JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - Naspaa

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Teaching Administrative Ethics in Nonprofit Management“Unquestionably. Are we making a difference? Yes, so it appears. Are we makinga large enough difference? Probably not” (p. 229). In Menzel’s view, the widevariation in techniques and the inconsistent approaches of ethics education madeit difficult to assess its effect, or to compare one form of instruction to another.As Menzel concluded, “There is probably no one best way to acquire ethics. Still,there is much to learn about both the teaching and learning (or acquiring) ofethics and values in public administration” (Menzel 1997a, pp. 229-230).A similar assessment can be applied to institutions that offer nonprofitmanagement degrees, certificates, or concentration programs. Virtually everyoneagreed that, to the extent possible, “right conduct” should be encouraged. Alarge percentage of people who believed that right conduct is a crucial questionalso believed that ethics instruction in the context of degrees, certificates, orconcentration programs is a reasonable means of encouraging such behavior.How these courses should be structured and taught, and whether they aresufficiently valuable, are questions that remain open to discussion and debate.Formal training and instruction in a subject can, and often does, lead to animproved understanding, and sometimes it leads to an impressive intellectualmastery. Courses that introduce students to the central theories and GreatThinkers in ethics can enrich and enliven their academic experiences, assumingthey are well-taught and that students engage the material. If the goal is to ensurean understanding of ethics, then multiple courses and multiple approaches canachieve the desired effect.The goal of ethics education, however, extends beyond understanding,although mastery of basic ideas and concepts is a necessary first step. Presumably,the purpose of introducing students to administrative ethics is to ensure thatthey do more than merely understand ethics as an academic subject. Studentsare expected to act on their new-found knowledge by incorporating ethicalprecepts and practices into their academic and professional lives. This laudablegoal can be traced back to the Greeks, for whom ethics was not merely a subjectof academic inquiry; it was a time-tested way of life. The cornerstone of ethicswas the notion of character — the qualities and attributes that comprise thepersonality of an individual. A person exhibited good character when he orshe acted in ways that reflected virtue (excellence), that is, the individual triedto become a fully actualized human being by engaging in right conduct, inaccordance with absolute, recognizable standards (Martinez & Richardson, 2008,pp. 18-22; Wallace, 1978, p. 10; Wilson, 1985).Knowledge of ethical concepts could be imparted in many ways, but amultitude of approaches might raise as many questions as they would answer.As Cooper noted in a 2004 Public Administration Review article, “Big Questionsin Administrative Ethics: A Need for Focused, Collaborative Effort,” the“interesting but highly disparate” literature on administrative ethics lacks“anything like a focused effort by groups of scholars to study specific setsJournal of Public Affairs Education 193
Teaching Administrative Ethics in Nonprofit Managementof significant research questions in a sustained and systematic fashion.” Heattributed the absence of a systematic approach to ethics as a consequence ofthe failure to build consensus on “specific theoretical perspectives, sets of relatedproblems, or significant issues” (Cooper, 2004, p. 395). Cooper was correctin saying that a theoretical grounding must precede the development of anysystematic approach to administrative ethics. To date, consensus regarding thatgrounding has been absent, although some scholars have attempted to provide atheoretical grounding (Goodsell, 1990; Schubert, 1957; Stewart, 1991). Despitethese efforts, public sector ethics, including in the nonprofit field, do not have anagreed-upon, more-or-less-uncontested series of propositions or theories that aretaught to members of the profession, in much the same way as analogous coursesin engineering, law, and medicine are taught. Scholars argue that it is valuableto teach administrative ethics in schools of public administration, policy, andmanagement, but consensus breaks down when there are attempts to go beyonda basic agreement on that broad conclusion (Hejka-Ekins, 1988; Katz, 1968; Lee& Paddock, 1992; Rohr, 1976).Consider the legal profession, for example. Graduates of AmericanBar Association-accredited law schools must pass a state-administered barexamination in order to be admitted to the profession. Typically, a state supremecourt or state bar association serves as a gatekeeper for bar admissions, inaddition to disciplining errant lawyers who violate clearly stated rules of conduct.For lawyers, then, the notion of legal ethics is not a set of philosophical principlesthat lack specificity and enforceability. “Legal ethics” — as the concept is understoodby practicing attorneys — refers to a set of more-or-less black-letter rules that mustbe obeyed if the practitioner hopes to avoid sanctions (Martinez, 1998).Contrast this sense of ethics with public-sector ethics as they would applyoutside of a recognized profession with a gate-keeping function. Public-sectorethics vary widely because the “public sector” is such a broad, amorphous term —one that carries different meanings depending on the part or aspect of the publicsector being referenced. “Nonprofit” ethics confront the same issues, and areexacerbated by an even weaker understanding of what constitutes the “sector.”As for nonprofit ethics instruction — based on the wide array of coursesand approaches available in nonprofit curricula — ethics and the teaching ofethics represent many different things to many different people. If scholars sofar have failed to establish a systematic approach to researching and teaching ethics,then it is little wonder that institutions with nonprofit master’s degrees, certificates,concentration programs, or professional education degrees have pursued multipleapproaches and curricula with no clear consensus on a preferred path (Bahm, 1982).Survey results suggested that treatment of case studies and examination ofprofessional codes of ethics seemed to be popular teaching techniques, perhapsbecause they provide relatively straightforward, positivist approaches to anexpansive, highly diverse subject. Broader philosophical works and well-known194 Journal of Public Affairs Education
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