From The Director

Dr. Daniel E. Wueste

I write while en route to the University of Western Australia.  I will be meeting Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center for Academic Integrity, there—she will be traveling to Perth from Monterey, Mexico, after a return speaking engagement at the University of Monterey.  The main reason for the trip is our participation in the 5^th Asia Pacific Conference on Educational Integrity, “Culture and Values,” which is being held at the University of Western Australia Monday 26 September 2011 - Wednesday, 28 September 2011 .  

Teddi and I will be doing a panel discussion as well as a workshop session, “Triangulating Plagiarism, Cheating and Deception,” with Jude Carroll of Oxford Brookes University, at the conference.  We’ll also be doing a special session, independent of the conference, for faculty, professional staff, and graduate students of UWA.  In this session we will be exploring the connections among, reasons for, and the “how-to” of integrating efforts to promote academic integrity with research ethics/responsible conduct of research, and the teaching of ethics across the curriculum.  In the discussions that led to our doing this workshop, the message from the Office of Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) Professor Robyn Owens was clear, the aim is to help the participants in the workshop achieve UWA’s goal of  “integrating academic integrity in everything we do.”  I rather like the sound of that (which made reaching an agreement very easy).  It is, after all, quite in line with what the Rutland Institute has been working on at Clemson and elsewhere: equipping educators to help students (a) acquire/develop skill in making ethical judgments, as well as (b) see that ethics is not an “add on” imposed by outside forces, but rather, a key to achieving and maintaining both individual integrity and the integrity of an enterprise.  We start where we are, of course, and focus on the enterprise of higher education, though, and this is a critical point, we stress the fact that the point just mentioned—–that ethics is not an “add on”—is true of other things that are larger than oneself that students will be part of after graduation, for example, business, government, or a profession such as architecture, medicine or engineering.

I am excited about this trip and the work we’ll be doing down under, all the more, given that this year is the tenth anniversary year of the Rutland Institute.   After all, one of our goals when we started out was to establish a reputation beyond our state and region, and we have made some real progress on that front.

As always, I invite you to read and enjoy the articles in this issue of RIE’s Issues and Perspectives, though this is the first time I’ve done it from the other side of the world!  

We appreciate very much your interest in and support of the work we do at the Rutland Institute for Ethics.