Word: men
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ALSO TOO EASY to resign yourself to sadness. It is one thing to understand why the men who run Harvard behave as they do; it is altogether a different thing to condone it. It is wrong to believe that Derek Bok is evil, but it is just as wrong to believe that he is not responsible, for his actions. Bureaucrats, administrators and scholars may spend their lives pretending that they are not human, that their august positions relieve them of the need to subscribe to common human virtues--but in 30 years, when they will have grown old and face...
...years these men and women might look back and wonder if the institution they served so well, and which will even then be served well by younger editions of themselves, might not have been served differently. They might wonder if the demands of the institution might not have allowed some room for human considerations; they might wonder if the imperatives of imagined greatness, of dealing rationally and efficiently with a vicious world, precluded so completely a concern for the lives and feelings of those who were not great. If they are truly human, they will consider these matters...
...course. The purpose of ethics is to apply moral concepts to life, but that is often a tricky business; rather than impose one set of morals on a diverse group, situational ethics allow for a wide variety of moral codes, within a basic, minimal framework of what all men and women will accept. Certainly, there is no greater tyranny than the moral outrage of a majority working on those of a conscientious minority, and so situation ethics wisely shies away from broad pronouncements of right and wrong...
...professional ethics are left to assume the basic moral principles of the world, leaves them the freedom to assume that they do not exist at all. "The ethics of the situation" obscure the morality of the human condition; living for the moment, for the immediate context, the professional men and women who emerge from Harvard need not always see that there are other contexts where their actions may be judged, and found lacking...
...lights when it accepted $1 million from the Engelhard Foundation, when it thwarted the efforts of clerical workers in the Medical Are to form a union, and when it set up a committee to punish student activists without regard to due process. These were the actions of men and women who have set up their own priorities, their own ethical standards, to cope with their own peculiar situations as august members of a massive bureaucratic institution...