I have no interest in setting a precedent with this short valedictory, and trust none of my colleagues who chair other standing committees will think this presumptuous. There is, however, something about chairing the Association's Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights, and Freedoms which makes the experience somewhat unique, and I am hopeful this short message will help sensitize my colleagues into keeping the question of ethics in their minds as they ply the academic vineyards.

Like other APSA standing committees, Ethics depends upon the volunteered time/effort of members who obviously have full-time commitments. But, unlike many other committees, the work load ebbs and flows. But, when the Committee accepts a case, there is a premium on timeliness (when the AAAS alert system indicates that a foreign political scientist's academic freedom has been violated by another government, for example), discretion and confidentiality to protect both parties to a dispute (plagiarism issues come to mind), and a recognition that although the process of resolving a case has some seeming judicial attributes, the Committee has no real judicial power—moral suasion is the ultimate muscle (there were occasions in my tenure when a letter to a publisher could rectify a blatant usurpation of another author's work).

It is also probably no accident that Speakers of the House have traditionally never accepted volunteers. Service on behalf of ethical conduct is delicate and no place for anyone with an agenda which goes beyond the charge of the Committee. Beating the bushes for business or trolling in troubled waters almost invariably involved unintended consequences.

The Committee is susceptible to being contacted by some members who are already in legal proceedings or engaged in the host university's ethics process, other members seeking guidance on appropriate procedures, and occasionally referrals that are less issues of ethics and more questions of policy. Putting the “Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science” on the APSA web site has provided the Association's membership with the ability to review the Committee's purview and tends to lessen the instances of erroneous requests. It also underscores the degree to which the Committee relies on the existence of individual university ethical procedures which must be pursued prior to any referral of a case to the Committee. The host institution is far closer to the facts of a case. The Committee only steps in when all local options have been exhausted or when institutions do not follow their own procedures.

The Committee is, in many respects, a work in progress and has had to adjust to broader university, discipline, and societal changes. Although, for example, the Committee has handled individual member cases for many years, when the Committee was established in 1968, its original jurisdiction did not include individual cases. The Committee was at first envisaged as an educational body to “protect the rights of political scientists” by the issuance of advisory opinions to guide the professional behavior of political scientists. Advisory opinions do have a broader reach among the APSA membership than individual cases where confidentiality generally limits a broader multiplier impact. On reflection, the Committee might consider doing more to make the

Association's wider membership aware of its existence without jeopardizing confidentiality or even touching on individual cases it has reviewed. Simply reminding people periodically that the committee exists would be valuable, particularly to faculty and students in smaller institutions who have fewer resources at their disposal and sometimes need someone in their corner.

In that context, a case could be made for the Committee to retrieve more of the original expectation by periodically raising broad ethical issues for the membership in hopes of creating a meaningful awareness on the university or college campus where most of the ethical cases originate. The effort of creating this wider focus could be initiated by letters such as this, and the inclusion in future issues of PS: Political Science & Politics of essays dealing with broader ethical questions facing political science faculty and students. There is a new generation of political scientists coming up that are not aware of the Committee or its history. Maybe a little more public relations would be in order.

There are relatively few opportunities to provide the membership with an overview of the Ethics Committee and to nudge them into thinking about the relevance of ethics in their professional lives. As stated in the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, the fundamental values of academic integrity (honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility) are not abstractions with which only an Ethics Committee should deal. Rather, they are standards which should measure the educational process and the faculty and students which make it function.

I have found my service on the Association's Ethics Committee to be a combination of challenge and frustration, but ultimately very rewarding, especially when our intervention led to a positive, amicable resolution. In departing my post, I am hopeful that our entire membership will keep ethical behavior on their mind. Ultimately, the more thought that is given to this, the less time the Committee might have to spend with individual cases—this is a quest to focus a bit more on the forest rather than simply a tree here and there.