Teaching Administrative Ethics in Nonprofit Management: Recommendations to Improve Degrees, Certificates, and Concentration Programs

The first protection against ethical lapses in the nonprofit sector presumably is to provide a sound foundation in ethical training at institutions of higher learning. To understand what we hypothesized as the fragmented state of ethics pedagogy in the nonprofit management field, we surveyed educational programs that offer graduate degrees, certificates or concentration programs in the management or study of nonprofit organizations. We found that two-thirds of the respondents offered an ethics course, but fewer than 40 percent required completion of an ethics course. Moreover, the nature and content of ethics courses varied widely in scope, methods, and emphases. To improve the overall state of ethics pedagogy, we recommend instruction programs that equip students with the tools to master three steps in administrative ethics: (a) identifying the scope of an ethical administrator's work; (b) defining the content of the appropriate ethical standards; and (c) developing a deliberative process so that an administrator can appropriately assess ethical questions and chart a satisfactory course for resolving salient issues.