Given this train of thought on which I've been traveling since taking up my current student services post within a School of Public Health, I've been particularly struck by how the old origins of the word go on resonating whenever I'm faced with academic integrity issues, which is, lamentably, not as rarely as I would wish. For this other word, “integrity,” similarly entails wholeness or soundness. Without integrity—of body, society, and environment—we cannot be healthy, whole, or sound. The meanings of these different words overlap and coincide.

To lead our recent workshop discussion on academic integrity issues within schools of public health, then, I began by attempting to reframe these issues in light of this more comprehensive consideration of the close etymological relationship between integrity and health. Usually, when we think of academic integrity, we are referring to these unpleasant interactions involving students who have been accused of plagiarism or cheating by their professors. The general tendency of our conversations with each other and with our faculty tends to circle, in frustration, around the problems of prevention and detection, taking largely for granted that we all know what we mean by a violation of academic integrity. Those of us who have spent our professional lives within the Rules of Schools may even tend to ascribe what can seem to be an increasing prevalence of integrity violations to an erosion of “traditional” values (McCabe/Drinan): a diminishing of academic integrity, within a society of diminishing integrity…within an increasingly unsound or toxic environment, on a planet that is increasingly inhospitable to life as we know it due to our lack of integrity as a species. And there may well be some truth within this cycle of negative thinking.

But something about ascribing academic integrity violations among public health students to an erosion of values doesn't seem quite right to me. Before coming to public health, I worked with more diverse crowds of students…young people who were pursuing their immediate objectives for a whole variety of different motives, many of them entirely and unapologetically self-centered, with zero apprehension of or concern for the larger whole of which we are all a part. Public Health students, on the other hand, are the good eggs. None of them is eager to become a predatory investment banker, to make a killing, to climb some dubious ladder to what a sick society considers success. These are the students who are swimming against the polluted current. They want to give back, to serve the under-served. If they're thinking about making a mark at all, they're hoping to do it by making the world a healthier and safer place. So, ascribing academic integrity violations among our students of public health to an erosion of values seems to be missing the mark by considerably more than a mile.

For the sake of discussion, then, I proposed (and again propose) that we consider the possibility that many of the academic integrity violations that we deal with may, in fact, stem from something more than an erosion of values. In my experience, academic integrity violations within our School of Public Health often seem to stem from 1) misunderstanding of academic expectations, 2) poor communication by faculty (and/or faulty assignment construction), and even from 3) some fundamental incompatibility between the mission and practice of public health and the intellectual property imperative that, in part, underwrites a concern with integrity within a scholarly environment.

Admittedly, the obvious explanation for the first item, this misunderstanding of academic expectations, is the consequence of an erosion of certain values in our national culture. These days highly competitive universities are awarding undergraduate degrees to young people with limited vocabularies and poor writing skills compared to the standards set by alumni of comparatively recent vintage. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to us that universities are also failing to indoctrinate their students with regard to traditional academic expectations. These are, moreover, the Dark Ages for education in America. We feel it most acutely here in California, where our state school system has been ranked forty-eighth in the nation. So, yes, we have systematically allowed the quality of education to erode, and it should come as no surprise that some of the classic values of education have eroded away as well.

Moving on to the second item, much of the responsibility for academic integrity amongst the students is in the hands of the faculty. In some recent cases of student plagiarism here at our School of Public Health, the faculty involved has admitted to some responsibility for misunderstandings that have contributed to integrity failures among the students. Take-home exams have been (poorly) designed in such a way as, seemingly, to invite unauthorized student collaboration or unacknowledged “cutting and pasting” from lecture notes and websites. One professor even admitted, with chagrin, to have made powerpoint demonstrations throughout the semester without conscientiously including references to source material at the bottom of each of his own slides. While all faculty seem to be aware that they need to say something about academic integrity, at least in the small print of the syllabus, in practice very few of them seem to give much systematic thought to their ongoing presentation of the issues and concerns. While those of us who work in student services deal with integrity violations semester after semester, as a matter of course, many faculty seem to be blithely unaware that it is an issue at all until an incident too flagrant to be ignored occurs on their own watch.

In “Toward a Culture of Academic Integrity,” Donald L. McCabe and Patrick Drinan do a particularly thorough job of considering the various factors that contribute to what they perceive to be a decline in the “culture of academic integrity on many campuses.” McCabe and Drinan observe that “ many campuses have become larger and more complex, losing the sense of shared culture, trust, and individual accountability that they once may have encouraged; part-time faculty members have taken on a greater role at institutions, while the influence of full-time professors on student life has declined.” They also point out that “on campuses with honor codes, fewer than one in 14 students surveyed in the 1995-96 academic year acknowledged cheating repeatedly on tests and examinations, compared with one in six at institutions without honor codes.” In “Honor Code 101: an Introduction to the Elements of Traditional Honor Codes, Modified Honor Codes and Academic Integrity Policies,” Timothy M. Dodd recognizes that the “strength and influence” of an honor code, or of any other institutionally adopted standard for integrity regardless of precise form, spring from “discussion from admission to graduation, inside and outside the classroom, of the fundamental values of academic integrity.” The point is that, as discussion is what largely creates culture, a discussion of integrity may go some considerable distance toward creating a culture of integrity.

It seems to me, given the etymologies with which I began my musings, that Schools of Public Health are particularly well-suited for ongoing discussions of integrity, inside and outside the classroom, and that, among all possible graduate students, our public health students may particularly receptive to a systematic effort to promote integrity. Integrity and health similarly resonate with the concept of “soundness”: there can be no lapse in understanding from one context to another, whether we're discussing academic integrity or integrity within the nation's health care system, without putting the whole at risk.

Despite the myriad new technological tools for communication that are available to us today, our work in student services remains endlessly hampered by communication difficulties. Even if we all accept that promoting a discussion of integrity issues within our schools is vitally important, we still face the whole usual variety of obstacles to effective community-wide communication. On this issue, the involvement of the faculty is indispensable. If I'm recalling correctly (and I'd like very much to hear otherwise!), none of the workshop participants had any surefire methodology to share for getting the faculty to take ownership of the integrity discussion.

Finally, as we go about trying to continue the discussion that we began in our workshop last fall, it may be helpful to consider the ways in which what our students need to do as public health professionals and what they're expected to do while they are students are at odds with one another. Following Brian Martin's very thoughtful and iconoclastic approach to academic integrity issues in his “Plagiarism: A Misplaced Emphasis,” it's worth remembering that there are some fundamental incompatibilities between the mission and practice of public health and the intellectual property imperative that, in part, underwrites a concern with integrity within a scholarly environment. The mission of public health is to spread the word, to take the good information uncovered by researchers and disseminate it as widely and usefully as possible, through community-based health education efforts as well as through policy advocacy.

Arguably, public health is all about sharing important information quickly and efficiently so that lives can be saved. The emphasis in a virtuous public health career is on the outcome: has this effort made lives healthier and the world safer? By contrast, the emphasis in a successful academic career is on authorship: widespread dissemination of life-saving information is often secondary to the need to stake one's claim to a meticulously delimited tract of intellectual property. Acknowledging the opposing tendencies of these two different sort of career imperatives might be a fruitfully polemical way of continuing a discussion of integrity. And these opposing tendencies—the integrity of dissemination and the integrity of ownership—must be reconciled because if integrity is not the cornerstone of a public health career then that career is poisoned at its core.

Submitted by Vincent Atchity, UC Berkeley School of Public Health

Works Cited

Dodd, Timothy M. “Honor Code 101: an Introduction to the Elements of Traditional Honor Codes, Modified Honor Codes and Academic Integrity Policies.” http://www.academicintegrity.org

Martin, Brian. “Plagiarism: a misplaced emphasis.” Journal of Information Ethics, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1994, pp. 36-47.

McCabe, Donald L. and Patrick Drinan. Toward a Culture of Academic Integrity.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 1999.

Sites Consulted

http://www.academicintegrity.org/index.php
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http://www.yale.edu/graduateschool/academics/integrity.html
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