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This paper calls for a credo for communication ethics to be established. The credo will consist of two parts: a description of ethical communication, its importance, and application guidelines; and a statement of beliefs which expound upon the description. The credo will be established using the intellectual capital of communications educators and researchers, as well as the heritage of rhetorical thought and the growing consciousness of the breadth and depth of the communication enterprise and its dominant role in our world. Several guidelines are suggested for the formation of the credo: (1) it must be grounded in respect for the moral worth of each human being and in democracy and democratic values; (2) it must account for the ethical dimension of all communication, for various communication roles and responsibilities, and for the increased power of communication and its consequent uncontrollable nature; (3) it must be offered as suggestion rather than commandment; and (4) it must be broadly applicable. (EF)

Argues that changing the reward system for college faculty to respond to societal and governmental pressures will require a massive model shift by educators within the academy. Outlines a scenario by which such a shift might take place in American higher education. (HB)

Addresses the issue of the relationship of ethics and speech communication, with emphasis on the distribution of responsibility among theorists, critics, researchers, practitioners, teachers, and students. (PD)

The relationship of ethics to communication is a central issue in the discipline of comunication. Accepting the idea that the twin goals of communication are to maximize the freedom of the individual and maximize the quality of society, acceptance of responsibility becomes the first moral article in a code of communication ethics. Most often, textbooks point out that the responsibility for ethical practice falls largely upon the speaker, but this responsibility cannot be too heavy to bear. While also assigning responsibility to listeners, textbooks often neglect a theory of responsibility that covers all the various ways in which people communicate in the communication process, including their roles as members of society in general. In all communication practices, people negotiate the ethical code by which they live. Teachers and researchers in communication have special responsibilities to identify the inexorable relationship between communication and ethics and to bring to the attention of students as well as people generally the fact that their communication behavior is defining the way in which they live with each other. (JL)

By providing conventions, journals, and bibliographies as outlets for scholarship and research, speech communication associations make available resources necessary for the discipline to pursue its scholarship and serve as a distribution system for relevant research materials. An association also fulfills the important function of refereeing--contributing to recognition, promotion, and tenure while preventing information overload. Associations also support alternative approaches and commission scholarship that otherwise would not be available. Many of the things that associations undertook initially are now being done by academicians. In dealing with a larger, more mature, and more specialized profession, the speech communication associations face some problems: increased specialization leads to fragmentation and sometimes conflicting demands, smaller faculty size and fewer graduate students will probably be the rule for the next decade, patterns of research and publication are changing, and publication costs are rising while subscriptions are not. Professional organizations will have to adjust to these changes, but whatever the adjustments may entail, these organizations will remain essential for speech communication research and scholarship. (JL)

A quick reading of Franklyn Haiman's writings on ethics and free speech would suggest many disparities in his early conception of the ethical communicator and in his conception of free speech and the activity it allows in a democracy. In the material on ethics, Haiman addresses the ideal of how people ought to communicate with others in an ethical way in a democratic society. In the work on free speech, he focuses upon the role that the state should play in regulating the communication activity within a democracy. Haiman argues, for example, that the state should act not to prevent speech but to protect speech. He further suggests that the state should act essentially to protect all speech, not just ethical speech. The congruency of these two views can be exemplified in thinking of the key virtues that ought to animate citizens in the democracy as they go about their roles as active participants in the polis. Haiman calls for the citizen communicator to be a person of great practical wisdom who uses the intellect to develop a habitual pattern of behavior in which communication activities are guided by the robust virtues of proper pride, rational decision making and action, and tolerance. (HOD)

The mechanisms by which nonparticipants come to exert a particular emphasis upon the ethical dimensions of the communication process and why the pressures exerted may be toward a more ideal ethic rather than toward actual practice is the focus of this paper. The paper begins by noting that an analysis of how nonparticipants contribute to the ethical dimensions of a communication activity involves at least an examination of an individual's or group's actions, and a differentiation between the mechanisms by which the individuals in a particular communication interaction derived their ethical norms and practices. The paper then explores two interests of modern ethicists that provide a basis for initial analysis of both these dimensions: (1) the analytical movement with an effort to define the nature of morality, what constitutes a morality or a moral point of view; and (2) the problem of the relationship between the morality of an individual and that of a group or society. Based on this exploration, the paper posits that nonparticipants provide a morality that constitutes a framework within which communication must function. The paper concludes that the existence of that morality legitimates intervention and pressure by nonparticipants so that they may become participants in several ways, including becoming an active participant on an immediate basis, or by having an impact upon the ultimate effect through any number of communication processes. (HTH)