From the Director

This issue of RIE’s Issues and Perspectives includes brief articles that report on some of the activities of the Rutland Institute and the International Center for Academic Integrity. It also includes three invited pieces: “EarlyAct FirstKnightTM  Comes to Powdersville Middle,” by Monty Oxendine, Principal of Powdersville Middle School; “Ethics is an Everyday, Every Person Responsibility,” by Bud Moon, professional speaker and humorist; and “Ethical Dilemmas Associated with Vaccinations: A Public Health Perspective,” by Donald Peace, Regional Director, Public Health Preparedness, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control. In addition, you will find some reflections from RIE Associate Director Linda Gallicchio and a section, “Ethics Challenges and Responses,” that provides links to articles that may be of interest. We are hopeful that you will find something here that is useful in your personal or professional life.

I want to take this opportunity to say a word about a recent road trip and invite attention to a way in which this sort of work relates to larger issues. My hope is that it will reveal something of the bigger picture we have in mind as we do the good work of the Rutland Institute.

Earlier this month, Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center for Academic Integrity, and I conducted a two-day ethics across the curriculum seminar for faculty in engineering and business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. One of the key elements of the seminar—clarifying the connection between ethics and academic integrity—is central to a long-term research-based RIE/ICAI project: helping leaders in business and the professions recognize and come to support academic integrity/ethics across the curriculum programs as a form of workforce development and similar programs customized for the workplace as professional development.

The project, which we are very excited about, will have two parts. First we will explore the ways in which attitudes about cheating, formed and reinforced while in school, affect society when applied in professional and business settings. In this work we will be comparing a large body of research data, amassed over more than 15 years through the work of researcher and founding CAI president Don McCabe, with data from a new (isomorphic) study to be conducted in business and professional organizations where students who participated in McCabe’s college and university studies are now working. The second part of the project will focus on the ways in which education (both in schools and in corporate settings) can positively affect those attitudes, and, subsequently, behaviors and outcomes as well. The next step, of course, will be the implementation of programs developed in light of this work.

A “note” such as this should be brief, so I will close by inviting attention to an upcoming event, the purposes of which are quite in keeping with those of the long-term project described above. “Elevating Ethics in Business and Education,” a symposium sponsored by The Greenville Regional Education Center that will be facilitated by RIE, will take place at Clemson at the Falls (55 East Camperdown Way, Greenville, SC) on May 26th. The two-hour agenda will begin with remarks by Debra Clements, VP and General Counsel, Milliken and Company, and Jan Murdoch, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Clemson University. The brief talks by Clements and Murdoch will set the stage for small group work by the participants. The work products of the small groups will be shared in a plenary session devoted to identifying ways to effectively elevate ethics in business and education. The model for the approach to be taken here is the approach that worked so well with the conference, “Resolving the Shortage of Organs for Transplantation: Ethics, Science, and Technology,” that took place in Charleston in November 2009. We look forward to sharing the upshot(s) of this event in the next issue of Issues and Perspectives.