Marquette University’s dental school has just suspended a student (with forfeiture of his $14,000 tuition and all credit earned that semester) for insulting comments about (unnamed) school students and faculty posted on his blog. Their grounds are that such remarks constitute “professional misconduct in violation of the dental school’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct” and a violation of a rule against “stalking, hazing or harassments”.

A dental student at Marquette University has been suspended for the rest of the academic year and ordered to repeat a semester after a committee of professors, administrators and students determined that he violated professional conduct codes when he posted negative comments about unnamed students and professors on a blog.

Scott Taylor, the student’s attorney, said his client, a 22-year-old in Marquette’s School of Dentistry, was brought before the committee for a conduct hearing last week after a classmate complained about his blog, a Web site that contained musings about topics ranging from his education to videogames and drinking.

The focus of the hearing, Taylor said, were half a dozen postings including one describing a professor as “a (expletive) of a teacher” and another that described 20 classmates as having the “intellectual/maturity of a three-year-old.” . . .

In a letter to the student dated Dec. 2, Denis Lynch, the dental school’s associate dean for academic affairs, said the committee had found the student “guilty of professional misconduct in violation of the dental school’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.”

The student also violated a universitywide code that subjects students to disciplinary action if they participate in “stalking, hazing or harassments,” the letter stated.

In addition to informing the student of his suspension and his need to repeat his fall semester, which costs $14,000 in tuition, Lynch threatened the student with expulsion if he continued to post material on “any blog sites that contain crude, demeaning and unprofessional remarks.”

Interestingly, the dental school acted against the advice of one of the university’s own ethicists and (apparently) the dental school’s own bioethics director:

Daniel D’Angelo, an adjunct associate professor of behavioral sciences in School of Dentistry, agreed. He reviewed the student’s blog entries at the request of his parents before the conduct hearing. D’Angelo, who is a co-director of Marquette’s Ethics and Professionalism curriculum, determined that the postings did not justify disciplinary action.

“What he wrote was imprudent, immature and oftentimes distasteful,” D’Angelo wrote in a letter to Anthony Ziebert, a professor who chaired the student-faculty review committee that heard the case. “But no matter how much I or anyone else find these entries, rude, distasteful and imprudent, it doesn’t make these entries unethical or immoral.”

D’Angelo said he made the decision after consulting with the director of bioethics at the Medical College of Wisconsin [Robyn S. Shapiro, JD] and a legal ethicist.

The dental school notes that they have disciplined this student, while other students with potentially offensive blogs have gone unmolested, because students in the professions are held to distinct codes of ethics that general students are not. And they have a point there. But the standards apparently incorporated in their professional code are - like so many professional codes of ethics - indecipherably vague. (For one thing, the committee that relied on these professional standards to discipline this student also managed to find him guilty of “stalking, hazing, or harassments” for the same blog posts - which is asinine. There is no apparent reason why their findings under the professional code should be regarded as any more reasonable.) As with most such “standards of professionalism” actions, the code appears merely to be a convenient excuse for controlling behavior the enforcers find distasteful or embarrassing.

This incident underscores the problems with vague and broadly-worded codes of professional ethics, and more generally with the notion of “professional standards” as a substantive ethical concept. It also points up the ways such concepts can be used punitively and to enforce conformism. One can certainly make a case that juvenile behavior is not in keeping with membership in a responsible profession. But it is surely far from coincidental in this case that the behavior that prompted punishment was explicit criticism of the university - the student would almost undoubtedly not have been punished if he had criticized the faculty of another school, or merely exhibited immature behavior in another sphere (say, excessive drinking or sexist jokes). It’s too much to imagine that a sincere concern for professionalism motivated this action.

So, how can we hold students and trainees to professional standards if (a) we cannot articulate a set of clear and explicit standards that meets consensus among professionals, (b) we cannot distinguish unprofessional behavior from mere bad behavior, and (c) we cannot trust ourselves to impose professional standards in a reasonable and disinterested manner?

One answer is to jetison the concept of professional standards as traditionally understood, and simply adopt explicit codes - statutory, perhaps - of required and prohibited behavior. This would take “professionalism” out of the hands of the professions, making them just another regulated industry and eliminating one central sphere of authority that has traditionally marked them as professions. But this may not be such a bad thing, and it may also be the only honest way to resolve conflicts such as are present in this case. (It would also resolve conflicts over such matters as “conscience clauses”, wherein professionals demand the right to impose barriers to professional service on grounds of “professional ethics”. If we addressed this through the law rather than the professions, at least we’d have a clear answer, yes or no, as to whether they should be allowed to behave in that way.)

I am not pleased to see professional students behaving like silly frat boys. But I’m even less pleased to see them failing to wash their hands between patient visits, bringing their racist and sexist attitudes into the treatment environment, and imposing their beliefs and preferences on their patients - all lapses of professional conduct that are commonplace and never the grounds for disciplinary action. That a professional school can unilaterally fine a student $14,000, delay his education by up to a year, and threaten to destroy his career over insulting remarks suggests that “professionalism” may not be all it’s cracked up to be.