An Undergraduate Perspective on Ethics

Every year since 2009, I have asked the students in my Historian’s Workshop class to draw up ethical research and teaching guidelines for historians. Their perspective is shaped, in part, by our reading of John Weiner’s Historians in Trouble, and by doing our own research into debates across the political spectrum about historians’ ethical quandaries. Students delight in this work and have strong feelings about issues of power, transparency, good planning, and due diligence that then effect the way they see their own research practices. In 2010, my students’ list of ethical guidelines was published by Perspectives, an outcome that reinforced to students the importance of thinking about, having, and practicing strong ethics in historical work. This paper will summarize the conclusions drawn by eight years of Knox students as they consider the confluence of ethics and history.