John Hudson, The Washington Post; After Guilfoyle dismissal, Rubio reminds diplomats to ‘avoid conflicts of interest’
[Kip Currier: It's a positive step to see Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly acknowledge the importance of all State Department staff to "avoid conflicts of interest." Much more needs to be done, however, to instill trust in the public, encourage maximal transparency, and hold employees accountable for ethics transgressions. Even an "appearance of impropriety" is injurious to public trust.
In my graduate courses in ethics, management and leadership, and intellectual property at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information (SCI), I underscore for students that the most important take-away is to hone their abilities to identify potential and actual ethics issues. Issues like conflicts of interest and accountability. Everyday, we see individuals -- and organizations -- in the news, as well as in our own communities, who have inadvertently or willfully made ethically concerning and/or ethically violative decisions.
With that in mind, I knew from the beginning that my Bloomsbury ethics book -- Ethics, Information, and Technology (2025) -- needed to have a robust section on Character and Professional Ethics in the initial portion of the book. The aim was to lay a firm foundation for readers to be well-grounded in character and professional ethics, as preparation for better grappling with and understanding the fundamentals and nuances of bedrock issues facing democracies and societies now: intellectual freedom and censorship, access and digital divides, freedom of expression, free and independent presses, privacy and surveillance, data autonomy, accuracy of information, misinformation and disinformation, social media ethics, ethics of AI and other emerging technologies, and more.
Character and Professional Ethics topics examined and explained in the book include: integrity, misrepresentation, plagiarism, attribution, conflicts of interest, transparency, accountability, corruption, and trust.]
[Excerpt]
"A day after President Donald Trump fired his ambassador to Greece amid a flurry of ethics complaints, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a message to all State Department employees reminding them to “avoid conflicts of interest.”
“It is my expectation that every member of our team must act with uncompromising personal and professional integrity,” wrote Rubio in a memo obtained by The Washington Post. “I expect employees to avoid conflicts of interest in our work, to act impartially, and to avoid using our public offices for private gain.”"
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