Governing Academic Integrity: Conceptualizing the Assurance and Efficacy of Strategies and Outcomes

Abstract

Governance bodies within universities play an essential role in testing and assuring the quality of critical academic activities, including the production of ethical knowledge, the achievement of student outcomes, and ultimately, the credibility of qualifications awarded to students. Yet, little attention has been given to the role of governing bodies in responding to the complex threats to academic integrity that are writ large across every jurisdiction. This gap is surprising given that maintaining academic integrity is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of the university, the education it provides, and the knowledge its researchers produce. This chapter seeks to begin to address this gap by articulating governing bodies’ role in enabling and overseeing the maturing of institutional responses to academic integrity. Having identified the governance remit, responses are considered to the critical questions faced by governing bodies: is the institutional strategy for academic integrity fit for purpose, and what are the opportunities for enhancing and maturing our institutional response? A proposed conceptual framework is presented that captures the critical dimensions of a governance assurance framework designed to enable scrutiny of institutional responses and make evidence-informed judgments of their efficacy and maturity relative to current risks and known best practices. This framework uses the academic integrity strategy developed recently by one of the authors as its starting point to identify what constitutes different levels of maturity in institutional approaches. It sets out what evidence governance bodies should look for to satisfy themselves that academic quality and standards are underpinned by integrity.