Codes of ethics are the topic of this issue, and chapters explore aspects of their basic nature in the context of higher education. Fundamentally, ethical codes take on the most troublesome of behaviors related to academe and present ways for individuals to behave in the face of pressures and uncertainties. They represent the ideals of various stakeholder subgroups and even mediate key institutional relationships. Codes can also exist at different organizational levels in higher education, including professional association, institutional, and intra-institutional. Although they provide a stable set of ideals to which a given population can aspire, codes and their status appear to have changed over time. The existence of codes within and across diverse constituent groups suggests that the higher education community deems them both important and useful in the practices of university teaching, scholarship, and administration (Callahan 1982;Kerr 1994;Shurr 1982;Woody 2008). Still, we know relatively little about codes of ethics holistically or from a scholarly perspective.Drawing upon research from higher education, specifically, and organizational studies more broadly, this chapter attempts to bring into focus a holistic view of higher education ethical codes from a scholarly perspective. The chapter reviews the rationale for ethical codes in a contemporary context of higher education and then provides an overview of the organizational principles underlying the development and functioning of the codes. We then look at the ways in which ethical codes have become organizational anchors for key constituent groups in higher education. Given these foundations for understanding the nature and evolution of ethical codes, the chapter concludes with a discussion of how codes of ethics are 8