Academic Integrity and the business of higher education
To talk about keeping academic integrity is easy. I’ve never met another academic in my (very limited) experience who would admit to have put their academic integrity on the back burner in exchange for something else (money, fame, prestige, all terms that need to be read in the context of academia – hence next to no money, fame only among our peers, and a prestige which is usually accompanied by the need to explain what we actually do to people who see us as glorified teachers with lots of free time). To walk the walk of academic integrity, well, that’s a different story; a story that comes with a significant reality check anytime we get a reminder that, in today’s world, education is also a business, and a very profitable one too. As in any business, the more customers you have, the more money you make, and students seem more and more to be considered as customers – to the point that in many instances they appear to consider themselves as such. The question, though, is: do we need more customers, or do we need to provide a better service to selected ones?
Before I get into any problematic area, let me get one point clear: I am not in favour, nor would I ever be, of elitist academic institutions. The university system of the 1950s, in which only the rich could get access to higher education, is gone and not really missed. On the other hand, the academic system needs gatekeepers – be them admissions offices or the academic themselves. The task of the former is pretty straightforward: check an applicant’s grades, if they’re high (and I mean high) let them in, if they’re not, thanks but no, thanks. Once the students are in, though – and this is important at every level, be it undergraduate, masters or PhD – the load is on the academics’ shoulders to provide excellence, and demand excellence.
The danger I see with the academic system leaning towards the business side of things is the transformation of universities in degree dispensers: come in, collect 180 credits, get a degree, go home. This is not what higher education is supposed to be. Academic integrity does not only entail integrity in our research, but also – and those not interested in our research would probably say first and foremost – embracing and applying rigorous academic standards in teaching, marking, supervising and examining. A university degree is not a professional qualification: it is something less and something more at the same time. Less, because having a degree does not mean one’s ready to perform a certain job (let alone being qualified, legally or otherwise); more, because a degree is (or should be) the measurement of the level of knowledge one has in a particular field.
Lowering, or simply not upholding, academic standards may make for a few happy customers in the short term. In the long term, however, low academic standards entail proliferation and devaluation of degrees, graduates with superficial knowledge of topics they should be experts on, and worthless academics – for I think the role of the academic is not to sit in their ivory tower and every now and then sharing a few nuts with the plebeians, but to constantly engage in cultural exchanges with their community of reference; a community that includes practitioners, other academics, students, and the occasional observers. Excellence in research is required from academics, and rightly so. Academics should, for their own part, require excellence from themselves and their students, but also be willing to spend time and effort in teaching and, more in general, spreading their knowledge – in other words, creating the conditions for such excellence to be sought and reached. Providing academics with an audience of people less than equipped to reach that level, though, undermines their work, and not just in a snobbish “I think, therefore I talk – but only to geniuses, please” way: the work of an academic can only be perform if the audience is educated, motivated, willing to engage and to put in the hours, and in the end determined to succeed. Lowering our standards to please less equipped people would mean providing a disservice to the desirable audience I just described – let alone shaming the whole academic community (or at least those who care).
