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Professional Conduct Expectations
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Professional Conduct Expectations

September 2025

The Allen School’s Code of Conduct (CoC) aims to serve as a resource for Allen School community members who seek to act with kindness, respect, and professionalism in their work and studies here. All of us are learners, and this CoC is intended to help us to learn by comparing our conduct with our community’s ideals, to identify when our conduct is drifting away from those ideals, and, when it is, to support our conscious work to grow toward more ideal professional conduct.

The Allen School Community Vision expresses the principles and practices we commit to working toward. Below, we enumerate some ways we live up to these ideals in our daily activities. To further clarify our expectations, we also list examples of unacceptable behaviors, which everyone in the Allen School should avoid.

While we have listed specific expectations here, these lists are not all-encompassing, and we expect Allen School community members to read and refer to college, university, and state policies referenced at the end of this document as needed.

Professional Interaction

People in the Allen School foster a positive community by adhering to the following expectations for professional conduct. We live up to our ideals when we…

  1. Treat others with dignity, honesty, civility, courtesy, and respect at all times. We welcome newcomers by seeking to learn about their strengths, valuing what they bring and investing in their growth.
  2. Foster collegiality, collaboration, teamwork and participation, encouraging the representation of different experiences, backgrounds, or viewpoints. When we express different viewpoints, we find ways to remain collegial when we discuss them.
  3. Adhere to ethical practices and standards in all our university activities, including research, academics, teaching, volunteering, and employment.
  4. Are mindful of how slang, jokes, or other language might not translate across cultures and cause inadvertent hurt or marginalization of others.
  5. Stay open-minded and listen when given constructive feedback regarding others’ perception of our conduct.
  6. Accept responsibility for mistakes and learn from them. More generally, we address interpersonal conflict with positive intent as soon as possible, seeking support if needed, so we can end hurtful behaviors or dynamics, heal relationships, and rebuild trust.

Discrimination, harassment, sexual misconduct and retaliation are strictly prohibited by state and/or federal law and/or University Policies. Behaviors that may not rise up to specific policy violations but are still unacceptable in the Allen School include, but are not limited to …

  1. Communicating in ways that are primarily intended to offend or spark emotional reactions by others, and not to support constructive discourse. i.e., bullying, derogatory language, trolling, personal attacks, negative teasing, and put-downs.  
  2. Inappropriate joking, including sexualized comments/jokes, or the sharing or distribution of sexualized media.
  3. Disruptive behavior, such as talking over speakers at events, meetings or in class.
  4. Mishandling or misusing private information. Default to treating such information as private and do not use it across contextual boundaries without permission.

Influencing or encouraging others to engage in unacceptable behavior is regarded as equivalent to engaging in the behavior yourself.

Bystander Intervention

Allen School community members do not sit idly by when they see people harming others – whether physically or with words. Ideally, we practice the 5Ds by…

  1. Observing carefully to ensure that we understand the interaction that is taking place and, when possible, document what we have observed.
  2. Offering support to those who have been hurt.
  3. When possible and safe, interrupt problematic behavior as it is happening.
  4. Providing constructive feedback to those acting inappropriately  if we feel safe doing so and if they are willing to hear it.  
  5. Seeking assistance from others who may be better able to provide support to those impacted as well as provide feedback to those causing harm.

The Allen School provides recurring training for students, staff, and faculty in methods of bystander intervention. While UW SafeCampus is available Monday to Friday 8 - 5 to provide assistance, people witnessing violence should call 911.

It is unacceptable for supervisors to ignore allegations of misconduct that others share with them or that they themselves observe, or to attempt to handle such potential misconduct without informing the Allen School Director or Allen School Human Resources. Allegations of prohibited conduct (identified in Executive Order 81 and related UW policies) include but are not limited to discrimination or harassment based on protected characteristics, sexual misconduct or retaliation. These types of prohibited conduct must be reported by employees as outlined on the Civil Rights Compliance office’s Employee Reporting Obligations page.

Academic and Research Integrity

Allen School community members demonstrate unwavering integrity in their conduct of research, in their courses, and in every other academic interaction. This includes adherence to the College of Engineering policies and principles on academic integrity and ACM’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, and University Executive Order 61: Research Misconduct Policy.

Allen School community members live up to our ideals when we…

  1. Only take credit for work that we have done.
  2. Generously share credit with those who have helped us to generate ideas or bring them to fruition.
  3. Do our work in the most rigorous and ethical manner that we are able. When unsure about how to do this, we seek assistance from others.
  4. Encourage others to examine whether they are acting with maximal integrity and responsibility, and raise concerns when such encouragement is not taken up.
  5. Actively reflect upon what the harms of our work could be, and attempt to mitigate them if they are undesirable.

We avoid unacceptable conduct such as:

  1. Sharing, submitting, or otherwise attempting to gain advantage by fabricating false or misleading information.
  2. Taking credit, either implicitly or explicitly, for work that is not your own.
  3. Citing someone else’s work without reviewing it.
  4. Intentionally excluding or isolating others by disregarding their contributions, not giving them a chance to speak, or failing to give due credit. Deliberately diminishing someone’s role or erasing their efforts undermines trust and discourages participation.

Financial Responsibility

As participants in a public institution, we must not only do what is legal, but also that which is reasonably interpretable as in the public interest (see references below). To stay within the bounds of what is acceptable, we…  

  1. Minimize use of university resources for purposes other than university business..
  2. Avoid costly expenses when more frugal alternatives would suffice.
  3. Avoid expenses that could appear unreasonable to a member of the general public with a minimum amount of contextual information.
  4. Ask a knowledgeable expert when in doubt.
  5. If uncertain about the reasonableness or ethics of any purchase or use of any university resources, consult with your supervisor or a member of the Allen School research administration or finance team before taking any action. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

References

Conduct

Academic and research integrity

Financial responsibility