Evidently, at least one major medical school things so. And to boot, their Chancellor, President and Board of Trustees appears to think that they can not only afford to live without a medical ethics department but to actively do away with their current one.

The Health Science Center at the University of Tennessee is considering a series of cutbacks that includes the excising of the Department of Human Values and Ethics at that university. When searching for places that the budget could be trimmed, clearly ethics was something that was expendable. Yet, clearly these administrators did not think about how much money ethicists actually save a university in terms of real costs–ethics consultations prevent real and horrible conflicts from happening at university hospitals around the country every day that cost hospitals millions of dollars. Having ethicists on staff mean that problems with research and in the clinical setting get solved, new policies get made, and most ethicists do this work without additional pay–while they are teaching classes and performing other essential services to the university.

It is odd that this institution would choose this cut at this time while most other medical schools are racing to add medical ethics to their curriculum, to their rosters of centers and departments. Clearly it’s not just window dressing either–these departments and faculty members do real work for universities and medical schools—if I toot the horn of my colleagues!

So, let’s ask the critical question again: can UT or any other medical school afford not to have medical ethics? I think the answer is a clear: I think not.

Summer Johnson, PhD