Elet Callahan seems frustrated.

When Callahan and the Syracuse University academic integrity committee she chairs made recommendations for cheating policies for students, the university community was receptive. But when the focus turned to faculty and staff, that level of attention simply wasn’t there.

‘I don’t believe that the university community or the leadership of the community see those two issues as equally urgent,’ said Callahan of student integrity versus faculty staff integrity. ‘And I think that’s a mistake.’

The committee’s final report published in December contained numerous anonymous accounts of faculty and staff academic integrity violations as well as alarming complaints about the current processes and procedures.

‘It was clear there was a very strong perception among a number of people on campus that the climate of the university was at risk,’ Callahan said.

Members of the committee as well as national academic integrity experts stress that ethical behavior must start from the top to create a proper campus climate. Yet several months after publishing their final report, Callahan and her fellow committee members are still waiting to see their recommendations set into motion.

‘We think that the issue of faculty/staff integrity should be viewed on par with student academic integrity,’ she said. ‘I think from a personal perspective, it’s folly to think student academic integrity will improve if the rest of us just keep doing what we are doing.’

National experts agree.

‘Students are often exclusively the object of moral development instruction, and part of that is a legitimate part of the teaching culture,’ said Tim Dodd, executive director of the National Center for Academic Integrity. ‘But we are all part of the campus culture of integrity. And we all need to be held accountable.’

The focus on students was a result of the college academic environment, said Vice Chancellor Eric Spina.

‘I think it is natural,’ he said. ‘There are many more students. The focus of the institution is on students. It doesn’t surprise me that there was more focus on student integrity. But I think as a community coming out of this exercise, the thing we need to embrace is that we all need to be held of strong academic integrity.’

Dodd echoed the sentiment of the committee and said that those at the highest level of the university must set an example for students.

‘There has to be a commitment at the top to not only speak to values, but to act on values,’ he said. ‘That means decision-making and dialogue at the top needs to be open, transparent, honest and devoid of conflicts of interest.’

If professors don’t follow the rules, students will not see little incentive, said Patrick Drinan, former president of the Center for Academic Integrity.

‘When we press on student integrity issues harder, sometimes the students will say, ‘Well, you have these clear expectations for us, but what about professors who don’t update their lectures or miss a lot of classes, or cut their classes short or engage in gender discrimination?” said Drinan, former dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Diego.

During the fall 2004 semester, then-Vice Chancellor Deborah Freund commissioned a group of professors and students to study academic integrity violations and policies at SU and to make recommendations of how they could be better executed. In spring 2006, the Vice Chancellor and Provost Committee on Academic Integrity (VPCAI) completed its recommendations on students and moved on to faculty and staff.

Its December 2006 recommendations were recently approved by a Sense of the Senate vote at the University Senate meeting March 21. But while the VPCAI was able to discuss its findings on students at several USen meetings, its findings on faculty and staff was only discussed at one, at the very end of a long meeting when a voting quorum was no longer present, Callahan said.

‘We are very concerned about the relative lack of prioritization being given by the university community as a whole and by the leadership of the university to the academic integrity recommendations about faculty and staff,’ she said.

The VPCAI published a preliminary report on faculty staff integrity issues in October 2006. The report identified various policies and procedures that were related to academic integrity of faculty, administrators, instructors and staff, and identified several issues that it felt should be investigated further.

But the committee quickly realized these recommendations weren’t strong enough.

‘We received a lot of feedback very quickly from people who disagreed with the report and our proposed recommendations to the extent that they were not very aggressive,’ Callahan said.

The dissent came in two waves.

The first wave focused on the procedures, Callahan said. A number of people came forward saying there needed to be a much stronger review of the procedures. People brought such concerns about the procedures as ‘They don’t work,’ ‘I’ve been disenfranchised’ and ‘I’ve been treated unfairly,’ Callahan said.

‘We have policies and procedures to protect people in many areas,’ said a faculty member who was quoted in the stronger December final report. ‘But they are often not what they seem (don’t get applied fairly, are used on an ad hoc basis, or people are discouraged from using them, etc.) In my experience, there is a wide gap between what we say and what we do.’

The second wave of concern focused on improper conduct that was occurring and not being addressed, Callahan said.

‘There is a longstanding culture here of failing to deal with misconduct and abusive behavior by administrators and faculty,’ an administrator was quoted in the December final report as saying. ‘Many good people have been hurt as a result. When and if the wrongdoers/people who cause this harm are finally forced to leave, it is likely precipitated by the threat of public exposure, rather than by the gravity or extent of the offenses, and they are permitted to resign and act as if they left for benign reasons. Thus, we allow harm to occur at other institutions.’

Such concerns made it quite clear to the VPCAI that something needed to be done, Callahan said. It made three recommendations in its December report to address these issues:

-The university should adopt a statement for academic integrity that applies to the entire campus community.

-The vice chancellor and provost should initiate an ‘external, independent and transparent’ review of current procedures.

-The university should establish an ‘independent, neutral, impartial and confidential process to receive, investigate and facilitate resolution of concerns.’

Vice Chancellor Spina acknowledged the troublesome nature of the findings of the report.

‘I recognize that this is out there, that there are people out there doing things they shouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘With this number of allegations out there, we need to be certain that we have a process we believe in.’

But his draft response, where he outlined his view on the recommendations, had some significant differences from the viewpoints of the VPCAI, Callahan said.

As a part of its first recommendation, the VPCAI is strongly in favor of an umbrella statement of academic integrity for the entire campus community – not just students, but in his preliminary response, Spina said he believed the statement for faculty and staff could be drawn from an already existing code of ethical conduct approved by the board of trustees in May 2006.

But the VPCAI believes the statement needs to clearly state a commitment to academic integrity from all reaches of the campus community.

‘In the same way that students are accountable, the faculty need to be accountable, the staff needs to be accountable,’ Callahan said.

An academic integrity code that applies to a whole campus, whether it be a single statement or a lengthy document, is a fairly common procedure at universities, Drinan said.

The preamble of the Code of Academic Integrity at George Washington University, established in 1996, applies to the entire campus, said Tim Terpstra, director of GWU’s Academic Integrity Office.

‘We, the Students, Faculty, Librarians and Administration of The George Washington University, believing academic honesty to be central to the mission of the University, commit ourselves to its high standards and to the promotion of academic integrity,’ the preamble states.

The University of Colorado at Boulder, which gained media attention for a controversial professor plagiarism case, also has a wide sweeping code.

The largest contrast between the VPCAI recommendations and the provost’s preliminary response lies in the committee’s third recommendation: the creation of an ombuds office to informally and confidentially help people resolve concerns.

‘With this fear and mistrust, and lack of confidence in the formal processes to meet these concerns, we think the ombuds office really needs to be put into place,’ Callahan said.

But while the VPCAI believes this should be put into place immediately, Spina said he wants to wait until the external review is completed.

‘I think it makes sense to be very deliberate here,’ he said. ‘I am trying to be sensitive to the fact that there are a lot of things in play. I don’t want to do something this year and something else next year.’

But Callahan said an impartial ombuds office, which is present at more than 200 universities across the country, is something needed by the university – and now, not later.

Callahan also said she hopes the external review, which Spina would enact, will begin soon. The VPCAI believes a review of existing processes and procedures done by experts from outside of the university would be a way to see where the university should go from here, she said.

‘I believe that the vice chancellor agreed in principal to that review a number of months ago,’ said Callahan, acknowledging that she only recently gave Spina a list of possible names. ‘I think it needs to happen sooner rather than later.’

Spina said he hopes to have the external review underway by the fall.

In the meantime, Callahan and her fellow committee members will be waiting – hoping that their hard work will not go to waste.

‘I think that it’s very clear that the entire university community has to buy into this whole cultural change we have been advocating for a year and a half for it to be successful,’ she said. ‘The leadership needs to take leadership to be successful in this area and I hope that it will happen.’

Published on April 30, 2007 at 12:00 pm