Abstract
The 1960s would prove to be a turning point for moral education in higher education. Instead of leading university presidents proclaiming that the object of the university was to develop character, they set forth visions devoid of major moral goals. In the curricular realm, ethics teaching continued to be marginalized. Moreover, in the co-curricular realm, the university abandoned many of the old behavior codes and enforcement efforts in the belief that students in a free society must learn to develop morally on their own without guidance from the university. Student life professionals thus became attracted to new theories of moral development that mapped changes in the cognitive reasoning ability of students. Although they still claimed a responsibility for nurturing the moral lives of students, it often remained unclear what role student life professionals could or should play in terms of moral development.
Courses in Ethical Reasoning teach students to reason in a principled way about moral and political beliefs and practices, and to deliberate and assess claims for themselves about ethical issues.
—Report on the Task Force on General Education, Harvard University, 20071
It’s not rationality that I lack but mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.
—Uma Thurman as The Bride in Kill Bill I
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Notes
Douglas Sloan, “The Teaching of Ethics in the American Undergraduate Curriculum, 1876–1976,” in Ethics Teaching in Higher Education, eds. Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok (New York: Plenum Press, 1980). 41.
Ibid., 41. The study Sloan cites is George Henry Moulds, “The Decline and Fall of Philosophy,” Liberal Education 50 (1964): 360–61.
See Helen Horowtiz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures From the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, (New York: Alfred A. Knopp, 1987).
David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008): 223.
Jacques Barzun, The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968/1993), 240.
Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 70.
Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 194.
William G. Perry, Jr., Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1999/1968).
Michael Novak, “God in the Colleges: The Dehumanization of the University,” The New Student Left, eds. Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 259.
Mary Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: the Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 9.
The six stages of moral reasoning are: (1) The punishment and obedience orientation; (2) The instrumental relativist orientation; (3) The interpersonal concordance or “good boy-nice girl” orientation; (4). Society maintaining orientation; (5) Social contract orientation; (6) The universal ethical principle orientation. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice, Essays on Moral Development, Vol. 1 (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1981), 17–18. Part of Kohlberg’s reason for developing his scheme was his disillusionment with what he called the “bag of virtues” approach to moral education (p. 9). What Kohlberg did not appear to recognize is that virtues only appear to be randomly selected if one attempts to scrape away a wider moral tradition from one’s vision for the ideal human. Why a person should choose to acquire a particular virtue only makes sense in light of such the rationale offered for a tradition (See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue [South Bend, IN: Notre Dame, 1984]).
Lawrence Kohlberg and Mayer, R., “Development as the Aim of Education,” Harvard Educational Review 42 (1972): 449–96.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
R.A. Shweder, “Liberalism as Destiny,” Contemporary Psychology 20 (1982): 421–24.
Don S. Browning, Christian Ethics and the Moral Psychologies (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 52–53.
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame, 1981).
Michael Davis, Ethics and the University (New York: Routledge, 1999).
Ibid. See also Derek Bok, Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities of the Modern University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
Thomas L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 146–148.
Bruce Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity and Alienation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 277.
Bill Readings, A University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 135.
Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, More Assertive, Entitled-and More Miserable Than Ever before (New York: Free Press, 2006.
Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).
Donna Freitas, Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 68.
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© 2009 Perry L. Glanzer and Todd C. Ream
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Glanzer, P.L., Ream, T.C. (2009). The Rise of Less than Human Moral Education. In: Christianity and Moral Identity in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101494_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101494_4
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