The Most Important Components of Professional Ethics of Professors from the Perspective of Faculty Members, Postgraduate Students, and Department Heads of Faculty of Humanities, University of Guilan

The present study seeks to examine the components of professional ethics of professors. Since learning environments, especially universities have an important task of training people and development of the society, it is necessary to for faculty members to follow professional ethics due to the profound impact on students who would be in charge of governing affairs in different aspects. The descriptive method in survey form is used. The population consisted of all postgraduate students, faculty members, and department heads of faculty of humanities of Guilan University. Using Krejcie and Morgan formula, 171 out of 308 postgraduate students of faculty of humanities, 69 out of 84 full-time faculty members, and due to the low number all 12 members of department heads were selected as research sample. Self-made questionnaire was used as a tool for data collection, which was validated by 30 experts. Reliability was determined to be 91.8 by Cronbachs alpha coefficient. In analyzing data obtained from research tools, descriptive and inferential statistics, SPSS, kruskal-wallis test, and Friedman test were used. The results showed that from the perspective of each of the three groups, professional ethics of professors are of great importance in four main components of student-professor relationship, professor-university relationships, professor self-relationship, and professor-society relationship. Five of the 35 components that have achieved the highest mean percentage and consensus among the three groups include propriety in the classroom, fairness and justice in teaching, evaluating and grading, having training program for effective teaching, having criticizable spirit, and respecting norms of society and civic duties as an academic individual. The results of this study are largely consistent with the results Murray et al. in most of the subcomponents (Motallebifard et al., 2011). The best strategy to select and improve the components of professional ethics is an attempt to prepare and compile a Code of Ethics in universities with the help of experts and officials, and to institutionalize it at universities.