Moral courage in a world of dilemmas: Ethical decisions grow from a process that promotes rational discourse against emotional tensions

School Administrator, Feb, 2002 by Rushworth M. Kidder, Patricia L. Born

Like many public and private schools, St. Paul's School posts its athletic schedules on its Web site. If you had clicked on it last spring, you would have found a list of baseball games, tennis matches and crew events from its campus in suburban Baltimore.

But not lacrosse. Despite being ranked No. 1 in a nationwide lacrosse poll of high school teams earlier in the year, the school canceled its entire varsity season on April 3. That day, school head Robert W. Hallett met for 20 minutes with a group of parents and with the varsity team--many of whose members had been drawn to the school because of its reputation as a lacrosse powerhouse--to announce the cancellation of further play.

The reason? Earlier in the spring, a 16-year-old team member had a sexual tryst with a 15-year-old girl and, without her knowledge, videotaped the whole thing. He was apparently mimicking a sequence in American Pie (a movie some students had recently seen and discussed) where a character tapes a sexual encounter and puts it on the Web. When this student's teammates gathered at a player's home to look at what they thought would be game tapes of an upcoming rival, they saw his tape instead.

None of the teammates objected. Nobody tried to stop the showing. Instead, they watched.

Crossing Swords

You can imagine the soul-searching among the staff leading up to the school leader's stunning announcement. Lacrosse, a game played on a soccer-like field with a small ball hurled from long sticks with nets, has a strong following among many schools and colleges, especially in the Northeast. At St. Paul's, it has a 60-year history and considerable parental support. But the school, affiliated with the Episcopal Church, still requires chapel for its students and retains a serious tradition of ethical concern.

What do you do when a popular sport crosses swords with an ethical collapse?

In this case, as reported in The Boston Globe, the boy who made the tape was expelled. Thirty varsity players were suspended for three days and sent into counseling with the school's chaplain and psychologist. And eight junior varsity players were made to sit out the rest of the season. It was not an easy decision.

As a school system leader, you understand that tough decisions like these will face you from time to time. When such dilemmas hit--often without warning, on an otherwise normal day--you need to demonstrate moral authority and wise decision making. You probably also sense that this sort of ethical decision making, more than simply intuitive, grows out of a process that applies structure in the midst of pressure and promotes rational discourse in the face of emotional tensions.

That process, we've found, is most successful if it includes four attributes:

* It is rooted in core, shared values.

* It centers on right-versus-right dilemmas rather than on right-versus-wrong temptations.

* It provides clear, compelling resolution principles.

* It is infused with moral courage.

Shared Values

Sound ethical decision making starts with being in touch with your own, as well as the community's, core ethical values. Indeed, many of these values are reflected in professional standards established for school administrators.

In its list of 10 commitments to the public, the AASA Statement of Ethics, adopted in 1981, identifies key values, including honesty, integrity, due process, responsibility, civil and human rights, and honor. According to the statement, an "administrator acknowledges that the schools belong to the public they serve for the purpose of providing educational opportunities to all ..." This responsibility, it continues, "requires the administrator to maintain standards of exemplary professional conduct. It must be recognized that the administrator s actions will be viewed and appraised by the community, professional associates, and students."

Values such as these are not unique to educators nor even to Americans. They are consistent with research findings from around the world. The Institute for Global Ethics has been studying the question of shared values for a decade. In the early 1990s, individuals such as Nobel laureate Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and John Gardner, founder of Common Cause, joined us in a series of interviews with moral exemplars from 16 different countries.

This work identified eight key values--love, truth, fairness, freedom, unity, tolerance, responsibility and respect--that were widely seen as essential in the 21st century. And from a series of surveys conducted between 1996 and 2001, we found that, over and over, respondents gravitate toward five of these values: truth, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion. In hundreds of workshops around the United States and overseas, we also have found empirically that people with different interests and backgrounds select these same five values as central to their sense of a moral future.

What is the importance of identifying such a list? First, they help us understand there is a bedrock of shared values that transcends our own time and place. While some in our communities fear our culture has lost moral footing in recent years, and while others fear further erosion in the future, there is a clear comfort in knowing these values have a timeless and lasting quality.