The Wider Dimensions of Academic Integrity

William J. Astore

Integrity in education is not something to be enforced – it’s something to be inculcated.  Educators and administrators must foster integrity at all levels and throughout the process of education.  In this process, students must not be viewed as customers, education must not be treated as a commodity, and teachers must not be viewed as providers.  Rather, students are seekers, education is a portal, and teachers are mentors.

Narrow visions of education as a practical set of tools to financial and material success are iniquitous to academic integrity.  If a higher-paying job is the primary goal, and education simply an instrument or enabler for this goal, students will undervalue their studies – seeing them simply as a series of hurdles to be jumped quickly and forgotten as quickly.

To instill and reinforce a culture of integrity in education, we must persuade our students – and remind ourselves – that education is not merely instrumental but rather central to the formation of the self.  To be an educated person of integrity, in other words, is a prerequisite to being a mature, self-aware adult.  Even more: It is the indispensable attribute of fully-engaged citizens.  To be an educated person but to lack integrity is to pose a potential danger to oneself as well as to wider society.

William Astore currently teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.  A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), he served as the associate provost/dean of students at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA (2002-05) and before this as the deputy of international history at the USAF Academy (2000-02).  His D.Phil. is in Modern History from the University of Oxford (1996).  He has written books and articles on military topics as well as science and religion, and he writes regularly for several web sites, including TomDispatch.com, History News Network, and Nieman Watchdog.  He is proud to say that he’s been teaching college students for eleven years.

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