Improving the Public Trust: Ethical Issues in American and Australian Universities.

This paper uses a comparative approach to investigate the ethical policies and practices of Australian and American universities. In Australia, 26 institutional surveys were returned in which institution heads responded to questions about the professional ethics of faculty, the ethics of student assessment, research ethics, and the ethical element of the curriculum; the response rate was 74%. Findings showed that the older and more established the university, the more the respondents tended to think of ethics as relating only to research activities and to such obvious problems as student plagiarism. Newer schools demarginalized ethics and defined the ethical dimensions of a broad range of activities. An American survey was conducted of 78 schools (54 responded; a 69% response rate) that were comparable with the Australian group. Results showed that universities in America had a stronger sense of the ethical dimensions and importance of their activities than did their Australian counterparts. Some of this is believed to be due to the Australian system's being more centralized with a more prominent role of the federal government and national bodies in shaping policies and directions of all universities. Contains 11 references. (GLR)