When the LSE Council published Lord Woolf's Inquiry into LSE's links to Libya in November, I made a personal commitment that we would both learn the lessons of the report and implement Lord Woolf's recommendations this academic year. Ethical issues lie at the very heart of Lord's Woolf Inquiry and his first recommendation was for the School to establish an "embedded code dealing with ethics and reputational risk which applies across the institution". To this end, Council has established an Ethics Code Consultation Group, which will work this term to produce the School's first overarching Ethics Code. The group met for the first time on 3 February and have elected Dr Daleep Mukarji (lay governor and former Director of Christian Aid) as their chair. I am deeply grateful to Dr Mukarji for taking on this role and to all the consultation group for their thoughtful and diligent work to date.
Key to the success of the code is consultation – and today marks the start of that process, which will run until 5pm on Friday 13 April. We will only be able to establish a meaningful, workable code if it is drafted with input from the numerous and diverse constituencies that make up our School community. With this in mind, I hope that as many of you as possible take this opportunity to contribute to the drafting of the code.
There are two main ways to contribute. Members of the consultation group will attend a number of meetings during February and March to ask for comments on what an LSE Ethics Code should look like. This will include a dedicated 'town hall' meeting in the Shaw Library at 5pm on Thursday 23 February 2012, open to all members of the School community. The group also invites individual written submissions by email to ethics@lse.ac.uk.
An illustrative draft code [PDF] has already been drawn up using as a template the Institute of Business Ethics/Council for Industry and Higher Education guide "Ethics Matters" [PDF]. This document can be accessed at the dedicated ethics webpage set up to provide further information on the consultation process and timetable. However, the consultation group wish to make clear that this document is not the first draft of the code; instead it is to be used as a starting point for discussion and a draft Ethics Code will flow from the consultation process itself.
The consultation group will present the first LSE Ethics Code for approval at the Academic Board on 6 June and Council on 19 June 2012. If the Ethics Code is to become a fully embedded part of life at the School, this point cannot, however, mark the end of the broader debate over what constitutes ethical conduct in a 21st-century international university. A permanent Ethics Committee, to be elected in the Summer Term, will take on responsibility for reviewing and updating the Code each year in response to new developments and further contributions from the School community. More details on this ongoing process of consultation will be provided after June.
I hope you will join me in supporting the important work that the consultation group has been asked to perform, and that together we will emerge from an intelligent and good-natured debate with a set of guidelines to help shape our conduct for years to come. We have an opportunity here to set a new standard for conduct in Higher Education; an opportunity I hope we will grasp.
Professor Judith Rees, Director
13 February 2012