A Legacy of Integrity: A Tribute to Leo Huberts

LEO’S LEGACY

This Symposium Issue of Public Integrity is comprised of contributions on, about, or inspired by the work of Leo Huberts, the famous integrity scholar who formally retired in September 2019. What is exactly the legacy of Leo Huberts?

Leo’s legacy lies first and foremost in his publications on administrative ethics, which are all about integrity. Starting in the mid-1990s, his research focused more intently on the essential role of integrity in establishing and expanding the field of public ethics internationally. Leo Huberts contributed heavily to this burgeoning movement with his prolific body of publications, his numerous public speeches, his administrative role in international conferences, including his role as a professor, colleague, and mentor. He has authored more than twenty books and over 200 articles in such prestigious journals as Public Integrity, Public Administration Quarterly, Public Administration Review, American Review of Public Administration, Administration & Society and Crime, Law and Social Change. Empirically, his work on integrity violations, especially corruption and fraud, has created new benchmarks that other scholars have emulated.

Regarding publications, not only is Leo’s own work well known around the world, but he also founded and led a study group at the Vrije Universiteit (VU), which built a large international reputation. “Leo’s group” became a common phrase among scholars of international public administration and catalyzed a host of studies on the quality and integrity of governance.

Leo Huberts successfully supervised twelve Ph.D. studies (and several more will finish over the next years). Another important element of Leo’s legacy is the supervision and training of researchers, and through them, he will have a lasting influence on the field. In this book alone, authors Klaartje Peters, Emile Kolthoff, Karin Lasthuizen, Carel Peeters, Ronald van Steden, Zeger van der Wal, Anne-Marie Reynaers and Hester Paanakker—whose Ph.D. studies were supervised by Leo Huberts (except Carel Peeters, who wrote his Master’s thesis under Leo’s supervision) and who all now have thriving academic careers on their own—attest to the importance of Leo’s guidance, inspiration, and teaching. Many of them give Leo Huberts in this book much praise and credit for their later academic successes.

Yet a large part of Leo’s contribution to administrative ethics is to be found not only in his publications and those of his group members but in his extraordinary ability to inspire and bring people together. As Graycar notes, “Huberts is keen to share knowledge and pass ideas between the old dinosaurs and the young dinosaurs, as he calls them.” Or, as Jurkiewicz puts it, “Leo’s passion for the topic of integrity, and his skillful leadership, has created an army of integrity researchers and practitioners spreading across Europe to multiple continents.”

In 2002, impressed by the Ethics Section of the American Society of Public Administration (ASPA), Leo co-founded the Permanent Study Group (PSG) Ethics and Integrity of Governance of the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA), which is flourishing today (under the name Quality and Integrity of Governance, reflecting the trend Trommel calls for in this book). Through the study group, Leo achieved his goal of establishing a European network on public sector ethics and integrity. Yet, not satisfied with merely a European network, he engaged the larger world. Soon after becoming co-chair of the PSG, he started lobbying to devote the First Transatlantic Dialogue (organized by both ASPA and EGPA) to the theme of ethics and integrity of governance—and he succeeded: the first so-called Transatlantic Dialogue was held in Leuven (co-chaired by Jeroen Maesschalck and Carole Jurkiewicz and organized by Leo as co-chair of the PSG) in 2005. For eight years, Leo co-chaired the PSG, always maintaining close ties with the American sister organization, including a yearly visit to the ASPA conference. Yet even a transatlantic dialogue was not enough. Leo was the driving force behind the idea of the First Global Dialogue on Ethical and Effective Governance, organized in 2009 at the VU in Amsterdam. Furthermore, after stepping down as the co-chair of the PSG, Huberts founded a new Study Group on Quality and Integrity of Governance within the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS), of which he is still the co-chair.

Huberts’ scholarly activities also helped to lay the foundations of other subfields in public administration such as good governance and public values (PVs) research; part III of this book attests to that. A good example would be the field on public values, which has mushroomed in the 21st century (Van der Wal). Masters and Van der Wal explore that area in this book.

The most important concept introduced by Leo during his academic career featured in one of his inaugural lectures (Huberts, 2005): the concept of “integritism.”

This significance not only makes integrity important and special, it also makes it crucial that questions and doubts about integrity be focused, through a clear reference to the moral values and norms violated, and especially about the object being judged. The term “integritism” refers to analysis and evaluation that does not comply with these criteria. (Huberts, 2014, p. 62).

Leo Huberts has also made numerous media appearances; the media know how to find him and that they can count on him as an integrity expert. Yet many requests for interviews and comments by newspapers and television were turned down by Huberts because often these were questions about individual integrity scandals and Huberts is always reluctant to comment on single integrity cases. He is always willing to paint the broader picture or to put things in (theoretical) perspective, but he sees much danger in commenting on individual cases. Every case has many contingencies, many of which are not known unless the case is thoroughly studied. Furthermore, the media loves to hear from the “expert” about what and who is right and wrong. And it is not up to the academics—not even (or especially) not those in ethics domains—to be the judge and give his or her personal normative judgment. Leo Huberts made one exception: Fred Spijkers, who is one of the best-known whistleblowers in the Netherlands. As a social worker for the Dutch Ministry of Defense, Spijkers was assigned the task of giving aid to the relatives of an army employee who died in a mine accident in 1983. Spijkers was ordered to tell the widow that the accident had been caused by the soldier’s own conduct but indicated he did not believe that was the case (Berndsen, 2015). The widow received a very low pension. Much later, the Minister was found liable because the landmines were faulty. Huberts did study this case thoroughly which gave him the confidence and assurance needed to publicly comment on it.

THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF A SCHOLAR

What about the societal influence of Leo’s work? Interestingly enough, it does not get much attention in this Symposium. Surely, that is largely because only scholars were invited to contribute to it. If practitioners had been asked, the picture would have been different. Also, Trommel calls for a reflexive and critical public administration, especially in the subfield of good governance. Yet scholars hardly mention Leo’s societal influence here, and there is little attention to scholars’ (moral) responsibilities; current developments are also hardly mentioned—not a word, for example, on the words and actions of the current American president, arguably the most powerful person in the world. What is the moral responsibility of scholars, particularly of those dealing with ethics? Maesschalck writes: “Good scholars think about the normative implications of their research and aim at making a difference in the real world by proposing interventions.”

When we speak to colleagues about why we do the job that we do—why we get up in the morning and go to work—we often hear two reasons: (a) I like to do research and teach, and (b) it is satisfying to contribute to society. Yet when scholars look critically at their job, where exactly is their societal contribution? What, in the end, is the influence on actual governance of the Journal of Public Administration and Theory (JPART) or Public Administration Review (PAR) publications? The biggest societal contribution of most public administration scholars is undoubtedly through teaching, not writing.

In almost all accounts of good governance, the public value of honesty is included (De Graaf & Paanakker, 2014; De Vries, 2002). The United States currently has a president who does not seem to agree on the importance of this value in public governance. According to Daniel Dale, journalist and fact checker of the Toronto Star, “Trump is up to 4,325 false claims for his first 745 days in office, an average of 5.8 per day.” (http://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/index.html). Dale writes further on this website:

The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on January 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged.

We agree this is the task of a journalist, but also that of scientists. When President Trump tells blatant lies or admits to potentially illegal conspiracies, why is it that scholars in the field of administrative ethics hardly engage with it in their scholarly journals and a book like this? And, of course, it is not just Trump. In Europe, there is the example of the Brexit campaign, which had the same levels of dishonesty, with rather dire consequences. When the integrity of governance is so ruthlessly shredded as it is today, is there not a danger that it makes our work incongruous? Do we not fail as scholars of ethics and integrity in governance in dealing with this unfortunate reality?

The value of “truth” is important. To develop and preserve knowledge and the transfer of that knowledge to students is why we believe the universities are on earth. Since the 6th century BC the value of truth has steadily climbed on the societal value ladder (Braeckman & Boudry, 2011), yet it seems more and more under pressure. Also because of social media, it is harder and harder for politicians to communicate realities that are based on knowledge; the influence of non-negotiable symbols has become larger. Populism is the world of symbols, not of morality or truth. See, for example, the discourse on global warming. Especially in our times, in which truth and knowledge are under increasing pressure, universities should be the bastion of knowledge (De Graaf, 2016), especially among scholars of administrative ethics. And these scholars should be—much more than we are today—engaged in telling truth to power (Wildavsky).

OVERVIEW OF THIS SYMPOSIUM ISSUE

The contributions in the Symposium are on the three of the most prominent dimensions of Leo’s work: two contributions on conceptualizing integrity, two on scrutinizing (the role of) public values, and two on the relationship between integrity and public management. All contributions appeared in a different form in a Liber Amicorum for Leo Huberts (De Graaf, 2019). This Liber Amicorum contains 25 studies on, about, or inspired by Leo Huberts.

Willem Trommel starts the symposium with an interesting critique he wrote in 2008: “Leo conceived integrity too much as just another value that could be measured (‘efficiency is fine, but don’t forget to measure ‘integrity’, also very important…).” His piece was meant in 2008 to get Leo to broaden his research and lead to a fundamental critique of the governing systems of modern societies; a more critical and reflexive approach. Trommel ends with the conclusion that he succeeded in his goal.

Ronald van Steden then makes the move from values to virtues. He states that the absence of integrity violations does not necessarily imply morally good behavior. He goes on to stress the importance of intrinsic normativity and makes a connection between virtues, normativity, and public craftsmanship.

Hester Paanakker and Anne-Marie Reynaers study how Huberts’ value framework relates to specific types of administrative service delivery, and show in two case studies on the identification and attainment of values in street-level craftsmanship and in PPPs, how values only acquire meaning in the specific context they are used, and they stress that value frameworks are only useful when their universality is not overestimated.

Adam Masters explores the role of the value of compassion in public values scholarship and unlocks compassion’s role as the private value in a public sphere.

Christoph Demmke also looks at governance reforms, he focuses on HR systems. He finds that there is little research on the link between HRM and ethics, and discusses the relationship between destandardization and delegation trends, ethical leadership, perceptions of organizational fairness and workplace behavior.

Frank Anechiarico and Lydia Segal focus on the relatively unexplored administrative mechanisms used by public and private organizations to ensure appropriate workplace conduct. They set out a framework for thinking about the ways that ethics management systems develop and they operate in different settings in governance organizations.

The diversity of the contributions in this Symposium Issue, reflect the diverse influence of Leo Huberts. He played a crucial part in establishing and mushrooming the field of administrative ethics, both through his publications as his inspiring leadership, and inspired many research directions and subfields for years to come. We are all curious about what role Huberts himself will continue to play in this.