INTRODUCTION
Higher education is leadership education. The values and virtues
practised in universities heavily influence the future leaders. Many
institutions of higher education show excellence not only in academic
subjects, as green campuses, with manifold ethics curricula and in their
community engagement, but also in the value-orientation of the Board
and teaching staff as well as students. But, additionally, in many
universities and schools around the world, fundamental values and
virtues are violated: cheating, plagiarism, unethical research, nepotism
in staff recruitment, corruption in exams, sexual harassment or simply
the lack of ethics curricula give then the signal to the future leaders that
‘this is how the world functions’ and only with unethical behaviour can
one achieve professional success.
This book is a fascinating compilation of 19 articles written by
authors from eight countries and five continents. The articles are
grouped in four sections: (1) Values in higher education, (2) Responsible
Leadership, (3) Education Topics and (4) Open and Distance Education.
This fourth topic, and the fact that a part of the authors come from South
Africa, specifically shows the origin of this book: it is the fruit of the
26th ICDE World Conference, organised by the International Council
for Open and Distance Education ICDE with the University of South
Africa UNISA in Johannesburg, held in Sun City in South Africa from
14-16 October 2015 under the theme "Growing Capacities for
sustainable Distance E-learning Provision".
The ethics dimension popped up in several contributions, among
other also at the Presidents’ Summit of almost 100 Presidents of Open
and Distance Learning Universities across the globe, but the book is