84 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
5.3 Universities, Cultural Diversity and Inclusivity
The contention of this part of the chapter is that the multi-cultural
university of the 21st century, as a centre of thought leadership that
creates and imparts conceptual and practical knowledge, is by its very
nature ethical. There are three reasons for this contention. The first one
derives its moral status from the integrity cluster of values in the table
above. It asserts that the business of creating and sharing knowledge is
itself a core form of ethical practice (as distinct from teaching about
ethics, which may have no real impact on actual practice). Knowledge
must be true to count as knowledge, and in every value-system accessed
in the global ethics movement, truth is judged to be a central moral
value. So to be in the knowledge business is to be in the ethics business
whether our universities acknowledge this explicitly or not. Thought that
is characterized by factual error, mere opinion, illogicality and
partisanship and that is untested by the critical assessment of qualified
peers is not thought leadership but an unpardonable waste of resources.
The second reason derives its moral status from both the beneficence
and integrity clusters of moral values in the table above. It is that
academics are key ethics players in their roles as researchers, teachers
and in their community service. The examples they set both personally
and in how they do their work are noted by their students and
colleagues, and send out clear ethical (and sometimes unethical)
messages. So we can ask how well our academics and administrators are
equipped for their role in providing moral influence in the academy and
beyond.
Like everybody else, university staff members all have the right to be
religious or not, but the notion that they have the right to be
professionally amoral if they choose, or that the right to freedom means
that what they do off campus, like cheating on their income tax or on
their partners, is nobody’s business but their own, must be firmly