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recent statement from the House of Representatives Speaker Marzuki Alie has drawn much criticism, especially from academics. He referred to several major state universities as breeders of corrupt people, citing the way they conducted their academic activities that had resulted in moral degradation among students.

Indeed, Marzuki’s statement has no scientific justification, as there is no correlation between corrupt people and the universities they went to. But as evidenced in studies conducted all around the world, universities do become places where rationalization of actions is nurtured and developed through academic activities.

This includes academic fraud, which is believed by behavioral scientists as a major indicator of one’s future career as a fraudster.

Many fraudsters begin to learn their fraud techniques during their professional life, but in many cases their ability to rationalize their misconduct began to grow long before that.

Many believe that pressure, opportunity and rationalization (fraud triangle) play an important role in the occurrence of occupational fraud. Nevertheless, as far as studies are concerned, fraud offenders are often exposed to these elements during their academic lives, which may led them to commit academic fraud.

Pressure can be in the forms of, for example, fear of losing financial aid (from parents), the need for decent jobs (which require high GPAs) and avoiding embarrassment, to name a few.

Opportunity comes in the form of, for example, a lack of serious supervision and availability of materials on the Internet (for plagiarism). Finally, examples of academic fraud rationalization are “everyone is doing it”, “no one gets hurt” and “it is a very hard subject”.

Behavioral scientists claim that the behavior of students in a country generally mirrors its public morality.

Therefore, although some may think that universities are sources of fraud, in reality they can actually become the solution to the problem by, among other things, cutting off the supply of potential fraudsters.

This can be achieved by conditioning, among other things, the teaching and learning process so as to eliminate or at least diminish the pressure, opportunity and rationalization for students to commit fraud.

In practice, efforts to diminish the academic-fraud triangle are often focused on the roles of the university, faculty and educators. Experts believe that this can be optimized by including students in the existing academic fraud prevention system parallel to whistle-blowing systems in a company.

Despite the benefits, this option is not without challenge since, for example, studies have revealed that the majority of students are reluctant to report their fellow students who cheat or commit other academic frauds.

Despite this and many other challenges, students’ involvement in fraud prevention initiatives is worthy of consideration for one important reason: To prevent them from being infected by the fraud rationalization “virus”.

When a student sees his fellow students engaging in academic misconduct, such as cheating and plagiarism, and not feel bad about it, this may cause him to begin to develop rationalization for acts that may eventually manifest into active participation in fraud in the future.

Universities actually play a strategic role in the movement to reduce fraud in a country by means of, among other things, shaping the way students rationalize their acts.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with rationalizing one’s act, but doing so to justify one’s fraud is obviously a problem.

There is more to building the morality of university students than just supervision and punishment.

Lecturers, faculties and universities should set examples for ethical conduct for their students. Lecturers, for example, are those whom students will look up to, at least during their studies and possibly many years after that.

Nevertheless, there are more than a few cases in Indonesia and overseas where senior academics themselves are involved in academic misconduct such as plagiarism and fabrication of research data. This will make creating fraud rationalization–free environment for students a very difficult task.

This requires universities to also supervise their academic staffs to ensure that no bad examples are given to our future generations. When universities become a fraud–free environment, Indonesia may have a better chance of winning its fight against fraud in the future.

The writer is the director of the center for forensic accounting studies at the Accounting Program of the Islamic University of Indonesia Yogyakarta. He obtained his Masters and PhD in forensic accounting from the University of Wollongong, Australia.