Article A10.5 Academic Integrity and Ethics Shad Saleem Faruqi Emeritus Professor of Law, Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Malaysia prof.shad.saleem.faruqi[at]gmail.com Published Online: July 30, 2013 Note. This is an extended version of an article by the author, titled “Integrity in Academia,” published previously in The Star Online on February 21, 2013, which is available online: http://www.thestar.com.my/Opinion/Columnists/Reflecting-On-The-Law/Profile/Articles/2013/02/21/Integrity-in-academia.aspx 1. Academic Integrity Membership of the academic profession carries with it many special responsibilities towards students, colleagues, the university, and the community. One such responsibility is to observe integrity and ethics in the discharge of one’s academic duties. Academic integrity is the moral code or ethical policy of academia. It relates to the maintenance of the high ethical, professional, and legal standards of a university and even of the broader community of which we are an integral part. It is a vast and expanding area. It straddles many shores within which the waters of ethics, economics, law, and technology intermingle. Universities in Ferment The university scene is one of creative ferment. There are evolving perceptions of the university’s activist role in social change. Universities are now immersed in “town-gown” relationships. There is a new emphasis on industry-varsity synergy. Information Technology Tertiary education is deeply influenced by the rise of information technology. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that new issues are coming to the fore. An important one is the challenges and opportunities of cyber sources of information, which comes with the following characteristics: (a) Technology has greatly expanded the traditional methods of teaching and learning. (b) It has made large amounts of information available, at the touch of a button, to millions of people simultaneously. (c) It has taken the search out of research. Previously we relied on direct sources to obtain material; now a large amount of information, some of it of dubious quality, some of it with no stated authorship, is available at our finger tips. (d) It has distorted the perception of what ownership of information entails. Previously information was created by individuals. Now information is more of a communal property, indicating the rise of a sort of “collective intelligence.” We need to put our heads together to think how to confront this and whether to reshape our notions of academic integrity. From amongst a large and expanding area, the following issues of academic integrity can be highlighted: (a) honesty and rigor in academic research and publishing, (b) plagiarism, (c) avoidance of cheating in examinations, (d) maintenance of academic standards, (e) investigation of academic misdemeanours, and (f) remedial and punitive aspects of the law. The following sections look into each of these issues. 2. Honesty and Rigor in Academic Research and Publishing All academics are required to produce original research. With this new demand, questions of research integrity come to the fore. Our conviction in the worth of advancing knowledge and our commitment to honesty in the pursuit of truth has to be emphasised. A Code of Ethics for Research in Education must be devised or revised that could, among others, address the following issues: (a) A large part of research financing inevitably comes from external organisations (i.e., the government and industry). This creates the temptation to sacrifice impartial truth in order to please the client who is paying for the work. This problem is well documented abroad in research involving the pharmaceutical, automotive, and airline industries. One way to mitigate the problem is to have elaborate rules for declaring sources of revenue and disclosing clients’ interests. How far such disclosures work is open to question. From the legal perspective what can be stated is that any academic staff who allows his outside professional activities, or private financial interests, or the receipt of benefits from third parties to outweigh his/her commitment to the university can be prosecuted under the law (e.g., Act 605 in Malaysia, Statutory Bodies [Discipline and Surcharge] Act 2000). (b) A more insidious problem is when the outcome of one study is withheld so that the sponsors of other studies are not uncomfortable. (c) In many parts of the world, research supervisors feel that being a supervisor entitles them to put their name as a lead author or co-author of their students’ articles and seminar papers. There are clear problem of ethics here. Mere supervision, direction, correction, or help with sources and materials does not entitle a supervisor to claim authorship of the student’s work. Intellectual ownership is a function of creative contribution, not of formal relationship or status. Only those who made substantial creative contribution to a product are entitled to be listed as authors. (d) Editors, reviewers, and appraisers should not, normally, be allowed to claim joint authorship. (e) If supervisors partly appropriate their students’ work, that leads to a further problem. The student cannot use that work in his or her thesis except to refer to it as the student is not the sole creator of that work. (f) In recent years due to the “publish or perish policy,” many academics are prepared to pay to have their articles published in some journals with mercantile motives. It is the practice of some foreign journals to appoint roving “external” or “overseas editors” who entice aspiring people from all over the world to submit articles for a fee. The fee is then shared between the editor and the journal. University Boards must look carefully at these journals that are converting academic publishing into a lucrative business. (g) Another questionable practice that has recently been brought to the attention of some university authorities is that academics from diverse fields often team together to produce a joint article. A lecturer familiar with research models may do the research model. Another lecturer from the field concerned may do the actual research. A statistician may do the analysis of data. A language lecturer may do the actual writing. Another team member may do the footnotes. All five will then share the cost of submitting the article to a journal that demands a fee. The end result is that people are “publishing” in areas quite outside their competence. Universities need to examine this practice. (h) An important issue is the conduct of a sponsored researcher when he or she resigns from an institution that sponsored the research. Rules of confidentiality are in place but they are not easy to enforce. (i) In many research projects, issues of privacy are paramount. (j) Research financing raises important issues of auditing and control. (k) A further issue is the liability of the university when an employee receives an outside grant and is permitted by the university to do the outside work. If the university signs the research contract, will it be held liable for the possible negligence of the researcher? A way out is to allow the grantee to sign in his or her own name. However, whenever the signatory signs as a delegate of the university, it will be difficult to escape liability. Insurance coverage is therefore needed. Asking the researcher to indemnify the university is unlikely to work. (l) There are environmental, health, and safety considerations in most scientific research. (m) The research design should minimise the risk of significant harm to the participants, including loss of privacy. The plan and costing of research should include provision for the remedying of harm. (n) What constitutes legitimate and morally acceptable research is open to debate. One test is consequentialist. Are the consequences desirable? The other test is deontological. Are the actions right or wrong on some higher criterion of morality, justice, human flourishing, etc.? (o) Trivial research should not be financed. The cost of the project must be measured on a cost-benefit analysis. (p) The claim that the topic or issue “has never been investigated” is often exaggerated. (q) Deception of participants in a research and secrecy towards them should never be allowed. (r) Researchers who criticise other researches should maintain decorum and respect of the other. Views must be engaged. Persons should not be demonised. (s) There are significant issues about the ownership of research processes and results. There are conflicting claims between the sponsoring institutions, the universities where the actual research was conducted, the supervisors involved, and the scholars who did the work. This is a complex area of copyright and intellectual property and requires detailed study. 3. Plagiarism How to cope with plagiarism in student and staff writings is a massive challenge in an age of technology. An ethics crisis exists everywhere. The Internet has made things worse because it has provided a quick and relatively easy way to cheat. Twenty-first century forces are affecting academic integrity. Our rules and guidelines need to catch up with current problems. (a) Through ongoing education we need to improve awareness of the ethical and legal norms in this area and of the consequences of academic dishonesty. (b) We need to devise Honour Codes, teach about academic integrity in ethics classes and note issues of integrity in our syllabi. (c) Internet citation is more complex than citation of print materials and needs to be taught. (d) More software systems to detect plagiarism, like VeriGuide (Taiwan), Turnitin, etc., need to be devised or imported. At Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), postgraduate students are required to pre-check their work and make a prior declaration before submission of their thesis. Perhaps this evaluation system needs to be extended to undergraduate assessments and to all staff publications. The practical implications are massive. (e) If all the above fail then the laws relating to staff and student discipline must apply. (In Malaysia, it is Act 605 for staff and Act 174, Educational Institutions [Discipline] Act 1976, for students.) These laws are quite adequate in their content though the machinery for their enforcement is inadequate in relation to the gigantic task. (f) Perhaps, specialised peer investigating committees--separate for staff and separate for students--are needed. In some universities student committees on plagiarism are called Student Honor Councils. (g) In extreme cases of breach, the law of copyright will have to be invoked. One must note that plagiarism and copyright violation are not one and the same thing. Copyright offences can exist even if there is no plagiarism. Likewise there can be plagiarism even if there is no breach of copyright. 4. Avoidance of Cheating in Examinations At the end of every semester examination, the legal office at UiTM, as at other universities around the world, is inundated with hundreds of reports of students using unfair means in the examination hall. Technology is helping students in an examination hall to find newer, illicit ways of electronic communication with outsiders. To mitigate the problem, let us move towards an open book system. This will require a totally new approach towards setting examination papers. 5. Maintenance of Academic Standards This is connected with the comprehensiveness, depth, and breadth of the knowledge we seek to impart to our wards. (a) Our syllabi must be up to date and even futuristic. (b) Our reading list must be broad-based. It must seek to broaden horizons. It must remove blinkers. (c) A study plan must be communicated to the students. (d) We need to be cautioned that in much of Asia and Africa, our education system is too narrowly conceived. It is too West-centric. It apes Western universities and shows ignorance of Asian and African contributions to knowledge. This is in no way to suggest that the scintillating contributions to civilisation of Europe and America must be ignored. It is meant to draw attention to the fact that in Asian universities and in Asian societies, intellectual discourse suffers from three debilitating tendencies. First, the Western worldview and its assumptions are blindly aped. Second, we are ignorant of Asian and African roots of knowledge and Eastern contributions to civilisation. Third, there is hardly any critique of Western theories of law or economics or medicine in the light of our own realities. This prevents us from tackling our own problems like poverty and unsustainable development. In every university worth its name the bouquet of knowledge must be filled with flowers from many gardens. It is a sort of misrepresentation for a university anywhere in the world to offer a course, let us say, in jurisprudence, and teach only Anglo-American legal philosophy to the exclusion of Chinese, Indian, Middle-Eastern, Persian, and African views on sublime issues of law. Fifty-five years after independence, Malaysian universities need a Merdeka [independence] of the mind. (e) Another serious problem is that “liberal education,” by which I mean the humanities and the arts, are being cut away in virtually all universities around the world. We are busy producing useful machines rather than complete citizens who can criticise traditions and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and some critical issues surrounding humanity. The quality of education suffers as a result. 6. Investigation of Academic Misdemeanours (a) Around the world, staff with fake degrees crop up now and then. (b) Students with forged certificates are discovered. It is up to the university to take disciplinary action and/or report the matter to criminal authorities. Both types of actions are allowed under the law. There will be no double jeopardy under our Malaysian Constitution’s Article 7(2), if along with a police report disciplinary action is instituted against a student for unethical conduct. (c) Everywhere rules exist on conflict of interest situations between staff and students. (d) The “sex for grades” trial in Singapore is an illustration of a form of corruption. (e) Attempts by staff to inflate the grade of their favoured students or relatives are not unheard of. (f) Leak of examination papers does take place now and then. This is not just a disciplinary matter but a criminal offence (g) A gray area is the giving of examination tips--what and how much can be revealed? (h) As teachers, academics must encourage the free pursuit of learning in their students. We must demonstrate respect for students as individuals and act as guides and counsellors and not as dictators dictating the truth. During the marking of the examination scripts it would be improper to downgrade or fail a student because his or her views are unacceptable to the examiner. As long as opinions are argued logically, consistently, and clearly, they should be credited. In the context of a university we must accept that truth is multiple. Examiners, at least in the humanities and social sciences, should be concerned with the journey, not the destination; they should focus on the process of arriving at the answer and not the answer itself. 7. Remedial and Punitive Aspects of the Law At UiTM, elaborate rules of staff and student discipline exist with two Acts of Parliament: Act 605 for staff and Act 174 for students. The laws allow for full and fair investigation of charges, notice to the accused, due process of deliberation, and a system of appeal. The main challenge of the law is that the present institutions and committees cannot cope with the magnitude of the task of plagiarism by students (and by staff). New techniques need to be devised. Perhaps a whistleblowers provision from the national law needs to be incorporated in our university law. Perhaps issues of plagiarism should be handled by student and staff peer committees. Our overburdened Ethics Committees need to be strengthened. Either their role should be broadened or they must receive assistance from a number of other sub-committees. Suggested Citation: Faruqi, S. S. (2013). Academic integrity and ethics. Research World, 10, Article A10.5. Retrieved from http://www1.ximb.ac.in/RW.nsf/pages/A10.5 Copyleft Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar 751013, India Research World (ISSN 0974-2379) http://www1.ximb.ac.in/RW.nsf/pages/Home | ||
 |