I saw a story in the San Jose Mercury News that I thought raised an interesting question about sick leave, one worth discussing here.
As it turns out, all the details of the specific case reported in the article sort of obscure the general question that it initially raised for me. But since I’m still interested in discussing the more general problem, here’s a poll to tweak your intuitions.
In cash-strapped community college system, an administrator collecting paid sick leave is …online survey
As we creep toward the end of the spring semester, I noticed a story at Inside Higher Ed about a commencement address gone wrong:
Making good ethical choices in the real world is hard, in large part because it requires us to find the best balance in responding to interested parties whose legitimate interests pull in different directions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that as we are trying to make the best ethical decision we can, or evaluating the ethical decision-making of others, we can’t help but notice that there is not universal agreement about who counts as a party with legitimate interests that ought to be taken into account, let alone about how to weight the competing interests in the ethical calculus.
We’ve talked about these difficulties before, especially in the context of the ethics of research with animals. In these discussions, we’ve noticed that some folks oppose such research across the board (at least if the research includes anything beyond purely observational studies in the field) on the basis that non-human animals’ capacity to feel pain creates a situation where it is unethical for humans to use them in any manner that might cause them pain (or discomfort, or distress, or boredom), no matter what benefit such use might bring to humans. Here, at least one set of people doing the ethical calculus assert that non-human animals need to be counted as an interested party, and that their interests ought not to be sacrificed in favor of those of any other interested party.
Of course, arguments about the ethical status of animal research are not the only place such ethical claims arise. I refer you to the new law signed this week by the Governor of Nebraska. As The New York Times reports:
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won’t go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That’s the question posed by a piece of research, “Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?” by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and Mladen Petrovecki, published in 2008 in Science and Engineering Ethics.
To introduce their research, the authors write:
Academic plagiarism is a complex issue, which arises from ignorance, opportunity, technology, ethical values, competition, and lack of clear rules and consequences. … The cultural characteristics of academic setting strongly influence students’ behavior. In societies where plagiarism is implicitly or even explicitly tolerated (e.g. authoritarian regimes and post-communist countries), a high rate of plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct may be expected. However, even in societies that officially disapprove of such behavior (e.g. western democracies), its prevalence is disturbing. (140)
Here, there is some suggestion of potentially relevant cultural factors that may make plagiarism attractive — and not the cultural factors I tend to hear about here in California, on the Pacific Rim. But maybe we can extend Tolstoy’s observation about how each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way to recognize the variety of cultural contexts that spawn dishonest students.
And this is not just a matter of the interactions between students and teachers. Bilic-Zulle et al. point to plagiarism in school as something like a gateway drug for unethical behavior in one’s professional life — so potentially, reducing academic dishonesty could have important consequences beyond saving professors headaches.
In any case, the big question the researchers take on is how to reduce the prevalence. Is it effective to emphasize the importance of academic integrity, or to threaten harsh penalties if plagiarism is detected?
There’s a recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication that has been making the rounds. Other bloggers have discussed the paper and its methodology in some detail (including but not limited to Bora and DrugMonkey and Dr. Isis), so I’m not going to do that. Rather, I want to pull back and “get meta” with the blogospheric discussion of the paper, and especially the suggestion that it might be out of bounds for science bloggers (some of whom write the blogs that provided the data for the paper in question) to mount such a vigorous critique of a paper that was, as it turns out, authored by a graduate student.
So, let’s consider the situation more generally:
By email, a reader asks for advice on a situation in which the personal and the professional seem like they might be on a collision course:
I am a junior at a small (< 2000 students) liberal arts college. I got recruited to be a TA for an upper division science class, and it’s going swimmingly. I’m basically a troubleshooter during labs, which the professor supervises. The problem is that I’ve fallen for one of the students, also a junior. Is it possible for me to ethically date her? The university’s handbooks are little help–sexual harassment is very strictly prohibited, but even faculty are technically allowed to date their students–and my instincts keep flip-flopping. On the one hand, teacher-student relationships are automatically suspect, but on the other I’m not sure that it’s significantly different from TAing the close friends that are in the class.
I obviously have no intention of changing grades or doing anything resembling sexual harassment, and I’m pretty good (sometimes too good) at being objective and keeping work and my social life separate. The grading is also pretty objective, and the professor goes over it to be sure my grades are reasonable. If it is possible, what do I need to look out for? Do I need to inform the professor (she knows I’m friends with the subject of my infatuation)? And in the event that we do go out, do I have to tell her that I grade her tests and labs (it’s unusual for a TA to grade in upper division courses in our department)? It seems like it might be easier if she didn’t know, but it would be at least lying by omission.
I know this probably sounds like it ought to be addressed to Dan Savage, but I’d really appreciate your advice and any advice your readers might have.
Thanks so much,
“Forbidden Chemistry”
I’ll allow as how Dan Savage knows a lot, but when was the last time he thought about the ethical challenges of power gradients in educational and training environments?
MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I’m going to look at them in reverse order.
Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he forgot. This faculty member is assigned a graduate student each semester. This semester, the faculty member’s graduate student comes to me and said his work has included collecting and analyzing all the data and writing substantial portions of the lit review, but the student is not being credited on the final paper.
This case embodies a number of problems of which we have spoken before, at length.
Indeed, it bears some striking similarities to a case we considered a couple years ago. (In that case, an undergraduate research intern was helping an advanced graduate student in the research group to round up the relevant literature background for their research project … and the undergraduates summary of that relevant literature crept, word for word, into the graduate student’s dissertation.) Here’s what I wrote about that case:
In a comment on a post at Henry Gee’s blog (I’d link the comment itself, but for the life of me I cannot figure out where the permalink is), Ed Yong offers his view on the relation between politeness and civility. Quoth Ed:
My objection comes when people mistake politeness for virtue rather than what it actually is – artifice masquerading as virtue. Politeness is what you teach children to tell them when and how to speak and behave before they are fully rational and capable of thinking through the moral consequences of their words and actions.
Adults, being (technically) able to do this should arrive at their words/actions through more sophisticated means. It’s the difference between “I won’t say that because it’s rude and is therefore wrong” and “I won’t say that because it has the following consequences and is therefore wrong”.
Politeness is a route towards true civility and not an endpoint in itself. It’s civility for beginners. The big problem is that when people forget this fairly basic difference and focus on the polite/pleasant aspect without the deeper, underlying stuff, all sorts of incivil behaviour goes unnoticed because it’s said under the veneer of politeness.
Back in December (or as we academics call it, Exam-Grading Season), esteemed commenter Ewan told us about a horrifying situation that was unfolding for him:
Probably not totally relevant, but frankly I’m still in a little shock.
Graded exams Friday evening before heading out for weekend. Noted some really strong efforts (take-home exam), some really lame, nothing special. Then: two word-for-word identical, typos-and-all, answers with *many* unique characteristics compared to all other answerers of that Q, even down to the same joke-aside-to-the-professor.
Ack, really? Check. Yep, really, and true for about four Qs (of 27) on this short-answer format take-home final (given this way because somewhat akin to Janet, I also want them to demonstrate knowledge even if they have to use a book or the net for some facts/help. Anyway..).
I’m still in shock; some details adding to shock are unpostable b/c of identification possibilities in public.
I send email to the two: “I need to speak to you regarding your final; are you around next week?”
From A: detailed reason, perfectly fine, why no. Also unbloggable.
From B: “Yes. If this has anything to do with similarities between A’s paper and my own, I want to talk with you privately.”
Well, there goes any possibility that I was wrong, huh? Wow. And what a response to send!
Oh, and: f*ck.
That last part of Ewan’s comment is relevant because I suspect some students believe that the people grading their papers are giddy with glee when they find evidence of cheating.
We are not.
The new piece by Natalie Angier at the New York Times may make things a little more ticklish for people who pick their food on the basis of the characteristics it has or lacks as an organism: