Four years ago, we received a major grant from the National Science Foundation to integrate ethics into IIT's technical curriculum. We called this effort "Ethics Across the Curriculum" before we knew how many different undertakings that name would soon cover. Now seems a good time to report what we did.

"Ethics" has at least three uses today: as a synonym for ordinary morality; as the name of a field of philosophy (the study of the good and the right); and as the name for those special (morally permissible) standards of conduct governing members of a group because they are members of that group (for example, engineering ethics for engineers). Some programs called "Ethics Across the Curriculum" are in fact concerned with encouraging ordinary morality. Some try to increase understanding of philosophical theories. But IIT's Ethics Across the Curriculum is concerned primarily with teaching those special standards of conduct that apply to members of a profession.

People often ask, "Can ethics be taught?" The question is hard to answer in part because the varied uses of "ethics" make the question ambiguous. Certainly the roles of ordinary morality can be taught-and generally are. Even a thief can recite the rule, "Don't steal". Those who ask whether ethics (in our first sense) can be taught to college students must be asking whether students can be made moral-whether, that is, they can be made to want to do what they know they should do. The answer to that question is that few college students need to be made to want to do what they know they should do. By and large, they come to college meaning well. Those few who do not will probably not be changed much by anything an institution of higher education can do. Even prisons, which exercise much greater control over inmates than colleges can over students, are relatively unsuccessful at making bad people good. The most college can do for morality is increase sensitivity to moral issues and sharpen moral judgment.

When people ask, "Can ethics be taught?" they do not seem to be asking whether philosophical ethics can be taught. Often, perhaps most often, they are asking whether professional (or business) ethics can be taught.

Professional ethics differs from ordinary morality in at least one important respect. While students come to college knowing a good deal about ordinary morality, they generally do not come to college knowing much about the ethics of their profession. The reason is obvious. Professional ethics differs from profession to profession and cannot be deduced from ordinary morality or philosophical theory. In this respect, professional ethics resembles law rather than morality. A profession's ethics must be learned much as laws must be. While we can assume our students have a pretty good understanding of morality and want to behave decently, we cannot assume that they know, for example, whether to put their client's welfare or the public welfare first. (For lawyers, the client's welfare generally has priority; for engineers, the public's welfare does.)

For IIT, Ethics Across the Curriculum means teaching professional (and business) ethics. We believe that professional ethics can be taught, but only in the sense that any other subject that is part of a professional curriculum can be taught. We cannot guarantee that everyone will learn the material or that, having learned it, they will always use it as they should. We can only provide a necessary condition of good conduct.

IIT has had courses in professional (and business) ethics since the late 1970s. Most of these, offered by the Humanities Department, prosper as advanced electives. They have, however, never reached more than a quarter of all undergraduates (and, except for a law school course in professional responsibility, virtually none of the graduate students).

What can be done to raise the percentage of students receiving some training in professional ethics? That was a question we asked ourselves for half a decade. Both tight budgets and stiff requirements seemed to forbid turning ethics electives into requirements. There were other reasons as well. Those teaching professional ethics did not want to teach students who felt the course an imposition. Many professional faculty also felt the incongruity of requiring of students what they could not teach, of insisting that ethics is integral to practicing one's profession while not making ethics integral to teaching the profession.

The goal of Ethics Across the Curriculum is to assure that every IIT student graduates with at least a basic knowledge of professional ethics gained in a way making ethics seem integral to the practice of the profession.

We have tried to achieve that goal by teaching IIT faculty in engineering, accounting, computing, biology, and other "technical" programs to include some ethics in their courses. Fifteen faculty a summer have gone through our thirty-hour workshop. What follows is a sample of what those forty-five have done with what we taught them.

Geoffrey Williamson attended our workshop in 1992. His integration of ethics into an advanced electrical engineering course is, in one respect, typical of what IIT faculty have achieved. He found a way to include an issue of professional ethics in an ordinary problem set. In another respect, however, Williamson represents a special achievement. Electrical engineering is generally considered the engineering program least hospitable to professional ethics. Technical detail is thought to leave no room for anything else. Williamson nonetheless found a way to integrate ethics into his course, a way that both he and his students found natural and rewarding.

Jacquelyn Fox-Good's thoughtful description of her (relative) failure is therefore striking. Many both in the humanities and in engineering, business, and other technical programs think that the humanities faculty have the easiest time integrating ethics into their courses-if, indeed, they have not had ethics there all along. Fox-Good, who attended our workshop in 1993, confirms my own surprised observation. In general, the humanities faculty find it harder than the technical faculty to accommodate professional ethics. Fox-Good helps us to understand why (while also helping us to see both how it can be done and why it should be done).

Louise Hewitt, who attended our first workshop in 1991, describes her efforts to integrate ethics into three courses in Computer Science. One, a first year course, forced her to think carefully about how to teach professional ethics to students who did not share a common profession or know much about their own. The second course, somewhat more advanced, mixed engineers with computer science students. The third course combined ordinary advanced undergraduates with graduate students already "out in the world". Hewitt's piece illustrates both the general utility of our strategy for integrating ethics into technical courses and some ways in which different courses require different tactics. While teaching ethics is no harder than teaching one's specialty, it is no easier.

Mukund Acharya, who attended our workshop in 1992, could have described how he integrated ethics into Thermodynamics. Instead, he describes his efforts to integrate ethics into a Research Experience for Undergraduates, an extra-curricular program NSF supports to encourage undergraduates in research universities to think about going into research. Like Hewitt's piece, Acharya's suggests the variety of ways in which professional ethics fits naturally into teaching students their profession. But Acharya's piece suggests something more that we probably are far from exhausting the ways in which we can productively integrate ethics into professional education.

During the summer of 1994, fifteen faculty from institutions other than IIT will take a somewhat compressed version of the workshop IIT faculty have taken. That workshop, like this issue of Perspectives, is part of our effort to disseminate what Ethics Across the Curriculum has taught us. We hope you find this issue useful.