Essay

The Power of Exemplarity

The ethics of quality applied to education

By Delphine Genin, Senior Teaching Faculty, Head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Neuroscience has demonstrated that we all tend to consider ourselves a little bit better than the rest of the population. One helpful example of this cognitive bias is the Dunning-Kruger effect, an overestimation of one’s capability. A two-minute video on social media might give the audience the impression that they mastered one topic simply because it became familiar to them. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability lead to overestimation of capabilities.

As educators, we need to look into this pattern and assess the risks and opportunity of exemplarity to open possibilities for learners, and of course, to do so, we have to set our egos aside. The word “education” comes from the Latin expression “ex-ducere” meaning to guide outside. Higher education is about inspiration and empowerment, and each educational institution has its own vision of “ex-ducere” and its possibilities.

But there is an embarrassing question: Is Higher Education really inspiring? Do we impress digital natives, Gen Z and Alpha? Does our attempt at exemplarity stand a chance against online teenage activists, digital dopamine shots and metaverse virtual Eden?

Being exemplary as a group

César Ritz Colleges Academic Director, Tanja Florenthal, identifies exemplarity as “doing the right thing at the right time”, this definition is very useful guidance on a daily basis. Exemplarity is first an individual responsibility, a commitment to self to behave in a certain way that makes a person worthy of imitation. The most reiterated Aristotle quote claims it as: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

The Best Practices management method is about sharing the exemplarity and reapplying. Whether as an individual or as an organisation, the objective is to improve and to motivate others to do the same. And when a set of individuals adopt similar beneficial behaviours, the magic of collective exemplarity happens. Faculty focus groups, for example, are a great way to enhance collective intelligence and best practices within the organisation.

Quality management processes the quest for exemplarity, with, at its heart, the highest interest: the guarantee of the best services possible. To summarize, exemplarity is deployed by Quality Management which needs to be backed up by Business Ethics.

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What is the link between Business Ethics and Quality Management?

Business Ethics stems from philosophy and morals, while Quality Management has grown from empirical management research. Those two subjects are two sides of the same coin. Quality makes visible the transparency of Business Ethics. The implementation of quality management systems goes with the deployment of systematic controls, responsibility checking, KPI board documents and trainings. Those processes are deeply linked to social dynamical aspects. The success of Quality Management depends then on the team behaviour, commitment and responsibility taking. When people consciously decide to act ethically, everyone wins. The social dynamical aspects are a crucial element of the success of quality process management.

In practice, there are gaps in Total Quality Management. No system can control every single aspect of a process. That’s where ethics kicks in and backs up the quality method. At the core of ethics is the concept of responsibility, the ability to be accountable for both the credit and the blame. It means having individuals that can give answers that go beyond the reference of the process or the rules of the game. The common, unproductive sentence is “I don’t know, that’s how we do it”, which leads to decreased quality. As educators, we are supported by programs, guided by syllabus, evaluated by management but amongst those quality process, what is key, is the individual responsibility we take to accompany and encourage our students one by one. The personal deontology to find any solutions to do the best possible.

While expanding personal ethics is massive work, as it is rooted in personal belief and education,research on empowerment and autonomy shows that in a climate of trust, teams perform better,take more responsibility, and consequently, quality increases overall. The challenge is to manage both quality processes control and the freedom to exercise responsibility.

"Excellence is not an act, but a habit."

The power of exemplarity in education

“Rabelais, a French philosopher of the 16th century warned “Science without conscience is nothing but the ruin of the soul”. The last century painfully proved him right. Even if we don’t refer to the soul of our students anymore per se, contemporary moral ethics, mental health and career purpose challenges echo the concept of conscience. Consciously reshaping education to face global concerns for modern societies is the task of educators.

Interestingly, students already expect higher education to reflect and meet ethical standards. As part of the QS Sustainability Ranking 2023, 3,000 students advocated that the top values they would like to see in a university they study are “supporting and respecting human rights”, “commitments to ethical working practices” and “ambitions to become a carbon neutral company”. Additionally, nearly half (49 percent) of the participants believe a university’s social impact to be very important when deciding which institution to study. Unpacking the QS statistics: students want to learn exemplarity in exemplar universities.

One could believe that living in a world of collective irresponsibility and narrow self-interest encourages passivity and the lossd of the soul, as Rabelais sayst. It is educators’ moral obligation to equip the next leaders with academic knowledge rooted in quality management and ethics. This is necessary to reach exemplarity management that the planet and humankind crave. Curriculars and courses will constantly evolve with content such as diversity and inclusion, sustainability, innovation, entrepreneurship and more, but the value of exemplarity is the cornerstone.

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