The Impact of the Internet on Our Moral Lives, edited by Robert Cavalier (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming).
Chapter 4
Virtual Virtues:
Reflections on Academic Integrity in the Age of the Internet
Lawrence M. Hinman
Introduction
When I was an undergraduate in the sixties, many things were different. Vacuum tubes were still common, even in computers not associated with air traffic control. Xeroxing was possible, but still considered extravagant. And plagiarism was different as well. We would hear rumors that certain fraternities had files of term papers that members could access. Occasionally we heard of someone who used a book or journal in the library and typed portions of it into a term paper. Once in a while a friend would write or rewrite a paper for someone else, usually a girlfriend for a boyfriend. But that was about it. Plagiarism was tedious, time-consuming, and required some forethought in most cases.
The academic community in which we lived was also different then. In many ways, the academic community for many of us was akin to Aristotle’s description of the polis in Book III of the Politics:
This is obvious; for suppose distinct places, such as Corinth and Megara, to be brought together so that their walls touched, still they would not be one city, not even if the citizens had the right to intermarry, which is one of the rights peculiarly characteristic of states. Again, if men dwelt at a distance from one another, but not so far off as to have no intercourse, and there were laws among them that they should not wrong each other in their exchanges, neither would this be a state. Let us suppose that one man is a carpenter, another a husbandman, another a shoemaker, and so on, and that their number is ten thousand: nevertheless, if they have nothing in common but exchange, alliance, and the like, that would not constitute a state. Why is this? Surely not because they are at a distance from one another: for even supposing that such a community were to meet in one place, but that each man had a house of his own, which was in a manner his state, and that they made alliance with one another, but only against evil-doers; still an accurate thinker would not deem this to be a state, if their intercourse with one another was of the same character after as before their union. It is clear then that a state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life. Such a community can only be established among those who live in the same place and intermarry. Hence arise in cities family connections, brotherhoods, common sacrifices, amusements which draw men together. But these are created by friendship, for the will to live together is friendship. The end of the state is the good life, and these are the means towards it. And the state is the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life, by which we mean a happy and honorable life.
Our conclusion, then, is that political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship. [i]
The academic community, while not a city-state in all the ways Aristotle describes, nonetheless possesses the distinguishing characteristic of the academic community at its best: the coming together of individuals for noble actions, in this case for the advancement of knowledge through research and scholarship, the transmission of knowledge through undergraduate education and the formation of future scholars and researchers through graduate education.
The situation today is very different. Although the life of the academic community remains, this life now intersects with the lives we lead on the Internet. If the traditional academic community is akin to the Aristotelian polis, the world of the Internet is closer to Hobbes’ state of nature. While it would be an exaggeration to say, following Hobbes’s description of the state of nature, that 'the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice ... have no place,' this description fits life on the Internet more closely than the Aristotelian one does. To be sure, pockets of genuine community exist on the net, and the net has made distance a much less relevant than was the case in Aristotle’s view. Genuine scholarly communities thrive on the Web, often around moderated listservers that are based on some specific noble goals. However, the Web as a whole has an anarchical structure much closer to Hobbes’s state of nature than Aristotl’e polis, a structure (or perhaps, more precisely, the absence of a structure) in which right and wrong, justice and injustice have little or no place.
The world of the web has not supplanted the academic world, but each has changed the other in important ways. They exist, not in identity or opposition, but like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram, partially sharing the same space but each in itself a larger world.
In thjs new world, plagiarism is fast and easy—just a few clicks away on the Web—although it is often costly. A Google search on “term papers” yields over 1.7 million results. A few are free, many are recycled papers that have been turned in before in other classes, and these seem to sell from $25 and up to $15 per page. Browsing through the ethics section of a typical site, I found papers on common topics such as “Kant's Moral Law And Mill's Utilitarianism” and much more obscure themes such as “Air Traffic Controllers Dismissal And Its Relation The Works Of Kant.” You can also have custom papers written just for you, although there is something ironic about a site guaranteeing that it is a newly-written paper for your plagiaristic pleasure. Some sites even offer to write masters theses and doctoral dissertations, and presumably the price for that would be quite high. It is also hard to imagine what kind of relationship would exist between a student and a thesis or dissertation director that this would even be possible. Some sites even advertise for writers, requiring at least a master’s degree and claiming writers can earn as much as $2000 per week writing full-time. Plagiarism has not become big business, but it has certainly become at least small business.
The rise of term paper mills is not the only factor that influences the increased ease with which assignments can be plagiarized from the web. Newspapers, magazines, and organizations of all kinds put materials on the web, and students can sometimes use these as sources from which to plagiarize. (They can also, of course, use them to do research, and in many cases they offer excellent resources for the serious student.) Professors often put their own papers on line, some journal is now on-line, and in some cases students put their own assignments on line as part of a course requirement. In many cases, these resources are not in a password-protected area and thus they become additional free resources for students who are intent on plagiarizing.
Just as plagiarism has become a business, so too has the detection of plagiarism. A Google search on “plagiarism” returns 462,000 entries, and we can easily see that there has been an expansive attempt to fight technological fire with more technological fire. Some sites offer tips on how to spot plagiarism. [ii] Other sites offer plagiarism-detection software programs. [iii] Still other sites provide plagiarism-detection services. The best-known of these is TurnItIn.com, which began as Plagiarism.org. [iv] This service works by matching submitted papers against its database of available papers and then producing a color-coded report showing what percentage of the paper appears to be taken from other sources. The submitted paper is then added to the database for future reference.
Technological responses to the challenge of plagiarism often elicit technological countermeasures. Recognizing that anti-plagiarism software relies of matching word patterns, students turn to Microsoft Word’s AutoSummarize function in the hope of fooling the detection software. My suspicion is that there is other software out there that is dedicated to changing papers sufficiently to avoid being flagged by plagiarism-detection software. We’ve come a long way from vacuum tubes!
In the following remarks, I want to explore some of the ways in which we can respond to the moral challenges posed by ease of plagiarism on the Web. We will see that this is an interesting and complex moral terrain, shaped in part by technological innovations and in part by non-technological considerations. As I map out this terrain, a single figure—Aristotle—will hover in the background, providing guidance and insight. In particular, Aristotle’s account of virtues as excellences of character will offer us the philosophical framework within which we can most fruitfully sketch out the full issue of academic integrity. In order to show this, I would first like to sketch out some background information about who cheats, and then turn a framework for understanding academic integrity, and then to look in depth at the issue of intellectual property rights and academic integrity, offering some practical suggestions for reducing the lack of clarity in this area.
Part One. Who Plagiarizes?
One of the pioneers in empirical research in this area, Donald McCabe [v] , a Professor of Management at the Business School at Rutgers University, has suggested a very useful typology for grouping students in regard to the issue of academic integrity. [vi] He suggests that students can be divided into three groups: those who never cheat, at one end of the spectrum; those who routinely cheat at their preferred choice, at the other end of the spectrum; and, in the middle, those who cheat occasionally. Thus we would get something like this:
When McCabe began his research in this area over ten years ago, this
The chart reflects a 20:60:20 division, that is, about 20% of the students never cheated, about 60% cheated occasionally, and about 20% habitually tried to cheat. In recent years, that has changed somewhat, with the “never cheat” category shrinking in size while the “habitually cheat” category has grown. These numbers vary, depending on the type of school, selectivity of the admissions process, school culture, etc. Schools with honor codes typically have the lowest overall rates of cheating. [vii]
If we wished to minimize plagiarism, each of these three groups needs to be approached differently. The first group, the one that never cheats, obviously does not need to be deterred from cheating. The most important thing in regard to this group is to provide a campus culture that is as supportive as possible of their commitment to academic integrity. They will not be influenced by the ready accessibility of term-papers on the internet, but they may well falter in their commitment if they find wide-spread plagiarism around them going unpunished.
The third group, the habitual cheaters, certainly find their life is made easier by the easy accessibility of web-based resources for plagiarism, but generally speaking they do not plagiarize because these resources are available. If they were not available, they would find some other way of plagiarizing. It is here that anti-plagiarism software can be very helpful, for these are students whose papers ought to be checked regularly. It should be noted, furthermore, that these are the students who are often best at cheating and plagiarizing. They have done it before. They are not usually encumbered by guilt. Among those who cheat, these are the pros.
The middle group, those who occasionally cheat or plagiarize, are the most interesting and the most likely to be affected by the easy availability of Web-based resources. McCabe has suggested that the challenge of academic integrity today is to figure out how best to work with this group. The first group will take care of itself, at least in a minimally supportive environment. The third group can only be detected and caught, and in some cases it might be deterred by very aggressive monitoring. The middle group, however, is most influenced by the easy availability of web resources, since their plagiarism is more likely to be a spur-of-the-moment decision. Let me give two examples.
First, I have sat on a number of hearing committees as a faculty representative. This is the accused student’s “day in court.” The professor presents the complaint. The student presents his or her side of the case separately. Each is questioned by committee members. Typical scenarios in such hearings are students who have failed to manage their time well. They have a paper due, realize they cannot complete the assignment on time, and turn the night before to the Web to get a paper or portions of a paper which they then turn in as their own work the next day. (I also realize, sitting on these committees, that I am often looking at the students who do not cheat well, in part because they do not cheat often; the hardcore cheaters, the third group, are often more skilled and consequently harder to catch.) Had the Web resources not been available, some of these students would probably have not handed in a paper or handed in some very minimal assignment. The Web offers them another possibility, not previously available at that late date.
Let me share a second example, changing a few incidental details to insure that the actual student is not recognizable. I was teaching an ethics course, and one of the assignments was for students to do a weekly journal of personal reflections on the readings. One class, when I was away at a conference, my grad assistant showed the movie Mississippi Burning at my request, since we were covering moral issues about racism that week. During the last week of class, a student asked if they were required to write a journal entry on the movie. I said they were not, but if they wanted to write about it, I would give them so extra credit. One of the students, who was rarely present in class, turned in his journal with an entry on the movie—and it turned out to be a movie review from a well-known American movie critic. It took my about thirty seconds to track it down (the second entry on an MSN search), and my guess is that it took the student approximately the same amount of time to find it as well. (There are in fact a number of good, critical resources available on the Web about this movie, even if this review did not happen to be one of them.) I am not sure if this student belonged in the second or third category, but my assumption is that this student would never have bothered to plagiarize this extra-credit assignment if it had not been so easy—and, in this case, free.
The data on whether this assumption is justified are inconclusive. In McCabe’s most recent research with high school students and cheating, he found that “90% of the students using the Internet to plagiarize have also plagiarized from written sources….[in other words,] The Web has ‘created’ few new cheaters - 6% of all students.” [viii] As more data become available, we should get a clearer empirical picture of the extent to which the Web is encouraging students who cheat occasionally to do so more often.
We can place these three groups of students within the context of Aristotle’s discussion of the virtues and vices. [ix] Aristotle draws a helpful distinction between two kinds of goodness: the temperate person and the continent person. Let me illustrate this first in terms of food (one of my favorite subjects), and then apply this distinction to academic integrity issues.
A temperate person is one who not only does the good, but also desires it for its own sake. I know people, although I do not count myself as a member of this group, who not only eat foods that are good for them, but do so because they like those foods. These are temperate people in regard to food. They have, in Aristotle’s phrase, rightly-ordered desires. Other, and on my good days I count myself a member of this group, eat foods that are good for them, but they do not enjoy doing so. They do it because they know they should, but it is not enjoyable for them. These are continent people, individuals who do the right thing ever though on some level they do not desire the right thing.
Individuals who fail to do good may also be divided into two groups, although this has been a much more contentious issue in moral theory. On the one hand, we have those who want to do the right thing but are weak and thus fall to temptation. How one explains weakness of will (akrasia was Aristotle’s term) is a matter of dispute, but we all recognize the phenomenon. On the other hand, there are those who seem consciously to choose the bad or the evil. (There is a debate about whether one can really know the good and not choose it, but we do not need to settle that debate here.) Unfortunately, we probably all recognize this phenomenon as well.
We can apply this set of distinctions us McCabe research. The third group of students, those who habitually cheat, belong in this final category, those who choose the bad. The first group, those who never cheat, are in all likelihood temperate individuals who are honest because they find that rewarding in itself; they desire the good. The middle group, the one for whom we are battling, is the group of individuals who are either continent or else weak-willed. It is this group that we must support and educate in the virtues of the academic life.
Part Two: The Fundamental Virtues of Academic Integrity
In 1998, at the request of my Dean, I became involved in revising the document that eventually was named “The Fundamental Values of Academic Integrity,” [x] and which is now available from the Center for Academic Integrity, which is affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. The process of working with faculty and administrators on this issue was an enlightening one in several ways, and I gradually came to have a much richer notion of academic integrity than I originally had.
A Minimalist Concept of Academic Integrity. Before I became involved in the Fundamental Values Project, I had what one might call a minimalist conception of academic integrity: don’t cheat and don’t copy. It was simple, and easy for everyone to remember.
A Rich Concept of Academic Integrity. As I began working with the Fundamental Values Project, I encountered a different, far richer concept of academic integrity. Basically, the question that the original authors of this document asked was this: what values are necessary to a flourishing academic life? Their answer was that there were five such fundamental values:
- Honesty
- Trust
- Fairness
- Respect
- Responsibility
Taken together, these five values comprise what I would call the rich definition of academic integrity.
From Values to Virtues. The Fundamental Values project framed the issue of academic integrity in terms of values, but I would like to recast it in a more Aristotelian light by considering these values as the fundamental virtues of academic life.
Aristotle on the Virtues. Aristotle’s virtues approach is particularly helpful here because of its strong focus on the importance of flourishing. Aristotle’s general question about the virtues was straightforward: what are the strengths of character necessary to human flourishing? The focus is a positive one, since for Aristotle the payoff of the virtues, to put the matter more crudely than Aristotle did, is that the individual’s life is better because of them. So, too, about the vices: they are weakness of character which diminish our lives. Vices are not only objectionable because they harm other people, but our vices are also harmful to ourselves. Our lives are diminished because of our vices.
Aristotle also sees the ways in which specific virtues are responses to particular challenges in life. Courage, for example, is the strength of character that we need to face danger and the possibility of death. Similarly, we can ask the question: what strengths of character do we need to flourish in the academic life, both as students and as professors? The virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility, when taken together, provide the foundation of a flourishing academic life. Let me comment on each of these virtues.
Honesty. Honesty is the bedrock virtue on which the academic life rests. Consider research in the sciences. If researchers are not honest in reporting their findings, there is little chance that science can make any progress. Either scientists will be forced to reinvent the wheel every time they design an experiment, or else they will find themselves relying on data that proves to be inaccurate. To be sure, sometimes mistakes happen; no one is infallible. Being honest is not equivalent to being right. However, as long as researchers report their results accurately and honestly, we can assume that in most cases the results are at least as accurate as they can make them.
Honesty is a strength of character, and it does not begin just with honesty toward others. It is also honesty with oneself. Whether scientist or philosopher, whether student or professor, in order to have a flourishing intellectual life, each of us must be rigorously honest with ourselves, always trying to insure that we see in our work what is actually there, not what we either hope or fear to see. Such honesty is akin to a spiritual discipline, requiring precisely the kind of strength of character that Aristotle describes as “virtue.”
Of course, we have to be honest with students as well as with ourselves. We have to exhibit honesty to them by telling the truth, even when the truth contradicts our own cherished beliefs. The professor who is an ideologue falls short of this ideal, and is likely to be surrounded by people who are either true believers or vociferous atheists. Professors who hold themselves to a standard of intellectual honesty and rigor provide a model for students and other faculty alike.
We as teachers need to be honest with our students in other ways as well. We need to share our mistakes as well as our insights. The college environment is all too often dominated by textbooks, which give the impression of timeless truths. Students often feel a pressure to look like they always know the answer—even if the only way they can accomplish this is by being quiet—and rarely do we value mistakes for what they can teach us. My experience is that students are often very interested in hearing about situations in which I have changed my views on an issue, and this often gives them permission to see their own intellectual journey in developmental terms.
Similarly, we need to be honest with students, faculty, and administrators in difficult areas such as evaluations and recommendations. We live in an era of inflation, including inflation of grades and recommendations. One of the ways in which professors can model the virtue of honesty for their students is to provide them with honest feedback and evaluation.
The Web is having an impact on honesty in several ways, some positive, some negative. We have already discussed the impact on plagiarism, which is the area in which its impact is most visible. However, the Web has had an influence on honesty issues in other ways as well. Let me mention two of them here.
First, some students find it easier to be honest in Web-based communications (on-line class forums, etc.) than they do in face-to-face classroom situations. This sounds paradoxical, since one thinks of honesty as a paradigmatically face-to-face virtue, but in fact those students who find direct communication uncomfortable sometimes flourish in on-line chat-rooms and in other virtual venues.
Second, as we shall see in more detail in Part Three of this article, students are increasingly likely to be placed in learning situations where there is in fact no teacher as computer-based teaching becomes more common. It is precisely here where Aristotle’s emphasis on the importance of virtues for the self becomes so important. Students engaged in computer-based learning often have no one else to be honest to; after all, they are responding primarily to a computer program. The incentive for being honest in these context must be primarily self-referential: without honesty, the student simply will not benefit from that particular educational experience. Dishonesty, in this context, harms the student first and foremost.
Trust. If honesty is the foundation of the academic life, trust is the natural result of such honesty. Just as professors may trust students, so too students must be able to trust their professors. The virtue of trust is the glue which holds the academic life together.
The paradigm case of trust is found in a relationship between two people, where one (A) trusts the other (B) to do or be a certain thing (x). Thus there are three elements in trust: the one who is doing the trusting, the one who is being trusted, and the trusted matter that is at stake. Typically, this trusted matter must be important and there must be an objective element of uncertainty about it. I can trust a good friend to watch out for my children if anything suddenly happened to me, but I cannot trust that friend to know that 2 + 2 = 4. That is something that I can know on my own, and there is no element of uncertainty attached to it.
One of the most interesting implications of the Web for academic integrity issues turns on the issue of trust. As was mentioned in the beginning of this paper, anti-plagiarism software can be used to automatically screen all incoming assignments and rate them for possible plagiarism. But what is the impact of doing this on the relationship of trust between student and professor, especially when all incoming papers are automatically tested for possible plagiarism? It seems that this is an indication of a lack of trust, and no different in principle from, say, urine testing for Olympic athletes. We test precisely because we do not trust.
Let me contrast two ways of responding to the possibility of Web-based plagiarism. The first way is to fight fire with more technological fire. Here the example of TurnItIn.com is most relevant. Individual instructors can purchase the services on a per-course basis, but they typically sell their services to larger groups—departments, colleges and universities—as a package. (Since the papers that are submitted for screening are also added to the database, there is a double incentive to sign up entire departments or institutions.) If a university subscribes to this service, then individual professors can send all papers in a given course to TurnItIn.com for screening.
Let me suggest an alternative approach to web-based plagiarism, both low tech and old-fashioned: better teaching. Typically, it is easiest to plagiarize a term paper from the Web when you simply have an assignment to turn the paper in at the end of the semester. If, on the other hand, professors meet with students to discuss topics, choose highly individualized topics, then plagiarism becomes more difficult. If professors require that, at regular intervals, students submit a topic, an initial outline, a preliminary bibliography, a short rough draft, and then the final paper, the possibility of plagiarism plummets: it is simply too much trouble to take a plagiarized paper and work back to each of the preceding steps. Moreover, if professors require that students respond to comments at each stage and incorporate that response into the next stage, then plagiarism becomes even less possible. If students present their work in class, this further reduces the odds.
Web-based plagiarism often arises in a vacuum, when students feel that they are not really seen or respected. There is much to be said for resisting the tendency to respond to this by additional technological means. We are much more likely, I think, to be able to do reduce this by trusting our students and engaging them directly in the challenges of the material we are teaching.
There is, however, a good technological fix for what sometimes appears to be “inadvertent” plagiarism, that is, cases in which people lose track of the sources for their data. [xi] This is particularly easy to have happen in a drag and drop environment, and I am sure faculty are often plagued by this problem as well. The fix is straightforward: an option (yes, one more checkbox under Tools | Options) that would enable your word processing program and your browser to work together, so that every time you drag and drop something from the Web into a document, the reference is automatically created with it.
There is yet another aspect to the issue of trust and the Web. One of the skills we have to teach our students is how to determine which sources of information are trustworthy. The virtue of trust has a element of what phronesis in it, what Aristotle called practical wisdom. In the case of trust, we find that this has both cognitive and volitional elements to it, which again is characteristic of Aristotle’s account of the virtues. We have to be willing to trust (that’s the volitional element), and we have to know what is worth trusting (the cognitive element).
This is particularly a problem on the Web, where peer review is rare. Students are often too willing to trust, and lack the discrimination necessary to distinguish sources worth trusting from those that ought not to be trusted. Aristotle tells us that vices can be excesses or deficiencies. Here too much trust is a vice, making students over-credulous and gullible. In my experience, the other send of the spectrum, the overly-skeptical student, is much less common. Typically, students know that they can trust articles they find in mainstream journals and in books published by major university presses, but they have much less sense about what they can trust in web sites.
Fairness. Fairness is an intellectual virtue, akin to justice in many ways. It is certainly crucial to the academic life. For the academic life to flourish, we need to be fair to people and fair to ideas as well. This latter kind of fairness is an intellectual virtue, consisting of giving each idea its due, being open to the implications of an argument, judging claims on the basis of their merit rather than on the basis of their source, being—in Martha Nussbaum’s beautiful phrase, “finely aware and richly responsible.”
Fairness in this sense is akin to what Aristotle called justice, and just as justice is the fundamental virtue of the well-functioning polis, so too fairness is one of the most important virtues in the interactions of the academic community. Fairness is an virtue of interaction, of relationship regarding the way in which we assess one another and also apportion the goods and burdens of the academic life.
The impact of the Web in regard to fairness is primarily found in the way in which certain groups will typically have less access to the Web. Increasingly, professors make Web access a mandatory part of their courses, but some students simply do not have the financial resources to have their own computers and high speed internet access. This “digital divide” disadvantages some students and gives an unfair boost to others who have had long familiarity with the Web. But this is not just an economic issue. There is certainly a percentage of students—rich, poor, and in between—who are just not comfortable with computers and computer-mediated instruction. The fairness issue extends to them as well, for they may be students who in many other ways are quite talented.
Teachers often feel caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place in regard to this issue. Until two years ago, I made sure that everything in my course was accessible to those without computers, but I gradually found my policy changing on this. I became increasingly concerned that those who did not use computers in fact needed to be helped (and perhaps pushed) in this direction, and now my courses regularly require Web access. However, one of the things that made this possible is that our university provides very good computer lab facilities, so students without their own computers can get on-line for as long as they want and do so without a wait. In addition, I found myself conducting mini-courses for those who were not yet comfortable with using computers, to try to reduce ways in which they might otherwise have been disadvantaged because of this requirement.
Respect. Respect manifests itself in many different ways. One of the most important ways in the academic life that we can show respect for other people is to take their ideas seriously. Lack of respect will often undermine trust and the other fundamental values.
The impact of the Web on respect seems, at best, indirect. Respect is an interpersonal virtue, so it seems that insofar as the Web establishes contexts in which individuals are less likely to recognize one another as persons, there may be some undermining of respect, but this typically only occurs in situations of high anonymity (on-line groups, flaming, etc.), but in educational contexts these are exceptions.
The other context in which issues of respect arise is respect for property, and here the Web has had an impact. All too often, we just fail to respect copyright restrictions and the like, even when this is not a matter of plagiarism. I will discuss this in more detail in Part Four.
Responsibility. The final fundamental value of academic integrity is responsibility. In its most basic sense here, to show responsibility means to take control of one’s own educational career and to make it one’s own—to say, in effect, “This is me,” rather than to say “This is a G.E. requirement” or “This is something my parents want me to take.”
The impact of the Web in this area is less easy to discern. The relevant variable here is anonymity. Insofar as some Web-based structures increase anonymity, they may diminish responsibility. This is particularly an issue in courses that are taught without an instructor. We will discuss this issue in Part Three.
Thus the five fundamental virtues are the strengths of character necessary to a flourishing academic community. While the impact of the Web on some of them (especially respect and responsibility) is minimal, its impact on others of those virtues (honesty and trust, most notably) is much greater. Let’s now turn to another area in which the Web is increasingly influential: distance education.
Part Three: Virtue at a Distance.
Much of the preceding discussion has been confined to the impact of the Web on academic integrity within the traditional classroom. Interesting though that may be, the most interesting changes are going to occur at the Web transforms the traditional classroom into new and challenging configurations.
What the Future Holds
There are several ways in which the traditional classroom will be transformed by the Web. These are not mutually exclusive, alternative futures but rather parallel developments, and they have important implications for academic integrity in the rich sense discussed above. Let’s examine several of these.
The Hybrid Course. Increasingly, many traditional courses will be taught as a combination of the traditional face-to-face classroom and the virtual classroom. This can occur in many configurations. Consider three. First, on-line discussions may simply be added to the regular class meetings. However, this quickly give rise to the question: if we are spending more and more time on-line together, then can’t we reduce the amount of actual classroom time? This leads to the next possibilities. Second, following the model of lecture/lab in the sciences, some courses may have the main presentation of material on the Web and then schedule small-group face-to-face interactions that deal with applications of the lecture. This is particularly useful when a single professor is offering a course that meets on several campuses simultaneously. The lecture occurs on-line, and then grad assistants conduct the discussion on the various campuses. Third, in some cases the main presentation may actually be a live lecture, followed by on-line meetings that function like discussion sections.
The hybrid character of such courses will not of itself have a significant impact on academic integrity.
The “Rent-a-Course” Option. Consider the following scenario. A university is doing well. Enrollments are increasing every year, and are now constrained only by the capacity of the current campus. But administrators are cautious; they know that if they begin building additional facilities, they could open themselves to long-term liabilities that would be difficult to meet if enrollments began to drop. They realize that if they add classroom space, they must make a number of other additions as well, including parking spaces, dormitory rooms, cafeteria space, etc. Yet the present moment seems to be a golden opportunity to increase enrollment and income, and they are hesitant to keep enrollments capped at previous levels.
Into this situation comes a new factor. A company, which in the past only published books, has now decided to take the next step and sell courses as well. It has formed a for-profit on-line university, but it markets its products in a unique way. It approaches administrators in precisely the situation described above and offers to sell them, say, five sections of Intro to World Civilization. These courses could be taken on-line by the university’s students, listed in the regular course schedule, etc. Similarly with a range of other basic courses. The company offers to sell these courses to the university at, perhaps, $3,000 per section and a set cost per student—carefully calculated to be slightly less than the salary of a part-timer and slightly less than the tuition paid per student. [xii]
To many administrators, this may seem to be the answer to their prayers. Suddenly they are able to offer a sufficient number of basic courses that they can increase enrollment without adding classroom space. In fact, they can even make a bit of money in the process. This can be a very attractive proposition to those who are charged with guarding the financial well-being of the university. The attraction is not greed but caution.
This development has serious implications for academic integrity for several reasons. First, these are typically very standardized courses that in large measure “teach themselves,” that is, there is a standard set of readings and assignments that students are taken through no matter who is the actual teacher of record. There is little room for individualized interaction or even personal contact between the student and the instructor.
Second, such courses typically will not be integrated into the life of the department. There is no discussion between the faculty who teach the on-line courses and the regular departmental faculty. The courses meet a requirement, but fail to be part of the undergraduate experience that universities hope to deliver.
Third, introductory courses are often quite important in terms of recruiting majors in a particular area. Often that process involves a student identifying with a particular professor. It is not simply a matter of becoming interested in American history, but of wanting to be like a particular professor who is teaching that course. As we all know from our own experience in the classroom, students start coming to office hours, asking questions about the subject matter, and generally trying on the identity of a person who works in this particular area. Insofar as we have on-line courses for meeting general education requirements, we may well lose this valuable opportunity for helping students to gain a sense of what they want to pursue academically.
Finally, in most universities there is a well-defined process for approving both courses and teachers. This type of on-line course could still be approved for its content, but there would be little or no opportunity for departments to screen those who would be teaching the course, whereas departments would typically screen adjunct faculty who teach in their department. This undermines faculty autonomy in a very crucial area.
The Professor-less Course. [xiii] The next step is this process is easy to see. Once someone has developed a set of assignments and activities and tests and has also developed a way in which students’ progress can be automatically assessed, it becomes possible to eliminate the instructor completely. This seems to be a reasonable scenario in certain types of courses that aim at developing a proficiency or skill in a given area. (I sometimes think my students could take my introductory logic course without me: lectures are available on the Web, assignments and tests could be automatically scored, and I could spend my time doing something more interesting than teaching intro logic for the fiftieth time.)
The implications of this for academic integrity are quite significant. When we recall the five values of academic integrity, we see that most of them are relational, that is, they define the optimal relationship between student and professor. What happens when the professor is removed from this equation? Consider, for example, the value of trust. Presumably students will still trust the accuracy of the material presented, but there will be no opportunity to develop a relationship of trust with a professor who might then guide one’s academic progress. Trust in the person disappears. Similarly with respect. There is little room for respect to arise, simply because there may not be a professor to respect—or, for that matter, to manifest respect for the students.
Part Four. The End of Private Property?
Let me conclude with a brief discussion of one of the additional way in which the Web has affected academic integrity issues, and this has to do with private property. There is something about the Web that breeds disrespect for private property, almost as though it were an irrelevant concept. Let me offer some examples.
File-sharing has become popular on the Web. Napster certainly made the biggest splash in this area, but there were other, less well-known but more radical competitors. The best known of these is Gnutella. [xiv] In many cases, and this in clearly true in regard to Gnutella, sharing is voluntary, although sometimes individuals may share material to which they have no rights.
Let me offer a personal example. On a number of occasions, I have found myself wanting to grab copies of photos off the Web without asking permission. (This is particularly true if I am doing a PowerPoint and need something visual for a particular slide.) If I were in a colleague’s office and that colleague had a picture of Rawls on his desk, and I needed a picture of Rawls, I would never just take the picture without asking. I would ask and, if refused, would not pursue the matter. If, however, I found that same photo on my colleague’s web site, I might well grab the picture, even without asking.
What’s the relevant difference here? In the case of a physical picture, my taking the picture diminishes the person to whom it belongs. On the other hand, with a virtual photo, the person who originally had the photo is not thereby deprived of his or her possession, although its value may be reduced by the production of copies. The math of copying and duplicating with virtual files is very different from what it has been in the past, for we can now make identical copies—indeed, it’s unclear whether the concept of the “original” still has relevance here—instantaneously and without taking anything away from the original.
There is another relevant difference here as well. When colleagues put pictures on their desk, they are not thereby giving implicit permission to others to take the picture if they want it. However, when something is put on the Web, many people—perhaps incorrectly—believe that the act of putting it on the Web implies that it is available for everyone for free. Certainly much ambiguity could be eliminated if items on the Web had XML tags that indicated whether they were (a) available for free viewing but not download and reuse [say a tag like this: <PermissionFreeNoDownloadNoReuse> and then <EndPermission>] or (b) available for download and reuse as well as viewing [with a tag like this: <PermissionFreeDownloadOkReuseOK> and then <EndPermission>]. Other tags could be added to indicate whether citation is necessary, if reuse is possible but requires either permission or notification, etc. Furthermore, information about the permission holder [<PermissionHolder> and <EndPermissionHolder>] could be embedded on each page or through a server-side include file. All of the tags, furthermore, could be made machine-readable for the new standards of the Semantic Web. [xv] At that point, the intent of the author of the web page would be unambiguous and that intent could be communicated in a highly efficient manner.
The XML/RDF solution is a reasonable way of responding to the kind of “policy vacuum,” first described by Jim Moor, [xvi] that is so common in computer ethics. It offers a clear and efficient way of demarcating the difference between what is merely publicly viewable and what is not only publicly viewable but also free for download and reuse.
The advantage of doing this in the realm of academic integrity is clear. It would clearly label authors’ work as their own, provide an efficient mechanism for obtaining permission, and greatly reduce the size of the policy vacuum we are currently facing in regard to academic integrity and the World Wide Web. [xvii]
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Endnotes