ABSTRACT
The academy, like any country club, has some well-tried ways to deal with subjects it does not like, such as parapsychology, speed reading, women's studies, informal logic, or ethics recently, or computer science, psychology, and relativity theory earlier in the century. Being fair to those authorities whose views one discusses in class is a traditionally recognized part of professorial ethics. Ethics has been treated in all these ways: the philosophers made the subject over; the social scientists denied its legitimacy though it embarrassingly continues to reemerge, rather lightly disguised, in welfare economics, political theory, sociobiology, program evaluation, the theory of games, scientific jurisprudence, and decision theory. Certain issues that happen to relate to professorial ethics have received substantial attention, for example, the perceived tensions between, on the one hand, union solidarity, tenure, or affirmative action and peer-review or merit-based faculty evaluation, on the other.
