After Ethical Lapses, Georgia Tech Surveyed Campus Culture. The Results Weren’t Pretty.

The responses flooded in.

More than 1,200 employees said they did not believe the actions of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s leadership always aligned with its stated values — and more than 500 said they felt their supervisor did not engage in ethical business practices. Several hundred said they feared that nepotism played a role in promotion and advancement.

The newly released survey findings suggest a level of distrust that exceeds the realm of an ethics scandal that shook the campus last summer. Georgia Tech had discovered that four employees had improper relationships with vendors, wasted university time, and insufficiently disclosed conflicts of interest. The four employees were all supervisors, and one was an executive vice president. Each was fired or resigned after the revelations.

More than 6,200 people responded to the survey out of about 12,200 staff, faculty, and graduate students who received it, in September. (Respondents self-identified their departments, which the university could not verify.)

Among the results, which were published on the university’s ethics website in late April:

• More than 700 employees said they feared retaliation for reporting unethical behavior.
• Nineteen percent of employees who said they worked in administration and finance said that their supervisors did not behave in an ethical manner, and that ethical practices were not observed in their workplace.
• Less than half of respondents who said they worked in “president’s units” — including the president’s office, development, student life, and athletics — agreed that “where I work, people do not ‘get ahead’ unless their behavior demonstrates Georgia Tech’s values.”

In a written response to the findings, the university pledged to scrutinize requests for salary increases, promotions, and award nominations to make sure each employee up for review had shown, in specific examples, his or her commitment to or demonstration of university values.

The question about getting ahead was a “light-bulb moment” for university leaders, said Lynn M. Durham, Georgia Tech’s chief of staff.

“You as administrators hope and think you’re in tune with everyone on campus, but that one really came as a shock to us,” she said. “That’s something we had to work on.”

Georgia Tech also said in its written response that it would attempt to better connect the university’s core values to what they mean in practice. University leaders chose five values — integrity, respect, community, accountability, and adaptability — following a recommendation from the survey that Georgia Tech identify and clarify such principles.

Ling-Ling Nie, the university’s newly appointed vice president for ethics and compliance, said she planned to distribute videos of key people on the campus talking about how those values emerge in their work.

“If we underscore the importance of having a work force that is grounded in integrity and respect, and articulate exactly what that means and how that manifests, day to day, as a manager or as an employee,” she said, “it gets to the heart of some of those concerns.”

‘Raise the Bar’

Nie said she was not surprised by the survey’s results, but she said they probably would have shown a more positive environment had the university solicited responses in recent months — or shortly before the results of the summer ethics investigation were released.

“Culture is very responsive to significant events and significant changes that are made to address those events,” she said.

The scandal that prompted the survey had the campus “reeling,” Durham said, agreeing that the survey’s timing reflected that feeling. In one review, Georgia Tech found that its executive vice president for administration and finance had held a paid position on a construction-technology company’s board and did not properly disclose his conflict of interest. During bidding processes, he pressured units of the university to select the company’s services, and he allowed the company to use university space and employee time for meetings, one report found.

A second report found improper vendor and contractual relationships, as well as waste and abuse of university-employee time, in the campus-services department. Leaders of campus services, parking and transportation services, and digital networks resigned during that investigation, according to the review.

Georgia Tech’s president, G.P. (Bud) Peterson, took several immediate actions after the dust settled. The university elevated the ethics-officer position, hosted an ethics-awareness week, and contracted with the University of North Georgia’s BB&T Center for Ethical Leadership for the survey, which a spokesman said had cost $31,000. (In January, Peterson said he would leave his position this summer, saying he believed the university had “turned a corner.” He remains in office.)

Feedback from the survey will inform the priorities of the university’s new office of ethics and compliance, Nie said, adding that she expected to regularly survey employees to assess campus culture.

The new office, she said, will feature training and marketing campaigns around the university’s values to “raise the bar in higher education” for what this kind of center can be.

Such offices have become more common at research universities, whose complex operations often include medical schools, swaths of sensitive data, and research agendas that involve individuals’ privacy and corporate relationships. Michigan State University and the University of Southern California created ethics offices last year, and George Washington University did so in February.

Evaluators with North Georgia’s BB&T Center for Ethical Leadership also urged Georgia Tech to develop governance controls to protect from retaliation people who report ethical violations, and to make sure both human-resources staff members and people who evaluate ethical complaints are seen as credible, the report said.

The university’s senior leaders gathered in February to discuss campus values. At the meeting, the message that retaliation would not be tolerated was stressed, Durham said. Senior administrators were then required to talk to their divisions about campus values face to face, she said.

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.