People who live, in glasshouses should not throw stones. Frankly, I believe the academic profession disregards this proverbial wisdom by throwing stones with great tome to every possible direction. Hardly a university is left whose philosophy department is met teaching well-attended courses about business ethics, medical ethics, ethics for lawyers, etc., thus providing ample, and often unsolicited, advice for other professionals, However, one, still waits for the course on ethics in academia to be taught witty the same enthusiasm and indignation. The walls of the academic glasshouse areshattered, but its inhabitants remain reluctant to put dawn the stones they am so fond of throwing and put their own house in order first.

It has always amazed and pleased me that other professions-business, law and medicine in particular have, at least on the academic level, been so willing to listen to the lectures on ethics from practitioners in other fields. I have observed a great willingness of business and law school deans to add ethics courses to their instructional offerings (or to make such courses a requirement, as is the case in some medical schools). Moreover, as practicing professionals, lawyers and physicians-and many other processionals-have established professional review boards which do disbar attorneys, remove judges from the trench and withdraw hospital privileges or oven licenses from unqualified doctors. These and most other professions have self policing procedures that arc not in, frequently employed and that men; often than not stop incompetent or unethical practitioners from practicing.

The professoriate knows no such mechanism. Occasionally, in some university rule book, we, list procedures describing the mechanics of removing a faculty member for "grow incompetence." These rules ere hardly ever invoked, but in the taw cases where we may be able to prove incompetence, we can subsequently never agree if we are really dealing with "gross" incompetence. In close to thirty years of professional life on the campuses of three very large universities, I have never seen a faculty member removed by judgment of his or her peers for behavior that, were it to occur in another profession, would certainly bring to the fore our academic ethics lectures. This fact aggrieves me: terribly. I am very proud of my profession and have during my academic career enjoyed the company of persons of great integrity, dedication and devotion.

Our academic profession has its toll share of outstanding practitioners, just as all other professions do. However, it also has its rotten apples; and it troubles me that we do so little to eliminate them, that we are so reluctant to face this problem, and that we tend to be so appallingly self-indulgent, seeing slivers in the eyes of others while being blind to the logs in our own.

Our professional organization, the AAUP, has historically interpreted its role as defender of faculty even when their behavior is questionable; and on campuses where the AAUP has become the agent for collective bargaining, it is a ready expectation that the union will defend its members no matter how outrageous the conduct. To my distress I have observed too many cases where we actually reward unethical behavior. Since faculty members will almost never find sufficient cause for dismissal when they are sitting in judgment of colleagues, academic offenders (sexual harrassers, plagiarists, severe alcoholics, drug addicts, etc.) will be placed "on leave," or on medical disability with pay and with the option to return to teaching when rehabilitated, or are offered the option of resignation, often with a handsome severance payment and the promise of assistance in finding employment at another university. Administrative acquiescence in cases like the last is often as unethical as the alleged violation.

I have been arguing my point that academia has to develop its own code of ethics for several years in speeches, papers and the like-with little resonance or success. (See Haenicke, "Ethics in Academia," Papers Presented to the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society, Vol. 1, No. 2, Jan. 1988). Recently James W. Nickel of the University of Colorado ("Do Professors Need Professional Ethics as much as Doctors and Lawyers?" Papers Presented to the Study of Ethics in Society, Vol. 2, No. 2, Jan. 1989) has suggested that several reasons for the relative neglect of academic ethics: Academics have not experienced a crisis in public confidence; the consequences of academic malpractice are less grave than those of legal and medical malpractice; and the temptations of professors are not as large or enticing as those of doctors.

Nickel does, of course, not argue against an ethics code for faculty; and all his reasons are, at least in part, convincing. But he may have written his paper before Charles Sykes' book ProfScam (1988) appeared, a scathing attack on university professors which certainly levels severe charges against our profession. In spite of the predictable cries of indignation, many a faculty member should have recognized his face in the mirror that Sykes is holding up to our profession. Similarly, when the Accuracy in Academia movement visited our campuses two years ago, most of us cried foul and ran for the cover of academic freedom. Too few of us were ready to examine what had caused this outside initiative and whether a good measure of ideological bias and indoctrination had replaced proper academic instruction.

Moreover, faculty teaching loads, the disarray of our undergraduate curriculum, and the absence of tenured faculty from undergraduate teaching in some of our leading universities are constant agenda topics of state legislators and the popular press, not to speak of the complaints from students and their parents. To assume that the academy has not or is not experiencing a confidence crisis means seeing things through rose-colored glasses. So much for Nickel's first argument.

I agree more with his second argument that assumes graver consequences of malpractice in medicine or law than in teaching. Certainly, a patient can lose his life, a client her freedom, in the hands of an incompetent doctor or lawyer. The incompetent professor seldom creates damage beyond severe disappointment or disillusionment in the student whose time and money is wasted in a poorly taught class. However, what of the damage created by the professor who sexually harasses a student, who demands sex for improved grades, for a recommendation, or in exchange for an assistantship? Though not life threatening acts, they are nevertheless of grave psychological or economic consequences for the student who finds himself in that position.

Nickel's last argument that the temptations are not as great for professors as they are for doctors (performing unnecessary operations) or lawyers (milking their clients) is only persuasive when applied to money. But even in that area they are relative. To neglect teaching or research in favor of a paid consulting job, to pursue university business ventures at the expense of academic work, these are not unheard of options a faculty member may choose. The difference may be the amounts the physician or the professor may respectively earn through unethical practices, but the relationship to their regular income may be comparable.

And while speaking of temptation, Nickel must certainly consider another area, i.e., that of sexual harassment, where the temptation might indeed be greater for professors than for any other professional since the faculty member deals day in, day out almost exclusively with young, often very attractive, inexperienced and impressionable people who, if not sexually harassed can be seduced into so called "consensual relationships, "the true nature of which is almost always questionable. The vehement opposition on practically every campus against establishing a clear-cut policy condemning sexual relationships between professors and their students is testimony to the fact that such relationships are widespread and widely tolerated in the academic community.

I continue to argue strongly for a written code of ethics for the academic profession. The policy statements issued by the AAUP do not suffice, mainly because they are vague in their essentials and, most importantly because, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a single case in the history of the AAUP that involves even as little as a public reprimand of one of its members for ethical or professional misconduct, not to speak of dismissal. Campus faculty themselves have to develop these ethics codes, and some campuses have already begun. We need to find standards that speak not only to sexual harassment but to consensual relationships; that examine conflicts of interest and conflicts of commitment; that illuminate our professional obligations to students and colleagues; and that wed our desire for shared university governance with the commitment to be held collectively responsible for what goes on and what goes wrong in the university. In recent years, the public eye began to rest more watchfully than ever upon public institutions and their representatives: the moral conduct of politicians is under increased scrutiny; the personal conduct of athletes, stockbrokers, industrialists, physicians and lawyers is constantly questioned and investigated. But we naively consider ourselves exempt from scrutiny and are out there with the public lecturing others-as we do so well-on proper ethical behavior. Are we beyond reproach? Should we wait until others begin to lecture and regulate us?

It behooves us to look at ourselves, to overcome our intolerable selfindulgence, and to prove that our profession does not have to shy away from scrutiny. Only if we ourselves begin a regimen of selfdiscipline and only after we have established a code of ethics for ourselves may we count on the respect of those to whom we lecture about ethics. Let us get on with it.