Constructing an Ethical Discipline: A Survey of Anthropology Program Requirements and Rhetorics

This study investigates the inclusion of ethics education within undergraduate anthropology programs across a stratified sample of U.S. higher education institutions, with emphasis on archaeology’s engagement with ethics education. We analyze publicly accessible anthropology course listings, program descriptions, and institutional websites to determine how programs position ethics within their curricula. We further assess how these results vary across Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). Our findings indicate that while just 5.8% of U.S. programs explicitly require ethics coursework, 18.5% offered elective ethics-related courses in anthropology. However, most anthropology programs do not visibly emphasize ethics as a core component of the major or minor, according to observations of program requirements. Additional findings include differences in the inclusion of required ethics courses within anthropology programs across PWI and MSI institutions types, with Hispanic serving institutions yielding the most ethics requirements. These results highlight the need for curricular shifts–or perhaps shifts in communicating the curriculum–to promote ethics as fundamental to anthropological study, particularly given the discipline's colonial history and current societal relevance. Future directions include further qualitative studies of course syllabi and student perspectives to evaluate ethics education’s impact on professional development in anthropological archaeology.