Academic integrity: Apparently only required of staff not systems

Staff are trained to do their work with utmost commitment to academic integrity. It’s in their best interest professionally - any threat to their reputation for not working this way is dire for their career. But they also work like this because at some point, knowledge acquired from the world about what constitutes as ethical practice crosses over to become an internalised value the worker cannot bring themselves to deviate from, knowing there would be emotional turmoil to then manage. Yes it is breached by some, and when that happens it is rightfully taken very seriously by management, but on the whole academics do not have a reputation for being dodgy.

That’s very different to the general reputation of academic institutions. The pandemic has starkly revealed how dodgy they are. I’ve never before heard so much rage and self-protective guardedness among staff from all across the world, about how smart and strategic they are now going to play ‘the game’. Any prior resistance to doing so, and remaining true to core values, is fast leaving the room. ‘If they are not looking after us, why should we look after them? This is nothing more than a job to me now. I have to treat it that way. All care for students is gone. They don’t pay me for it, so I’m not going to do it. I don’t care who they are or what their problem is, if I can’t fix it in the 2.3 minutes I’m paid to, tough. The university already owes me hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid labour, taking advantage of my kindness and integrity, while my children sometimes went hungry, but their property portfolio is looking quite fat to me. Screw them all. I’m playing the game, and I’m playing it tough. You want hardball? Game on’.

Ethics, trust, and humaneness are the bedrocks of organisations working well. They have been so eroded by neoliberalism that academia is all but a sunk ship. Staff are held to high account when they breach academic integrity, but who holds the institution to account when high-salaried administrators design policy after policy making it look like the system is full of integrity but those on the other side of the policies know otherwise? (And yes, I do wonder how they sleep at night).