Responsible governance and the university: ethics across the curriculum as institutional architecture

Insights based on the research article “Ethics Across the Curriculum: Experiences and Recommendations from a Latin American University”. Maria Eugenia Barroso. March 2026.

In a global context shaped by technological acceleration, the expansion of artificial intelligence, the erosion of public trust, and growing normalisation and impunity of corrupt practices, ethics is no longer a marginal issue in higher education; instead, it has become a matter of governance. Within this framework, the article “Ethics Across the Curriculum: Experiences and Recommendations from a Latin American University,” the result of the first research project of the Globethics Competence Centre, presents a model of ethical governance in higher education.

The experience of Universidad de los Andes in Colombia shows that ethics can shift from being an isolated subject to become a transversal institutional infrastructure. This is Uniandes’ main contribution: through more than ten years of implementation by its Applied Ethics Center, the university has developed the “Ethics Across the Curriculum” (EAC) model, which seeks to integrate ethical reflection into all disciplines.

Unlike the traditional approach, in which ethics appear as an additional subject or as a formal graduation requirement, the EAC model seeks to permeate the entire educational process. To do so, it relies on concrete tools: faculty training, courses with explicit ethical objectives, communities of practice, as well as institutional monitoring and evaluation. By this logic, ethics ceases to be merely a normative discourse and becomes part of the university’s organizational architecture.

This paradigm shift is essential. Responsible governance is not built on abstract declarations, but on institutional mechanisms capable of sustaining values in practice. In this regard, the research article highlights one of the main risks facing universities: the inconsistency between the values they proclaim and the practices they actually uphold. It is not enough to teach ethics; it is essential to practice it institutionally.

The authors identify several structural challenges that shape ethical formation: the logic of performance and competition, the pressure to maximize academic results, economic incentives that prioritize productivity, and a meritocratic culture detached from an ethic of care. Ethics can hardly flourish in institutions whose incentives contradict the principles they claim to defend. For this reason, any university that aspires to educate ethical citizens must review its evaluation policies, faculty incentives, recognition systems, and measures of success. From this perspective, the EAC model is not only pedagogical, but also political.

The article also puts forward a powerful idea: the university can be understood as a microsociety in which the state, the market, and civil society intersect. As a space for the education of future government officials, business leaders, engineers, and public decision-makers, the university has the responsibility to foster what the authors call “ethical empowerment”: the ability to deliberate critically and assume responsibility for the consequences of one’s decisions.

Another central contribution of the model is its emphasis on sustainability. The authors stress the need for clear institutional policies, resource allocation, continuous training, monitoring, and evaluation. In other words, they propose a process of institutionalization that makes it possible to move from individual will to organizational structure. In this way, ethics becomes a permanent, integrated institutional policy.

It is especially significant that this proposal emerges from a Latin American university. In a region marked by structural inequalities, crises of institutional trust, and deficits in democratic governance, a model that links ethical education with institutional responsibility carries transformative relevance. Responsible governance begins in the classroom, but it is only consolidated when the institution as a whole lives out the values it teaches. That is the challenge, and also one of the great opportunities for higher education in the twenty-first century.

I invite you to read the full article in Spanish here.