Week 4

Kimi Villaroman
A01
Week 4

This week's readings focused on the corporatization of the University system, and I honed in on the ethical side of the readings, "Ethics and 'Breaking Bad': Developing and Practicing Ethical Skills", "Whistleblower" and "Why We Should Fear University, Inc." The first two articles talked about the importance of ethics in the workplace and how it affects the productivity of any organization. The third talked about how the university system is increasingly becoming a corporation. In her ethics article, Amy Block Joy advocates for ethical learning to be taught in workspaces, and I find this to be extremely beneficial because recently, in my parents' work space, ethical learning is taught. Because of it, their productivity has increased, showing actual evidence to me that this is true. She uses this principle of ethics, "doing what's right", when she decided to "whistleblow" against her supervisor for embezzlement. She does this despite all the stories of whistleblowers getting fired, and yet, she did the right thing. I found this empowering because the majority of people would turn a blind eye to things that may have repercussions to that person; they would rather exemplify the bystander effect and not deal with doing the right thing. Finding myself to be an ethical person, I find it interesting that people could actually choose to ignore such a blatant wrong and the fact that the university tried to hide it by telling Joy to keep quiet shocked me even more. This ties into DeBoer's article when he states that "the administrators who run their universities... are not their friends" even if rules of conduct are supposed to protect persons against unjust acts.

Question: What are the pros and cons of having ethical learning being mandatory for all organizations?

Reference:

Amy Block Joy. “Whistleblower: Police.”

Amy Block Joy. “Ethics and “Breaking Bad”: Developing and practicing ethical skills.”

DeBoer, F. (2015, September 9). Why We Should Fear University, Inc. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html

Image retrieved (23 April 2017) from http://www.radicalcompliance.com/2017/01/23/whistleblower-sanction-worth-attention/