Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure. Even within the halls of respectable academia, the difference between legitimate and fake publications and conferences is far blurrier than scholars would like to admit. Some canny operators have now realized that when standards are loose to begin with, there are healthy profits to be made in the grey areas of academe.

Have you heard of 'predatory' publishers or journals? Such publishers or journals charge authors for publishing articles without having been peer-reviewed. Their number is growing. A list of potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers and journals can be found at Scholarly Open Access

It has been argued, that the way to address the problem of unethical student recruitment agencies is to ban them. But are all education agents inherently bad? No. Are there serious issues and potential pitfalls? Absolutely. Although the use of education agents is fraught with potential problems, it is possible to develop ways to address legitimate concerns related to the holy trinity of accountability, integrity and transparency.

US public universities recorded about five cases of alleged cheating for every 100 foreign students, and only one for every 100 domestic students, in the 2014-15 academic year. In the United Kingdom students from overseas – from outside the European Union – are more than four times as likely to cheat. Many of these cheating students come from countries with endemic corruption or with significantly different academic cultures and standards. Universities should acknowledge this problem and allocate all necessary resources to mitigate academic misconduct involving students.

In considering what universities are for, too little attention has been paid to the ethical role played by all who participate in them. The focus on the learning of useful skills often obscures the ethical dimension of university life. Universities are places where truth claims, propositions, theories, understandings and explanations, for all kinds of things and events, are subject to critical scrutiny. It is this critical dimension that distinguishes universities from schools and training. The ethical duty of universities is to question truth claims, to seek explanations, to find good understandings, and not to propound one or another doctrine without question.

Higher education institutions play a deciding factor in the development of future leadership and national social cohesion. And here higher education leaders play a critical role. They speak publicly about the ethics of their institution; they explain the details of how their institution manages ethical transgressions on the part of administrators, faculty and students; and they are the first to admit when there has been a failure. Leaders of ethical institutions today can be held to account in a way that is unprecedented.

A developmental university must have well-crafted research ethical standards anchored in principles of democracy, social justice and human rights. Research ethical standards are important as they provide guidelines for researchers to ensure that specific values like integrity, transparency, respect, objectivity and accountability are strictly observed; they generate confidence in and support for research among both domestic and international research communities; and they help establish trust between researchers and research participants.

Ethics is not always dealing with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but may sometimes be a choice of a lesser of evils, a nuanced decision dealing with trade-offs or viewed as situational. How do we better equip students to better understand ethical dilemmas and how to approach them? EthicalSystems.org, collects and shares research on ethics which spans a wide variety of topics, including accounting, cheating and honesty, contextual influences, corporate culture, corporate governance, corruption, decision-making, leadership and teaching ethics, among others.

Most scientists and medical researchers behave ethically. However, in recent years, the number of high-profile scandals in which researchers have been exposed as having falsified their data raises the issue of how we should deal with research fraud. There is little scholarship on this subject that crosses disciplines and engages with the broader phenomenon of unethical behaviour within the domain of research. This is partly because disciplines tend to operate in silos and because universities, in which researchers are often employed, tend to minimise adverse publicity.