Creating the Ethical Academy: A Systems Approach to Understanding Misconduct and Empowering Change in Higher Education (review)

The contributions to this edited book are centered on two core questions: Why does academic corruption occur? And what should we do about it? The authors consider many types of corruption, from student cheating to ethical issues that arise at the board level. Throughout the text, academic corruption is addressed through a "systems" paradigm, not as a form of "individual dysfunction." The various chapters consider a broad range of ethical violations, each of which is structured by institutional, systemic, and social norms from within and outside the academy. Throughout Creating the Ethical Academy, context and individual behavior are given equal attention. Tricia Bertram Gallant and her colleagues contend that academic corruption requires this type of holistic approach if one is to understand and resolve it because issues of corruption are "nested within a framework" (p. 42) of individual, group, and institutional interactions.

The book is divided into three parts. The first portion of the text outlines the scope of corruption in higher education and lays out the applied and multilevel approach to ethics that will be used to examine various forms of academic corruption. The final chapter in the first section (chapter 3) provides an excellent overview of the systems perspective that is employed throughout the text. Gallant, the book's editor and author of this pivotal chapter, defines ethics and highlights the book's unique approach to ethics in the academy. She then outlines the key tenet of the systems approach: Irrespective of the level on which violations occur, issues of academic corruption simultaneously affect individuals, institutions, the educational system, and larger society. This theme of interrelationships resonates throughout the consideration of a wide range of topics in the remainder of the book.

This is evident in the second section (chapters 4-8) wherein specific issues of academic corruption are considered in greater depth. The authors remain holistic in their approach, and each topic is considered from multiple points of view. In chapter 4, for example, which describes integrity practices related to college admissions, we are vividly confronted with the competing interests of individuals and institutions as well as the conflicts that can arise between personal and social expectations of the educational system. Gallant begins this chapter with an anecdote that has remained with me since reading the text— one that aptly epitomizes the complexity inherent in addressing issues of academic corruption. During a discussion in one of her classes at a competitive institution where the students are generally "better than perfect" (p. 49), Gallant learns that five out of twelve students in the class had experienced situations in which their high school teachers facilitated cheating on AP tests by walking out and providing them with the opportunity to compare answers and enhance their performance. She substantiates her personal observation with the literature on academic integrity, which asserts that the growing pressures on teachers and school systems to perform adequately has led to a rise in teacher cheating and has altered classroom teaching practices (i.e., teaching to the test). Thus, we are immediately confronted with the fact that students have acquired ethical habits long before they move into their dorm rooms and, moreover, that trends in student cheating have pervasive and long-term consequences for students, teachers, and the institutions to which they are admitted.

The final section of the book is devoted to proposing solutions to problems of academic corruption. While many of the chapters in the second section discuss various ethical problems and offer issue-specific recommendations (e.g., the "ethical audit" and development of conflict-of-interest policies proposed at the end of chapter 8), the authors fail to adequately synthesize this final section with recommendations made in earlier chapters. The conclusion reveals that the main strength of this book—its ability to examine issues of corruption...