Book Review: A Professor's Duties: Ethical Issues in
College Teaching
Peter Markie. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994.
Reviewed by Willie Young, Graduate Student Associate, TRC and Department of Religious Studies

In A Professor's Duties, Peter Markie outlines the duties and obligations constitutive of professorial life. He seeks to provide a justification for both teaching and research duties, and is by and large successful. However, by describing academic ethics simply as a collection of obligations, Markie ignores the central importance of relationships to successful teaching and conceals the communal nature of a vibrant and healthy academic life.

Markie's focus on obligations shapes his understanding of the goals of teaching. On Markie's view, good teaching brings students to true beliefs justified by evidence, or "guiding students to knowledge" (p. 25). He rightly emphasizes that students "know" the material only when given classroom space and time for understanding, so that good teaching may require imparting less information. However, Markie's focus on the results of inquiry in both teaching and scholarship risks leaving the process of teaching and learning in a secondary position. Ultimately, his focus seems to be on the information conveyed, rather than how teachers convey it. The limits of his approach become apparent in his discussion of grading; for Markie, grading is justified only insofar as it helps students to choose a successful career.

In the second half of the book, contributors' essays spell out the specifics of these obligations-grading, scholarship, and respect for students' autonomy. While most contributors share Markie's assumptions regarding the priority of duty and obligation for academic ethics, Elias Baumgarten's essay, "Ethics in the Academic Profession: A Socratic View," singularly emphasizes critical inquiry and questioning, thereby de-emphasizing the results of the learning process. Baumgarten argues that a focus on questioning allows space for the "critical anguish" (p. 163) central to students' reflection on humanistic issues. He accepts the perceived relativism of this approach as part of the university's development of societal "gadflies" who do not tacitly accept values and information. Baumgarten opens the possibility that teaching students how to think, rather than what to think, is the true goal of university teaching. In a sharp departure from Markie's position, Baumgarten argues that a certain "professor-student relationship" is required for good teaching.