This week’s allegations of plagiarism against the director of the Clinical Research Department at the San Diego Naval Medical Center come during a month when similar abuses have made headline news. An elaborate and very professional scheme for cheating on SAT exams by exploiting time-zone differences between the East Coast and California was broken up after a tip from an informer. Last week a graduate student in Ottawa won a suit against one of his former business professors for plagiarizing a paper that he, the student, had submitted in one of the professor’s courses in 1991. ETS discovered that the questions and correct answers for its high school principals exam had been circulating among Louisiana high school teachers for years. And, throughout this time, countless students have been ordering plagiarized term papers from World Wide Web sites that promise delivery within two hours.

There are two ways in which we can respond to the challenge posed by plagiarism. First, we can try to control it by laws, regulations, oversight committees, and the like. This approach offers some hope of partial success when the controllers are a separate group from those they control—for example, the administrators of the SAT and those who are taking the exam. However, even in such quasi-adversarial situations with vigilant oversight, one suspects that much cheating goes undetected. In situations where the regulators and those who are being regulated are both part of a larger organization—and here the Navy example appears relevant—the motivation for oversight is often dulled by the desire the retain at least the appearance of integrity for the organization as a whole. The way in which whistle blowers are treated in an organization often provides a quick litmus test for gauging how seriously an organization is committed to policing itself.

There is a second way of responding to this challenge, one that offers more long-term hope of effecting change: the cultivation of integrity. If we begin with a situation in which people want to cheat, then oversight will always be fighting a losing battle. If we can eliminate or substantially reduce the desire to cheat, then the chances of effective oversight in the remaining cases increase dramatically. And it is the cultivation of integrity that eliminates the desire to cheat.

People with integrity not only refrain from cheating, but don’t want to cheat. Integrity comes from the Latin integer, the word for "whole" as well as "number." People with integrity have a sense of wholeness, of who they are, that eliminates the desire to pretend—through cheating, through plagiarizing, and the like—that they are someone else. For them, signing their name to something signifies that it is theirs. They would not want to pass something off as their own.

People with integrity also have a clear vision of what is right and what is wrong. Their world is not the murky world of thoughtless and easygoing relativism, but a world that is sharply illuminated by the light of their vision of goodness. And added to this clarity of vision is the strength of will to act of the basis of that vision. They see what is right, and they stand up for it, even when the personal cost is high.

Finally, and most importantly, people of integrity apply this vision of what’s right and wrong to themselves first and foremost. We are all too familiar with evangelists and others who have a clear vision of right and wrong—and are willing to impose it on others while providing private exemptions for themselves. That is not integrity, but rather just moral posturing that debases the currency of morality at the same time as it dishonors the person. People of integrity live up to their own ideals before they challenge others to do the same.

How, then, do we create a society in which integrity is valued more fully? Our tendency is to look outward—to the schools, to civic organizations, to corporations, to the military, to the media. And there is nothing wrong with this, as long as it is only a part of our response. Schools and other organizations can do much to promote integrity, by extolling its virtues and honoring those who display it, rather than shunning them. However, looking outward cannot be our total response. Integrity is primarily a virtue that comes from within, and the best way each of us can promote integrity is to exemplify it, to lead lives that embody our sense of moral values. Integrity can best be handed down to our children and our students by example—by committing ourselves to our own best moral ideals and by seeking to realize that commitment in our everyday lives. Integrity, like most other good things, begins at home.

San Diego Union-Tribune, October 2, 1997