"Education is not just another business; it is a calling"

Howard Gardner

The Need for Externally Imposed Protection for Whistle-Blowers

Punishing whistle-blowers has had its intended effect:

A study carried out by June Tangney found that less that 50 percent of faculty suspecting fraud in the research of their colleagues did anything to verify their suspicions, let alone file a formal complaint. Nor should it be surprising that Swazey and her colleagues found that while many faculty members claimed to endorse an obligation to report research misconduct, they were reluctant to do so. In both studies the message expressed with undeniable clarity is that whistle-blowing can be personally costly, it is simply better not to know whether or not your colleagues are proceeding honestly in the execution of their research efforts. (Lewis 133)

Steward and Feder say that over the years they have heard from hundreds of researchers who believed they had witnessed fraud but were afraid to report it, and others who had made allegations of fraud and wished they hadn't (Taubes 50).

The research of Swazey and colleagues found that:

Fear of retaliation for reporting suspected wrongdoing is a key problem in the way that ethical problems are dealt with in universities. More than half of our student respondents believe that they could not report possible misconduct by a faculty member without retaliation, and 29 per cent also would expect sanctions for reporting another student. Faculty members also are concerned about the consequences of whistle blowing: Only 60 per cent believe that they could report a graduate student and 35 per cent that they could report a colleague with impunity. In our interviews, some faculty members and students told us that when they did confront or report someone they believed was engaging in ethically wrong or dubious research practices, their concerns often were ignored, they were penalized for their actions, or the incident was covered up. (A25)

After listening to testimony about how administrators and colleagues attempted to silence and punish those who exposed error and fraud, Congress established rules forbidding universities from punishing those who make accusations, even when the accusations aren't true. But these rules proved ineffective, so a federal commission proposed the "Whistle Blower's Bill of Rights," which would dictate how universities must treat those who expose scientific wrongdoing at research institutions (Burd). That such a Bill of Rights has to be imposed on universities in the first place is a disturbing indication of the decrepitude of the academic creed, for there can be no greater perversion of it than punishing those who speak the truth.

The Decay of Peer Review

For peer review to actually work, every faculty member at every stage of the review process has to be a responsible fact-checker, fault-finder, and, if need be, whistle-blower. But, as one might assume from the material I've presented, on campuses nowadays these are risky things to be. Thanks to fear of reprisal, there may be less serious peer accountability on America's campuses than anyone wants to admit (Lewis 48).

To be fair, peer review, especially within departments, always contains the threat of retribution; the people we critique today often have the power to critique us tomorrow. But what has been happening in higher education for over a decade goes beyond this person-to-person conflict. Now even fault-finders and whistle-blowers who are right--factually and legally--are routinely pressured and punished--by colleagues and administrators who should be defending them--for doing what the academic creed requires--exposing academic wrongdoing. How many of us are going to stick to our expert guns when we know that our principled stubbornness will only offend people we have to face day after day after day, and who could hurt us?

One might describe the mood that prevails in most departments and professional interactions today as "chummy permissiveness" (Lewis 128). This chummy permissiveness is encouraged by the way that most professors now define "academic freedom." The term has come to mean, "I get to do my thing and you get to do your thing, without interference." In essence, the term interdicts "what would otherwise be normal curiosity about the work-related behavior of one's colleagues," shielding it from peer reviewer. In essence, "academic freedom," as functionally defined by the professoriate, legitimizes a sort of convenient blindness to what is going on around us, for if we are oblivious to wrongdoing, we do not have to do anything about it, the professorial version of "plausible deniability." "No harm, no foul, and therefore no need to blow the whistle" (Lewis 16-17).

The more serious the offense that confronts us, moreover, the more urgent the need to deny its existence, for the worse the wrongdoing, the more danger in exposing it. These carefully cultivated habits of denial, of expedient blindness, relieves us of the costly obligation to expose and repudiate the transgressions which in fact occur around us with some regularity. For twenty-five years, administrators and colleagues at Boston College turned a blind eye to the fact that Mary Daly excluded males from her feminist theory classes, in violation of Title IX and of the ethics of the profession; it was only when a student threatened to sue that her faculty members and superiors noticed anything.

Thanks to this perverse dynamic, peer accountability, according to one academic, often amounts to "the hollowest of rhetorics and a set of superficial procedures that too often amount to nothing more than bureaucratic ritual" (Lewis 47). A recent study supports this view. "Only 13 per cent [of the 2,000 faculty members surveyed] believe that they and the colleagues exercise substantial responsibility for each others' professional behavior," with personal autonomy taking "strong precedence over a norm of collegial self-governance" (Swazey, Louis, and Anderson A25).

If we cannot police ourselves, others will do the job for us. There is already talk of establishing a government agency to investigate accusations of plagiarism and determine the validity of published scientific data (Walker "Scientists").

Conclusion

The majority of professors, I believe, do not plagiarize, or condone it, and do not fabricate bogus data, or protect and defend those who do. But too many of us stand by, silent, when one of our own is set upon for exposing plagiarism, fabrication, or other wrongdoing that plague--and threaten to discredit--higher education. We gaze at these hapless victims like cud-chewing wildebeests watching one of their own go down to hyenas. The bravery of tenured professors cannot be underestimated. But the real scandal is that bravery is now required of those who expose error and deceit in what is supposed to be the bastion of unbiased knowledge and truth.

Many academics have an exalted view of their integrity, and feel it is up to them to save the world from itself; fine, but perhaps we ought to clean up our own profession first. We might start by comparing how malfeasance blithely tolerated and sometimes championed by academics is dealt with in the real world. When The New Republic discovered that one of its writers fabricated parts of stories, they fired him and apologized to its readers (TNR). In England, a British television station that faked scenes in a documentary was fined a record $3.2 million. In the real world, the perhaps naïve distinction between fact and fabrication is apparently taken most seriously indeed, and it would be unwise for professors--especially in tax-supported institutions--to not do the same. When we exonerate ourselves from all wrongdoing, we "make more ordinary work venues seem ethically superior by comparison" (Lewis 33).

Our dishonest denials call into question the privileges and immunities we have been granted by society to create and teach knowledge and truth. Of course, the professoriate can always renounce those benefits, along with its claim to elevated specialness, but this renunciation is exceedingly unlikely since it would require a sense of integrity that, if it existed, would have precluded the ethical tension in the first place.

Assuming that enough professors still care about the integrity of the academic creed, what can be done to thwart its undoing? First, the professoriate should engage in a very spirited and public debate of the issue on campus and at national and regional conferences. Right now, such a debate, and such conferences, do not exist, because the profession does not want to acknowledge the problem, for acknowledgement makes convenient blindness to wrongdoing more difficult.

Second, departments with graduate programs should discuss the issue locally. Swazey and her colleagues found that while 88 percent of faculty and 82 percent of students believe that "ethical preparedness" training should be an important function of their academic departments and universities, "only a minuscule proportion (4 per cent of faculty members and 3 per cent of students) think that their departments actually take a very active role in this area" (Swazey, Louis, and Anderson A25). But they need to, since few graduate students work closely enough with mentors or advisors to learn about the complexities of research ethics, and the stringencies of the academic creed, through example. And if they do not learn these values, they will more likely add to the problem in the future (McGee). Indeed, one reason for the erosion of ethical behavior in higher education that we now have is that the large number of people who came into the profession in the 1960s and '70s were not thoroughly initiated into the moral stringencies of the academic creed.

"To give explicit instruction to students on these matters, most faculty members themselves will need explicit instruction, through seminars and other means...[about] how ethics should be taught...Faculty members and administrators must find ways to incorporate explicit attention to research ethics into their departments in ways that go beyond the occasional 'brownbag lunch' or guest speaker" (Swazey, Louis, and Anderson A25).

The moral decay that can so easily be found in the institutions of higher education is now being transmitted to the next generation of teachers and scientists. Until this mess is cleaned up, the holier-than-thou moral superiority that comes so easily to many academics and their institutions is as fraudulent as the growing mounds of research piled on innocent colleagues and citizens.

1.This essay is very narrowly focused, and does not, because of space limitations, attempt a comprehensive survey of malfeasance and misfeasance in higher education. I do not, for instance, discuss administrators who misappropriate or actually embezzle university and government money, pad expense accounts, rip off the government by overbilling, ignore or encourage wrong-doing by staff and coaches, surreptitiously change instructors' grades, intimidate professors into dumbing-down their courses, file false charges to fire unruly instructors, etc. Nor do I discuss professors who dumb-down courses to raise their scores on evaluation forms, sell grades, ignore policies for biosafety and animal or human research, select only convenient data or condone sloppy data, sexually harass students or colleagues, use state resources for nonprofessional activities, exploit teaching and research assistants, etc.

2. This heavily ideological tract may be the single most read and most assigned work on American college campuses. Its hallowed status is indicated by the fact that the University of Maine selected it as the "class book" for the class of 2000, meaning that students entering in the fall of 1996 must read it to graduate. According to Menchu herself, it has inspired some 15,000 scholarly papers, been translated into twelve languages, and induced 14 universities to award Menchu honorary doctorates (Lane 36).

3. Stoll discovered, among other things, that: although Rigoberta's brother was killed by Guatemala's rightwing military, he was not burned to death before her very eyes; her father did not wage a land battle against rich Guatemalans of European descent but against his own in-laws; he was not a peasant "leader" but a political neophyte manipulated by the left; the embassy fire in which he died (and which also killed the hostages he helped capture) was not started by the army but likely by the revolutionaries themselves; the younger brother she said she watched starve to death never existed; Rigoberta did not have to forego education to work on a plantation (she never set foot on the plantations as a child); she was not an illiterate peasant but could write and read thanks to Catholic nuns at a private boarding school; most Mayan peasants did not support the armed struggle to which she was mortgaged (xiv); she sided with the Sandinistas against the Miskitos.

 

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