Brown University was never really known as a place to learn bioethics as a profession.
But what Brown was known for in bioethics was its great research and writing, and a kind of leadership in bioethics that allowed it to create the very first “bioethics major” for those who are not yet ready to learn a profession – undergraduates. It was a brilliant concept – teach undergraduates about medicine, philosophy, the social sciences, and so many other things through the filter of ethical issues in biomedical science. And it worked. It was started by Dan Brock, a philosopher and bioethics pioneer who retired from Brown several years ago, taking positions first at NIH, then Harvard.
Brown couldn’t get its act together to hire Brock’s replacement. It had, instead, a very public implosion in bioethics, in fact, as the Brown philosophy department displayed the nearsightedness that has become typical of philosophy departments, declining to hire any among a pool of strong applicants for Brock’s job because none of them were “good enough philosophers.” It was the sort of decision that has characterized the past decade in philosophy, a ten year period that has seen the more-or-less total demise of the public role of academic philosophy.
So bioethics at Brown – easily one of the school’s best-known areas of accomplishment – essentially died, and with it that incredible bioethics major, which Brown has announced will now die. The bioethics major wasn’t just a precedent that a number of other schools would eventually follow, although it did establish that an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in bioethics might make educational sense. What it really represented was the pinnacle of Brown’s greatness as an undergraduate institution – back when Brown was a top-10 school in the late 80s. It was a fabulous example of how the Brown “design your own major” program both attracted good students with good motivations and also taught them to combine science and humanities.
So, just like that, Brown disappears from bioethics. R.I.P.