Discipline ought to be grounded in ethics

MACQUARIE University vice-chancellor Steven Schwartz makes no secret of his spiritual agenda.

UNIVERSITY is personal.

Steven Schwartz's conviction, deep and long held, that churning out degree-toting professionals is only part of a vice-chancellor's brief has fuelled his most recent speeches, as well as his desire to turn his own bailiwick, Sydney's Macquarie University, into an "ethical community".

"Sometimes I ask students, 'What is the most important thing you learned at university?' " Schwartz says. "Most answer: being able to do accounting, or science, but if you persist they always try to come up with some personal issues. To me that's what people really want."

This is not to discount the desire for an interesting and profitable career, he says. Merely that while debate goes on about funding, student allowances, rankings and research excellence, Schwartz is also pursuing an agenda that can be described only as spiritual.

He took his campaign for an ethical community public in his inaugural vice-chancellor's oration in August.

"To fulfil our true purpose, universities need to get back on course," he told his audience. "My take-away message is this: we need to re-moralise." He argued that for "almost 700 years ... the purpose of universities was to forge character", but that they had given up their moral role for "one that is strictly utilitarian", sinking into "the morass of moral relativity".

"The result is our universities teach students, but they do not even pretend to make them wise."

He is keeping good company on this issue. Among US university presidents who have spoken out is Harvard's Drew Faust, who during her ceremonial welcome talked about the need to "engage with the world, locally and globally, as responsible citizens committed to public purposes, as students and scholars ready to help solve complex problems with rigour and imagination, as people who live by the ethical standards we teach, as individuals who repay the privilege of being in a rare place like this by using our knowledge to help advance the wellbeing of people beyond our walls." Schwartz traces his serious interest in these ideas back about 15 years to his time as executive dean of medicine at the University of Western Australia in the mid-1990s, before his first stint as vice-chancellor at Murdoch University. He was struck by the proliferation of discoveries in the hard sciences, by the rapidity with which they were displacing old information and ways of doing things. He began to wonder what might constitute irreplaceable knowledge worth acquiring.

"If you listen to the government, well, it's all about money and we are here to drive the economy," he tells the HES.

"I have no problem with that, I am happy for Australia to be as rich as possible and for all the graduates to be rich as well, but even then money is only a tool. A sound economy is a way of achieving your social goals, but you have to have some goals, otherwise you have means with no ends.

"You have to have some purpose behind that."

No religious intention backs his stand, nor does he intend to moralise, although he is taken by American psychologist Barry Schwartz's argument that it is important to develop moral will and skill, that is, the desire and ability to do the right thing. Barry Schwartz explains this using some work psychologists in the US did with cleaners, who were chosen because their job descriptions did not include human interaction. One hospital cleaner, Mike, related how he had deliberately failed to mop a floor so that an elderly patient who was practising walking that stretch of the hallway could continue without fear of slipping: a rule broken at the right time, for the right reason.

"Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing," Barry Schwartz says. "A wise person knows how to use ... moral skills in the service of the right aims."

How to inculcate this? By practising what is preached. Thus, new managers at Macquarie must adopt an ethics code and academics have been asked to set a good example, even as work continues on a code of practice for the whole university. The concern for a moral education is also there in the new curriculum, designed and driven by provost and deputy vice-chancellor Judyth Sachs, that starts in the new year. Characterised as the 3Ps - people, planet and participation - Sachs's prescription translates as a requirement for students to study some arts and humanities as well as some science, and to perform community work.

"That really is our ultimate way of trying to build some form of virtue into students by giving them the opportunity to build it into themselves," Steven Schwartz says. "At the very least they will understand there are people who haven't had the advantages they have had, and that has to be the basis of any kind of morality."

These are Schwartz's plans for the 32,000 souls in his care, but certain practical difficulties must be tackled as he strives to educate the whole person. "Student overall satisfaction is not that great," he says. "It's a big challenge for us, student-staff ratios are way too high." The overall number is 22.8 but peaks at 46.6 in the business and economics faculty, while for science it is 14.6. Macquarie's staff hiring program continues - about 80 people have been hired in the past few years - but having over-enrolled students by 12 per cent this year, this boost will not necessarily shift the problem anytime soon.

The plan is to allow numbers to build in faculties such as science while keeping a firm lid on intakes for popular areas such as business.

Of course, funding is always a problem. And the global financial crisis set back the plan to develop the income stream from leasing the land and buildings on which the university sits in the northern suburbs of Sydney.

Like all Australian universities, Macquarie has trouble convincing alumni to open their wallets for the benefit of succeeding generations. Schwartz is philosophical and will not criticise. "It's difficult for people in Australia to ask people for money and there is no secret way other than to stand up and do it." He and his wife, Claire, have made a bequest in an effort to encourage others to do so, too.

Like Harvard's Faust, Schwartz is determined to see beyond present cares to focus on posterity. At 63, four years into his seven-year term at Macquarie, he says he wants to be remembered as a champion of what he calls real education: "the curriculum that looks at the whole person, not just the person who works for a living, and that develops an educational philosophy and educational approach that nurtures not just the mind but also the soul".