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[neutralname]

Reviving my old thread. 

In teaching generally, and especially in teaching ethics, I'm wondering whether it makes sense to expect faculty to be role models. 

My own thoughts are that it might make some sort of sense in a liberal arts college where students get to know the faculty, although that model of teaching seems a bit on the decline.  In more impersonal places, where there's little connection between faculty and students outside of the classroom, the idea that we need to hold up faculty to special standards of behavior because they are role models is to misunderstand the nature of the job.

[mystictechgal]

Depends on what you mean by role model. I do expect my professors to display some degree of ethical behavior, but, then, I tend to expect most people to behave in an ethical manner. I also know that my professors are human, just like everyone else. And behaving ethically isn't a black and white matter. More often than not, I'd argue that it is more of a balancing act. I don't know that it matters whether I know the faculty member (politician, businessman, etc.) well, or not.

Do I hold faculty members to a higher level? No, I don't think I do, at least not generally. That said, yes, I did have a greater sense of outrage when it was the professor teaching the ethics course last semester that was behaving in a highly unethical manner than I might have had if it had been anything but an ethics class. Canceling classes and going incommunicado for 3 weeks to go on vacation every semester that you teach the class because you can't (or don't wish to) deal professionally with the subject matter being covered in those weeks is grossly unethical, in my opinion. There were other things, too, but that was the most glaring. I'd have been just as angry if it had been another class, but the fact that it was an ethics class added a level of irony that was hard to ignore.

(I understand that shortly after I dropped the class the professor resigned. S/he did finish out the semester, but has now moved on. I wish him/her well, but I can't say that I hope s/he finds another academic job. His/her sense of ethics may be just fine in another context, but not in that one.)

[snowbound]

The notion on teaching students to be "good" has no place in a university.  If you want to submit your students to your brand of morality (and, I guess, grade them on how good or bad a person they are), then you should have become a preacher.  Ethics as a branch of philosophical enquiry is anther thing entirely.

It's like Religious Studies.  Let's say you had a class on monotheism and were discussing ideas of the trinity. The point would be to teach students where trinity ideas came from, who held (holds) them, how those ideas intersect or conflict with monotheism, etc.  The point would not be to teach students that God really exists in a tripartite form (or really exists at all, for that matter).  

[amlithist]

Neutralname, your points are really interesting to me--at a CC. I think that, in a way, we're expected to be role models as much as I would be at a SLAC.  (Full disclosure: my undergrad is a fundy Christian LA, so of course all the profs were expected--and effectively contracted--to be shining role models for us.)

But as we're repeatedly reminded at my sub/urban CC, wer're the only "real" adults in most of these students' lives, even those who are non-trad age.  Fully 1/4 of our students come from no-parent homes (raised by other relatives, or often by the state/on their own by age 15-16 or so); another 1/2 are from single parent homes, and these are overwhelmingly with Mom, who's statistically overwhelmingly 18 or fewer years older than the student.  Even those who come to us as non-trads show varying degrees of social immaturity.  Something like 90% of our students work 20 or more hours/week, but again, the vast majority of those are entry-level service jobs, i.e., not jobs that are taken as part of a career path for either the student or his/her supervisor, so they often don't have great examples there of maturity, responsible adult behavior, etc.  (Yeah, our institutional research folks can slice the baloney pretty thin.)

Maybe it's because I've been a mom for 20+ years, but I just assume people are watching me.  Whether I extrapolate that to being a role model, I don't know, but I guess at my CC we are, whether we want to be or not.  Certainly not all, or even most, of our students here see us that way, which is clear from their behaviors and attitudes inside and outside of our classrooms, but for those who are truly trying to learn and grow and make something of their lives, it's clear that they're attached to various of their profs to some degree. 

In reading the thread and thinking of your earlier question, I'm reminded that my own ethics developed, as I think VP suggested, more in my late 20s and 30s rather than as a young student (bombarded as I was by my profs' exhortations and examples of high moral character).  I know the best thing I do every summer to reset the "ethics" button is a habit I started back in grad school: reading all of Walden.  I use healthy portions of it in my Early Am lit class and my interdisciplinary studies classes (albeit for other primary purposes), and a good number of students each term tell me it has the same effect on them.  FWIW.

Oh--one other thing occurs to me as I reread this before posting:  I am a middle-aged white woman, and this is my take on the matter (and it's similar to what I hear from others of my general demographic--yes, we do have these discussions on a fairly regular basis, both formally and informally).  But my colleagues who are members of other racial/ethnic groups are more or less explicitly told and reminded of their role model status on a regular basis; one of my dearest friends, an African American woman in her late 30s, used to sarcastically refer to this as the (figurative)  "DuBois Clause" in her contract.  Again, FWIW.

[oldfullprof]

I have trouble with mandated "social justice" curricula, such as our college now has.  I think we do have a responsibility to teach a number of different approaches to ethical dilemmas. 

[penultimate24]

Seems like "critical thinking" and debate are the skills learned. I don't think we can measure personal virtue and vice...and why would we want to?

I feel like when I teach Literature I want to instill a "love" of reading in the students..but..that is abstract, hard to prove, and just may not happen!