JANELLE STRAWSBURG
Staff Writer
After two years of discussion, the university is still without a new ethics statement, Provost and committee member Darryl Tippens said.
A committee of university administrators will revise the final draft before the end of the term, when it will then be handed over to President Andrew K. Benton and the Board of Regents, Tippens said.
Tippens, chair of the University Faculty Council, Professor of Education Dr. Jack McManus, Equal Opportunity Director Edna Powell, Associate Professor of Law Dr. Roger Alford and Associate Professor of Business Law Dr. Larry Bumgardner are the five members of the president-appointed committee in charge of writing the new ethics statement.
“There is a national concern about ethics — in business, in government and, most recently, in higher education,” Tippens said. “It’s no longer acceptable simply to say ‘we are ethical.’ There are increased expectations that we be very clear and precise about our ethical expectations.”
The committee has been meeting for more than two years, first starting out as a subcommittee of the University Faculty Council. That council worked on a document for about a year, completing a draft in the spring of 2005. However, after that first draft, the committee decided to head in another direction with the statement.
“It became apparent that what was needed was not a faculty ethics policy, but rather a broader document that applied to all constituents of the university,” Tippens said. “So, with the president’s support, we formed a new committee last fall, one that includes faculty, staff and administrators.”
Law Professor Dr. Shelley Saxer, a member of the original subcommittee, recognized the need for an ethics statement in relation to Pepperdine’s Christian mission statement.
“The statement was brought up as a perceived need on the part of the university to respond to the whole community with a university-wide statement,” Saxer said. “Other schools, such as USC and Yale, which are pretty secular in nature, have one. We had statements relating to ethics, but they were scattered throughout many documents, we wanted a broader statement to encompass the whole university.”
Many secular schools, such as USC, Purdue and Emory, have ethics statements while the majority of universities in the West Coast Conference (WWC) don’t have separate documents although ethics are included in their mission statements. USD, for example, has ethical conduct listed as one of their core values within its mission statement.
Junior Rachel Garrett doesn’t see the need for a separate ethics statement
“All the schools within the WCC are religious schools, so it is assumed that ethics would be a part of any mission statement,” she said.
Tippens, however, said he sees a need for this new statement. “The new statement will neatly summarize our values and provide Web links to existing policies,” he said. “I think it will be helpful to everyone to know that there is a single document to which we all subscribe.”
Above all, the committee members said they hope that the new statement will accurately represent the values and uniqueness of Pepperdine.
“I believe that our statement will cover many of the same categories as those statements from other institutions,” Tippens said. “However, we want our document to be appropriate to the unique kind of institution that we are. We want the language to sound like us, not a secular institution.”
03-23-06