Chapter 1

The Erosion of Academic Ethos

Quo Vadis Higher Education?

The Crisis of Academic Ethos—Fact or Hype?

The university is one of the oldest institutions in the world. Even a commercial enterprise with a bold 500-year history pales by comparison. The first university was founded in 849 AD in Constantinople. Two of the oldest universities in the Western world, Bologna University and the University of Paris, are steeped in more than 1,000 years of tradition.

The success of a university that has existed for many centuries and is still developing without any noticeable constraints is recognized as a luxury available to only a few enterprises. It is an extraordinary phenomenon that, when it occurs, is recognized with respect, and its sources, origin, and history are scrutinized with attention. We are so sure that a university’s longevity and development are a result of exceptional talent, leadership, or even unexpected luck, and we do not ask basic questions: What made, makes, and will make universities the great ones? What determines their existence and development? What becomes autonomic in a higher school, what separates from the particular persons and outlives them? Why do the aged universities exist despite the turbulent changes in their environments?

First of all, universities are highly organized groups. This organization is one of the most persistent attributes of a university.¹ However, a much more important attribute not only of the persistence, but also of its development are the known and codified core values in the form of academic ethos. These values define a university’s identity and express particular modes of its conduct. The university not only exists but also evolves. The awareness and stability of universities’ identities and their academic ethos were a security for their existence in the past and also were conditions for their happening and becoming in the future.

In my opinion, centuries-old tradition and the organizational and cultural heritage of a university still influences its social recognition as the respected and reliable institution. Many countries and large social communities treat the national scientific heritage with a recognizable esteem as they observe the key role of higher education in shaping the potential of not only regions but entire nations as well.² Universities have always been leaders in developing paradigms for how to live well; in general, society views the university in its ideal form as a haven for truth, knowledge, democratic principles, and the development of students as positive, productive citizens of the world.

Provocative issues arise as to whether or not contemporary higher education³ complies with these obligations well and whether the academic environment truly shapes the moral attitudes of young people and creates the appropriate exemplars for them. Does academic ethos and core values that constitute it (that are included in some declarative documents, such as mission statements, codes of ethics, and core values statements) really shape the behavior of the academic community (students, staff members, and university officials)? Has higher education, and especially business school, forgotten about its prime objective: not only promoting the discovery and exchange of knowledge ideas, but also educating wise people who will be equipped with knowledge and integrity?

As I argue, an educated person of the twenty-first century is not only an expert, but he or she can also be a rather wise person, who is not only mentally efficient but who is also able to distinguish between good and bad solutions, since wisdom is highly connected with the ability to perform an accurate appraisal of what is possible, desirable, and what is not appropriate. Hence, it may concluded that wisdom as an individual characteristic is the capability to accurately recognize correct values and to conduct, in accordance with them, the process of searching for the best solutions.⁴ The most important skills for our collective sustainable well-being are moral competency skills, skills that allow us to honor the moral principles of integrity, responsibility, compassion, and forgiveness.⁵

In itself, capitalism is not necessarily immoral or degrading. It can help vast populations not only survive but thrive in unimaginable ways. The key is for people utilizing capitalism to abide in simple precepts put forth by economist and philosopher Adam Smith: “Tell the truth. Keep your promises. Be responsible for your actions. Treat other as you would like to be treated—with compassion and forgiveness.”⁶ And be wise.

The beginning of the current decade was abound with numerous financial crises and corruption scandals involving global corporations such as Enron, WorldCom, Xerox, Tyco, Dynergy, Arthur Andersen, Global Crossing, Adelphia, ImClone, and AOL. The scandals revealed that many people and corporations making their business worldwide do not have a sense of responsibility toward the societies, cultures, or entities they encounter while carrying out their international ventures.⁷ Table 1.1 summarizes many of these most egregious cases of corporate scandals during the past decade.

However, as Wankel and I have noted, much unethical behavior can be ascribed not only to particular corporations but also to their very leaders such as Kenneth Lay (founder and CEO of Enron Corporation), Jeffrey Skilling (CEO of Enron), Bernard Ebbers (CEO of WorldCom), Leo Hindery (CEO of Global Crossing Limited), Richard Scrushy (CEO of Healthsouth), and Dennis Kozlowski (CEO of Tyco Corporation). On the basis of these facts, we may come to the conclusion that the business world seems to be ethically disoriented. If we are right, we need to consider the possibility that the root cause of this is the inattention of higher education, especially business schools, toward ethical education. The code of ethics does not guarantee cultivating an understanding of moral principles in the world of business. It is necessary, therefore, to develop virtuous characters of future business leaders.

During the past decade, the educational system in general and the business education in particular were immersed in a wave of criticism as being responsible for moral ignorance in the business world and for their failure to inculcate in students the standards of good conduct and even as having weakened the moral character of students.⁸ Wankel, Tamtana, and I observed that if current trends continue, incidences of ethical misconduct in business practice along with negative public perception will continue to increase.⁹ To promote more ethical reasoning within the field of business, business education programs must better develop students’ abilities to confront moral and ethical dilemmas with knowledge, sensitivity, and conviction.¹⁰ Ghoshal provides one of the most discussed critiques of business school education.¹¹ His primary thesis is that today’s business education, with its foundations in agency theory and economic liberalism, contributed significantly to the recent stream of unethical business practices.¹²

On the basis of the data extracted from AACSB International for the year 2008/2009, only “1% out of the 604 schools reporting MBA programs is devoted to business ethics, while other fields such as general business or management receive attention from 69.5% and 34.9% of the business schools, respectively.”¹³ Critics of today’s educational system (and business education particularly) became the subject not only of newspapers and popular science publications, but also of the scientific literature. More and more often, the academic environment sees the destruction of academic ethos. Moreover, from behind university walls appear examples of unethical conduct, such as: cases of plagiarism,¹⁴ master theses written on request,¹⁵ or the unreliability of conducted research,¹⁶ cheating,¹⁷ and academic dishonesty (such as fabricating or falsifying a bibliography). According to a report for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), bribery and corruption damage universities and schools throughout the world. Koichiro Matsuura, director general of UNESCO, states, “Such widespread corruption not only costs societies billions of dollars, it also seriously undermines the vital effort to provide education for all.” Authors Jacques Hallak and Muriel Poisson paint a bleak picture of world education. Their report says: “In most societies—rich and poor—the education sector is facing severe difficulties and crisis; financial constraints, weak management, low efficiency, wastage of resources, low quality of service delivery, and lack of relevance as illustrated by high unemployment of graduates, among others.”¹⁸

Searching for Sources of Academic Ethos Erosion

Academic ethos is understood as a group of core values shared by the majority of people in an academic environment, namely tutors, students, administrators, and employees, and is recognized by all parties as a foundation for a university’s endurance and development. The fact is that ethical erosion has occurred at all levels, from the foundation up, and redefinition is in order.

The first step toward redefinition of academic ethos is to become aware of the causes of the current state. Those causes may be defined (in the easiest and most logic way) as a consequence and continuum of pathological phenomena and behaviors happening outside the university, such as the global problem of corruption or the moral crisis of business world. However, adopting this view seems to be insufficient or even unacceptable if taking into account a feature that constitutes a higher school—its autonomy.¹⁹ Causes of the erosion of the university’s core values can be traced to the “marketization of education,” which resulted in mass and commercialized academic education.²⁰ Despite the adopted model of a university (Kant’s model, model of Humboldt, model of Napoleon, or the British model), its traditional vision faces the market reality, ICT development, the external pressure to be more competitive and open for requirements of labor market and needs of society.²¹ According to Ramaley, these pressures include “financial constraints, demands for accountability and enhanced productivity, concerns about student learning and values, student and family concerns about employability of jobs, demands from policymakers for responsiveness to societal problems and a trend toward seeking private answers to public questions (e.g. privatization, contacting for services, reinventing government high tuition/high aid proposals).”²² The university transformed from a “temple of wisdom” into a “higher school” or even into a “professional service firm” as it adopted many rules of organizational culture of a corporate world making the same mistakes.²³ These mistakes of managing the university made by authorities of higher schools may be perceived as the next cause of erosion of academic ethos.

In recent years, such initiatives as defining vision, mission, or core values are very popular not only among entrepreneurs, but also among authorities of higher schools.²⁴ Numerous higher schools are proud of their core values and present them to their employees, students, and stakeholders. Walls in many campuses are adorned with placards expressing those core values as well as including them in the first pages of many academic publications. In contrast, though, the role and influence of these core values appear restricted to these superficial actions. True core values seem dead, covered with the dust of time, and forgotten. They provoke cynicism and laughter among students and employees as they are not transferrable to the real day-to-day activity of a higher school.²⁵ Consequently, decisions made by a university’s authorities do not fit declared core values; they do not create a culture of internal integrity at a school as much as they foster a culture of cynicism and a lack of trust in interpersonal relations. This, in turn, causes the atrophy of organizational bonds and the decrease of social capital inside a university.

Fortunately, the current crisis of academic ethos has inspired colleges and universities to be more introspective and to draw lessons from very public mistakes; in this way, they will redefine their ethos in order to better educate honest and responsible future leaders in the world. A sine qua non condition for this process is the return of higher schools to their fundamentals—to the core values that consolidate an academic community. A fundamental academic value is the truth. This value permeates all three basic spheres of academic activity: scientific research, educating, and social servicing. The ethos of truth is supported with other values that are characteristic of academic life, such as reliability and responsibility.²⁶ The academic community is obliged to search for truth during scientific research in a reliable and responsible way, educating in a manner that results in creating a wise, usable, engaged, and responsible human being; thus, truth nourishes the individual at school and fortifies society at large.

The basic constitutive feature of a university is a community of educators and educated. Values that are characteristic for the community are truth and goodness, including the common good. In their book, Harland and Pickening present a list of concepts that have embodied the Western university traditions: Freedom of speech, Critical thinking, Tolerance, Respect, Knowledge, Truth, Creativity, and Democracy.²⁷

In Campus Life—In Search of Community, published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, we find six principles that, taken together, define the kind of community that every college and university should strive to become:²⁸

• A college or university is an educationally purposeful community, a place where faculty and students share academic goals and work together to strengthen teaching and learning on the campus.

• A college or university is an open community, a place where freedom of expressions is uncompromisingly protected and where civility is powerfully affirmed.

• A college or university is a just community, a place where the sacredness of the person is honored and where diversity is aggressively pursued.

• A college or university is a disciplined community, a place where individuals accept their obligations to the group and where well-defined governance procedures guide behavior for the common good.

• A college or university is a caring community, a place where the well-being of each member is sensitively supported and where service to others is encouraged.

• A college or university is a celebratory community, one in which the heritage of the institution is remembered and where rituals affirming both tradition and change are widely shared.

On the other hand, the European University Association declares:²⁹ “The development of European universities is based on a set of core values like: equity and access; research and scholarship in all disciplines as an integral part of higher education; high academic quality; cultural and linguistic diversity.”

Intense scientific discussion and public debate on core values creating, consolidating, and developing the academic community initiated by the moral crisis of recent years has resulted in a focus on the topic of integrity within higher education and the necessity to reconstruct academic integrity, called the “culture of integrity,” or the culture of university’s character.³⁰,³¹ Leaders of higher schools as well as society as a whole expect that higher education will reconstruct a culture of integrity that will “provide the foundation for a vibrant academic life, promote scientific progress, and prepare students for responsible citizenship.”³²

On the basis of reports from the world of science and the world of higher schools’ managing practice, we may state that various values are defined as those that constitute academic integrity. According to The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI), “academic integrity is based on the five fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility. From these values flow principles of behavior that enable academic communities to translate ideals into action. An academic community flourishes when its members are committed to those five fundamental values.”³³ Respect, Trust, Honesty, Responsibility, and Effort are considered by School of Ethical Education to be the core of the academic integrity.³⁴ Turknett and Turknett provide this definition of a company with character: “Like people with character, they get results, but they do it with integrity and a respect for people. Like people with character, companies with character are able to balance accountability and courage with humility and respect” (p. 2).³⁵ At the same time, Paine defines organizational integrity in a broad sense as “honesty, self-governance, fair dealing, responsibility, moral soundness, adherence to principle, and consistency of purpose.”³⁶

However, it is not so important which values are perceived to constitute the academic integrity (whether they are enumerated as truth, trust, honesty, or responsibility). The most important issue within the process of constructing academic integrity is to enliven and cultivate it in an ethical way. If there exist enterprises such as Sony, which in its set of core values does not include “leading customer value” and is still the example of market orientation, or Nordstrom, which does not include “teamwork” and is an example of employees’ cooperation, then the higher school does not necessarily need to include in a set of values constituting its academic ethos terms such as integrity, responsibility, or respect. The only requirement here is to manage core values of a university in a confident and consistent way. We need to manage the academic ethos of a university.

Academic Ethos Management is a process of managing the university identity and transferring the university’s core values from one management generation to another by taking over responsibilities resulting from core values and their protection in the name of and for the benefit of the university and its members through their institutionalization in a morally positive manner. It is the awareness, loyalty, and respect of core values in everyday activity that lead to the flourishing of an academic community and are fundamental to fulfilling its social and educational mission. This mission essentially is to foster sound judgment and ethical behavior in youth, thus creating an entire foundation for a better society in the future; this is coupled with an awareness of environmental imperatives and a need to harmoniously coexist in all aspects of human interaction.³⁷ Human interaction encompasses mind, body, and soul, developing an individual’s intelligence, sense of responsibility, sensitivity to the needs of others, awareness of the environment, aesthetics, and spirituality.³⁸

How to Understand Core Values Constituting Academic Ethos and Why are they Important?

In the area of management of organizations, in 1939, Barnard noticed that commonly shared values appear to be useful in solving problems of creating and managing compound organizations.³⁹ Over the past decades, the term “core values” has been very popular among researchers examining organizations as well as among the employees of organizations. The existence of “core values” or “common values” that can be identified is a characteristic of an organization that has achieved success.⁴⁰ Such are the key elements of organizational management, as well as the source of a high level of organizational involvement and individuals’ morality.⁴¹,⁴²

Table 1.2 presents examples of scientific research results that indicate the beneficial effect of an organization’s core values.

But what precisely are the core values of an organization and how should they be understood?

Webster defines the notion “core” as “a central and often foundational part usually distinct from the enveloping part by a difference in nature,” and a “value” as “principles, objectives or social standards shared and accepted by the human entity, social class or society.” Core values are the most intrinsic standards, shared and accepted by members of an organization.⁴³ According to J. Porras and J. Collins (2003: 89), core values, next to the mission statement, are the component of the leading ideology.⁴⁴ It was discovered quite early that people need to feel that they are a part of a sublime vision. Defining core values is thus necessary to help people make their everyday decisions. The mission is very abstract. Vision has an impact in the long run. People need a lodestar for navigating.⁴⁵ Core values are also defined as the principles that are permanent, fundamental, and inviolable. They are what we believe in, and they do not change.⁴⁶ They are also understood as fundamental ethical, moral, or professional beliefs of an organization, and they are leading in a process of decision making.⁴⁷ In the turbulent and changeable world, core values remain constant. They are not a description of a work or of strategies chosen by an organization in order to fulfill its mission. Values are the basis for work, our cooperation with others; they determine the course of a strategy that helps to fulfill the mission. They are the practices used by an organization every single day in everything it does.⁴⁸ Senge states that the leading idea answers three questions: what, why, and how. A vision answers the question “What?” by giving an image of the future we want to create. An objective or a mission answers the question “Why?” by showing why we exist. Core values answer the question “How?” by showing how we need to act in accordance with our mission in order to approach our vision. The term core values relates to a particular group of publicly expressed values or concepts that are shared for the majority of organization’s members and that are considered to be the most central and most important for organization’s continued development.⁴⁹ In many cases, those values are formalized and expressed in writing for all the organizational members. They are also often shared by other key units from the organization’s environment.⁵⁰

Research conducted by me and my team in 2009 that analyzed core values declared by higher schools included on their websites, which construct academic ethos in the context of different national cultures (according to G. Hofstede), enabled to distinguish the most frequently declared core values of higher schools with regard to the dominant dimension of Hofstede’s national culture. Having analyzed the results of this research, it was noticed that the universities from countries with a dominant Power Distance Index (PDI), such as Indonesia, China, or Ecuador, most often declared innovativeness and academic excellence as their core values. Quite opposite were the results for countries with a dominant Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI), such as Argentina or Israel, as the most often preferred values, there were social engagement, progress, and the quality of educating and research. The core values that create academic ethos most often appearing on the websites of the analyzed higher schools with regard to a dominant dimension of national culture (G. Hofstede) are presented in Table 1.3.

The most popular values appearing on websites of analyzed universities (taking the number of indicated values in all national culture dimensions into account) are presented in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. Core values appearing most often on websites of analyzed universities in total.

Source: Based on Stachowicz-Stanusch A. (Ed.) (2009). The Core Values of Universities in the Context of Different National Cultures. The Concept of Research and Survey Findings. Gliwice: Wydawnictwo Politechniki S´la˛skiej.

Core values of a university may comprise team work, reliability, or justice. The examples of higher schools from different parts of the world and their core values are presented in Table 1.4.

In my opinion, values of university members that are fully accepted and made real in their behaviors create academic ethos. Those values permeate all dimensions of academic life; they are a justification of adopted objectives and ways of their realization. It is not a partial implementation and respecting the values just in particular situations or toward particular partners. Academic ethos is connected with the whole academic environment as it is a set of values and principles that lead a life of academic community and serve as a guide for a higher school’s authorities.⁸⁴

Core values, which are fundamentals of academic ethos, are realized by all higher schools—however to the different extent—and connections between them may be classified in the following three groups.

Within the first group there exist academic values connected with fundamental objectives of science and education as well as with university obligations toward its social environment. It includes values such as: truth, reliability, or social and global responsibility.

The second group consists of values connected between a higher school institution and academic community of a university. Those values guarantee basic academic liberty. It includes values such as: autonomy, freedom, liberty (of research, teaching, and views dissemination), courage, responsibility, and tolerance or common good.

The third group includes values that are dominant inside a community and which are correlated: a master–a pupil, understood as the respect of dignity and subjectivity of each community member, care for student’s personal and professional development, supporting research curiosity, lack of discrimination, tolerance, kindness, fairness, reliability, and honesty—there are just a few of values that are realized inside a community.⁸⁵

The awareness of core values and even writing them does not cause their persistence and university’s development. An organization does not simply exist—it also develops and transforms. During its development and transformation, a university’s members may easily forget the values that have been a source of success for their organization. Time, success, and other factors blur human memory about the reasons for success. Moreover, the new, unfamiliar values that are identified by higher schools’ management or that were considered to be better and more competitive are often imposed on a university’s participants. In such a case, the university develops a strong and centralized organizational culture that hinders initiatives and innovation—a culture supporting bureaucracy and egocentric behaviors. There are two primary reasons for this:

First, it is often forgotten that core values are not something that may be “bought or borrowed.” Core values are an internal element of an organization; they are those values that are shared by its members in a deepest and strongest way.

Secondly, core values as the core of culture and integrity have not been passed from one generation of management to the next.

What causes the persistence and development of an organization and is a fundamental of integrity at university is not just awareness of its core values but also a consequent management of them and implementing them into organizational life in a morally positive manner.⁸⁶

How to manage core values that create academic ethos? The answer may be found in the following chapters of this book.