Academic Deans, Codes of Ethics, and……Fiduciary Duties?

College and university academic deans must comply with two sets of professional regulations. As faculty members, they must adhere to their institution's internally generated code of ethics. As administrators and agents of their institution, they must meet the fiduciary duties of diligence and loyalty. Both sets of regulations are similar in the obligations they impose on a dean, the degree of care they demand of a dean in the execution of those obligations, the nature of a breach of those obligations by a dean, the procedures by which the breach of an obligation is addressed, and the remedies available to the institution against a dean following a breach. Colleges and universities should develop and publish both an ethics code and a fiduciary code. Both sets of regulations, however, should avoid common shortcomings. Ethics codes should not be too specific or too general, overly simplistic or highly complex, or outstripped by the rapidly changing world of academia. A codification of fiduciary duties should avoid the problems of poor definition or ambiguity. Developing an institutional code of professional responsibility that incorporates both ethical and fiduciary responsibilities would provide an academic dean with a more comprehensive benchmark for professional expectations and responsibilities. The interplay between the two sets of complementary regulations would further clarify the professional expectation of an academic dean and may also ameliorate some of the shortcomings inherent in an ethics code.