Starting this month, University of California employees — all 170,000 of them — will be required to take a 30-minute online ethics course. It’s a step in some direction, at least.

The course was created in May 2005 after the adoption of a new ethics policy, independent of reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle that UC officials violated university policies while awarding extra pay and other perks to high-level administrators. But the maelstrom that followed the disclosures certainly underlined the need for a greater dedication to ethical practice.

Unfortunately, all the training courses in the world aren’t enough to make a person decent. Are there UC employees who do not already understand that circumventing the university’s salary approval process is unethical? Is it not clear to anyone that the university is meant to serve the public good, and that back-room deals and hidden pay are an obvious subversion of this principle?

UC President Robert C. Dynes admitted to legislators last year that his office often had the mentality of ‘trying to get away with as much as possible while disclosing as little as possible.’ If employees know the rules and willingly defy them, a 30-minute ethics course will not bring moral fortitude to the university any more than traffic school deters speeding.

But at the very least, the university administration is trying. Some scenarios in the course may actually be informative, such as those on avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest in activities that are in fact legal. Hopefully the course will at minimum help university employees avoid the simple appearance of wrongdoing, so they can focus on real ethical insolvency.