Toward the Concept of Academic Integrity Development by Academic Ethos Management
The conclusions and recommendations from qualitative research conducted in this field provide vital rationales when formulating the concept of academic integrity through management of the core values of academic ethos. Key research has been conducted in six deliberately chosen higher schools located in different countries: the United States, Argentina, Iceland, and Poland. The criterion of choice was the age of the school, its ownership form, and phase of development.
Case studies of DePaul University, Hamline University, Wright University, IAE Business School, Jagiellonian University, and Reykjavik University after the process of its merger provide rich empirical material. Synthesis and reference to the theoretical proposals furthers the existing state of knowledge about the methods of academic integrity creation and of academic ethos management, as well as offers guidelines to better understanding the concept of academic integrity development through managing the core values of academic ethos.
The assumptions of this concept are included in the following statements.
1. The source for the persistence and development of contemporary universities is finding the golden mean (the balance) between the stability of core values of academic ethos (cultural identity) and the constantly changing mechanisms of their enactment and maintenance in order to make them compliant with internal and external requirements.
2. Universities throughout the world, regardless of their age, size, or ideology, have managed and still are managing the academic ethos. However, they do this in a more or less aware, institutionalized way following developed sets of deliberate actions.
3. Managing of academic ethos values is the process of managing a university’s cultural 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 for the benefit of the organization and its members through their institutionalization in a morally positive manner.
4. The level of academic integrity in a substantial way depends on the extent of managing the core values of academic ethos.
5. The process of managing core values of academic ethos is of a cyclic character and consists of the following phases: discovering and developing, enacting, and maintaining the core values of academic ethos.
6. Academic integrity is the result of a compound process of coordinated actions in the following areas: leaders’ integrity, integrity of a higher school as an organization, integrity of members of academic community, and integrity of environment of a higher school.
7. The key differentiation among higher schools lies not in the general core values statement (many universities have very similar or nearly identical core values) but in the effectiveness of transmitting the chosen academic ethos to the academic community and transferring academic ethos core values (cultural identity) into university behavior.
8. Core values of academic ethos emanate from various sources. Most often they are academic tradition, ideology, the institutional history with ideology, and the leader’s personality.
9. Representatives of all the groups constituting the academic community should be involved in the process of discovering and redefining core values of academic ethos.
10. Higher schools with a high level of awareness of academic ethos core values place a special emphasis on enacting these values by supporting them in the university’s goals, objectives, and measures, formulating university’s policies, procedures, and codes as well as maintaining them by recruitment, actions taken in order to explain core values, training on core values for members of academic community and the way of awarding and promotion system and control the behavior compliance of academic community members with the behaviors ascribed to core values of academic ethos.
11. The persistence of core values of academic ethos in the process of a university’s development has its source in the clear definition and continuous updating of definitions in the context of desirable and unacceptable behaviors.
12. Each participant of the academic community should sign an academic pledge and be trained on core values of academic ethos, behaviors and policies, procedures and codes created on this basis. Training should be supplemented with the appropriate materials in paper and electronic form.
13. A university should call into being the unit responsible for the control of policies, procedures, and compliance with core values of academic ethos.
14. A university should create a formal system for communicating core values of academic ethos. One of its objectives should be to inform the members of academic community about the achievements and activities undertaken for academic ethos enactment.
15. A motivation system should regard the compliance of actions of a university employee with the values of academic ethos.
16. The key elements to the success of universities’ merger are the organizational cultures analysis of the combined organizations and recognition and respect for their traditions and values of academic ethos of those organizations.
17. Core values of the higher school created as a result of a merger should be the effect of consensus regarding traditions of both the universities.
This set of statements is not a closed list of suggestions. The practice of managing the higher schools, as well as the importance and present-day interest of this topic in the scientific discourse, will probably result in the identification of particular conditions and deviations from the statements.
However, the assumptions of this concept are compliant with the main development trajectory within this research area in management sciences, and the importance of this topic provokes further cognitive efforts to be taken in this field.