The Watergate disclosures and other scandals of the early 1970s were startling examples of the immorality of conduct and decision-making by persons in high and responsible places. Decent men and women reacted with dismay, anger, and, in some cases, with a determination to try to change things. For example, when Thomas Martin, then President of Illinois Institute of Technology, received news of a gift of half a million dollars to his University, he seized the opportunity to make a real contribution to professional morality and responsibility. President Martin sought out the small group of professional philosophers at LIT to inquire whether we were interested in developing a program of research and teaching in professional ethics. That was how the Ethics Center was born.

During the infancy of the Ethics Center, when these philosophers were trying, in effect, to retool and to learn how to apply moral philosophy to concrete situations, we met for several hours every week. Early on it was determined that field work-that is, that interviews and research and investigation and reading about the actual problems and issues facing engineers-was going to be absolutely essential. No "armchair philosopher" was ever part of the Center's team!

Far and away the most useful and inspiring contact any of us had in the days of our early travail was with Professor Eben Vey of the Department of Civil Engineering. Eben Vey was deeply troubled by the emerging evidence of serious misconduct by engineers, and he resolved to dedicate whatever strength remained to him to helping our fledging Center become established and rightly oriented. His death from cancer the next year was a great loss to his profession and to the citizenry as well as to us. He attended every one of our meetings during the three or four months when we were first learning how to explore this new field. His presence and character then and the memory of them now give us an intuition of what the ideal standard of professional responsibility should be.

Subsequent to the novelty, intensity and inspiration of those earliest days, a great deal has been accomplished. The first Center Director was Ernest d'Anjou (1976-79). During his years we prepared the first "Moral Issues in Engineering" course and with no known precedent. One exceedingly tough-minded student wrote later to two of us: "I thought the whole idea of such a course was dumb and I didn't really enjoy it that much, but man have I ever found that I use the things you taught me, now that I'm out and working! Thanks." At that time too, Robert Ladenson led the preparation and publication of the first annotated bibliography in Engineering Ethics. Various members of the Center group were regularly invited to attend and address meetings, to serve as consultants, to give public lectures, and to organize workshops and conferences. A Conference on Engineering Ethics, funded by N.S.F was conducted at LIT Engineers and philosophers from around the country worked together on cases and on formulating morally acceptable solutions to concrete and troublesome situations during two weeks in the summer of 1979. From the beginning, the main responsibility for this Conference, for subsequent conferences in this field and for important publications resulting from them was assumed by Vivian Weil, who of course always made appropriate use of the other long-time Center members as well.

During those first years, two other "Moral Issues" courses were developed and began to be taught regularly, one in Business and one in Architecture and City Planning. Originally every Center Course was co-taught by a philosopher and a professional engineer or Business School professor or architect. Every Center course emphasizes the concrete, on-the-job aspects of moral problems and the instructors try to keep up-to-date on newly emerging practical situations within these and other professions.

Dr. Mark Frankel became Center Director in 1979. During the Frankel years a tremendous number of new and exciting enterprises were initiated and all earlier projects were continued and expanded. These accomplishments are especially impressive in view of the fact that both our internal and external funding had diminished! Yet somehow grants were obtained for projects in engineering ethics, for workshops and meetings related to architectural ethics, for investigations about the concept of `owning' intellectual products such as software, for consideration of the restrictions on freedom of information in science, for "modules" in applied ethics, and so on.

A Center Library was established during this period and we collected an impressive and growing collection of relevant books, periodicals and articles. The Center hosted a series of luncheons, each of which focused on a particular area of moral concern to a more general population. These working luncheons turned out to be very successful and made many new friends for the Center, as well as teaching those of us who work here more about "real world" moral issues. A new "Moral Issues" course was developed by John Snapper dealing with problems associated with the computer industry and technology. The list of invited addresses and publications by Center members has grown tremendously and our working knowledge of how to teach an effective course in professional ethics for precisely targeted professions has so deepened that we are regularly consulted by other Universities and Centers on how to do this. Finally, during the Frankel years we began to publish a regular periodical called PERSPECTIVES ON THE PROFESSIONS.

In the summer of 1986 Dr. Frankel resigned to take the position of Program Head of the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility of the A.A.A.S. The interim Director, Dr. Vivian Weil, is a nationally prominent and widely respected figure in the field of professional ethics. Her depth of concern, information and judgment in this field is equaled by few if any persons in the country. And for this year, at least, we have also the superb talents and industry of Dr. Michael Davis, a philosopher with an impressive record of publications on legal ethics.

As we start our second decade, therefore, we feel confident about our continued and growing ability to contribute to the goal set for us so long ago by Eben Vey. That goal is to help to promote professional responsibility and to uncover the range of conditions that diminish it. Effective progress toward this objective requires the kind of reflective and analytic examination of contexts, conditions and issues which, over the years, members of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions have learned how to offer.