scholarly journals Utilitarianism and the idea of university: A short ethical analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-87
Author(s):  
Nenad Cekic

The standard objection to the utilitarian vision of morality is that utilitarian so-called ?Greatest-Happiness Principle? could justify counter-intuitive practices such as punishing and sacrifice of innocents, breaking of promises and manipulation. The underlying presumption is that the greatest cause (general utility, ?happiness?) must be capable of justifying causing suffering of the few. The fact is that, in the upbringing and education of humans (children), some degree of manipulation is needed. Instead, in that process, we use concepts which belong to deontological prescriptions (?obligations,? ?duties?) such as ?Do not lie? or ?Do not steal.? Our question is: Can we imagine the University guided by the simple utility principle. We must remember that a University is for adults, not for children. Why now not be open and at the University say that everything we do we do for the sake of hedonistic ?happiness,? not for the sake of duty. That seems suspicious for several reasons. Maybe the most noteworthy objection is that Mill?s version of the utilitarianism tends to divide humanity into two classes: moral aristocracy, which seeks ?higher pleasures,? and others who do not. Does that mean that utilitarians must organize secret utilitarian universities for moral aristocracy? Does it mean that moral aristocracy, according to the utility principle, should organize ?deontological,? manipulative public universities for lower classes?

Author(s):  
Amran Abdul Halim ◽  
Abdulloh Salaeh

This study is to identify the involvement of academicians on the teaching of the hadith. The contribution of the academicians to the teaching of the hadith is also very much needed so that Muslims can acknowledge al-Sunnah closely. The academicians were selected from Academic of Islamic Studies, University of Malaya Islamic Studies Academy, the National University of Malaysia, the Islamic Science University of Malaysia and the International Islamic University which they are all from various fields of Islamic Studies. The methodology used in this study is a questionnaire which is group sampling. The researcher distributes the questionnaire to the academic staff at the university involved. Based on this descriptive analysis of the questionnaire, it can be concluded that academic practitioners either in the field of hadith or other fields are involved and contribute to the teaching of hadith such as in public universities and other institutions. This shows that most academicians have good knowledge related to the field of hadith. Therefore, they are among the most suitable as references to the community in solving Sunnah and bidaah issues, especially the academicians who are experts in the field of hadith. Abstrak Kajian ini adalah untuk mengenalpasti penglibatan ahli akademik terhadap pengajaran hadith. Sumbangan ahli akademik terhadap pengajaran hadith juga amat diperlukan agar umat Islam dapat mengenali al-Sunnahsecara  lebih  dekat.  Ahli-ahli  akademik  yang  dipilih  adalah  dari  Akademi  Pengajian  Islam  Universiti Malaya,   Universiti   Kebangsaan   Malaysia,   Universiti   Sains   Islam   Malaysia   dan   Universiti   Islam Antarabangsa  yang  mana  kesemuanya  dalam  pelbagai  bidang  Pengajian  Islam.  Kaedah yang  digunakan dalam kajian ini adalah soal selidik iaitu persampelan berkelompok. Penyelidikmengedarkan borang soal selidik tersebut kepada ahli akademik di universiti tersebut. Berdasarkan, analisis deskriptif soal selidik ini, dapat dirumuskan bahawa ahli akademik sama ada dalam bidang hadith atau lain-lain bidang adalah terlibat dan turut memberi sumbangan dalam pengajaran hadith seperti di universiti-universiti awam dan lain-lain institusi  pengajian.  Ini  menunjukkan  bahawa  kebanyakan  ahli  akademik  mempunyai  pengetahuan  yang baik  berkaitan  dengan  bidang  hadith.  Oleh  itu,  mereka  adalah  antara  golongan  sangat  sesuai  dijadikan sebagai rujukan masyarakat dalam menyelesaikan permasalahan Sunnah dan bidaah, terutama sekali ahli akademik yang pakar dalam bidang hadith.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Naser Jamal Khdour ◽  
Omar Durrah ◽  
Martin Harris

<p>This study seeks to shed light on the phenomenon of job burnout, and its prevalence amongst the staff and seeks to address the issue of the level of job satisfaction in Jordanian universities, together with the examination of the effect of job burnout on job satisfaction. The study adopted a descriptive analytical approach through a comparative study between public universities and private universities, and used the questionnaire as basic tool for data collection, which was distributed to a sample of (200) members of the administrative staff in Jordanian public and private universities. The study found that the degree of job burnout experienced by the administrative staff in the university sector was more than average, Showed that low personal performance dimension has ranked the first as the most persistent job burnout dimension then physical and emotional exhaustion then negative attitude towards relationships. It observed that the degree of job burnout in public universities was greater than in the private universities. The level of staff job satisfaction in the public universities was less than that observed in private universities. The study showed that no dimension of job morally affects on employees satisfaction in public universities. while only one dimension (low personal achievement) affects employees satisfaction in private universities.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Robert Kyaligonza ◽  
Edson Kamagara

In this study, we examined three sets of antecedents of staff turnover in public universities in Uganda: demographic, controllable and uncontrollable. Data were collected from lecturers and administrators at the universities. Our findings suggest that the extent of controllable turnover is greater than uncontrollable turnover and that poor management practices are the major cause of employee turnover. Poor motivation was reported to be a major problem. In particular, economic incentives were found to be grossly inadequate to retain lecturers in the university system. Therefore, it is recommended that the universities upgrade their incentive systems, especially the economic motivators. The study also revealed that there is a pressing need to make the lecturers working environment conducive for the universities core functions of teaching, research and community engagement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 79-79
Author(s):  
Lucia Galvagni ◽  
◽  

"The presentation intends to present and illustrate an experience of teaching clinical ethics realized with a group of clinicians and philosophy students and held at the Philosophy Department of the University of Trento, Italy (Spring 2013 and Spring 2015). The class was intended to train clinicians and students to the main concepts of clinical ethics and to a specific methodology to approach clinical matters with ethical and philosophical tools. The class offered a space and time of listening, confronting, debating and learning. The opportunity to dialogue and to reflect, starting form clinical cases presented by clinicians and to realize an ethical analysis of them, combining languages and competences, resulted extremely relevant for clinicians, for students involved and for the teachers themselves. It represented – as well – a first and previous step to start some action-research in specific clinical units, as the local Intensive Care Unit, the Transplantation Coordination Unit and the Mountain Medicine and Ethics Lab. "


Author(s):  
Georgina Asi Owusu ◽  
◽  
Rev. Isaac Barfi Sarbeng ◽  
Paul Kwesi Mensah ◽  
Bernice Owusu Sekyere ◽  
...  

This paper sought to find out the reasons why in the view of faculty members and officers, some academic Deans in public universities are ineffective leaders. Faculty members and officers of some faculties and schools in University of Cape Coast were requested to first say why in their view; some Deans in University of Cape Coast turn out to be ineffective leaders. Second, they were also requested to give their views on the consequences of leadership failure. Using a qualitative design, the investigators sampled eight (8) faculty members and four (4) faculty officers purposively from four Faculties in University of Cape Coast. Interviewees were asked to consider their own Deans first. A thematic narrative analysis was used to analyse data from the interviews and reported. The results showed that Deans fail due to poor posture, poor interpersonal skill, unclear vision and direction and communication failure. The paper has shown that the consequences of a Dean’s failure affect individual members within the faculty, and create disaffection thus, affecting organisational output. It was therefore recommended that the University Council and Management should consider reviewing the current policy of voting deans into office if it even calls for amendments in the 2016 Statute of the University.


Author(s):  
Stanley Fish

But you can’t do it in a vacuum. And although academics would be reluctant to admit it, the conditions that make what they do possible are established and maintained by administrators. When I was a dean, the question I was most often asked by faculty members was, “Why do administrators make so much more money than we do?” The answer I gave was simple: administrators work harder, they have more work to do, and they actually do it. At the end of my tenure as dean, I spoke to some administrators who had been on the job for a short enough time to be able still to remember what it was like to be a faculty member and what thoughts they had then about the work they did now. One said that she had come to realize how narcissistic academics are: an academic, she mused, is focused entirely on the intellectual stock market and watches its rises and falls with an anxious and selfregarding eye. As an academic, you’re trying to get ahead; as an administrator, you’re trying “to make things happen for other people”; you’re “not advancing your own profile, but advancing the institution, and you’re more service oriented.” A second new administrator reported that he finds faculty members “unbelievably parochial, selfish, and selfindulgent.” They believe that their time is their own even when someone else is paying for it. They say things like “I don’t get paid for the summer.” They believe that they deserve everything and that if they are ever denied anything, it could only be because an evil administrator has committed a great injustice. Although they are employees of the university (and in public universities, of the state), they consider themselves independent contractors engaged fitfully in free-lance piecework. They have no idea of how comfortable a life they lead. Neither, said a third administrator recently up from the ranks, do they have any idea of how the university operates. They seem proud of their parochialism and boast of their inability to access the many systems that hold the enterprise together.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 127-135
Author(s):  
Mônica Dantas ◽  
Sandra Meyer ◽  
Suzane Weber

This round table presents an overview of activities developed at higher education institutions with graduate and postgraduate studies in dance in Brazil, especially southern Brazil. Oddly enough, amid the global crisis in early 2008, the Brazilian government launched an educational program that allowed the expansion of courses at the graduate level, including dance, in several public and free universities. As an example of this scenario, we present our experiences in two public universities, UFRGS and UDESC. These dance courses have seen increasing interest and confrontation the presence of artists and researchers seeking to investigate their own work or the work of others. How can we contemplate structuring contents and methods to teach dance in the university context? How does a dance artist associate the experience of dancing to academic research? How does teaching dance force universities to think about embodied knowledge? The situation of teaching dance in Brazilian universities shows that there is still a lot to be done, considering that the creation of these courses is rather new and that dance, in this context, is an area of ongoing consolidation. The struggle to create a greater number of dance courses in universities is part of the discussion of this session. The practice of teaching dance in universities seeks to articulate repertoires of knowledges that belong to different traditions and artistic experiences transversed by reflections about contemporary dance, and to qualify the teacher, the dancer, and the researcher.


2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abubakar Idris Hassan ◽  
Mohd Nazri Baharom ◽  
Rozita Abdul Mutalib

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the social capital factors of career advancement of female academic staff in Nigerian universities. Design/methodology/approach A measurement and structural analysis were conducted for the three independent variables and a dependent variable on 20 public universities. Data were collected using a structured self-administered questionnaire. The dependent variable was female academic staff career advancement and the independent variables were mentoring, networking and government machinery. Using stratified random sampling, 532 academic staff were selected as the study respondents. They represented sampling criteria such as federal and state universities. Findings Structural modeling analysis showed that social capital variables, specifically mentoring, networking and government machinery variables, were significant contributors to the career advancement of the female academic staff in Nigerian universities. Practical implications This study creates an insight into the knowledge of career advancement among female academic staff in public universities. These institutions dominate the university system in Nigeria and serve as the main avenue for university education in the country. At the level of higher institution, HRD is significant, particularly in creating awareness among academic staff about their career planning and aspirations, the role that the perceived environmental factors play in their advancement to higher positions in the university and how they should further utilize those factors. Originality/value The paper examines social capital factors (limited to mentoring, networking and government machinery) that are of concern to managing the career advancement of female academic staff in public universities.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document