Accountability, technology, and leadership

Accountability and technology are another issue with leaders. The issue of the loss of ethical decisions is the focus of education to have the highest grades in the class no matter what. In this environment, students are pressured to succeed, no matter what the ethical cost. Cheating has greatly increased over the past decade. Americans live in a goal and power driven society. Students look for highest GPA, the most competitive school, and the greatest success among classmates as the ultimate goal, regardless of how they achieve that feat. With this failure of academic integrity and understanding its underlying ethical component, academia is failing to impart its ethical code onto it students. Without reinforcement, the sense of “right” and “wrong” is diminished. When these students go out into the workplace, they will lack that sense of accountability.

As an administrator at a graduate school, I am already seeing this lack of accountability in our students and our workforce. When one student was questioned as to how she had arrived at a research paper so similar to one that another student had presented a year earlier, she admitted that she had copied it off the lab computer of that student. She saw nothing wrong with changing the name and a couple of citations and calling it her own work. She had no idea that this consisted of plagiarism. “People did it all the time in undergrad” was her response.

No accountability, pressure to succeed, and apathy all reduce the code of ethics so necessary to promote a healthy social culture. Administrators need to allow instructors to instruct students on how to resist the easy routes to success, which, more often than not, leads to a crumbling of the social code of ethics, and the loss of “right” and “wrong”. They need to bring students to see the computer, internet, and other technologies as a right but not a way to cheat for success. This cheating leads to a failure in responsibility on the part of the leaders as well as the students.