The ethical academy? The university as an ethical system

Abstract

Ethics, classroom and academy Universities may be seen as an evolving network of ethical systems that govern teaching, research, service, and administration. The university system, however, is changing; adding new rules, new ways of working, and new ideas to its repertoire of operations. Universities now comprise a spectacularly large body of regulations and policies, both internal and external, that cover issues from cheating, human subject research, academic integrity, research on animals, environmental ethics, and the ethics of sexual harassment. These interconnected ecological systems of ethics have not emerged in one rational process but rather reflect the ongoing historical and dynamic development of law and ethics in relation to the creation of new values. This has, of course, played out in a particular political and ideological environment, which has produced the university as a set of practices and beliefs, and a particular set of rationalities. The theories that we have traditionally employed, may be now put for questioning and examination (see our prior work Peters et al., 2018). An interesting body of work entitled Creating the Ethical Academy (Gallant, 2011) focused on cheating, the bending of admission rules, fudging research, and plagiarism, arguing that if we allow a corrupt Academy what hope is there for society? This collection focuses on two questions: Why does academic corruption occur, and what should we do about it? Gallant adopts a systems view, suggesting that corruption should be seen as part of a holistic approach rather than individual dysfunction. Similar approaches and questions have been raised in other kinds of learning institutions such as at the secondary school level. New technologies have made 'cutting' and 'pasting' easy and the Internet has exploded with problems based around student and faculty plagiarism and issues springing from the 'paradigm of the copy'. Quite recently other fields of ethics have sprung up on academic integrity (Bretag, 2016), originally based on the southern honour code (duty, pride, power, and self-esteem) in the eighteenth century, evolving into a more contemporary concept that distinguishes between students and faculty, focusing respectively on cheating and publishing ethics. The contemporary concept, challenged by technological disruption of academic writing, began to pick up steam in the 1990s with the work of McCabe (1992) and McCabe and Trevino (1993) on cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty. More recently we have witnessed paid anonymous services, that will allow students to receive a written work within 24 hours, via ghostwriters who could be your classmate or people living on the other side of the globe. Research ethics, while somewhat more established, has also undergone changes, with a greater emphasis on institutional indemnity. Universities now have a code of ethical conduct for research, teaching and evaluations involving human participants focused on 'risk of harm' to research participants, voluntary consent and ownership of inf...

Beyond Diverse Datasets: Responsible MIR, Interdisciplinarity, and the Fractured Worlds of Music

“…A third response to this potential misuse is to exclaim that the featured researchers are merely scholars and scientists working at a university and therefore: 1) they are seeking to advance knowledge of the world; 2) they are performing fundamental research that could benefit ITM in ways that may not be immediately tangible but are nevertheless worth pursuing; and 3) while they may benefit professionally from the work, they are not profit-driven, commercial entities seeking to exploit artistic traditions for financial interests. There are several problems with these statements, not the least of which is the romanticized and inaccurate notion of the university as an "ethically neutral" guardian of knowledge divested from selfish, profit-driven concerns (Tesar et al, 2021;Fleming, 2021). Another issue to point out is that the knowledge produced in the university, and the training such learning institutions provide, travels outside its walls.…”