(Wall) Street Justice? Not likely, but it should be dispensed...

The more things that come out about the HP scandal, the more frustrating and saddening it becomes. Where are the ethics that govern conduct? Unfortunately the ethics are all about the cash, not the principle.

The problem is that this has always been the case. No matter how far you reach back into history, the same ethical gaps appear in the history of even the acknowledged leaders in every area of business.

The problem is two-fold: continual financial performance is considered sacred, with anything that does not contribute to the bottom line relegated to the scrap heap. This is why patent fights are so prevalent, why shady accounting practices go forth and why things like wiretapping and spying are done. Unfortunately, this is also why it is difficult to justify Disaster Recovery costs and due diligence with data handling to upper management.

There are a lot of people who will weigh in on what has happened, with their reactions generally geared to their level of culpability in something similar, or their sympathy for those caught with their ethics around their ankles. Where should the academic world weigh in? That's a good question. How many of the schools granting the degrees to the folks who did the wiretapping came out in public and denounced the activity as being unworthy of the education that was received?

How many of the degree programs involved placed the spotlight on the issue and began a serious debate about rescinding the degrees granted? This is not unprecedented, as some degrees have been rescinded based on plagiarism in the past. The rescinding of a degree is normally done based solely on the student's actions during their matriculation, however "isn't" is definitely not "can't." A degree can be awarded based on merit instead of accomplishment based on a consensus of the grantors, so the only stumbling block to toughening the practicing standards for graduates is the lack of forceful application of ethical standards on the part of the schools.

I'm not attempting to be overly aggressive, but we do need to take a serious look at the standards we allow to exist within the business world, especially within the technology sector. Ministers can be de-frocked, lawyers disbarred, doctors and psychologists can have their licenses revoked, yet business professionals are permitted to exercise their own lack of ethics whenever they wish without recourse to their ability to further carry out their abuses.

In the case of the HP fiasco, taking away a journalism degree won't really accomplish anything, and isn't relevant to the crime; however, if Harvard stripped away an MBA from a graduate who perpetrated securities fraud, or if MIT suspended a doctorate for a known research 'shortcut', it would send ripples through the professional community. The individuals affected would be unable to practice the skills they abused previously, and if they had to go through a rigorous process to restore their credentials, it might be sufficient to keep them from making further bad decisions.

One need in the academic community is for the education garnered to be relevant, a guiding principle for the proper practice of the learned skills. If what we learn is irrelevant once we graduate, there is no need to graduate. If the practices we use are so different than those we learn, then why do the work to begin with? We can discuss ethics ad infinitum, and we can frown when they are broken in the 'real world', but until we do something about it, until there is an aggressive response from the community that produces the violators, nothing will improve. We cannot be surprised if individuals do the very things we allow them to do by refusing to directly address violations.

Technology is arguably more important to our economy than medicine, and we need to have similarly high standards for the practitioners. The effects of this breach of ethics could affect the employees of HP very negatively (especially since HP has a line of servers called the Integrity series - hmmmmm...), thus making this malpractice of a professional skill harmful to the blameless. A bad doctor may harm a few patients, but how many more people are harmed through bad business ethics?