ALL IN-tegrity: Students Talk to Students About Ethics

The nature of working in the senior Capstone class with Dr. Brendan Kendall is quite a unique experience indeed.  Dr. Kendall encourages his students to organize classes so that students can accomplish the goals that they establish at the beginning of the semester.  In essence, his classes create a dynamic that is untraditional for the classroom, but best suited to use student strengths to accomplish the goal of expanding the name of ethics in an academic setting. 

After talking with Dr. Teddi Fishman from the International Center for Academic Integrity, the goal the class established in the beginning of the semester was to create a brand that would be recognizable for academic integrity on Clemson’s campus.  The tangible way of getting this brand, “All In-tegrity”, out to our audience was to host an event; later named “The Price is Righteous,” that encompassed the ideals of integrity and ethics.  The nebulous idea of creating an event that somehow encompassed academic integrity was then the focus of the team for the next few months.
 

Our class was able to work closely with Dr. Fishman, in order to learn exactly what her goals were for expanding the name recognition of academic integrity and learn how we could assist her in this process.   The class separated into three different groups to attack the goal of putting on the event as a business rather than a class project. The groups included the Event Planning Team, the Marketing Team, and the Managerial Team. The Event Planners were in charge of all of the tangible details of the event including designing the game, writing the questions and developing creative ideas for a fun environment for students. The Marketing Team designed three different videos to be posted on our YouTube channel to promote the event, Twitter and Facebook updates as well as organizing the students of our class to speak in classes to promote the event.   Finally the Managerial Team worked as a liaison between the two other teams doing the executive work of making sure everyone was staying on task and also took on the task of creating a handbook to denote the processes we went through to accomplish this event in order to pass this on to future students of Clemson as well as other universities.

At the conclusion of the semester, we surpassed our goals for reaching Clemson students with a tremendous, enthusiastic turnout at The Price is Righteous. We were also successful in getting approval for the brand “All In-tegrity” from President James F. Barker, the Clemson Creative Services office and Coach Swinney’s agent with help from Linda Gallicchio from the Rutland Institute for Ethics, so the logo can continue to be used in future endeavors.  Those two accomplishments—reaching current students and producing a durable logo to help reach future students— truly demonstrated that given the right opportunities, students can use their the capabilities to self-organize and do what it takes to succeed, even when faced with a lofty goal.

Grace Clayton