88 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
us from wrong-doing and from wrong-doers, must always be there in
any institution. It requires two arms: external, in the form of effective,
fair disciplinary structures, personnel and where necessary punishments,
and internal, in the form of the moral sense or conscience of members.
The ideal situation is where individual conscience is strong, backed
by a strong ethical workplace culture and by ethical leaders, and where
these are supported by the minimum of effective external policing. The
worst situation is where both internal and external policing are weak, for
that opens the door to the evils of academic corruption.
To achieve the ideal situation it is not enough for the multi-cultural
university to open its doors to people from any culture. It must enlist
their commitment to participating in the project of creating a richly
ethical, multi-cultural future for the academy and the world by
understanding their backgrounds and needs, seeking to meet those needs
and ensuring that the university they attend is not just inclusive in name
but in reality.
For this to happen a special responsibility rests on the shoulders of
the senior university leadership. Only they can set the right tone for a
truly inclusive campus that embraces ethical values all can share.
Achieving that requires of them the visible, consistent practice of three
cardinal values: equality, respect and fairness. Equality means that
everyone in the university is treated and valued equally as unique human
beings with hopes, fears, frustrations, needs and feelings. Respect
means accepting and valuing the reality that they come from diverse
backgrounds, follow different faiths or none, and have different political
loyalties. Fairness means relating even-handedly towards all, and that
makes it essential that the leadership shows no trace of bias on grounds
of belief, culture and political party. On this kind of basis our
universities can do invaluable work to create a global future worth
having.