Collegiate Moral Climate Showing Signs of Neglect

The moral equivalent of nuclear winter may be settling over America’s campuses.

That’s one of the fears of Jon C. Dalton, a student of college mores today. Dalton worries that the mushrooming of an educational-industrial complex is obliterating a traditional role of colleges and universities--namely, the formal and informal teaching of values, the codes of right and wrong that should be lifelong guides to private and public conduct.

He also worries that schools today are rife with a “survivalist” mentality that encourages “a highly materialistic” student culture.

Dalton’s concerns are shared at the University of Redlands, a small private school, where he was invited recently to discuss research on current student attitudes and the environment that helped create them, said the university chaplain, the Rev. Brent Waters. “I think many faculty here know there’s a problem in this area, but they haven’t had the empirical information that would define its scope.”

The assistant vice president for student affairs at Northern Illinois University, Dalton has conducted his own studies and compiled surveys by others to measure the collegiate moral climate.

In a talk before one faculty group, Dalton outlined a variety of reasons that today’s college students are more self-centered and career-oriented than their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s.

One reason is historical. Since the founding of Harvard College in 1636, American schools have steadily shifted their emphasis from religious and moral instruction to professional education and the latest demands of the job market, he said.

For example, when it was founded in 1965, North Florida University stated its goals as to “serve the northeast Florida area by providing a sound foundation in professional education, to meet the local needs of business, reflect the economic characteristics of the community and prepare students for useful careers.”

In the 20 years since then, this attitude has become more and more common, Dalton said, as economic concerns have become paramount in the society at large.

Another element in today’s moral mix is that many colleges and universities have walked away from their previous concerns about student conduct. Because of court decisions limiting higher education’s in loco parentis role and because many educators feel it’s no concern of theirs how students behave outside the classroom, the ethical side of education has been given short shrift, Dalton maintained.

“I think there are a growing number of people who are concerned that in our effort to avoid tampering with student values, we may have promoted an atmosphere of neglect or avoidance of values in higher education,” he said.

The results of this neglect show up clearly in many studies, including an annual poll of college students conducted by the American Council on Education, Dalton said.

Between 1973 and 1983 the council found that students who wanted their education to help them “develop a philosophy of life” dropped from 72% to 45%, Dalton said. Blaming this trend partly on the pressure to get good grades in their chosen fields, Dalton noted that in the same decade students who wanted grades abolished dropped from 33% to 14%. “I think students would riot if we tried to do away with grades today,” he said.

Interest in the Arts Down

In that period, too, there was a dramatic decline in interest in the arts and extracurricular activities such as student government, drama clubs and newspapers.

A survey of this year’s freshman class found that their top four priorities were: to be an authority in their field, to be well off financially, to be successful in business and to help other people in difficulty, Dalton said. (Chaplain Waters said this trend is evident at Redlands where students tend to avoid humanities courses “because of the ambiguous nature of the subjects.” He estimated that 25% of the school’s 1,300 residential students are business majors.)

Dalton maintained these attitudes have been exacerbated by what he called “a Titanic ethic” among students. Students are pessimistic about the future of the world at large, he said, adding that they are only somewhat more optimistic about their own prospects.

In a survey on academic honesty he conducted two years ago while he was at Iowa State University, Dalton said, “More than half the students said they had been involved in cheating and half said they tended to look the other way. Only one out of the 1,500 that I surveyed said he would actually report someone else who was cheating.”

Personal Responsibility

Dalton also said he had polled student counselors and advisers on campuses around the country and found that issues dealing with personal responsibility--primarily drug and alcohol abuse--topped their lists of concerns.

It won’t be easy to reverse this trend, Dalton said. The issue of how much responsibility colleges and universities have in the role of personal development is likely to remain controversial, he added.

“There is continuing debate about the role of colleges in promoting values development,” he said. “That debate is still with us and probably will continue as long as there are colleges and universities.”

Moreover, there are no cut-and-dried remedies. “Rules and regulations are not very effective in promoting ethical development,” Dalton said. “Although it seems a simple solution, rules do not promote values, rules promote conformity. . . . We know that what does promote moral development are role models. Studies show that students are influenced enormously by faculty and staff that they come to know.”

Fewer Role Models

However, faculty and staff today have little reason to develop themselves as role models, Dalton said. “Working with students outside the classroom in student organizations and as advisers earns little reward in the academic system,” Dalton said. “Faculty also express fear about getting in over their heads or involved with student problems beyond their expertise in counseling. Also, many teachers teach because they are more interested in their subject matter than their students.”

The pressure-cooker atmosphere on campus also has made a casualty of the free-wheeling talks that were once a part of college life, Dalton contended.

“Studies show that students who frequently discuss moral issues tend to develop more sophisticated and more complex levels of thinking,” he said. “The question is where do students find the opportunity today to talk about these issues. Bull sessions, including with faculty, used to be effective. These obviously still happen but much less frequently because students are under more pressure to get good grades and faculty are concerned with tenure and publishing.”

The picture is not entirely bleak, Dalton noted. In his work with students he’s found many who are concerned with developing ethical and moral foundations, he said. But he stressed that “for anyone who’s responsible in education, there’s this dilemma of how do you serve the marketplace without selling your soul.”