A concern for the ethical instruction and formation of students has
always been a part of American higher education. Yet that concern has by
no means been uniform or free from controversy. The centrality of moral
philosophy in the undergraduate curriculum during the mid-19th Century
gave way later during that era to the first signs of increasing
specialization of the disciplines. By the middle of the 20th Century,
instruction in ethics had, by and large, become confined almost
exclusively to departments of philosophy and religion. Efforts to
introduce ethics teaching in the professional schools and elsewhere in
the university often met with indifference or outright hostility. The
past decade has seen a remarkable resurgence of the interest in the
teaching of ethics, at both the undergraduate and the professional
school levels. Beginning in 1977, The Hastings Center, with the support
of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Carnegie Corporation of New
York, undertook a system- atic study of the state of the teaching of
ethics in American higher education.