be worked into the other courses."

The Program's largest impact on the College curriculum came in 1987 when the American Express Foundation awarded the Program a $1.5 million grant in order to give ethical issues a more prominent place in undergraduate courses. As a result, 44 ethics courses throughout the University were either developed or revised.

The Program

At the core of the Program are the Fellowships in Ethics, which are awarded to between four and eight scholars each year. The fellows are usually selected from faculty at Harvard and other universities.

"The biggest success are the fellows," Thompson said. "We honestly didn't expect the talent to be as exceptional as it has been."