Professional values in the university context. The academics from the national autonomous university of Mexico

The aim of this paper is to analyze the values mentioned by a sample of professors and researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), as well as other ethical references that help them to guide their academic work. In the theoretical part, we discuss the definition and characteristics of the notion of value and its relation with principles, norms and beliefs. For the empirical part, we used the questionnaire: "Indicadores de excelencia docente en la Universidad de Granada" (Fernandez-Cruz y Romero, 2010), and we added four open questions. Here, we present the results of the first one, which is: What are the five main values that the university should foster among their academics? We got 1,986 responses that were classified into four categories: Value issues, Competences, Behaviour, and Professional-Institutional Aspects. The highest proportion was for the Value issues with 1,328 answers. The subcategory of Values had the highest amount of responses (1,008). The most mentioned values were Honesty, Responsibility, Respect, and Compromise. We would like to highlight that when we ask about values in general, the respondents tend to include other kind of ethical issues.