The Teaching of Ethics in the American Undergraduate Curriculum, 1876–1976

Abstract

This article is an attempt to look at main developments and issues in the teaching of ethics to undergraduates during the past century. Although I had suspected as much, it was not until I was well under way in working on the piece that I began to realize the extent to which a look at the teaching of ethics provides, as it were, a central window on the whole of American higher education. The teaching of ethics has been uniquely and inseparably connected with the most important issues of modern higher education, issues involving the curriculum, institutionalization, professionalization, epistemology, the “two cultures” split, the community—indeed, the very purposes of higher education. It is with this larger perspective in view that I have sought to understand the place and problems of the teaching of ethics, not only with respect to ethics courses as such, but also in the larger curriculum. Even as concern with the teaching of ethics has time and again flagged or even disappeared at one point in American higher education, it has without fail, and almost immediately, reappeared at another; for the issues with which it deals have been those integral to the entire enterprise.