Keywords

Introduction

Over the past three decades, various commentators and scholars have noted a significant change in the campus environment, often described as the commercialization, marketization, or commodification of higher education. Leading higher education scholars Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) classified these changes as part of an academic capitalist environment. They characterized college campuses as shifting from what had traditionally been a public good ideology to an academic capitalist regime. While the two ideologies currently coexist within most campuses and are competing forces, the increasing prevalence of commercial culture on college campuses may shape student behaviors and ultimately threaten the integrity of the academic enterprise.

Expanding on the notion of threat, Kezar et al. (2005) documented how the public good ideology supported a particular set of values, such as the collective good of society over individual benefits from education, equal access, excellence in education, truthfulness and openness of the research enterprise, and faculty members playing a role in challenging society. These public good values also signaled to campus constituents – faculty, staff, and students – appropriate behaviors that are aligned with these broader institutional and societal values.

The academic capitalist ideology privileges a different set of values on college campuses. This includes maximizing efficiency and productivity over effectiveness (such as outsourcing of staffing and the influx of adjunct faculty), managerial expertise over scientific expertise, corporate governance rather than shared governance, privatization of research and intellectual products, the importance of profiting from intellectual efforts of faculty in both research and teaching, and individual rather than collective values (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). These new values encourage very different sets of behaviors on college campuses.

These capitalist values are not neutral (Kezar et al. 2005). They have the potential to compromise the integrity of the academic enterprise because of ethical issues that emerge from these new ideologies. Kezar et al. (2005) describe the increasingly unethical environment that has resulted from an academic capitalist ideology on college campuses. While institutions certainly dealt with integrity issues under the public good ideology, the capitalist system supports a corrosive environment, as it has few social values that support academic integrity.

Using culture as a theoretical framework, the authors provide some examples of the ways that the macro shifts to an academic capitalist environment have created a culture of growing unethicality on college campuses which signals to students that unethical behavior is “okay.” Culture is a valuable theoretical framework for demonstrating the impact of the academic capitalist (macro) environment on college campuses and how it affects the assumptions on which students’ individual decisions – that may increasingly lack integrity – are shaped. Students model the behavior of valued others – faculty, staff, and peers – about appropriate ways to act, which informally become a part of their consciousness through the institutional culture in which they are embedded. Figure 1 illustrates the perspective that is described in more detail throughout the chapter. This figure captures how the macroenvironment infiltrates campuses; is communicated to the members of the institutional culture, faculty, staff, and students; becomes embedded in the basic assumptions of students; and manifests as unethical behavior. This chapter provides background and context from the forthcoming chapters about students’ behavior on campus.

Fig. 1
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‘↓’ indicates direction of influence

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The chapter is organized as follows: the first section describes the theoretical framework that informs the analysis and the reflexive relationship between various layers of culture in higher education. Next, the authors review the macroenvironmental factors that influence campus subcultures and students’ individual behaviors, including a discussion of academic capitalism and its consumerist manifestations on college campuses. Third, specific examples of faculty and student subcultural trends and behaviors are discussed that both reflect and reproduce commercial values that encourage academic dishonesty.

Theoretical Framework: Culture

Joanne Martin (1992, 2001), a well-known theorist of culture, notes how sophisticated conceptualizations of culture examine the way that various layers interact to shape the values of individuals. While organizational or institutional culture is often the site of inquiry for culture, external influences are important in shaping internal organizational values that might not be formally espoused or embraced by the institution. Additionally, Martin describes how institutions are not monolithic, but made up of subcultures that can more directly shape the behaviors of individuals. It should be noted that subcultures may hold different or alternative value systems to a dominant institutional culture.

Organizations often espouse values that are inconsistent with their “values in practice” (Argyris and Schon 1978). For example, in higher education, institutions often articulate that they value teaching, but reward faculty primarily for conducting research. As a result, faculty members are conditioned to value research over teaching, in contrast to espoused institutional values. Values in practice are often hard to identify because they rely on basic assumptions that are implicit and not outwardly embraced by institutions.

This disconnect between espoused and practiced values has already been identified as relevant in previous research on creating environments of academic integrity. Bertram Gallant (2007) found that existing literature on academic integrity incorrectly assumes that in order to effect culture change, institutions need only to alter surface-level aspects of their cultures. However, as Bertram Gallant (2007) explains, to bring about cultural change involves “changing private values and normative practices” (p. 395). Where an integrity problem exists on college campuses, contributing factors include more than mere institutional missions and honor codes. Cultural change requires that individuals confront their own ideologies that may be deeply embedded and that may conflict with the surface-level aspects of culture (Bertram Gallant 2007).

As captured in the figure above, the authors use this chapter to illustrate the various layers of culture on college campuses and the ways that they impact students’ academic integrity. It is through the interactions of these layers that external (macro) environmental factors surrounding academic capitalism infiltrate the institutional culture and become embedded in the basic assumptions of cultural members. The authors show how the various layers of culture shape the values of subgroups on campus, including faculty and staff, which then impact students’ attitudes about academic integrity .

The primary purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the overarching shift that is taking place in basic institutional assumptions, which support a lack of integrity on campuses. Though empirical evidence of the contextual issues addressed in this chapter is provided, implicit and contextual processes are difficult to test empirically, and thus limited evidence is available in the literature.

This chapter builds on several other scholars that have demonstrated the importance of culture to environments of integrity. In addition to Bertram Gallant, the chapter builds on Whitley and Keith-Spiegel (2001) who identified how campus culture shapes cheating on campuses:

The nature and feel of the campus community environment—the campus ethos—is a powerful influence on individual student’s attitudes toward cheating. If students perceive their campus as merely providing a means to an end—and as unjust, disjointed, laissez faire, impersonal, and without a core identity—deterrents to cheating may be very weak. (p. 336)

The authors add to this argument by showing how the macroenvironment can shape institutional cultures and directly impact the ethicality of students’ academic conduct. As scholars have demonstrated in previous studies, culture is a powerful organizing framework for ethicality, aiding in the determination of rewards and punishments, appropriate behavior, and what means and ends are valued (Kuh and Whitt 1988). For this reason, culture is a useful perspective for understanding the contextual influences on college students that may impact their choice to engage in academic dishonesty.

The Macroenvironment

The Origins of Academic Capitalism

The transition to the academic capitalist regime began with economic policies of the 1970s and 1980s that were implemented to boost a weakened economy. The Higher Education Act of 1965 was reauthorized to give aid for tuition directly to students rather than institutions, and government assistance for college was thereafter delivered in the form of student loans and grants (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). The Bayh-Dole Act was passed in 1980, which allowed colleges and universities to patent inventions developed with federal research grants instead of placing them in the public domain, which had previously allowed for greater access to these innovations by the public. As a result of these legislative changes, universities were legally permitted to profit from both tuition and faculty research.

Alongside these changes, there was a rise in corporate governance of research universities in the USA. Board members and trustees were appointed because of their business experience and connections to industry. Many institutions were “headed by presidents who are paid like corporate executives, and recruitment of university leaders often focuses on the business acumen of candidates, rather than their expertise as educators or their commitment to learning” (Natale and Doran 2012). In 2010, about half of college and university board members came from business backgrounds (Fain 2010). Decision-making became more centralized, with administrators emphasizing principles of good business management to bolster efficiency and competitiveness at the expense of educational values like truth, equity, and autonomy (Kezar 2004).

With fewer public funds being allocated toward higher education, universities felt increased pressure to generate revenue and cut costs. Campuses were asked to outsource services and activities that often had a fundamental education component, such as residence halls and bookstores (described in greater detail below). Higher education institutions experienced pressure to generate revenues from auxiliary services and to create more programs among high-paying students, such as executive programs and programs supported by business. The University of Arizona’s recent partnership with Starbucks is an example of such partnerships and pressures to increase revenues by training and providing education directly for business interests.

The move to managerial leadership and commercial partnerships directly influences trends toward business practices, revenue generation, and privatization that propagate and embed corporate values throughout a student’s experience – in the residence halls, in the type of curriculum offered, and the decisions made by important educators in their daily environment. However, it is not these corporate values themselves that are problematic, but how these values translate into ethical compromises – faculty cheating, conflicts of interest between administrators and business interests, competitive pressures that lead to unethical decisions, consumer-oriented approaches to education that privilege individual student interests over broader learning goals, and contingent faculty who are unable to provide sufficient attention to grading and assignments (Benjamin 2003; Kezar 2004; Giroux 2005; Benford 2007; Hartley and Morphew 2008). These broader values become embedded into campuses and then translated into student experiences, which perpetuate commercial values and resultant unethical behaviors.

The effects of academic capitalism are visible in the surface-level aspects of culture on many college campuses. The market-based values held by many higher education institutions are exemplified by consumerism and credentialism – two interrelated concepts that influence student attitudes toward their college education and their own personal worth in a capitalist society. Following is a discussion of how a consumer mentality that develops as a result of the academic capitalist environment reinforces actions that increasingly lack integrity.

Consumerism and Credentialism

With the decision to give financial assistance directly to students instead of institutions, the federal government placed students in the role of consumers of higher education and promoted market-like competition among institutions for federal money. The policy changes of the 1970s and 1980s were premised on the belief that higher education is largely a private good, with benefits accruing primarily to individual students, who use their degrees to increase their human capital value and better position themselves in the workforce (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004).

Academic capitalist values have become embedded in the institutional culture of most campuses: a culture that mimics the market economy and values rational self-interest over the search for truth and intellectual progress. As illustrated in the figure above, students are socialized into the culture through direct observation of commercialism on campus and interactions with campus subcultures and valued peers. Student consumerism refers to a collection of beliefs and behaviors, which stem from the central premise that higher education is a service for sale and that students are discerning customers of their own future (Giroux 2005). Consumerism is an ideology practiced by students and encouraged by institutions in many ways, from prospective student marketing to exclusive arrangements with corporate partners for advertising access to intercollegiate sporting events.

The transition to consumer culture was marked, in part, by the institutional use of students for extracting revenue in the form of tuition and commercial profits (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). Institutions often target prospective tuition-paying students with promises of extracurricular activities and commercial services – restaurants and shopping – rather than academic quality. These institutional marketing tactics emphasize consumption and consumer capitalism that serve the college’s own financial interests to the detriment of students. Hartley and Morphew (2008) found that through their marketing materials, institutions attempt to communicate to all students that they are unique and that faculty and staff are typically prepared to serve their individual academic and nonacademic needs (Saichaie and Morphew 2014).

Credentialism is the view that degree completion, not learning, is the goal of higher education. Academic credentials, such as degrees and certificates, are shorthand for competence and mastery. “Credentials are proxies for skills and knowledge that are required by employers and symbolic of social status. In this way, they are helpful tools for social organization” (Fairchild and Crage 2014). A college degree is a signal to the workforce that students have fulfilled the terms of their educational contract: universities provide training and assessment in exchange for completed assignments, exams, and class completion (Happel and Jennings 2008). Employers factor college degrees into their hiring decisions based on the assumption that these signals provide adequate measures of achievement or mastery that students can apply to job tasks. However, a candidate’s resume is not necessarily reflective of what happens in the classroom (Fairchild and Crage 2014).

Both consumer and credential values impact academic integrity by regarding education as a means to an end. Consumerism favors market-based values over social progress, which means that institutions provide educational services for the purpose of increasing revenue and market share. Like consumerism, the credentialed view emphasizes education as a gatekeeping mechanism or a vehicle for increasing students’ market value. Both perspectives underscore monetary rewards as the ultimate goal of providing or receiving an education. Where institutions ignore or condone academic dishonesty, they send the message to students that monetary ends are valued over means, effectively de-emphasizing the importance of ethics and honesty in academic work.

Students operating under the credentialed view perceive higher education as a stepping stone to financial and status rewards, instead of an opportunity for learning, and are more likely to condone and engage in cheating behaviors as a means to an end: higher grades and degrees for the purpose of achieving a higher quality of life (Bertram Gallant and Drinan 2006). However, where academic dishonesty is prevalent at an institution, degrees and transcripts are merely signals that a student can cheat without getting caught. Thus, in an academic environment marked by dishonesty, credentials are useless as markers of substantive knowledge (Brown 2001). Increased competition among students – for grades, jobs, and graduate school admission – in tandem with the exaltation of opportunistic values, shifts the focus of students in school from thriving to surviving, encouraging victory in the form of grades and degrees by any means necessary (Bertram Gallant and Drinan 2006).

The consumer model of higher education is one in which “faculty members are seen as providers of customer service and transmitters of industry-relevant skills. Professors are often no longer seen as scholars; rather they are viewed as employees with publications” (Natale and Doran 2012, p. 4). This model may also deter faculty members from reporting incidents of academic dishonesty for fear of damaging student records out of empathy for students who are about to enter a very competitive market (Bertram Gallant and Drinan 2006). The consumer model is based on the belief that “all factors of a student’s educational endeavors are negotiable,” including standards for grades, deadlines, and expectations, which are lowered or altered to please and satisfy student-consumers (Plunkett 2014, p. 1). Following is a discussion of the institutional and subcultural trends that are observable by students on campus and that provide evidence of a growing culture of unethicality.

Microlevel Evidence

While the macroenvironment reflects the more abstract economic paradigms affecting higher education, microlevel factors refer to events, decisions, and behaviors of campus subcultures that are directly observable by students on college campuses. These include the increasing marketization of college admissions, corporate sponsorship and outsourcing, the commercialization of athletics, the role of faculty (including the privatization of the researcher enterprise, faculty-teaching misconduct, and the influx of contingent faculty), as well as the exploitation of graduate students. The examples provided represent only a sampling of the various changes that are occurring on campuses around the country. These increasingly common trends impact student cheating behaviors by signaling to students that compromising integrity is not only acceptable, but in some cases necessary to ensure student success in college and in the future.

College Admissions

The college admissions process is often a student’s first encounter with a particular campus culture. Students research institutions by examining campus brochures, websites, and other promotional materials before applying. Prior to the shift to academic capitalism, college promotional materials presented the institutional mission in an informational way, allowing students to make educated decisions based on the academic focus of the institution (Saichaie and Morphew 2014). In 1987, Ernest Boyer conducted a study of university marketing materials from 29 institutions to determine whether the message communicated to prospective students by institutions was consistent with the academic experience. Boyer found that “promotional booklets and brochures are more visually appealing than informative and, if we judged from the pictures, it would be very easy to conclude that about half of all college classes in America are held outside, on a sunny day, by a tree, often close to the water” (1987, p. 14). Though Boyer’s study concluded that the material was for the most part ethical, the competitive marketing practices of institutions have gained substantial momentum over the last 30 years.

More recent studies of university marketing practices reveal that institutions often target prospective tuition-paying students with promises of services and extracurricular activities rather than academic quality. Studies have found that viewbooks, websites, and other promotional materials deliver an overwhelmingly homogenous message about the college experience, despite their diverse public missions and goals (Hartley and Morphew 2008; Saichaie and Morphew 2014). These materials consistently depict an experience filled with extracurricular activities, flexible courses tailored to students’ individual interests and career paths, all leading up to a valuable credential and a successful future.

Hartley and Morphew (2008) found that through their marketing materials, institutions attempt to communicate to all students that they are special, that their individual needs coincide with the strengths of the institution, and that faculty and staff are always available to serve their academic and nonacademic needs (Saichaie and Morphew 2014). Given the cost of attendance at many four-year institutions and the prevalence of student debt as a result of college attendance, students who make decisions about their education based on exaggerated or unscrupulous marketing efforts of universities may be at a greater disadvantage upon graduating than if they had attended low-cost state or community colleges. Where students choose a particular school based on inflated claims, they are likely to feel misled and to develop a distrustful attitude toward their institution.

For many students, the college admissions process is a first encounter with consumer culture that has direct and serious consequences for their future. The consumer culture is ingrained before applications are submitted, and thus students learn to see themselves as targets of advertising before they are ever socialized as students.

Corporate Sponsorship and Outsourcing

Once enrolled in college, student perceptions of consumer culture are bolstered when they observe the increasing corporate presence on college campuses. Institutions in recent years have turned to corporate sponsorship and outsourcing of university products and services in an effort to cut costs and generate revenue (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). Outsourcing is the contracting out of services or products to outside suppliers instead of providing the services or products through in-house resources. A form of privatization, university outsourcing usually involves a long-term profit-sharing arrangement with corporations who are adept at performing the task and able to do it at a lower cost than institutions. Campus bookstores are one of the most commonly outsourced operations on college campuses. Companies like Follett and Barnes and Noble offer to purchase university inventory, manage stores at lower labor costs, generate more revenue, and share profits. In addition to campus stores, institutions may outsource food services, janitorial work, security, fundraising, and mail delivery, among other things (Gupta et al. 2005). Though outsourcing has been successful in some areas, like food services, areas more tightly linked to the educational mission, like campus housing, may present threats to institutional values (Kezar 2004).

One issue posed by corporate arrangements is that students on college campuses are captive audiences of corporate advertising. Many modern university campuses are so crowded with fast-food restaurants and chain coffee shops that they have begun to resemble shopping malls. Corporate logos appear on everything from football stadiums to athletic apparel sold at the campus store, and students are all but required to view the ads, eat at the restaurants, and purchase the clothing (Giroux 2005). Commercial arrangements are often made solely on the basis of financial gain for the university, with little regard for how the products or services might impact students when purchased (Giroux 2005).

These trends are evidence that modern institutions operate according to capitalist, profit-driven motive s. As a result, students on campus perceive their institutions as comparable to commercial retail companies and hold them to lower ethical standards. Where the administrations who create codes of academic integrity themselves engage in unethical practices, students may view these codes with suspicion as hypocritical and, consequently, optional.

Intercollegiate Athletics

The commercialization of college athletics is neither a new phenomenon, nor a new problem, but one that departed from its educational roots nearly a century ago (Benford 2007):

[College football] is not a student’s game as it once was. It is a highly organized commercial enterprise. The athletes who take part in it have come up through years of training; they are commanded by professional coaches; little if any initiative of ordinary play is left to the player. The great matches are highly profitable enterprises. (Savage 1929)

Though the problems are not new, new technologies allow for rampant commercialism of college sports by expanding the market through cable television and streaming Internet (Benford 2007). Between 2005 and 2012 alone, Division I FBS universities increased their funding for athletics by 92 % (the median FBS general fund expenditures for athletics per student were $11,882 in 2005, compared to $22,808 in 2012), while these same schools increased their academic spending per student by only 30 % in the same period (Knight Commission 2013). Though college athletics provides nonfinancial benefits to institutions, like reputation and campus spirit, boosts in applications and enrollment are small or short-lived (Desrochers 2013).

The NCAA puts forth ethical guidelines for student-athletes, including appropriate conduct, financial or compensatory award limits, and academic requirements that athletes must meet in order to play (Bertram Gallant et al. 2010). However, ethical breaches by both student-athletes and faculty/coaches/staff have been fairly common in recent years, and scandals have been widely publicized. The most common scandals are those involving faculty and staff-assisted cheating to ensure that student-athletes can meet academic standards to play. Ethical breaches include faculty and staff completing assignments for students to ensure that they meet minimum GPA requirements, coaxing athletes into easy majors and easy courses, and creating special “shadow curricula” for athletes involving phony courses and grades. As recently as October 2014, the New York Times reported that the University of North Carolina had been operating a shadow curriculum for nearly twenty years within the Afro- and African-American Studies department that helped 1,500 athletes at the university meet their GPA requirements to play (Lyall 2014). Both the department’s chairperson and office administrator admitted fault, and an investigation implicated many members of the academic support staff who, in some circumstances, expressly told department staff what grades their students needed in their classes in order to meet NCAA standards.

Finally, institutions both economically and physically exploit their student-athletes (Benford 2007). Student-athletes are promised an education, but encouraged to place practice before academic work, in an environment that condones cheating if it means increased revenues for the institution. Nonathlete students on college campuses watch as their institutions compromise their own integrity and reputation in order to generate revenue through commercial sports and may perceive those actions as institutional endorsement of commercial values over values of truth and integrity. Given the bloated salaries and extravagant perks of many Division I athletic coaches, punishments for those responsible are rarely sufficient to deter recidivism. In the midst of an Ohio State scandal of 2011, when asked whether he might dismiss football coach Jim Tressel, University President Gordon Gee joked that he was “just hoping that the coach doesn’t dismiss me” (Morris 2011).

Gee’s statement, along with his own subsequent departure from Ohio State and other similar dismissals (like that of UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp amidst the most recent scandal), reveals the expendability of high-ranking university officials as compared with athletic staff and reinforces the message to the student body that revenue-generating athletic programs are more highly valued and enduring than both university leadership and academic matters. Where attending a football tailgate is praised as more culturally relevant than studying for exams, academic work is likely to take a backseat to sporting events. What were once athletic programs to promote educational values are now educational programs to promote athletic competition (Duderstadt 2000; Bertram Gallant and Drinan 2006). Students are socialized into sports culture, which distorts university priorities by rewarding student-athletes with celebrity status, despite acknowledged and very public scandals involving both academic and even criminal violations (Benford 2007). Students who observe their athlete-peers being rewarded for their performance in spite of cheating behaviors are more likely to perceive these behaviors as acceptable, if not encouraged, by the institution.

The Role of Faculty

Faculty members play various roles in the university setting. They are researchers and scientists to their administrations and employers, and they are teachers, advisors, and mentors to their students. The faculty subculture at an institution (comprised of many departmental and disciplinary subcultures) links students directly with the institutional culture. Because all students interact with professors throughout their college attendance, faculty members are the most visible role models for students and play a prominent role in shaping students’ attitudes about academic integrity.

Though the academic profession still privileges values of openness and truth (Merton 1973), faculty members do not always act in accordance with ethical norms. Following are three ways in which trends involving faculty members contribute to the deterioration of academic integrity among students: the privatization of research, misconduct in the teaching role, and the influx of contingent faculty in higher education institutions.

Privatization of Research. Robert Merton (1973) articulated the four principles of scientific research: communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. These “Mertonian norms” are touted as the primary values undergirding the scientific community. The public good ideology privileges values of openness and truth in faculty research. Faculty members have placed a high premium on research results being authentically represented and are undergoing significant peer review and replication to ensure their truthfulness. This openness has led to discoveries being openly available to the public, which ensures that other people see and respond to research results, rather than hoarding them for profit through patents and licensing.

Since the Bayh-Dole Act was passed in 1980, profits from research have become a considerable source of revenue for institutions and faculty members. Privatization of the research enterprise has led to a move away from openness in research in favor of increased revenues, which bolsters the claim underlying academic capitalism: that knowledge is a private good developed for the benefit of industry. This move signals to both faculty and students that the purpose of knowledge production is to generate revenue and reinforces the credentialed view that education is merely a means to an end.

Much of the research produced for industry does not go through the peer review process to ensure validity and truthfulness. “Philanthropic science,” (Broad 2014) or research funded by wealthy private groups and individuals, operates outside the sphere of governments and peer-reviewed journals. Proponents of philanthropic science argue that privately funded research contributes to scientific progress by creating a market for research and incentivizing scientists to build upon previous work (Murray and Stern 2007). However, demand is not evenly distributed across the scientific spectrum. Opponents of greater industry involvement in academic matters argue that private groups fund studies based on their own interests and issues that are more fashionable, like space travel, arguably at the expense of less trendy but more central topics. “Physics isn’t sexy,” stated White House Science Adviser William H. Press, “but everybody looks at the sky” (Broad 2014). Institutions in the current academic climate encourage a “move to entrepreneurialism: academic leaders provide faculty with incentives to treat their teaching, research and service as commodities to be sold, making profits for the institution, thereby reducing the institution’s responsibility for faculty salaries” (Kezar 2004, p. 439). For example, Sovacool (2008) found that researchers in the biomedical sciences, natural sciences, and engineering make between $10,000 and $30,000 more per year than researchers in the humanities and social sciences because of their financial arrangements with research sponsors and universities, including moonlighting through consulting contracts, stock ownership, and patent royalties.

Controversies involving the moonlighting efforts of faculty members usually revolve around conflicts of interest. In 2003, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) received some bad publicity after it was revealed that high-level researchers were receiving money for patents and business affiliations with pharmaceutical companies (Sovacool 2008). More recently, the director of the NIH called for an ethics summit as a result of conflicts of interest among top scientists (Willman 2005).

The academic reward structure influences the degree to which faculty abide by norms of openness and truth in scientific research. Institutional emphasis on publications and grant funding has increased so dramatically that only those scientists who conform to entrepreneurial norms will receive the benefits of tenure and promotion. Additionally, with the increasing prevalence of scientific research “teams,” scientists feel more anonymous, feel less reputational pressure, and are more likely to falsify or conceal research results (Sovacool 2008). Graduate students who work in team-like environments are more likely to observe faculty engaging in fraud, plagiarism, and “down-right white collar crime” (Anderson et al. 1994, p. 343). Anderson et al. (1994) found

“that students who have the best opportunities to learn the skills needed to conduct research (by having close, collaborative relationships with faculty and peers) are also those who are most likely to be exposed to forms of behavior that are either contrary to university policy or illegal” (p. 344).

Academic incentives are a barrier to openness in science research, as market-based competition has promoted secrecy of research findings due to fear of theft or perceptions of incompetence. Graduate students and young faculty members are socialized to believe that they must compete for recognition, tenure, and promotion and must therefore demonstrate their independence as researchers in order to succeed (Cohen and Siegel 2005). As a result of extreme competition and isolation, scholars in high-stakes disciplines ultimately battle one another instead of battling the scientific issues (Kumar 2010). Students therefore witness a faculty culture (comprised of presumed role models and mentors) that includes conflicts of interest, cheating, and other unethical behaviors, prompting acceptance of such behavior as commonplace and replicable.

Faculty Misconduct in Teaching. Often overlooked in the literature is the prevalence of faculty misconduct in the teaching role, in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Professors are uniquely visible to students. They provide a direct link to the institutional culture and the external environment. Because they are perceived by students to be agents of the institution and its mission, faculty misconduct in the teaching role is particularly damaging for students. Braxton and Bayer (1999) argue that the academic profession is built on norms, compliance with which is expected in exchange for faculty autonomy and self-regulation of teaching practices. Though normative structures differ between graduate and undergraduate programs, Braxton and Bayer (1999) found seven types of inviolable norms as a result of their empirical analysis of undergraduate faculty disapproval. These include condescension, inattentive planning, moral turpitude relating to sexual misconduct with students or intoxication, particularistic grading, personal disregard or disrespect toward students, uncommunicated course details, and a failure to cooperate with departmental activities relating to teaching (Braxton and Bayer 1999). The extent of faculty disapproval for any one of these norm violations in a particular institution differs depending on the emphasis placed on teaching (whether the institution is a research university, liberal arts college, or two-year college). For instance, though moral turpitude and particularistic grading were condemned universally, uncommunicated course details and personal disregard for students were viewed with less disapproval at research universities than at liberal arts colleges.

Braxton et al. (2002) argue that undergraduate students have the primary responsibility of detecting and reporting faculty wrongdoing. Unfortunately, students have a lower level of disapproval of faculty misconduct than that of the professional community, which may explain why these behaviors go undetected. This suggests that students who are demeaned by their teachers, observe sexually inappropriate behaviors, or are subjected to poorly prepared lectures and materials are conditioned to view these experiences as normal. From a cultural perspective, this evidences a cycle of lowered expectations and fewer role models for students that demonstrate academic integrity.

Contingent Faculty. The culture of an institution is manifested through the behavior of faculty (Bertram Gallant and Drinan 2006). All students have the opportunity to interact with their professors throughout their tenure. Consistent with the figure above, faculty constitute the most direct and consistent connection for students to the macroenvironment. Because faculty members are the most visible role models for students, they are in a uniquely prominent position to demonstrate the importance of honesty, integrity, and respect for the learning tradition and to counteract the negative cultural influences of academic capitalism. However, due to the rise of contingent faculty hiring practices in recent years, there is less opportunity for faculty members to take on the responsibilities of a role model. Part-time and temporary teaching appointments nullify the potentially positive cultural impact that faculty involvement can have in instilling ethical values in students.

The makeup of the academic profession has undergone massive changes over the last 30 years. Tenure-track faculty members now account for only 30 % of faculty employed at US institutions (Kezar and Maxey 2013a). The remaining 70 % are part-time or full-time non-tenure-track faculty members. Due to efficiency needs and financial necessity, institutions have engaged in what some view as an unethical hiring pattern comprised of a largely contingent faculty (Kezar and Maxey 2013b).

Contingent faculty members often have little to no formal relationships with the institutions at which they teach. They lack office space, making it difficult to hold office hours, advise, or build meaningful relationships with students (Kezar 2004, p. 15). Empirical studies have shown that contingent faculty use less engaging teaching approaches, spend less time preparing for classes, and have little time for advising or office hours (Baldwin and Mywrwinski 2011; Benjamin 2003). Unfortunately, students are more likely to cheat in classes taught by contingent faculty, where they believe it is less likely that their professors will read their work (Park 2003). Studies show that students who take more courses with part-time faculty or are at institutions with large numbers of part-time faculty tend to have lower graduation rates, retention, and transfer from 2-year to 4-year institutions (Kezar and Sam 2010). Various negative outcomes are associated with the significant growth of part-time and contingent faculty employment (Ehrenberg and Zhang 2005; Jacoby 2006; Gross and Goldhaber 2009; Kezar and Maxey 2015).

Though student tenure in college is by nature transitory, in some instances, students are more permanent fixtures at institutions than many contingent faculty members. For this reason, students may have little interest in developing long-term relationships with professors who are not guaranteed to return the following semester. Further, the student-as-consumer culture requires that “colleges and universities cater to the desires of the individual (short-sighted though they may be), thereby further displacing faculty authority” (Gumport 2000, p. 81). Consumer culture on college campuses shifts the power dynamic from teacher to student, reinforcing students’ belief that it is the responsibility of teachers to entertain and make material interesting, and the resulting view that poor performance and academic dishonesty are a direct result of the teacher’s failure.

Further, the overall trend in academe of hiring contingent faculty undermines the traditions of shared governance and academic freedom in the academic profession. Faculty who have little affiliation with their institutions are not represented in their departments, have little voice in curricular matters, and have no job security. These arrangements are damaging to the fabric of the academic community and provide another example for students of the institution’s desire to cut costs at the expense of academic values and student learning. Ultimately, regardless of the skill and concern demonstrated by non-tenure-track faculty members, due to their contingent employment and loose ties to their institutions, it is unlikely that they will truly impact campus cultures in a positive way.

In sum, students receive less attention to their coursework from faculty and less adherence to or enforcement of policies and have fewer lasting role models of integrity. The widespread move to transactional approaches to learning is inconsistent with broader learning goals. The resulting breakdown of the academic profession means that faculty members fail to communicate a holistic view of learning, and ethics is disregarded in the overarching curriculum. Further, the use of contingent faculty members at the expense of student learning may bolster student perceptions of their institutions as commercial enterprises, who are unconcerned with academic values and integrity.

Graduate Student Exploitation

Related to faculty integrity , the use of graduate students in scientific research is problematic in light of increasing industry-funded research. Graduate students are intelligent, inexpensive, and valuable sources of labor, especially in departments like the hard sciences that work closely with industry (Mendoza 2007). For this reason, they not only become targets of exploitation, but they are particularly susceptible to changing values in the academic culture. Graduate students are socialized into the academic profession through their disciplinary culture and primarily their advisors and mentors who are bound to account to industry sponsors for their findings. Young scholars observe and internalize the behavioral and professional norms exhibited by their professors and faculty advisors, in turn inheriting the values they perceive to be operating in the research process. Academic dishonesty among faculty members is thus problematic given that their graduate students who go on to academic careers contribute to reshaping the culture of the discipline, further solidifying the commercial values instilled in them by their faculty advisors.

The possibility for profit in academic research can create serious conflicts of interest between the university and the public (Slaughter et al. 2002). As Mertonian norms are gradually overshadowed by commercial prospects, the role of graduate students in science has become more closely aligned with the interests of industry than with the search for truth. Graduate students are often viewed as employees, who conduct research in line with those who are more likely to offer jobs and fund future projects (Sovacool 2008). Rhoades and Rhoads (2003) found that graduate students are increasingly forming and joining unions because of “what universities are doing to their own students, by way of what they see as exploitation, in the interests, not of students, either undergraduate or graduate, but of the institution” (Rhoads and Rhoades 2005, p. 247). They argue that graduate student unions reflect a significant change in the academic culture from the public good to commercial interests. In many cases, graduate students are not just cheap labor, but “free” (p. 297) when their research stipends are paid by federal taxpayers. When those students work on private sector projects with faculty members, the federal government is essentially subsidizing professors’ profits.

Because graduate students’ perceptions of the research community are inherited from the previous generation of scholars, the commercial values held by current faculty researchers may ultimately reproduce themselves (Gumport 2005). According to Gumport (2005), graduate students involved in industry-sponsored projects are unlikely to think about societal problems that do not result in profits. Thus, graduate students are likely to encounter the same ethical quandaries as established researchers in their field and are more likely to embody and reproduce those commercial values upon entering the academic profession.

Conclusion

Students are surrounded by instances of compromised integrity on campus. These and other examples of dishonesty and profit seeking are likely to impact student perceptions of the value and purpose of their college education. Given that degree-granting institutions so publicly engage in exploitation and corruption and praise dollars over truth and fairness, how are students supposed to distinguish between rules to break and rules to follow?

Though many institutions have attempted to address cheating behaviors of students, these attempts have done little to curb academic dishonesty. Bertram Gallant and Drinan (2006) suggest that the reason for this is the disproportionate focus on the individual student as the underlying cause of cheating. They argue that many past research studies ignore the larger organizational factors such as “structures, systems, relationships, and governance” (p. 841) that might impact student cheating behaviors. McCabe and Trevino (1997) found that contextual factors were more influential on students’ decisions to cheat than individual characteristics like age, gender, and GPA. These contextual factors include membership in a fraternity or sorority, peer behavior, and peer disapproval. Students reported that they were more likely to cheat when they perceived higher levels of cheating among their peers (p. 391). Thus, the culture created at universities can have a large impact on the prevalence of academic dishonesty. However, few scholars have examined the broader forces that shape student culture, such as the implicit ways that commercial actions and aspects of institutional culture perpetuate student perceptions of cheating. Instead, researchers tend to focus on micro-interactions within student activities and between peers.

This chapter aimed to fill this gap in understanding by looking at broader cultural forces within campuses. Meaningful solutions to the problem of widespread cheating must address the institutional culture – including the actions of presidents, boards, faculty, staff, and athletic departments – not just student culture, as well as move beyond individual sanctions. Bertram Gallant and Drinan (2006) propose that cheating behaviors should be addressed from an organizational lens, where change can occur more systemically. Among the recommendations, they suggest that institutions must acknowledge cheating as corruption and avoid explanations of cheating as isolated incidents of unethical students. Institutions must take responsibility for the ways in which the organizational structure and practice might contribute to the problem of academic dishonesty . Additionally, those authors argue that institutional leaders must take continuous action by reinforcing the values of integrity at the heart of the educational mission. This reinforcement elevates the level of urgency of the problem, reducing the tendency to ignore or overlook and “minimizing the space in which corruption can fester” (p. 853). Leadership is important in combating the problem of academic dishonesty because institutional change requires reflection on institutional practices and a willingness to take reputational risks (Kezar 2013). Instead of disregard and secrecy, these problems must be diagnosed and treated publicly in order to change the structures that support academic dishonesty. At the national level, accrediting bodies should track and record the results of academic integrity issues, and at the local level, institutions should be transparent about their own academic integrity assessments (Bertram Gallant and Drinan 2006). The goal in this chapter has been to shed light on those areas within the institutional culture that can be addressed and to provide direction for campuses willing to engage in self-reflection. It would be insincere to expect students to act with integrity at an institution that supports cheating among student athletes, hires contingent faculty who are unable to uphold ethical standards or promote ethical behavior, allow faculty to cheat and plagiarize without significant consequence, and emphasize the commercial aspects of the enterprise over student learning. It is imperative that leaders are made aware of potential risks to integrity as a result of commercialization and consumer trends that they may not have considered, as well as the ways that the institutional culture may impact students’ academic conduct.

Summary

Commercialization of higher education is a symptom of the widespread shift to an academic capitalist regime across US colleges and universities, wherein institutions exhibit increasingly market-like behaviors, and the public good mission takes a backseat to revenues and market share. Cheating among college students has increased alongside these capitalist trends, causing many scholars to question the role of institutions in matters of academic dishonesty. This chapter uses culture as a theoretical framework to provide some examples of the ways that the macro shifts to an academic capitalist environment have created a culture of growing unethicality on college campuses which signals to students that unethical behavior is “okay.”

Culture is a valuable theoretical framework for demonstrating the impact of the academic capitalist (macro) environment on college campuses and how it affects the assumptions on which students’ individual decisions – that may increasingly lack integrity – are shaped. Students model the behavior of valued others – faculty, staff, and peers – about appropriate ways to act, which informally become a part of their consciousness through the institutional culture in which they are embedded. This chapter captures how the macroenvironment infiltrates college campuses; is communicated to the members of the institutional culture, faculty, staff, and students; becomes embedded in the basic assumptions of students; and manifests as unethical behavior.

While the macroenvironment reflects the more abstract economic paradigms affecting higher education, microlevel factors refer to events, decisions, and behaviors of campus subcultures that are directly observable by students on college campuses. These include the increasing marketization of college admissions, corporate sponsorship and outsourcing, the commercialization of athletics, the role of faculty (including the privatization of the researcher enterprise, faculty-teaching misconduct, and the influx of contingent faculty), as well as the exploitation of graduate students. The examples provided represent only a sampling of the various changes that are occurring on campuses around the country. These increasingly common trends impact student cheating behaviors by signaling to students that compromising integrity is not only acceptable, but in some cases necessary to ensure student success in college and in the future.

The culture created at universities can have a large impact on the prevalence of academic dishonesty. However, few scholars have examined the broader forces that shape student culture, such as the implicit ways that commercial actions and aspects of institutional culture perpetuate student perceptions of cheating. This chapter aims to fill this gap in understanding by looking at broader cultural forces on college campuses. Meaningful solutions to the problem of widespread cheating must address the institutional culture – including the actions of presidents, boards, faculty, staff, and athletic departments – not just student culture, as well as move beyond individual sanctions. University leaders must consider the potential risks to academic integrity that result from commercialization and consumer trends, as well as the ways that the institutional culture may impact students’ academic conduct.