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The Point of All This
Ron Pitt
AOL, Enron, ImClone, Martha Stewart, Merrill Lynch, Qwest, Tyco,
WorldCom… American business is on trial, and accounting scandals
and corporate misdeeds are shaking the very foundations of our economic
system. As a school that teaches business, we know we have a responsibility
to teach business ethics. But that's not the point of this newsletter.
The academic world is hardly immune to wrongdoing. The profit motive
and the pressure to publish have always been factors, but it's especially
disturbing when respected scholars are found to have falsified material.
One wonders how reliable research is when one of the nation's prominent
materials-science researchers publishes the same graph to present
several different data sets. But that's not the point of this issue
either.
In our immediate environment, student plagiarism and other forms
of dishonesty require constant vigilance. In the last issue of this
newsletter, Bill Graves wrote about the need to raise the penalties
now that students have incredibly easy access to massive quantities
of information. But that's not the point of this issue either.
What is the point is that these problems may be related.
Our classrooms are a microclimate of the surrounding environment,
and at all levels of our society, honesty is under attack. Students
respond to models of financial success, and those models are not
particularly wholesome right now. Furthermore, what kind of model
does academia present when scholars are found to have cheated, or
when faculty (elsewhere) use publishers' PowerPoint slides as their
own?
The articles in this issue span the breadth of this topic, and
they are really worth reading. Art Gudikunst does a beautiful job
of framing the more global, corporate problem exemplified by Enron,
and Janet Dean, Paul Lokken, and Charlie Cullinan discuss the more
local issues. Elizabeth Powers helps all of us by clarifying the
college's procedures for dealing with cheating.
I wish to thank these contributors, who took the time to deal carefully
with this sensitive and maddening problem. And please refer to Bill
Graves' article in the last issue, which can be found on the facdev
website at http://web.bryant.edu/~facdev/news.html.
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