96 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
creation (Brewe & Lucas, 2009). Translated into the everyday life of the
academic, research and publication assume far greater importance than
teaching, contributions to service or internal university governance.
According to Bexley, James and Arkoudis (2011:14) academics in
Australia expressed a sentiment commonly encountered in most
universities elsewhere, “Even though there is a spoken
acknowledgement that all three (teaching, research and service) are
important, every academic knows there is a hierarchy with research
sitting on top.” Thus, the tension between teaching and research
manifests itself in decision-making revolving around a how the
academic spends his/her best time and resources – in quality teaching or
in quality research with its lure of material incentives at the expense of
the teaching task. Although such dilemmas will seldom, if ever, bring an
individual academic into contravention of an official code of ethics, they
are nonetheless real in terms of moral decision-making. Thirdly, the
service role also may also present the university educator with choices
between non-profit community projects and lucrative consultancies or
large scale funded projects privileged also by university administrators
in pursuit of a source of third stream income.
6.4 Concluding Comments
Institutionalisation of ethical checks and balances, while necessary,
run the risk of mere ‘paper ethics’. To create a pervasive ethical culture
in the current context of the university fraught with ambivalent, jostling
discourses and among the competing role sets of the professoriate,
principles and values hinge on the internalisation and the transmission of
an ethical habitus, that is, an embodied ethics (Bourdieu, 1970) or an
‘ethics from below’ (Dill, 1982). This is of particular importance as
universities receive continually new cohorts of academics who should be
socialised in ethically sound and rigorous communities of practice. In