Mandatory Ethics Training

Yes, folks it's time once again, before the fall, for manditory ethics training if you are an employee of the state here in Lincolnland. Let's see what has been learned so far? Well, if you don't take long enough to read the grade 10 text before selecting the rediculously obvious answer you get accused of cheating even though you read with comprehension well above this level, and quickly, as part of your job. We've also learned that the people who get handsomely paid by our tax dollars to administer this training to university personnel don't have a clue what ethical challenges faculty face in our jobs. To date not one single item has any real bearing on what faculty do for their jobs, and an attempt to make the training relevant involved changing a few words so it sounded a bit like education, but do they think my "immediate supervisor" actually tells me what to do on a day to day basis? But no question about it, if there is ever time that a contract needs to be signed accepting Cubs tickets in return is not OK; now maybe Blackhawk tickets. The designers of this training could use a good ethics course wherein they learn about shades of gray rather than assume all situations are black and white. Making a personal call, say to remind my wife of an afterwork commitment, using my office phone is unethical, even though there is no real cost or waste, and many hours in compensatory time are worked, and no one is paying us overtime. And of course the only people employed by our great state that ever get called out on the carpet for major ethical infractions are our representatives who probably are not taking the ethical training they themselves mandated. Guess there aren't internet connections in prison.

Ethical training in Lincolnland

Each year the state government of Lincolnland mandates ethics training for its employees. This is hard to argue with in a state with so many ethically challenged politicians, but it remains uncertain if they mandate such training for themselves or not. One way or another there seems little evidence of the training's effectiveness. Actually this training has little to do with real ethics and ethical dilemmas; it does learn you about state rules of how to conduct state business.
University employees get our own training, and you have no idea how helpful this is for faculty. Yes, should the Phactor ever have to deal with civil service time cards, work orders, job estimates, medical records, outside contractors, jobs in the private sector, vendors, the line will be toed. Other than learning that it's OK to accept a small present from the parents of a former student or an honorarium for speaking at another university, virtually nothing in this year's training had anything to do with the ethical situations encountered as faculty. Of course it was mildly amusing and quite ironic to have this year's ethics training endorsed by all of our university presidents, of which one had recently resigned for allowing political and financial clout to alter admissions decisions. Guess they missed that part of the training. Last year many faculty got dunned for taking the online training too fast, never mind it was written at no more than a grade 12 level and the choices were so obvious you could guess correctly most of the time. So the verdict from this quarter is that our tax dollars could be better used, you know, for things like bribing aldermen, deans, or constables.