A Crisis of Ethics in Higher Education

First it was Coach Jerry Sandusky from Penn State University, who was convicted of sexually abusing children in 2012 that also led to the conviction of Penn State’s President, Graham Spanier for endangering the welfare of children, then it was Louisville who paid basketball recruits to wear a certain brand of shoe, followed by the University of North Carolina who falsified athletes academic grades and class attendance for classes that they did not even attend, and then Michigan State who’s own gymnastics team physician sexually abused over 300 women gymnasts both at Michigan State and on the Woman’s U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Team, followed by a Penn State student who died during a fraternity hazing incident, and then the misappropriation of $85 million state public dollars at the University of Central Florida that resulted in another university president and board chair’s resignations, and then the controversy of four senior administrators at Georgia Tech who failed to disclose a conflict of interest or had maintained inappropriate relations with vendors leading to the resignation of all four officials.  Then it was the federal charges of over 30 parents who paid enormous amounts of money to bribe college officials with fake test scores, fake credentials and other means of deception and fraud to ensure their children were accepted in prestigious universities. 

What was amazing in this last case were the number of university athletic coaches and administrators who were charged with bribery, fraud or racketeering conspiracy, including a soccer coach from Yale, a sailing coach from Stanford, a Test Administrator for the College Board ACT, a senior associated athletic director and water polo coach from USC, a head soccer coach at UCLA, and a men’s tennis coach from University of Texas. [1]

The incidents are alarming.  When the men’s basketball apparel conspiracy broke into the public domain, the NCAA quickly hired former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice  to head a commission that not only looked into what was actually occurring, but to recommend ways in which the NCAA could regain their ability to provide the leadership and accountability in this space.  When the Commission submitted their final report, it said “… everyone knows that these payments occur.  That state of affairs – where the entire community knows of significant rule breaking and yet the governance body lacks the power or will to investigate and act – breeds cynicism and contempt. “  It really is a terrible indictment about university leadership’s failure to build ethical climates within their university campuses.

You can probably say that all this leads to one conclusion, and it was expressed eloquently at Penn State President Spanier’s trial by Laura Ditka, Pennsylvania’s chief deputy attorney general, who led the prosecution against Spanier.  In her closing arguments she summed up the Penn State President’s actions by saying, “Graham Spanier was corrupted by his own power.  He was a leader that failed to lead”.[2]   You can certainly say the same for every other incident listed above.  There was a leader, someplace, who failed to lead.  You can be the best university president in the country, but if you fail in character, you fail in leadership.  It is as simple as that.

Some would attest that a failed ethical climate results when ethical fading occurs.  Ethical fading is a deterioration or corrosion of ethical standards over time.  When unethical behavior occurs and goes unchecked by leadership or others, it can become standard practice, and over time, no longer seen as wrong.  This is exactly what occurred at the University of Central Florida’s misappropriation of $85 million public dollars over 5 years.  But this behavior demonstrates a lack of leadership when unkempt and unethical behavior are not known, not addressed, or when leadership looks the other way. 

In examination of the University of Illinois admission scandal in 2009, Dr. Nathan Harris, Assistant Professor at the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester, says that “the potential for misconduct pervades colleges and universities more than we assume – and even more than we feel comfortable acknowledging”.[3]   “A senior administrator does not wake up in the morning and say, ‘Today I am going to do something that lands me on the front page of the Chicago Tribune for the wrong reasons’.  Instead what comes into play is a phenomenon known as “ethical fading,” in which the culture of structure of an organization causes those within it to lose sight of ethical considerations.”[4]

So how are universities today trying to get after this?  And can universities develop a culture of ethics on their campuses?  I would assert they can if they want to. 

Maybe it takes a Penn State or a Georgia Tech experience to grab your attention and put some leadership and resources behind this.  But Penn State is following what is occurring more and more in the business world and has created an independent centralized compliance office that ensures compliance in employee conflicts of interests, proper use of appropriated funds, employee training in whistle blower procedures, hiring vendors, disclosing crime statistics, complying with NCAA and other governance statutes, such as gender-equity laws known as Title IX.  There are numerous other laws, policies, regulations and statutes university staff and faculty must comply with, but it is the leadership’s responsibility to create a culture of ethics that seeks compliance vice trying to find ways around the regulations.[5] 

One of the more powerful advances in this field that more and more university Compliance and Ethics offices are using are campus cultural assessments using a simple campus wide survey.  When Georgia Tech discovered four senior employees that had inappropriate ties with vendors and contractors, Georgia Tech’s president, Dr. Bud Peterson, surveyed his 12,000 staff, faculty, and graduate students while achieving slightly over a 50% response rate.  This is a statistically high response rate which was driven by the concerns and apparent distrust resulting from the ethics scandal they were experiencing.[6] 

What Georgia Tech’s leadership received from their survey was astonishing.  The results revealed a level of distrust that “…exceeds the realm of an ethics scandal that shook the campus last summer”.  “You as administrators hope and think you’re in tune with everyone on campus, but that one really came as a shock to us”, said Georgia Tech’s chief of staff, Lynn M. Durham. [7]

But Bud Peterson should be applauded.  Other presidents would be reluctant to survey their staff and faculty for fear of exactly what Georgia Tech received for feedback.  The fact that he faced these issues head on, that he was transparent in the survey findings and in the follow-on actions he would take to address these issues, showed the staff and faculty how serious leadership was in addressing their concerns.  Besides, you’ll never get to where you want to go if you don’t know where you are to start with.  Leadership like that only produces one thing – the rebuilding of trust that was lost as the crisis unfolded. 

Georgia Tech also appointed a new vice president for ethics and compliance, Ling-Ling Nie, who said “If we underscore the importance of having a work force that is grounded in integrity and respect and articulate exactly what that means and how that manifests, day to day, as a manager or as an employee, it gets to the heart of some of those concerns”.[8] 

As Georgia Tech’s leadership and staff and faculty continue to build this ethical culture on its campus, other programs they implemented included regular surveys of employees to assess campus culture, instituting an ethics-awareness week, regular ethics and whistle blower training, senior leadership meetings singularly focused on campus values, senior level emphasis that retaliation would not be tolerated, and the requirement of all senior administrators to regularly talk with their leaders about campus values face to face.[9]   

This is leadership building a culture based on university values.  This is leadership making a difference. 


[1] National Public Radio, March 12, 2019, “U.S. Charges Dozens of Parents, Coaches In Massive College Admissions Scandal”

[2] The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Guilty Verdict Puts a Dark Coda on Spanier’s Fall”, by Jack Stripling, March 24, 2017

[3] The Chronicle of Higher Education, “An Admissions Scandal Shows How Administrators’ Ethics ‘Fade’”, by Peter Schmidt, April 1, 2015

[4] Ibid

[5] The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can Universities Foster a Culture of Ethics?  Some Are Trying”, by Nell Gluckman, May 10, 2017

[6] The Chronicle of Higher Education, “After Ethical Lapses, Georgia Tech Surveyed Campus Culture.  The Results Weren’t Pretty”, by Lindsay Ellis, May 10, 2019

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

Robert CaslenComment