Targeting Entry Points for Ethics in Chemistry Teaching and Learning

1506 Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 77 No. 11 November 2000 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu Life for today’s academic scientist can include competitive funding, research agendas driven by predicting the “hot” area of investigation, and the accumulation of students, papers, and citations as a measure of scholarly value. Djerassi has characterized the “tribal culture of research scientists” as an “overwhelming desire for name recognition...brutal competition...Nobel Prize lust...” and so on (1). In a 1999 essay, Sanders (2) argues that faculty attitudes such as these have negatively impacted the learning environment on campus. Sanders cautions faculty that they have contributed to a “culture of despair” in undergraduate education, where the seeds of Djerassi’s competitive consumer mentality perhaps are being sown early in the academic season. Everyone is so busy competing to advance their personal status that there is little time remaining to acknowledge moral values in intellectual pursuits. Even the idea that we in higher education could be serving some larger good, as Sanders concludes, seems a quaint 1960s’ anachronism. In a previous paper, “A Case for Ethics”, David Smith and I identified a number of principles for bringing this moral dimension into focus (3). The key idea in that essay was that