IT'S UNETHICAL TO CALL ME UNETHICAL. The faculty revolt at Southern Illinois against Springfield's Impediment-In-Charge-of-Counting-Online-Minutes gains strength.

State employees that passed the ethics exam in less than 10 minutes received a noncompliant packet that must be read and signed, or the employee risks job loss. As a result, two tenured professors at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale have filed a lawsuit intended to counter the state's current solution.

"I believe that taking the additional training and signing the certification would be an admission that I was noncompliant, though I was not," said Marvin Zeman, a SIU mathematics professor, in a written statement. "It would be unethical for me to sign this document."

Frank Bucaro, an award-winning public speaker who specializes in business ethics, said the SIU professors are making a statement based on personal principles and called the state's noncompliant solution a "coward's way out."

"The noncompliant issue gives the perception of a guilty plea," Bucaro said. "To be noncompliant, in this case, is like pleading 'no contest' in court. You don't actually plead guilty, but you still have to pay a price."

Bucaro said state employees should not sign any noncompliant option if they feel it is unethical.

"An online ethics course with a 30-minute time frame reeks of being a waste of time, a joke and ineffective," Bucaro said. "Quality ethics training must be interactive, ongoing and enforceable."

At Northern Illinois, the official position on these make-up packets is that the recipients are compliant despite being sent the packets.

Deborah Haliczer, NIU director of Employee Relations and Human Resource Services, said state employees at NIU have generally cooperated.

"Most have been turning in their signed sheets," Haliczer said. "No one has been happy about it, but they know that the university does not consider them to be noncompliant."

Haliczer said most NIU employees argued they were already familiar with the material on the ethics exam, on top of being educated individuals who are adept at reading and processing information quickly.

The duplication and distribution of these compliance packets (which a number of people managed to avoid receiving by taking their time on the training site, perhaps mousing to other websites) comes out of the university's budget, which apparently does not include new dry-erase markers for the smart classrooms.