Making a Code of Computer Ethics Work at Pimli College
Sally Webster
1. Life at Pimli after the Code is Adopted
Congratulations to Pimli College for doing so many of the right things when it decided to write a Code of Computer Ethics. The code writers investigated the constraints by which they are already bound (state and federal laws, present student and faculty codes of conduct, and network guidelines); discussed what they hoped to accomplish with a code; assembled interested parties from a variety of campus perspectives to discuss and write; looked at models from other institutions; made up a list of problem behaviors; and talked about how to raise awareness of the issues (beyond merely writing the Code).
They could also have discussed two other, related, areas: (1) the ethical environment already operating at Pimli, and (2) activities and attitudes necessary to make it possible for the Code to be taken seriously. If the ethical environment is inimical to ethics codes, or if only Pimli’s Computer Center is left to support the Code, its framers may have worked to no purpose.
For about eleven years, I was a professional academic computing services (ACS) person; for five of those years, one of my responsibilities was talking to students and faculty who had breached, sometimes without realizing it, an ACS policy. In that role, I was able to talk to offenders and understand some of the reasons they misunderstood or chose to flout a policy. From my colleagues and staff at ACS, I heard many ethics “war stories,” and together we searched for ways to explain to our users why the policies were there and what the consequences would be if illegal or unethical computer and network activities continued unabated.
For the past year, I have been a professor in a small science, technology, and design school which is a part of the State University of New York. In this role, I see the forces at work on students and faculty which keep them from examining too closely the way they treat software, privacy, intellectual property, and network access. I teach five courses a year in which I can directly influence students (most of them freshmen) to discuss ethical issues. I consult with faculty colleagues often enough to suggest the dilemmas which should be considered. My remarks on this topic, then, have been forged by experience on both “sides” of the faculty/staff divide.
Judging from the number of people trying with great difficulty to do it, writing and adopting a Code of Computer Ethics is a tremendous achievement. However, once it is written and adopted, will it do what the framers want? Or will it be a shield behind which the college can hide from lawsuits?
Let’s assume that the ethical environment at Pimli is “typical,” by which I mean that some parts of the college take ethical issues very seriously and others don’t think about them much at all. Furthermore, rules apply more to students than to faculty or staff, and students pay more dearly for mistakes than do others. In such an ethical environment, how will the Code be supported and by whom? (“Support” here means “understand and disseminate and discuss and explain and enforce and uphold.”) Could the writers of Pimli’s Code have been wasting their time? Will the Code be published but ignored? Will the faculty/student double standard apply to it as well? Will college administrators have the guts to take action when the provisions of the Code are violated, or will the all-too-real threat of lawsuits brought by the offenders back them down? For such a Code to do what its framers want, it must be supported by the right players making the right plays.
Go to: 2. The Players and the Plays
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