Ethics and professionalism in the contemporary university

The paper analyzes the theoretical approach to academic ethics that explains its specific character using the notion of professionalism. If university is an organization uniting professional teachers rather than providers of educational services, than norms of academic ethics exceed the bounds of a diligent fulfillment of formalized job responsibilities. A professor has a considerable freedom as to how and what to teach and takes full responsibility for his/her professional decisions. A university administrator should find a way to reconcile a creative freedom of a professor with a coherence of academic curricula. Imperatives of academic ethics are aimed at establishing an optimal interaction of these key figures. This is a central thesis of conceptions developed by R. Weingartner and V.I. Bakshtanovsky