Got integrity?
This is not a political slogan from a leftover campaign sign found battered on a New Hampshire roadside. But it could be.

While braving sub-zero temperatures and the cranky independence of New Hampshire voters, all of the recent presidential candidates who descended upon our state and campus claimed to have integrity, and each of them decried its absence in their present and would-be opponents. Meanwhile our president and our military are trying to restore integrity to the people of Iraq. Integrity is also a treasured commodity that corporations cannot seem to purchase on Wall Street. Martha Stewart lost hers, and Pete Rose is pleading to have his back.

What exactly is this much sought after trait that people seem to find in themselves more often than in others, this virtue that encompasses honesty, fairness, propriety, and sincerity? The oldest and simplest definition of integrity is “completeness.” Integrity, it seems, is not about having it all, but about being all there, not appearing to be whole, but actually being so.

While I cannot personally vouch for the integrity of the politicians who have come and gone from New Hampshire, I along with many others, work vigilantly every day to insure the wholeness of a Saint Anselm education, so that when a student graduates he or she has not just completed a degree, but earned a degree that is itself complete—representing an education whose integral academic parts comprise a unified and meaningful whole.

When Saint Anselm College confers a diploma, it does so upon people who have, as the diploma’s Latin phrasing says, “rendered themselves worthy to receive public awards and honors.”

And we mean it. No Saint Anselm alumni in our long history have ever written to tell us how easily they came by their Saint Anselm degree. The integrity of that degree resides in the hard work and sacrifice necessary to achieve it. Sustaining the enduring integrity of a Saint Anselm diploma is at the heart of the work that all of us at the college, particularly our faculty, do on a daily basis.

Our cover story, “The Fairness Factor,” examines an issue closely connected to that work, the unglamorous yet vitally important work of assigning grades. The article addresses the not-so-secret national trend of grade inflation in higher education, and Saint Anselm’s long-standing reputation of avoiding this trend by consistently assigning grades that represent honestly the level of work achieved.

Responses to this topic will no doubt vary, but those readers who have earned a Saint Anselm diploma—whether hanging on their wall, hidden in a drawer or stacked in an attic—can be assured of one thing: As far as their academic careers are concerned, they’ve got integrity.

Rev. Jonathan DeFelice, O.S.B.
President