Respect Academic Integrity

After analyzing five values (honesty; fairness; trust; respect; and responsibility) that are constitutive of academic integrity, this paper considers moral challenges to academic integrity that are posed by the World Wide Web in three areas: student integrity, faculty integrity, and institutional integrity.

Introduction

The advent of the World Wide Web has brought a number of challenges to the academic community not the least of which is a wide array of issues that fall under the heading of academic integrity. In the following remarks, I will sketch out a range of such issues and discuss some of the ethical questions that they raise. In so doing, I hope to bring together two disparate academic discussions, one of which has been concerned with computer ethics and the other of which has been devoted to academic integrity. The two discussions intersect in the area where the Internet, and especially the World Wide Web, meets the university. 

Understanding Academic Integrity

 When I first became involved in working on the statement that has just recently been published by the Centre for Academic Integrity as the "Fundamental Values of Academic Integrity/ I thought about academic integrity exclusively as a matter of honesty. Academic integrity, I thought, could be reduced to a simple injunction, "Students, don't cheat!" I was interested to discover a different approach to academic integrity, one that was much broader than I original by assumed. Academic integrity the draft of this document suggested, encompassed five values: respect, trust, honesty, fairness, and responsibility. [See http:// www.academicintegrity.org/values.asp ] As I helped to develop this document through its next draft, I became intrigued by the vision of academic integrity it proposed. Several distinctive characteristics of its approach were noteworthy. First, this document is basically concerned with the integrity of the academic life, and it is this to which the phrase "academic integrity" refers. This sets aside the negative and narrow conception of academic integrity as "don't cheat" and replaces it with a conception that is both positive and much broader. Second, this document does not focus exclusively on students. It recognizes that issues of the integrity of the academic life encompass three main parties: students, faculty, and administrators. (It is also noted that other parties, such as legislatures and boards of trustees, play a role in this process.) It also recognizes that the academic life encompasses several principal activities--learning, teaching, and researching--and that to engage in these activities we often must participate in a community. This is a departure from conceptions of academic integrity that see it as applicable only to the activity of learning engaged in by students. Third, this approach derives its five values by asking the following question: what values must be present if the academic life is to flourish? This approach, incidentally, has the structure of a transcendental argument, which attempts to determine the necessary conditions of the possibility of x, where x in this case equals "the process of education" or "a flourishing academic life." [Stroud, 1968] In this case, the argument involves looking at the necessary moral conditions of the possibility of a flourishing academic life, and the answer to that question is the set of five fundamental values.

Honesty

Without honesty, neither students nor teachers could trust what they hear from one another. For the process of education to work, both students and teachers have to be honest. Students not only have to refrain from cheating and plagiarizing, but they also have to be willing to be honest about their own beliefs and values. Unless they are willing to be honest in this way, those beliefs and values will remain insulated and untouched by the academic dialogue. Just as students must be honest, so too must faculty members be honest as well. In teaching about Kant and universalizability, I often sketch out the following situation for students. Imagine that you have cheat throughout a course and done so successfully. Your final course average is 98%, and your professor has not inkling that you cheated. You receive your grades in the mail and are dismayed to see that you received a "D" in the course. Storming into the professor's office, you say there must be some mistake. He says, "No, there's no mistake--I just lied to the Registrar about what grade you deserved." The student's response, of course, would be, "You can't do that--you can't lie about my grade." Even cheating presupposes a context of fairness and honesty as the condition of its possibility.

Trust

Without trust, the dialogue that is at the heart of the academic life withers. In the sciences, for example, one has to trust the reliability of the work of one's colleagues; otherwise, scientific research would have to begin from the start each time, never progressing because it could not rely on a firm foundation. Indeed, in all research, we presuppose and trust the work of our colleagues, and without that trust, we would be unable to move forward in our own work. Similarly, in the classroom, our students rely on our trustworthiness, on our professional integrity to render professional judgments impartially. Without that trust, the classroom dialogue can never really begin. Nor does the trust end there. Our students must trust us in other ways as well. They must trust us, as we shall see below, to treat them fairly and with respect. They have to trust us not to dismiss their ideas as foolish or funny. Indeed, the relationship between teacher and student is, by its very nature, a relationship of trust because of the power differential. Professors have power over students in many ways. For the educational process to work, students have to trust that their professors will use that power wisely, to further the goals of the student's own education rather than the professor's self-interest. It is precisely here that the teacher-student relationship resembles the patient-therapist relationship. In both cases, trust must be present if the process is to work. Violations of trust, including sexual exploitation, strike at the very foundation of the process. Trust, of course, is also a fundamental value in regard to administration as well. Students need to be able to trust, for example, that when a university advertises a particular major, it will provide the courses necessary for students to complete that major. Similarly, ~ faculty need to be able to trust administrations in a wide range of different ways, including trusting them to be fair and to be committed to the goals of genuine education.

Respect

Without respect, individuals may well be unwilling to risk articulating and openly discussing ideas. A classroom in which ideas and persons are treated with respect is one in which trust, honesty, and the other academic virtues will flourish. It is important to note here that respect does not mean agreement. To respect an idea is to take it seriously on its own merits, to weigh and appraise it in a professional manner, to be willing to learn from it even if it challenges some of our firmly held beliefs. Respecting persons involves, among other things, giving them a place in the community of ideas, even when they disagree with us. Nor does respect stop with ideas. We must recognize that others have feelings and experiences that are sometimes far different from our own. Respect involves acknowledging the legitimacy of their experiences and feelings without automatically denying our own. This is particularly important in regard to issues such as racism and sexism, where different people often have radically different experiences of what they assume is the same world. 

WWW Challenges to Student Academic Integrity

If we look at the ways in which the Web has impacted student integrity, we see two principal areas. The first, which involves buying of papers and other assignments, is not new in kind, but certainly new in scope. The second, which involves selling (and auctioning) papers and other assignments, is not new, but the scope is so vastly increased as to present a distinctive challenge.

WWW Challenges to Faculty Academic Integrity

Obviously in many ways the web offers tremendous opportunities to faculty, especially in terms of facilitating the possibility of collaborative work and making it much easier to share information. After all, this is where the Web began, as a project that would allow scientists at CERN and other places to share scientific information easily. It also offers the possibility of making much more material available to students in courses.

Conclusion

 The rise of the World Wide Web presents faculty, students, and administrators with a number of challenges, many of which raise questions of academic integrity in the full sense outlined at the beginning of this paper. Some of these are specific questions about issues such as academic honesty, and I am sure that we will continue to debate the most effective ways of responding to them in the coming years. However, in large measure these are mainly questions of how best to respond. The moral goal is clear, only the path to attaining it is in dispute. Other issues raised by the growth of the Web strike at the very heart of the integrity of the educational process, and these are the more vexing. The Web will transform the educational process--of that, there is little doubt. The challenge, in part pedagogical and in part ethical, is to determine how we ought to shape education in the future, given the pervasive background of the Web. In this area, not only is there debate about means, but the goals themselves are still to be determined.

References

Blum, Lawrence A. (1994). Moralperception and particularity. Cambridge University P~ss, Now York. Walzer, Michael (1996). Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. University of Notre Dame Press, West Bend, IN. Stroud, Barry. (1968) Transcendental arguments. Journal of Philosophy, 65, 241-56.

Biography Lawrence M. Hinman is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Values Institute at the University of San Diego. He is the author of Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Harcourt, Brace, 1998) and Contemporary Moral Issues, 2nd ed. (Prentice-Hall, 2000) as well as editor of Ethics Updates (http:// ethics.acusd.edu). He is currently involved in an extensive project to put ethics-related video on the World Wide Web.