c. 2000 Religion News Service

PRINCETON, N.J. _ Peter Singer’s students have handed in their end-of-term papers and now they are waiting for the grades that will determine how they did in his course, Practical Ethics.

As he completes his first year at Princeton University, the Australian ethicist whose hiring sparked outrage and demands for his ouster is himself facing an exam of sorts. If his students are any measure, the intellectual described by one newspaper as “the most dangerous man in the world” has already passed, and with flying colors.

“It was really exciting,” said Dan Powell, a senior bioethics major from Scotch Plain. “Dr. Singer is one of the leading bioethicists in the world, and I wanted to hear what he had to say on the controversial issues.”

And?

“He was really great. He never pressed his views on us. He’d press us on our views. He certainly made me more aware of my own moral stands,” said Powell, one of the students who attended his lectures and met weekly with him in small groups called precepts. Powell said he already had been pro-choice regarding abortion but is reconsidering his eating habits in light of Singer’s views against killing animals.

“I’m very glad he’s here,” agreed David Carpenter, a senior and philosophy major from Los Angeles. “He is a very intelligent, very undogmatic thinker and speaker. Only I don’t buy into his initial paradigm, which is utilitarianism.”

Translated, that is the view that individual actions should bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people as well as the individual.

In this school of thought, as elaborated by Singer, the selective killing of disabled infants, for example, could be ethically acceptable, even desirable. Euthanizing the terminally ill or elderly would be acceptable if the care of such people was a drag on society’s well-being. And human cloning doesn’t bother him at all.

Needless to say, such views have disturbed many people over the years, especially advocates for the disabled, conservative Christians, and Jews who think Singer’s views sail perilously close to Nazi eugenics.

Thus it was no surprise that when Princeton hired Singer last fall as its first professor of bioethics, the anger spilled over into demonstrations. One of the rallies drew 250 protesters last September and resulted in 14 arrests after demonstrators used their wheelchairs to bar the doors and trap university administrators.

Since then, however, the protests have been few and rather sparsely attended. Among students the reaction was so muted that the director of the Center for Jewish Life, Rabbi James Diamond, described it in January as “total apathy.” The students, he said, “couldn’t care less.”

The young people who have spent an hour every Monday and Wednesday morning with Singer over the past few months say his persisting critics need to chill.

“I think people expected him to come out and say we should kill all the babies,” said Traci Strickland, a sophomore from Washington, D.C. “But he presents all sides. I personally take issue with some of his positions, but he made me think about what we do for the people around us.”

Such benign reactions were not unusual. For all the uproar surrounding Singer’s appointment, his classes themselves were quiet, serious explorations of ethical issues.

Singer’s lectures, which were regularly attended by about 50 students, covered ethical abstractions that ranged from artificial insemination and surrogacy (“Surrogacy is not new; you can find an account of it in the Bible,” Singer says, referring to the story of Abraham and Sarah) to such thinkers as Plato, Kant and Singer’s own philosophical progenitor, John Stuart Mill.

Singer’s course, in short, was pretty much like any class on any campus _ most students taking notes, some passing notes, others asking insightful questions, a few nodding off.

“The sense of polemics that you get from reading the newspapers I don’t get in the classroom,” Singer said as he crossed the leafy campus on a recent balmy spring day after class. “No one has stood up and made any polemical speeches.”

But he added, “Maybe the ones who don’t like it just walk away.”

Not likely.

“I was interested in the controversy surrounding his appointment and I wanted to see for myself,” said Griffin Witte, a senior from Nyack, N.Y., who stuck it out and found himself agreeing with Singer more than he expected.

“He probably gets an unfair rap from a lot of people. They tend to condense his views into sound bites,” Witte said. “He has very clear ideas about what he believes, but he’s not someone who is shoving his ideas down your throat.”

Indeed, the lanky Australian hardly appears threatening, his accent cloaked in a pleasantly deep voice that speaks of nothing so much as utter reasonableness. Singer’s apparel is almost unchanged from week to week: corduroy slacks, dark cotton shirt, perhaps a blue blazer, and always the plastic-framed glasses.

But even if he looks the part of the archetypal academic, the almost daily revolutions in biotechnology and the consequent ethical quandaries have made his arcane field of study fodder for headline writers.

This is, after all, the campus where the university newspaper has run ads from wealthy, childless couples offering thousands of dollars for viable eggs from good-looking women with Ivy League brains.

But it is Singer’s visibility, and the eloquence and matter-of-factness that he brings to his unorthodox views that have made him the lightning rod for what is a broader concern over things like genetic engineering.

When Singer started last September, for instance, Princeton alumnus and trustee _ and, at the time, GOP presidential candidate _ Steve Forbes announced he would no longer donate to his alma mater as long Singer was there.

“The first week or two, when there were the rather large protests, it was a little tense perhaps,” Singer acknowledged in an interview in his corner office, a functional space cluttered with books and electronics.

“After that it really relaxed,” Singer said. “But the important thing is that everyone I deal with here has been really friendly, very positive. I haven’t met anyone who has said, `You shouldn’t be here.’

“Some say, `I don’t agree with you at all,’ but that’s what a university is all about.”

Added Singer with a slight smile, “I expect to be here for a while. Steve Forbes can find some other things to spend his money on.”

DEA END GIBSON