> Saying it was an "ethics ... based institution" is challenging for me - it implies right and wrong, which requires someone to decide what is right and what is

> Saying it was an "ethics ... based institution" is challenging for me - it implies right and wrong, which requires someone to decide what is right and what is wrong. Ethics here don't mean anything metaphysical. They mean something like "professional ethics" or even "taking pride of your work". More generally some shared (and maybe internalized) view of what's good/acceptable/bad behavior in a community. E.g. in medicine this is/was sort of codified in the hippocratic oath. In such a system reputation stems (at least ideally) from how well the actors (individual or institutional) behave in terms of these ethics. This of course has its own set of problems and may lead to (other) forms of corruption. But IMHO it's less bad than the neoliberal model where individual actors should focus on their individual career success "by any means necessary" and just trust that "science is self correcting".