What do we mean by academic integrity?

This paper examines the concept of academic integrity. Drawing on Calhoun’s social perspective of integrity and on MacIntyre’s goods-based view of practice, we propose to understand acting with academic integrity as standing before others and with others, firmly but non-dogmatically, to protect the integrity of academic practice and, therefore, its internal goods –which are not readily specifiable but nevertheless related to growth, learning, and knowledge production and sharing. This view differs from others that take academic integrity as compliance with rules and procedures of academic institutions, or as a general virtue closely related to honesty, that simply happens to be applied in academic settings. Some implications of our view include the fact that not cheating or breaking rules of academic institutions is not enough for acting with academic integrity, the need to be aware of and collectively resist internal and external –including societal– pressures and threats, and the demands on academic institutions and organisations to promote democratic climates that allow all their members to speak up, and to favour democratic-educative over causal-objective approaches –such as incentive-based and cheating-proof designs– to protect the integrity of academic practice.