Ethics courses are all about doing the right thing

Christina Littlefield

Sunday, July 16, 2006 | 7:47 a.m.

There's nothing like a good scandal to question whether anyone is teaching ethics in this town.

It's taught at UNLV, of course - but weren't those UNLV dental students who were caught in June hijacking a professor's password in order to tinker with patient records?

The students "flunked Ethics 101," university System Chancellor Jim Rogers said. If they cheated a little, he says, they are the kind of people who will cheat a lot.

The scandal, local and national ethicists say, should force UNLV administrators to re-evaluate how well they are teaching and reinforcing professional ethics. Already, program directors in other health science fields at UNLV are using the situation as a case study for their students, and deans in other areas are looking at how they can improve the ethics curriculum within their own majors.

University President David Ashley, who arrived on campus earlier this month, and several deans say they believe every UNLV student would benefit from an ethics course.

They can't agree whether it should be a graduation requirement, but they say ethical training and personal development are critical parts of a university education, particularly in professional fields such as health sciences, teaching, business, law and engineering.

"You are presenting to the world your graduates as professionals, and they need to understand that (ethical behavior) is a part of the practice of the discipline," Ashley said. "We can't leave it for them to learn on the outside."

A university degree, particularly in professions such as medicine, law or journalism, gives those students power to affect society, said Brian Schrag, executive secretary for the international Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, based at Indiana University in Bloomington. "I think the university has some responsibility to inculcate in them the ability to use that responsibility ethically," Schrag said.

Ethicists say students should be required to take an introduction course in ethics that gives them a background in ethical thought and reasoning, and then an applied ethics class more appropriate for their major.

Simply attending an ethics class won't shape a person's moral character any more than attending a personal-health class makes a person exercise or adopt a better diet, says Craig Walton, UNLV ethics professor emeritus and founder of the Nevada Center for Public Ethics.

But an ethics course can give students a deeper and broader perception of what constitutes an ethical or moral question, Walton says, and teach them how to reason through those questions and develop their own critical thinking skills.

Thus, the corrupt politicians of Nevada who take cash for votes probably can't be helped, Walton said, but ethics courses can help the majority of people better navigate through thorny, murky dilemmas. Ethical training also helps people decide between conflicting values, such as going to work to meet a deadline or staying home with a sick child.

Certainly, Las Vegas has its share of ethically deficient politicians.

County commissioners have been convicted of trading votes for money. Judges seem to be playing favorites. A county politician is accused of selling information for profit.

Will the next generation of home-grown public servants be any better equipped morally?

The vast majority of students can earn their degrees without once being exposed to even one class on ethics. The classes are offered, to be sure, but Nevada doesn't require attending one in order to graduate.

Ethics courses are mandated in only a handful of majors or professional schools, such as business, law, engineering and many of the health science majors. In several other majors, a discussion of ethics is folded into other classes.

Only a few public schools, including Utah Valley State College and University of Montana, require ethics as a general education requirement. Given tight budgets, such classes are considered a luxury in the basic curriculum.

"It really comes down to trying to squeeze everything into the general education requirement we'd like to," said Michael Bowers, currently interim co-provost at UNLV.

Religious schools often attempt to ingrain character development through mandatory philosophy and religion courses.

Public schools have to be more careful how they teach and mandate ethics, ethicists say. The trick is to develop responsible citizens without indoctrinating students with any one belief system.

Ethics is already major part of the course curriculum at UNLV in the College of Business, College of Engineering and the Boyd School of Law, all of which have accrediting bodies mandating that ethics be taught.

Business schools across the country began beefing up their courses after the Enron scandal broke in 2001. Ethics was required to be part of the curriculum before Enron, but the scandal heightened the need to add more substance to the ethics courses and not just "pay lip service," College of Business Dean Richard Flaherty said.

At UNLV, ethics is a major part of the introduction class all business students must take as freshmen, and it's a part of the management class they take as juniors. It is re-emphasized in every class.

The importance of academic integrity is also reinforced in every class at UNLV, and the university recently redrafted its policy to make it more consistent across the university.

The American Dental Association requires ethics to be taught as part of its accreditation standards, and from orientation on UNLV incorporates it into the curriculum, Interim Dean Victor Sandoval said. Students learn about ethical issues that may arise in their practices and with their patients, including privacy laws and appropriate relations with patients. Students must recite a pledge to uphold the ethics of the profession and the student honor code.

Sandoval believes the ethics curriculum is sound, but that professors will be paying more attention to how ethics is presented. "I think the natural reaction of our faculty would be to want to re-emphasize it and to model it in a more distinctive way."

Walton wishes every major would prioritize ethics. Before his retirement at UNLV, he pushed to incorporate ethics throughout the curriculum at the university and is now developing a training program for K-12 teachers to help them incorporate ethics.

Ethics training begins early - with a toddler being told "no, bad" by a parent. It is reinforced in school by class rules and lessons on kindness, sharing and telling the truth. As students mature, schools emphasize citizenship and universal concepts of good behavior.

College classes, however, offer students a more mature, reasoned approach to ethics and equip them to deal with specific issues sure to arise in their profession, said Mickey Bebeau, director of the Center for the Study of Ethical Development at the University of Minnesota.

For instance, is it ever OK to fudge a payment request to an insurance company to help an impoverished patient, perhaps by claiming that a covered procedure was conducted when in fact the patient received a procedure that was not covered?

College level courses also address temptation, such as the pressure to cheat or look the other way when others do.

Case study reviews help individuals understand ethical issues that may not be clear cut or help them recognize conflicts of interest that might otherwise go unnoticed, says Caren Jenkins, chairwoman of the Nevada Commission on Ethics. The commission enforces state ethics statutes but also offers free training to help public officials avoid ethical lapses. The commission presented 15 seminars in 2005 and 17 in 2006.

Jenkins believes the training has led to an increase in the number of public officials seeking advice on ethical issues such as how to avoid conflicts or when to report gifts, and a decrease in the number of complaints against them. In fiscal year 2005, there were seven requests for opinions and 69 complaints of violations. In the year that ended June 30, there were 22 requests for opinions and only 36 complaints.

The 10 UNLV dental students caught in the recent scandal fudged patient records by stealing a professor's password to sign off on their treatment of patients rather than having a supervisor check it. Professors are required to sign off on patient care multiple times for each patient, up to 1,000 times for a fourth-year student.

Because the vast majority of work was properly approved, system lawyer Bart Patterson wrote in his report that he believed students either "did not comprehend the importance of all these checks and/or they were simply unwilling to undertake all of the effort required to locate an appropriate faculty member." Patterson found that patient care was not compromised, but that perhaps additional classroom emphasis on the importance of electronic records would be appropriate.

An honor council initially recommended that students repeat the fourth year of course work, or in the alternative, perform free dental work in a medically underserved area, pay a fine and participate in ethics education.

In the end, Interim Dean Richard Carr recommended allowing the students to graduate but required them to complete 1,500 hours of free dental work. A 30-day suspension will be on the student's transcripts, and if they don't complete the community service their degree will be revoked.

The students will have to report the discipline in their license applications, and it is uncertain whether that will prohibit them from practicing.

One thing seems certain: UNLV professors will have a new case study - close to home - to illustrate ethical lapses.

archive