They teach us many things during the course of our education but learning about integrity is something that we ultimately learn on our own. We are taught to respect our teachers, obey the authority while accepting their judgments as proper and sincere. As we develop critical thinking, we might start questioning the moral integrity of our superiors while forming our own sense of academic integrity in this process. Our university days usually shape our moral fiber when it comes to understanding what does integrity means. It means being honest toward yourself, your colleagues, and being impartial and objective in your studies as a student.
Challenges That Young Students Face
Young students will become young leaders of tomorrow so we have to ask ourselves what kind of leaders do we need in these times? We certainly do not need those who have no integrity or moral compass which guide us into a better future. Reading some free essays on academic integrity might help you understand what academic integrity really is, and it may inspire you to form your own if you haven’t already. Great things in our academic sphere are archived only by those who know how to stand for themselves and their core values. The most common problems that each young student faces in his college days are plagiarism or being sabotaged by their teacher or fellow students.
These are tough moments with hard lessons to learn for a young student who wants to do things the right way. This means avoiding that urge to paraphrase someone’s thoughts and make your own opinions about any subject matter. It may seem hard at times but this is how one forms healthy working habits and that core of his academic integrity. When that pressure to take the easy way of cheating or plagiarism is high, that is when you need to stand for yourself and your values. Having a strong character when it’s hard is what separates men from boys and honest students from cheaters.
International Studies Instigate Academic Integrity
The knowledge went viral these days and it knows no boundaries, so any international exchange of students is an everyday occurrence. These young minds break prejudices and connect us through their love of discovery and learning. They represent their countries and hopefully spread the message of academic integrity as they soak up other cultures and meet different people. This kind of mindset is needed for ensuring the academic success of our whole generation by following most of the 6 keys to academic success. These include hard work, dedication, plus time management among others, and are great guidance on how to become a better student and a better person.
We are in all this together so being positive role models to each other is important for building trust in our academic community. Important discoveries of the next generation will come as a joint effort of students who believed in academic integrity plus trust and cooperation between colleagues. Perhaps we need to include more ethics in our conventional education so pupils can be aware of its importance from an early age. This way all controversies regarding plagiarism or similar transgressions won’t come as a shock once they face them in real life. It is important to keep that spirit of proper moral conduct in the international academic community so that we all can feel some benefit.
It is not always easy to do the right thing, especially if it demands personal sacrifice or doing things the hard way. As much as a simple copy/paste technique may seem tempting when writing your assignment papers, try having a bigger picture in your mind. Maybe you can get away with some plagiarism but in the long-term, it is your academic integrity that will separate you from the crowd. Think about your future and the example that you send to other students. Doing the right thing is always better.
Vaccine Nationalism Is a Multilateral, Neocolonial Failure
By Dr. Dan Steinbock
In the coming months, vaccine nationalism is likely to compound COVID-19 economic damage and penalize more lives. It reflects the utter failure of multilateralism. It is old colonialism in a new disguise.
After mid-January, WHO chief Dr Tedros warned that, due to unequal COVID-19 vaccine policies, “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”
And yet, in contrast, The Economist reported it was “Asian governments” that “are needlessly hampering vaccination drives,” due to their “nationalism and geopolitics.”
The simple reality is that by mid-January almost 40 million vaccine doses had been given in nearly 50 rich-income economies, whereas one poor nation had only 25 doses. As a result, 9 out of 10 people in poor countries are set to miss out on COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, according to Oxfam.
Exorbitant economic and human costs of unilateralism
Last year, the pandemic relief efforts soared to an estimated $20 trillion, according to Bank of America. That is likely to unleash a series of debt crises in the future.
Thanks to misguided COVID-19 unipolarity, particularly by the Trump administration, the outcome has been historical economic and human damage. Despite the worst recorded global contraction, more than 110 million pandemic cases and over 2.5 million deaths, more will follow.
What has dramatically compounded the pandemic crisis has been the failure of the major advanced economies to implement the WHO’s multilateral preparedness plan.
Before fall 2020, that plan represented barely 0.01% of the world’s cumulative output loss, as measured by the costs of the global contraction. By shunning multilateral cooperation, developed countries chose exorbitant costs that will penalize both them but particularly the poorest economies.
Usually, neocolonialism is defined as the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former dependencies. Vaccine nationalism is a case in point.
Recently, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte accused the European Union (EU) of holding up supplies of COVID-19 vaccines: “This is a fight among the highest bidders, who can pay first.” Actually, he has a point. And it’s not just the EU that has been hoarding vaccines.
On the basis of public records, governments in high-income economies, representing barely 16% of the global population, have struck pre-orders covering at least 4·2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines. According to a just-released report by Lancet, these countries have secured at least 70% of doses available in 2021 of five leading vaccine candidates, on the basis of known deals (Figure).
High-income countries have bought most of COVID-19 vaccines for 2021
Major economies representing Have bought up to 70% of
less than 16% of world population COVID-19 vaccines
Multilateralism is moral, safer and cheaper
By late November 2020, Canada and the US had already pre-ordered up 8-9 doses of vaccines per person. The UK, Australia and the EU followed in the footprints with 5-6 doses per person. That contributes to higher prices, which hurts all countries, but particularly the poorest ones.
What we need is multilateral cooperation across all differences. Here’s why: It is moral, safer, and cheaper.
Multilateral cooperation is moral. It’s the right thing to do. And it reduces the current gap between high-income economies’ rhetoric and the devastating realities in the poorer economies, which may have adverse political repercussions over time.
Multilateral cooperation is safer. During global pandemics, we are only as safe as our weakest links. Like its precursors from the Black Death to the Spanish Flu, COVID-19 is democratic. Ultimately, it will spare no one. However, if containment involves all nations, it will minimize cases, deaths, and potentially fatal mutations.
Multilateral cooperation is cheaper. Due to vaccine nationalism, vaccines are still distributed too slowly, remain in short supply and mainly reserved for high-income economies. Recent research suggests that up to 49% of the global economic costs of the pandemic in 2021 could be borne by the advanced economies, even if they achieve universal vaccination in their own countries.
Undermined living standards, and a lost decade
Unsurprisingly, the pandemic has drastically boosted inequality. If it is allowed to increase after the crisis, this will have a profound long-term impact on poverty levels, according to World Bank.
If all countries’ Gini indices increases by just two percentage points annually, the worst-case scenario would result in global growth contraction of 8%. That would mean that over 500 million more people would be living on less than $5.50 a day still in 2030 (compared with a scenario with no increase in inequality).
As a result, global poverty levels would soar higher than they were prior to the pandemic still in 2030.
Last August, I released a COVID-19 report that reflected similar outcomes: years of lost progress, undermined living standards in all economies, lost decades in poorest countries, increasing domestic divisions, and elevated famines and conflicts in failed states.
New variants, new long-term challenges
Thanks to the failure of multilateral cooperation, the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths is now far, far higher than initially anticipated. In turn, the greater spread of the global pandemic has ensured a greater number of mutations.
Most of these mutations tend to be benign, but huge numbers contribute to rising probability of adverse outcomes. In recent months, new variants of the original virus have been spotted in different countries – UK, Brazil, South Africa, US – and seem to cause major changes in the way the pathogen acts, including its contagiousness.
Scientists in the U.K. had been watching the B.1.1.7 variant for some time before announcing in December that it might be at least 50% more transmissible than the original form. Moreover, scientists are concerned about another mutation in South Africa in which a genetic change may help the virus evade the immune system and vaccines. Similar concerns involve new variants in Brazil and the US.
The longer the crisis lingers, the greater remains the probability for potentially malignant outcomes.
With more than a hundred million infected people (and the real number may be substantially higher) creating antibodies against the virus, still other versions are likelier to emerge that could evade the immune system, reinfect even recovered persons and then become more widespread in a population.
That would represent still another outcome of the failure of multilateralism.
About the Author
Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net