Exploring Moral Tension between Academic Integrity and Institutional Survival in Neoliberal Higher Education
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Abstract
Higher education has increasingly been shaped by neoliberal governance, managerial accountability, and performance-driven cultures that reconfigure academic work and professional ethics. Within this context, ethical issues in academia have largely been examined through normative frameworks and institutional policies, leaving limited attention to how such issues are experienced in everyday academic life. What remains insufficiently understood is how academics subjectively experience and interpret ethical dilemmas arising from tensions between moral integrity and institutional survival. Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological framework informed by Heideggerian notions of lived experience and moral agency, this study conceptualizes academic ethics not as a set of external rules, but as an interpretative and meaning-laden practice embedded in institutional lifeworlds. This study addresses this gap by employing a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to explore the lived ethical experiences of academics working in contemporary higher education settings. Data were generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews and reflective ethical narratives with academics who had sustained experience of institutional pressure. The data were analyzed using hermeneutic thematic analysis to identify meaning structures that reveal how ethical dilemmas are lived, interpreted, and negotiated over time. The findings show that ethical dilemmas are experienced as ongoing processes characterized by moral distress, ethical silence, negotiated integrity, and continuous meaning-making within institutional constraints. Specifically, participants described recurring tensions between performance metrics and pedagogical commitments, strategic compliance as a survival mechanism, and moments of reflexive resistance that reasserted personal moral identity. These findings demonstrate that ethical practice in higher education is shaped less by formal codes than by situated interpretative judgments formed within power-laden institutional contexts. These findings deepen understanding of academic ethics as a lived and interpretative phenomenon and suggest that future research and policy development should attend more closely to the experiential dimensions of ethical life in higher education.
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