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How Professional Are We?
In contrast to our sister professions, law and medicine, the professoriate tends not to study its own ethics. Legal ethics, medical ethics, and even business ethics—we offer courses on all of them. But academic ethics? The empirical data available regarding faculty understanding of the social contract, academic freedom, and faculty professionalism indicate a widespread failure to understand academic professional ethics. In research undertaken between 1983 and 1985, the Study of the Academic Profession at the University of California, Los Angeles, interviewed 170 faculty members in six fields of study at six institutions. Noting the importance of academic freedom to the academic profession, interviewers asked respondents what it meant to their own work. The responses indicated a limited and generalized understanding of the rights of academic freedom and virtually no recognition of its correlative duties. (See Burton J. Clark’s 1987 book, The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds, for details.)
A 1993 study of 2,000 faculty members and a similar number of graduate students in chemistry, civil engineering, microbiology, and sociology stated that about half of the faculty reported familiarity with the university’s and discipline’s policies on research misconduct. (See “Misconduct and Departmental Context: Evidence from the Acadia Institute’s Graduation Education Program” by Melissa S. Anderson in the spring 1996 issue of the Journal of Information Ethics and “Ethical Problems of Academic Research” by Judith Swazey, Melissa Anderson, and Karen Seashore Lewis in the November–December 1993 issue of American Scientist for details.) Seventy-four percent of the faculty respondents believed that, in principle, they and their colleagues should, to a great extent, exercise collective responsibility for the conduct of their graduate students, but only 27 percent judged that they or their departmental colleagues actually did anything about their shared responsibility for their students’ professional ethical conduct.
Fifty-five percent of the faculty respondents believed that they should, to a great extent, exercise responsibility for the conduct of their colleagues (meaning that 45 percent failed to understand a major principle of professionalism, a predictable outcome of limited socialization in professionalism). Just 13 percent judged that faculty in their department exercised a great deal of shared responsibility for their colleagues’ conduct. Thirty percent reported very little or no manifestation of collegial responsibility. Only 35 percent of the graduate students reported that they received significant instruction on the details of good research practice from someone in their department. Swazey, Anderson, and Lewis concluded, “Our survey data, and statements by faculty and graduate students whom we have interviewed, challenge the idea that faculty actually practice an ethic of collective governance.”
A 1999 study of graduate students in eleven arts and science disciplines from twenty-seven universities (4,110 responses) reported,“ The data indicate that the ethical dimension of faculty and professional life—how to act responsibly and in the best interest of the profession, is not, as often assumed, part of graduate training. ”The authors concluded that “the health of the academic profession, with norms of self-regulation and peer review, depends on shared values and practices. Students told us that they are unclear about many of the customary practices that rely on a shared understanding of ethical behavior. Those responsible for doctoral education cannot assume that norms and practices are routinely and informally handed down.” (See At Cross Purposes: What the Experiences of Doctoral Students Reveal about Doctoral Education, a 2001 report prepared for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Retrieved May 22, 2006, from www.phd-survey.org.)
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