Featured Article - Integrity

Every time final exams roll around, we get a talking-to about honesty, plagiarism, and cheating. While I certainly appreciate the reminder of our duties, I do think it is a little sad that such warnings are so necessary. In generally I think most law students are good people, but the intense pressure to succeed combined with a highly competetive environment make cutting corners look very tempting for many students.

It strikes me that this is a very short-sighted approach to life. I think most practicing attorneys would agree that good grades and a law degree from a prestigious institution won't do you much good if no one trusts you. In that spirit, the featured article this week "Integrity," by BYU President Cecil O. Samuelson. He's a doctor, not a lawyer, but the pressures of med school are very similar to those of law school. And as a president of a large university, he's not stranger to the issue of academic intergrity. The speech is available in html, pdf, or mp3. A few of my favorite exceprts are included below.

"I . . .believe that the attendant principles and practices of integrity are so important that all of us regularly need to think and act seriously on this topic. Although I am confident that you are in relatively high standing with respect to personal integrity, particularly when compared to the world around us, I am also persuaded that many of us overlook or fail to understand fully what it really means to have integrity in our lives."

"All of us are aware that we live in a general environment awash in moral relativism. Matters of honor, truthfulness, respect for others, and the like were often in the past understood to be hallmarks of an educated and cultured person . . .. In more recent years—when we have had increasing examples of moral, ethical, and legal lapses in those of prominent status and stature—the basic values related to integrity apparently seem to some to be old-fashioned and perhaps even outmoded at the practical level. Although we—at least I—may be old-fashioned, the issue of integrity with all of its facets is not related to a particular age, time, place, or circumstance."