Academic Integrity Office

In Spring 2024, UCSC created the Academic Integrity Office (AIO). As its inaugural director, Greer Murphy (they/she) is charged with building a campus-wide resource from the ground up — an exciting yet uncharted opportunity. In this month’s Teaching Spotlight, the TLC sat down with Greer and their new colleague, Education Specialist Jessa Kirk (she/hers), to talk about their collective vision for the AIO and the resources it will offer for faculty and students alike. 

Greer came to academic integrity through their doctoral work in Education. Although they began their graduate studies with a general interest in writing across the curriculum, a persistent dissertation director encouraged them to focus on plagiarism research. Greer’s initial response was not precisely enthusiastic — “I’m not the plagiarism lady! I don’t want to do that!” — but their advisor’s arguments were compelling, and ultimately led them to a professional career focused on integrity. “Academic integrity,” Greer notes, “is a flashpoint for so much else that happens in higher education.” They add, “having an opportunity to build from the ground up and institutionalize a culture of academic integrity isn’t something that comes along every day.”  

Jessa Kirk, newly hired into the AIO Education Specialist position, comes to UCSC from an Academic Dean position at a Santa Cruz independent school and previously taught English at both the high school and university levels. Her role centers around designing an original curriculum for training the AIO’s future group of academic integrity peer educators and managing the peer educators’ work. The goal of academic integrity peer education is to move away from the conventional student conduct model (in which students who violate academic integrity policies understand themselves to be “in trouble” and interact with a process based primarily in discipline) and toward an educational/restorative justice model, in which academic integrity staff seek to clarify expectations via education, identify issues with decision-making, and guide students toward making future decisions that are aligned with academic integrity precepts and their own intellectual growth and development. 

In her Academic Dean work, Jessa witnessed the complex levels of intervention required when a student cheats and came to understand her position as such: “Students need a chance to grow and evolve from this. They are, of course, going to make mistakes. We have to believe in them as learners.” Jessa also reflects on the importance of counseling faculty — “making them feel like they also have support.”

One of the uniquely challenging features of conceptualizing an academic integrity office at UCSC is that the institution has a long-standing practice of handling academic integrity issues at the residential college level — typically through the college provost. In addition to revising reporting forms and finding ways to streamline the suspected academic misconduct process for instructors, Greer intends for the AIO to work in partnership with TLC to support faculty, departments, and programs in upholding a teaching and learning-focused approach to academic integrity. While recognizing the potential of a semi-centralized reporting structure, Greer also points to the importance of the “pastoral” role provosts play in helping students move through and past academic integrity mistakes, promising, “there is no plan for the future in which (provosts) would have zero role in dealing with academic integrity.” Greer looks forward to cultivating a campus resource that faculty and students alike can lean on for clarification, counsel, expertise, and recommendations grounded in empathy, deep experience, and practice. Jessa shares this perspective: “I don’t want anyone to see us as the people who [just] mete out all the consequences.” “It’s hugely important,” she says, “that students are involved in the educating.”

Greer emphasizes their commitment to the AIO operating as transparently as possible. When faculty or students reach out to the AIO, “they’ll get plain dealing, a listening ear, and compassion for both sides of potential misconduct.” Greer is also clear about their role and approach to difficult situations: “I recognize the amount of time and labor it takes to do academic integrity work, and I can amplify that.” And, they affirm, “I will always offer my perspective while recognizing faculty members’ expertise, discretion, and agency over parts of the process that are theirs, too.”Faculty who wish to consult with someone about academic integrity can contact the Academic Integrity Office at aio@ucsc.edu or the Teaching and Learning Center at tlc@ucsc.edu.