




































[Expositions 7.1 (2013) 33–41]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Mearsheimer’s Mistakes: Why Colleges Should (and Inevitably Do) Provide 

Moral Guidance 

 

GREGORY BASSHAM 

King’s College 

 

 

Should colleges be in the business of moral education? May college professors―including those 

who teach ethics courses―openly endorse and defend particular moral theories and values in 

class? In a much-discussed address and subsequent follow-up paper, John J. Mearsheimer, a 

distinguished political scientist at the University of Chicago, has answered both of these 

questions with an emphatic “No” (Mearsheimer 1998a). In this paper I shall argue against 

Mearsheimer’s view. In particular, I shall defend three claims: (1) Colleges unavoidably provide 

certain forms of moral guidance to their students. (2) Colleges may and should seek to positively 

influence the moral characters and values of their students. (3) College professors may, and 

sometimes should, engage in classroom ethical advocacy, that is, expressly endorse and defend 

contestable ethical views. 

Why does Mearsheimer think that colleges should refrain from ethical guidance and 

advocacy?
1
 His central argument can be summarized as follows. 

Today, elite universities like the University of Chicago, Measheimer argues, are “remarkably 

amoral” institutions. By this he doesn’t mean that such institutions actively teach their students 

to be unethical. They are “amoral” (as opposed to “immoral) in the sense that they have no 

“moral agenda” (Mearsheimer 1998b, 195), make little effort to provide moral guidance, and are 

“largely mum on ethical issues” (Mearshiemer 1998a, 150). There are three ways, he says, that 

colleges could engage in the task of moral education. First, they could provide students with 

explicit moral guidance both in the classroom and in university publications that spell out 

acceptable and unacceptable forms of behavior. Second, they could offer a wide array of classes 

where moral issues are discussed in detail and students are encouraged to make up their own 

minds about which views are most defensible. Third, professors can promote virtuous behavior 

in their students by serving as good ethical role models. 

None of these three forms of moral education is viable, Mearsheimer argues. Explicit moral 

guidance in classroom teaching or in university publications is unacceptable because it involves 

“preaching about values” (Mearsheimer 1998b, 194) and violates the most important mission of 

modern universities: to teach critical thinking. In fields such as ethics where there are no 

“approved solutions” (Mearsheimer, 1998a, 148), the role of faculty is not to tell students “what 

to think, but how to think” (Mearsheimer, 1998b, 196). The second option, offering classes in 

which students are invited to think critically and in depth about ethical issues would be great if a 

“scientific morality” were possible, but unfortunately efforts to develop such a rigorous, 

knowledge-based morality have “failed almost completely” (Mearsheimer 1998a, 150). As a 

result, present-day universities “operate on the belief that there is a clear separation between 



Mearsheimer’s Mistakes  34 

intellectual and moral purpose, and they pursue the former while largely ignoring the latter” 

(Mearsheimer 1998a, 150). Finally, college professors should not seek to be ethical role models 

for their students, because professors are no more ethical than any other class of professionals, 

nor can they claim any special moral expertise or authority. For these reasons, colleges should 

not provide moral guidance or engage in moral education. Such a task “is no longer in their job 

description” (Mearsheimer 1998b, 194). Instead, they should focus, as Mearsheimer’s own 

University of Chicago does, on “fundamentally amoral” tasks such as teaching critical thinking, 

broadening intellectual horizons, and promoting self-awareness (Mearsheimer 1998a, 140). 

There are multiple confusions in this argument. Let’s begin with Mearsheimer’s false 

opposition between teaching critical thinking or teaching values. 

 

Why Colleges Necessarily Teach Values 

Mearsheimer acknowledges one legitimate exception to his ban on values education in college: 

rules prohibiting plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct (Mearsheimer 1998a, 150). 

Such conduct, he says, is inconsistent with the university’s mission to promote truth and 

independent thinking. He fails to see that a slew of other bona fide educational values can be 

justified by a similar logic. 

All colleges are committed to the pursuit of academic and intellectual excellence. This, of 

course, involves a great deal more than simply avoiding cheating and plagiarism. Intellectual 

virtues such as diligence, accuracy, rigor, exactness, persistence, time-management, curiosity, 

fair-mindedness, and open-mindedness are implicit in the pursuit of academic excellence. If 

colleges, in virtue of their missions, can rightly “preach” against plagiarism and other forms of 

academic misconduct, they can, by the same token, “preach” for a great many other virtues of 

intellectual excellence. 

A quick sampling of college mission statements shows that universities nearly always aspire 

to do more than simply promote academic achievement and intellectual excellence. They also 

seek to produce graduates who are “well-prepared for the workforce,” “responsible and active 

participants in civic life,” “environmentally conscious,” and “dedicated to the pursuit of justice 

and the common good.” If these are a university’s explicit and overarching goals, it’s hard to see 

why it may not consciously seek to advance them in ways that respect other mission-based goals 

(including Mearsheimer’s “critical thinking”). 

As student handbooks make clear, all colleges make and enforce rules governing students’ 

moral behavior. Typical student handbooks include rules governing responsible use of 

information technology, hazing, hate crimes, unwanted sexual advances, disruptive classroom 

behavior, employee-student fraternization, excessive noise, and residence hall visitation hours. 

Reasonable and even necessary rules of this sort surely constitute an acceptable form of “moral 

guidance.” All colleges (and other organizations and institutions) must “teach values” in this 

minimal sense of making and enforcing rules that promote institutional objectives and positive 

human interactions. 



35  Bassham 

 

Mearsheimer overlooks the many ways that colleges unavoidably teach values because he 

equates “moral guidance” with academic “preaching,” which he rightly condemns. By 

“preaching,” he seems to means offering explicit moral advice to students in ways that amount to 

“moral value infusion” (Mearsheimer 1998b, 195) and aren’t open to challenge or reasoned 

debate. Mearsheimer is right that “preaching” in this sense is inappropriate in a college 

classroom and inconsistent with critical thinking. However, he is wrong to suppose that all moral 

guidance is a form of preaching in this sense. 

Moral guidance, in fact, can take many forms, and need not be inconsistent with critical 

thinking (on this theme, see Paul 1993, 303–318). Socrates is a prime example of a skilled moral 

teacher who never sought to impose his own views and always respected the intellectual 

autonomy of his interlocutors by means of his eponymous “Socratic method.” Indeed, any form 

of ethical advocacy that appeals solely to reason, eschews sophistries and cheap propaganda 

tricks, and is manifestly open to debate is fully consistent with critical thinking―unless, that is, 

one thinks that ethics itself is incompatible with critical thinking, which may in fact be 

Mearsheimer’s view. Some of what he says about the failed quest for a “scientific morality” 

suggests that Mearsheimer is a late-blooming logical positivist or emotivist who thinks that only 

“facts,” not “values,” can be subject to rational argumentation and critical inquiry. If so, 

Mearsheimer would do well to browse through an introductory ethics text or two, for as Wayne 

Booth notes in his reply to Mearsheimer, crude fact/value dichotomies of this sort have long 

since been exploded (Booth 1998, 174). 

The idea of a fact/value gap goes back to Hume, who correctly pointed out that no logically 

valid argument may move from purely factual or descriptive premises to a normative conclusion. 

This follows from simple logic. In a valid argument, the conclusion must be implicitly contained 

in the premises, and no normative conclusion is contained in any set of purely factual premises. 

A normative conclusion always adds something, or goes beyond, what is asserted by a group of 

factual statements.
2
 

Confusion results when Hume’s purely logical point is confused with much stronger and more 

controversial claims. Nothing in Hume’s argument implies that “there are no moral truths or 

moral facts” or that “moral claims aren’t cognitive or rationally justifiable.” Mearsheimer 

appears to fall into this confusion. Despite obvious differences between ethics and science, there 

are no sound reasons for denying the existence of moral truths. Nor, a fortiori, are there adequate 

grounds for denying the objectivity of moral judgments. Patently, some reasons for moral 

conclusions are better than other. (“It hurts” is a better reason to believe that “Punching people in 

the nose just for the fun of it is wrong” than “Grass is green.”) As ethicist James Rachels argues, 

this simple fact about good and bad reasons is sufficient to establish the objectivity of ethics. In 

Rachels’ view, “the right thing to do is whatever there are the best reasons for doing” (Rachels 

and Rachels 2009, 162). As long as we can distinguish (as we clearly can) between better and 

worse reasons for ethical conclusions, no hard-and-fact distinction can be drawn between what 

Mearsheimer calls “intellectual” and “moral” purposes. 

 



Mearsheimer’s Mistakes  36 

Why Some Forms of Moral Education Are Legitimate 

If colleges, as I have argued, unavoidably teach values, it follows (assuming that higher 

education is a worthwhile endeavor) that they may teach values. At a minimum, as we have seen, 

such values include (a) academic success virtues such as accuracy, hard work, and honesty and 

(b) student handbook values such as respect for privacy and responsible use of information 

technology. Might other values also be legitimately taught? I believe that they can. 

Mission-based values of the sort previously mentioned might be legitimately promoted. A 

college that seeks to prepare its graduates “to succeed in an increasingly diverse global 

economy” can properly seek to develop in its students qualities of mind and character that are 

conducive to such success. The same is true of mission-based values such as “active and 

responsible civic participation” and “commitment to justice and the common good.” The case for 

teaching mission-values is strongest, of course, at sectarian colleges, which are usually up-front 

about the centrality of such values in their educational vision. But non-sectarian universities can 

also properly highlight and advance their mission-based values. At no university is “critical 

thinking” the be-all and end-all of educational mission. 

Improving students’ moral reasoning skills is another legitimate form of collegiate moral 

education. Sharpening students’ abilities to analyze ethical arguments, understand ethical 

concepts, make sound moral decisions, and offer cogent and well-formulated ethical arguments 

is clearly a worthwhile and appropriate task at colleges that offer ethics classes and value such 

abilities in their students. As Wayne Booth shows, Mearsheimer significantly understates the 

number of ethics-related courses offered at elite liberal arts and research universities such as the 

University of Chicago (Booth 1993, 174–76). And as we’ve seen, Mearsheimer’s claim that 

colleges such focus exclusively on “intellectual” purposes, not “moral” ones such as improving 

students moral reasoning abilities, is based on a long-discredited fact/value dichotomy. 

Advocates of “character education” have made a strong case for teaching consensus values 

such as honesty, respect, responsibility, hard work, fairness, kindness, cooperation, and self-

discipline in public schools. Supporters note that such core values are recognized as desirable 

character traits in virtually all ethical and religious traditions; that they are widely seen as 

essential for individual fulfillment and social harmony; and that teaching them in public schools 

can make up for ethical deficits in our culture and prevent the formation of “ethical illiterates” 

(Lickona 1992, 37–47). The case for teaching consensus values in colleges is weaker than it is at 

the pre-collegiate level. College students are older and have less plastic characters; there is more 

emphasis in college on intellectual and career training and less on social adjustment; and as 

Mearsheimer notes, there is a greater stress on teaching students “how to think,” as opposed to 

“what to think.” Nevertheless, it is a mistake to say, as Mearsheimer does, that teaching values is 

no longer in colleges’ “job description[s].” Universities don’t exist simply to promote critical 

thinking and the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. They have a valid interest in 

promoting both their students’ individual fulfillment and the collective good of society, and for 

this reason should promote values and character traits that are necessary for these ends. They 

should not, of course, do this in ways that conflict with independent thinking or amount to 



37  Bassham 

 

indoctrination or bully-pulpit preaching. The risk of such excesses is inherent in any program of 

moral education. But the greater risk is that amoral universities will produce amoral graduates. 

When professors, in the interests of “critical thinking,” refuse to endorse even consensus values 

like honesty and fairness, many students will naturally conclude that these values are relative or 

subjective or otherwise empty or cognitively suspect. This was the very concern that led Socrates 

and Plato to oppose the Sophists.
3
 Given the fashionableness of attacks on the objectivity of 

ethics in academia and the many headwinds confronting moral education in our time, these 

concerns are arguably even greater today. 

 

A Plea for Ethical Advocacy 

Until the last few decades, nearly all ethics textbooks openly took partisan stands for and against 

various ethical views. For example, William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political 

Philosophy defended a kind of utilitarian divine command theory, John Dewey and James 

Tufts’s Ethics argued for a kind of pragmatic ethical naturalism, and Vernon Bourke’s Ethics: A 

Textbook in Moral Philosophy defended a Thomistic approach to moral issues. Nowadays, it is 

relatively rare to encounter such texts
4
; most leading ethics textbooks today are anthologies that 

present a variety of competing approaches and leave it to readers to make up their own minds 

about the merits of these views. This is the sort of non-advocative “critical thinking” approach 

Mearsheimer evidently favors.
5
 I want to suggest, on the contrary, that it is often appropriate and 

pedagogically effective for ethics instructors to defend in class their own views on controversial 

issues. 

Mearsheimer offers no reason why ethics instructors shouldn’t engage in classroom advocacy 

other than his claim that this amounts to illicit “preaching,” which we’ve already considered and 

rejected. So let’s look at another much-discussed argument for the same conclusion: that 

presented in Stanley Fish’s 2008 book, Save the World on Your Own Time. 

Fish argues for what he calls a “purified academic enterprise” in which college professors are 

prohibited from consciously aiming to shape students’ moral, political, or civic values, or taking 

partisan stands, endorsing contestable ideas, or advocating any values other than those that are 

immanent in the academic enterprise itself (honesty, thoroughness, rigor, and so forth). Most of 

Fish’s arguments don’t apply to ethics instructors taking stands on issues discussed in class, but 

there are two that do: “the responsibility argument” and “the culture-wars argument.” 

Fish’s responsibility argument is this: Instructors, he says, have a “fighting chance” of 

imparting disciplinary knowledge and analytical skills to their students, but they have “no chance 

at all [. . .] of determining what their behavior and values will be” outside the classroom or after 

graduation (Fish 2008, 58–59. The next few paragraphs draw freely from Bassham 2009). People 

are responsible only for things in their power. It is not in instructors’ power to determine 

students’ non-academic values or behaviors. Moreover, instructors should only aim to achieve 

what they are responsible for, not things that are unforeseen and contingent. Thus, instructors 

should not aim to influence students’ moral, political, civic, or other non-academic values and 

behaviors. 



Mearsheimer’s Mistakes  38 

This argument fails for two reasons. First, Fish’s claim that people are responsible only for 

things in their power is an oversimplification. Responsibility is not an all-or-nothing thing; it 

comes in degrees and can be shared. College professors can bear partial responsibility for their 

students’ nonacademic values and behavior, even though, of course, it is not in professors’ 

“power” (i.e., full or even substantial control) how students will react to their teaching. If I’m a 

business professor and I spend the whole semester dissing ethics and praising the most callous 

forms of amoral capitalism, I bear at least some responsibility if one of my students takes me at 

my word and get caught up in an Enron-like scandal. It is true, as Fish argues, that college 

professors have very limited ability to influence their students’ behavior and values, for either 

good or ill. But that is not the issue. Limited influence is not the same as no influence. The 

question is whether there are things professors can do that will positively impact their students’ 

values and their moral and civic behavior, and whether these are things that professors should be 

doing in light of their other responsibilities. 

Second, Fish’s claim that people should aim to achieve only what they are responsible for is 

an overgeneralization. Imagine if parents or church leaders adopted this principle. Parents clearly 

can’t “determine” whether their kids will respect their prohibitions on underage drinking or risky 

sexual behavior. Should they, therefore, “aim low” and avoid such topics altogether? Should 

pastors stop exhorting their flocks to live righteous lives because they cannot “determine” how 

their congregations will react to such teaching? Fish’s responsibility argument would prohibit far 

too much legitimate guidance and exhortation. 

Fish’s main argument for “purifying” higher education of all partisan or normative advocacy 

is the culture-wars argument. Fish claims that putting the lid on all forms of classroom advocacy 

would neutralize the powerful and increasingly effective argument from the right that America’s 

universities have been commandeered by “tenured radicals” who trash patriotism and religion, 

preach moral relativism, and seek to indoctrinate students with their left-wing politics (Fish 

2008, 114), The issue, Fish thinks, isn’t whether this indictment is sound―he thinks it’s 

overblown but not wholly off-base―but what must be done to counter it in state legislatures and 

in the forum of public opinion. Fish believes that conservatives are winning the public relations 

war, and that as a result public universities are likely to face further cuts in state funding as well 

as intensified efforts by political conservatives to interfere with university hiring, retention, and 

curricular decisions in the name of “ideological balance” and “intellectual diversity” (Fish 2008, 

117–24). By insisting that all professors―liberal or conservative―avoid ideological politics in 

the classroom, Fish believes that this potent conservative public relations campaign can be 

neutralized and the autonomy of America’s universities be preserved (Fish 2008, 150–152). 

This argument fails for two reasons. First, it ignores several very negative effects of Fish’s 

purification proposal that outweigh any likely advantages. And second, it exaggerates the threat 

of crippling, ideologically-driven crippling state funding cuts and a right-wing intrusion into 

university staffing and curricula. 

What negative effects would Fish’s purification proposal have on college teaching? Recall 

that Fish doesn’t just impose a moratorium on overt political or ideological advocacy. He rejects 



39  Bassham 

 

any endorsement of a contestable idea, policy, or value. Professors on his view should transmit 

knowledge, impart analytical skills, teach debates, dissect and weigh arguments―but never draw 

conclusions. They should be rigorously neutral and non-committal on all issues that are open to 

debate or imply a commitment to action. Even in an ethics class, he says, students “shouldn’t be 

arguing about whether stem cell research is a good or bad idea. They should be studying the 

arguments various parties have made about stem cell research [. . . ] Analyzing ethical issues is 

one thing; deciding them is another, and only the first is an appropriate academic activity” (Fish 

2008, 26–27).  

As someone who regularly teaches ethics, I find this view unreal. The kind of neat separation 

Fish calls for between weighing arguments and drawing conclusions is impossible. If, in 

classroom discussion, it becomes clear that view A is true and view B is false, it would be wholly 

artificial to perform an argumentum interruptus and refuse to draw the conclusion that A is true 

and B is false. By refusing to draw this obvious conclusion, the only lesson you would be 

teaching your students is the bad one that well-supported conclusions need not be drawn from 

compelling arguments. 

Moreover, how would Fish’s ban on classroom advocacy be enforced? Would department 

chairs and deans conduct classroom observations to monitor the ideological and normative 

neutrality of professors’ classes? The very idea flouts any concept of academic freedom. 

One must also consider how Fish’s proposal would affect the attractiveness of college 

teaching as a career choice. A great many college professors―myself included―chose teaching 

as a profession because we hoped to have a positive impact on young peoples’ lives. America’s 

colleges and universities have been very successful in attracting highly qualified faculty. Would 

they still be as successful if it were known that college professors are barred from making value 

judgments or attempting to influence their students’ values and ideals? 

Pace Mearsheimer, Fish is right that many college professors do go beyond merely “studying 

the arguments” and do argue forcefully for their own views. And this, I suggest, is often a more 

effective way of teaching than purely noncommittal Socratic discussion or Sophist-style devil’s-

advocate argumentation. Many of the best classes I took in college were those in which 

professors boldly set forth their own views and invited critical responses from their students. 

Often, this lent energy and passion to the discussions, and students appreciated the compliment 

of being treated as worthy interlocutors. Such classes allowed professors to test out their ideas, 

and often better and more sophisticated ideas emerged for discussion than would have been 

elicited by purely Socratic dialogue. There was no conflict between telling students “what to 

think” and teaching them “how to think.” We learned how to think by critically engaging with 

views that were powerfully defended. 

But what of Fish’s fears about the effectiveness of the right’s public relations campaign 

against radical left-wing professors? If the very existence and autonomy of America’s colleges 

and universities are imperiled, shouldn’t we bite the bullet and “purify” our campuses as Fish 

recommends? 



Mearsheimer’s Mistakes  40 

Fish is here crying wolf. For all the complaints about rising costs and tenured radicals, 

Americans are justly proud of their institutions of higher education and understand their value in 

keeping America strong, safe, and prosperous. To suggest that either we make our campuses 

ideologically pure or we put our world-class system of higher education at risk is to pose a false 

choice. The right-wingers may be scoring points, but they are a long way from winning. 

 

Conclusion 

Mearsheimer’s claim that elite colleges and universities like the University of Chicago don’t and 

shouldn’t teach values is false both descriptively and prescriptively. As Fish notes, many college 

professors do engage in ideological and normative advocacy in their teaching―arguably, 

sometimes, to a fault. Mearsheimer’s claim is thus false as a description of what actually takes 

place in college classrooms. It is also false, I have argued, as a statement of what college 

instructors should be doing in their classes. There is no clear separation between teaching 

students “what to think” and teaching them “how to think.” The educational aims Mearsheimer 

endorses―“critical thinking,” “academic success,” “intellectual excellence, “self-awareness,” 

“broadened intellectual horizons”―are thoroughly value-laden. Moreover, a strict embargo on 

classroom value advocacy would weaken America’s colleges, lead to less effective teaching, and 

ultimately result in less critical thinking by faculty and students alike. Every college does and 

should have a “moral agenda.” 

 

 

Notes 

1. Mearsheimer claims that he is “mainly trying to describe how Chicago and other like-minded 

schools deal with ethics,” not “laying out my own thinking on whether and how universities 

should teach morality” (Mearsheimer 1998b, 193). However, it is clear from his discussion 

that Mearsheimer doesn’t think that any robust or self-conscious form of moral education is 

desirable at universities such as his own. 

2. An apparent counterexample: “Whatever Bassham says is true; Bassham has said that he is 

the most virtuous―not to say, best-looking―person alive; therefore, Bassham is the most 

virtuous (and best-looking) person alive.” This obviously valid argument apparently moves 

from purely descriptive premises to a normative conclusion. To avoid such counterexamples, 

Hume’s fact/value argument needs to be careful in its definition of what counts as a “factual” 

or “descriptive” statement. No value terms can be included. 

3. See, for example, Plato’s Protagoras 1956, and Republic 1992, Book I. For a more recent 

statement of the concern, see Bloom 1987, 25–43. 

4. Notable exceptions include Rachels and Rachels 2011, which critiques a number of notable 

ethical theories and defends a kind of good-reasons approach, and Thiroux and Kasemann, 

2011, which defends a “humanitarian ethics” and critiques competing approaches. 



41  Bassham 

 

5. Significantly, Mearsheimer doesn’t claim that instructors must never engage in personal 

advocacy in class. He says, “The key point […] is that we will not attempt to impose our 

theories on you. We will certainly tell you what we think, and we will try to convince you 

that our perspectives are the correct ones, but we will also present you with the alternative 

views and then leave it up to you to decide what you think” (Mearsheimer 1998a, 149). Given 

his blanket embargo on “moral guidance” and “not telling students what to think,” however, 

strict limits on such advocacy would need to be observed.  

 

Works Cited 

Bassham, Gregory. 2009. “Fish’s Purified Ivory Tower: A Review of Stanley Fish’s Save the World 

on Your Own Time,” The Journal of College and University Law 36.1: 287–93. 

Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. 

Booth, Wayne C. 1998. “Introducing Professor Mearsheimer to His Own University.” Philosophy and 

Literature 22.1: 174–78. 

Fish, Stanley. 2008. Save the World on Your Own Time. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Lickona, Thomas. 1992. Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and 

Responsibility. New York: Bantam. 

Mearsheimer, John J. 1998a. “The Aims of Education.” Philosophy and Literature 22.1: 137–55. 

___. 1998b. “Teaching Morality at the Margins.” Philosophy and Literature 22.1: 193–98. 

Paul, Richard. 1993. Critical Thinking: What Every Person Needs to Survive in a Rapidly Changing 

World. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Foundation for Critical Thinking. 

Plato. 1956. Protagoras. In Plato, Protagoras and Meno. Translated by W. K.C. Guthrie. 

Harmondsworth: Penguin. 

___. 1992. The Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett. 

Rachels, James and Stuart Rachels. 2011. The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 7
th
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McGraw-Hill. 

___. 2009. Problems from Philosophy, 2
nd

 ed. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Thiroux, Jacques P. and Keith W. Kasemann. Ethics: Theory and Practice, 11
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