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Universities can sharpen their commitment to democracy through institutional change. This might be resisted by a traditional understanding of universities. The question arises whether universities have defining purposes that demarcate possible university policy, strategic planning, and priority setting. These are significant questions because while universities are among our most stable long-term institutions, there is little consensus on what they are, what they are for, and what makes them valuable. This paper argues that universities can in fact be organized around a wide variety of purposes without thereby becoming any less real as universities. Normative discourse around universities should therefore be unafraid to consider novel ideas that test the limits of our current university concept and our entrenched practices. The argument applies fresh insights from feminist philosophy. Haslanger’s (Haslanger, S. 2000. Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Noûs 34(1), 31-55, Haslanger, S. 2005. What are we talking about? The semantics and politics of social kinds. Hypatia 20(4): 10-26, Haslanger, S. 2012. Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford University Press.) ameliorative account of gender and race provides a model for how to frame novel and critical ideas about universities. Ásta’s (Ásta. 2018. Categories we live by: The construction of sex, gender, race, and other social categories. New York: Oxford University Press.) conferralist framework explains how universities are socially constructed and where our university concept, social behavior, and normative discourse fits into that construction. Stakeholders have the power to create the social fact of whether an institution is a university and what being a university means in each context. However, stakeholders are a heterogenous group and contemporary universities are fragmented institutions in desperate need for an ameliorative account that would guide their construction toward democratic value. That account can build on a distinction between valuing universities as expressions of democracy, its symbols, components, and causal agents.

Persistent symptoms are common after SARS-CoV-2 infection but the correlation with objective measures is unclear. We utilized the deCODE Health Study to compare multiple symptoms and physical measures between 1,721 Icelanders with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection (cases) and 546 contemporary and 13,842 historical controls. Cases participated in the study five to 17 months after the acute infection. One percent reported still suffering severe symptoms more than a year after the infection. 46 of the 88 symptoms explored associated with prior infection, most significantly disturbed smell and taste, memory disturbance, and dyspnea. On the contrary, only a handful of objective measures associated with prior infection. Cases were more likely to have measured impairment in smell and taste, lower grip strength, and poorer immediate and delayed memory recall than controls. No other objective measure associated with prior infection including heart rate, blood pressure, postural orthostatic tachycardia, oxygen saturation, exercise tolerance, hearing, and traditional inflammatory, cardiac, liver and kidney blood biomarkers. There was no evidence of more anxiety or depression among cases. We estimated the prevalence of long Covid to be 7–8%. Thus, in our large case-control study of mostly non-hospitalized Icelanders, diverse symptoms were common after SARS-CoV-2 infection while objective differences between cases and controls were few and, except for smell and taste, small. Discrepancies between symptoms and objective measures suggest a more complicated biological or biopsychosocial contribution to symptoms related to prior infection than is captured by conventional tests. Traditional clinical assessment would thus not be expected to be particularly informative in relating symptoms to a past SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Samkvæmt nýlegri greiningu á opinberum stefnuskjölum um háskóla á Íslandi eru hugmyndir um lýðræðislegt hlutverk þeirra óljósar og ómótaðar auk þess að falla í skuggann af þrástefinu um gæði og samkeppnishæfni. Þetta er sérstakt áhyggjuefni í ljósi þess að lög kveða á um að háskóli undirbúi nemendur til ábyrgrar þátttöku í lýðræðissamfélagi. Í alþjóðlegri umræðu hefur áhugi á borgaralegu og lýðræðislegu hlutverki háskóla aukist og helst umræða um lýðræðishlutverk háskóla í hendur við sívaxandi ógnir við lýðræði í heiminum. Í stað þess að einblína á háskólann sem uppsprettu efnahagslegra eða andlegra verðmæta velta æ fleiri því fyrir sér hvernig háskólar myndi samfélagsleg verðmæti með skírskotun til siðferðilegra gilda. Það er á ábyrgð íslenskra háskóla að rannsaka, ígrunda og efla samband sitt við lýðræði á Íslandi. Markmið rannsóknarinnar er greina í hverju lýðræðislegt gildi háskóla liggur. Þótt hugtökin háskóli og lýðræði séu margræð er þess freistað að greina þá þætti í háskólastarfi sem hafa gildi fyrir lýðræði óháð ólíkum túlkunum. Aðferðin felst í flokkun á notagildi, táknrænu gildi, framlagsgildi og annars stigs innra gildi háskólastarfs frá sjónarhóli lýðræðis. Helstu niðurstöður eru þessar: Lýðræðislegt notagildi háskólastarfs felst í þekkingarsköpun, mótun lýðræðishæfni og lýðræðismenningar og skuldbindingu við sannleikann. Táknrænt lýðræðisgildi háskóla felst í hefðum jafningjastjórnunar, akademísku frelsi, tjáningarfrelsi og umburðarlyndi. Háskólar hafa lýðræðislegt framlagsgildi með því að vera hluti lýðræðislegs þjóðskipulags, svo sem með menntun embættismanna, sérfræðinga og fagstétta, þekkingarsköpun og alþjóðastarfi. Háskólar hafa annars stigs innra gildi þegar lýðræði er iðkað í háskólastarfi og fyrir tilstilli þess. Álykta má að hér skapist forsendur fyrir því að velja að ýta undir lýðræðislega mikilvæga þætti háskólastarfs í stað þess að láta reka á reiðanum um hvort íslenskt lýðræði spjari sig án þess að hlúð sé að því sérstaklega í starfi og stefnumótun háskóla.

The duty to seek informed consent from prospective research subjects derives not only from respect for the autonomy of the subject but also from the status of the researcher as an autonomous moral agent. Virtual Mentor is a monthly bioethics journal published by the American Medical Association.

Introduction * Why Ethical Educational Leadership? Christopher M. Branson and Steven Jay Gross PART 1 : Issues and Perspectives * The Essence of Professionalism Sigurdur Kristinsson * Ethical Leadership: A Critical Transformative Approach Carolyn Shields * The Purpose of Education Robert J. Starratt * Socio-Political Awareness Steven Jay Gross * Leadership, Sustainability and Ethics Mike Bottery * Seeking Social Justice Rachel McNae * Leading with Empathy Qian Haiyan and Allan Walker * A Concern for Caring Lea Kuusilehto-Awale * The Prevalence of Silence Kjersti Lien Holte PART II : Developing Ethical Educational Leadership * An Ethical Leadership Developmental Framework Nancy Tuana * The Interplay of Values Ross Notman * The Power of Personal Values Christopher M. Branson * Ethical Decision Making Joan Poliner Shapiro, Jacqueline A. Stefkovich and Kathrine J. Gutierrez * Managing Ethical Dilemmas Neil Cranston, Lisa C. Ehrich and Megan Kimber * Using Turbulence Theory to Guide Actions Steven Jay Gross * Maintaining Moral Integrity Christopher M. Branson * An Insight into the Nature of Ethical Motivation Michael Bezzina and Nancy Tuana * De-Constructing Ethical Motivation Christopher M. Branson PART III : Examples from the Field * Holistic and Moral Development of Educational Leaders Pauline E. Leonard, Tammy Schilling and Anthony H. Normore * A Measure of Ethics Lyse Langlois and Claire Lapointe * Ethical Responses to Educational Policies Stephen Jay Gross and Joan Poliner Shapiro * The Ethical Perspectives of Turkish School Leaders Mualla Aksu and Gamze Kasalak * Preparation of Integrity William C. Frick and John F. Covaleskie * Striving for Moral Purpose Charles Burford and Michael Bezzina * The Ethical Demands of Multiculturalism Katarina Norberg and Olof Johansson Conclusion * If It Isn't Ethical, It Isn't Leadership Christopher M. Branson Contributing Authors

Leading accounts of personal autonomy are content-neutral: they insist that there are no a priori constraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind of person who acts at the command of others. I define myself as a slave and endorse those attitudes and preferences. My autonomy consists in being a slave.” ’ John Christman similarly claims that ‘any desire, no matter how evil, self-sacrificing, or slavish it might be’ could be autonomously formed. The same seems to apply to Harry Frankfurt's view, that actions are autonomous if they stem from second-order volitions that reflect what the agent cares about; it puts no constraints on the content of what a person might care about. All of these accounts hold that the mere content of a desire or value is never sufficient to rule out that it might be autonomously acted on by someone.

For decades, the greater part of efforts to improve regulatory frameworks for research ethics has focused on informed consent procedures; their design, codification and regulation. Why is informed consent thought to be so important? Since the publication of the Belmont Report in 1979, the standard response has been that obtaining informed consent is a way of treating individuals as autonomous agents. Despite its political success, the philosophical validity of this Belmont view cannot be taken for granted. If the Belmont view is to be based on a conception of autonomy that generates moral justification, it will either have to be reinterpreted along Kantian lines or coupled with a something like Mill’s conception of individuality. The Kantian interpretation would be a radical reinterpretation of the Belmont view, while the Millian justification is incompatible with the liberal requirement that justification for public policy should be neutral between controversial conceptions of the good. This consequence might be avoided by replacing Mill’s conception of individuality with a procedural conception of autonomy, but I argue that the resulting view would in fact fail to support a non-Kantian, autonomy-based justification of informed consent. These difficulties suggest that insofar as informed consent is justified by respect for persons and considerations of autonomy, as the Belmont report maintained, the justification should be along the lines of Kantian autonomy and not individual autonomy.