06/30/2025

Summer Series Post-Blog 3: Working with Faculty

by Joseph Brown

The Summer Series of webinars continues the blog takeover with the third post-webinar blog. One of the presenters from Workshop 3: Working with Faculty on June 27 reflects on takeaways from their session.

Many thanks to everyone who attended our session “Working with Faculty” last week! As typically happens, Kelly and I were both energized by our conversation and regretful that we didn’t have more time. In wrapping up the topic, we wanted to share some thoughts on the recommended readings from our workshop. As the former English professor, Kelly nominated me to author it!

Transparency is Great, but it’s Not a Magic Wand

Arik Levinson’s Chronicle article made me feel a lot of emotions. I agree that universities could all benefit from being more transparent about academic misconduct numbers. Doing so is about accountability and can spur new investment, energy, and initiatives to promote academic integrity. However, as a former faculty member, I laughed at the idea that it would somehow shame nonreporting faculty into more engagement. Inversely, his argument that “alert professors would enjoy courses full of students who don’t cheat” is woefully unaware of how students make decisions. At my previous institution, I saw students take courses online, at a community college, or change majors to avoid taking a professor they believed would make their lives harder. Does Levinson really believe that students won’t look at a lower number of reported academic misconduct cases as a benefit?

However, this article is helpful to integrity professionals (and integrity-focused faculty) in one important way: it reminds us that faculty allies can look a lot of different ways. You won’t always agree with their conclusions (or policy ideas), but you can always work with someone who thinks academic integrity is important.

How Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru Test Reminds Us That Norms Change

When I read Alexander Amigud and David J. Pell’s “When Academic Integrity Rules Should Not Apply: A Survey of Academic Staff,” I scoffed at many of the scenarios they described that should be held as exceptions to what we consider academic misconduct until I remembered the fictional Kobayashi Maru test in Star Trek. Remember that nugget from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? It’s when audiences discover that their beloved, rakish Captain Kirk cheated on the biggest final exam of his career. The Kobayashi Maru test, we are told, is a simulation designed to test how a potential starship captain faces a “no-win scenario.” We learn that Kirk reprogrammed the test so he could win because, he tells us, “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.” It’s a mic drop moment in the film, and, suddenly, audiences find themselves loving this character precisely because he doesn’t follow the rules (a beloved, if not complicated, American tradition!) and especially rules that betray our sense of fairness.

The reason this information doesn’t disqualify Kirk is because it taps into a very strong tradition and cultural norm of invalidating tests that are unfair. Those norms are negotiated over time, and it’s important to understand that, since most colleges and universities have been around for a century or more, their ideas and norms have lifespans. While it might have seemed absurd to consider a student’s personal welfare in an academic misconduct case in a previous generation of faculty, today it seems much more appropriate to see the situation holistically. The takeaway of this article, it seems to me, is to be aware that the norms underlying our work are not fixed and smart leadership should try to balance being responsive alongside upholding the core values of our institution and profession.

The Secret Lives of Faculty Opinions

Lastly, Rowena Harper and Felicity Prentice’s “Responsible but Powerless: Staff Qualitative Perspectives on Cheating in Higher Education” underlines the point that, if you want to know what faculty think, you have to build ways to ask. I love that the piece focuses on the open-ended responses of a typical survey. In the qualitative-heavy world of program administration decision-making, it is delightfully not that. Here, faculty are being painfully honest about their institution, academic integrity policy, the offices and processes managing it, and their own feelings about their role in it all. The value of this article for integrity professionals is that it reminds us that unvarnished feedback (the kind that isn’t mediated by typical concerns of positionality, potential blowback, unwillingness to ruffle feathers, etc) is hard to capture. But like the spouse you discover who spends a surprising, maybe irresponsible, amount of time thinking about the Roman Empire when they’re quietly coexisting with you, you simply won’t know what these faculty partners really think until you ask.