Lea P. Stewart's Commentary on "Taking a Position of Influence"
Author(s):
Lea P. Stewart
The job of a college faculty member in any discipline is a
complex, involving multiple tasks and sometimes conflicting
responsibilities. Most faculty members are expected to
participate in three general activities: teaching, research,
and service. This means that a faculty member must facilitate
students' learning through activities such as classroom
teaching, laboratory supervision, and student advising. A
faculty member must also conduct a program of independent
research that results in articles published in academic
journals or, perhaps, books. In addition, a faculty member is
expected to provide service to the educational institution by
serving on various decision-making or policy-setting
committees. In some schools, the balance of these activities
may differ--some schools emphasize the primary importance of
teaching while others require more research activity.
Nevertheless, it is the faculty member's professional
responsibility to the academic profession to carry out these
duties.
Although this may not sound like a very complex situation,
in reality performing effectively in these three areas may be a
difficult juggling act. There are only so many hours in the
day, and faculty members must allocate their time wisely to
meet these three responsibilities. In addition, some faculty
members are more talented in one area or in another. For
example, some people are truly gifted teachers, others are
innovative researchers, and others are highly effective
participants in university service activities. Schools could
not function without faculty members who contribute to these
three important areas of academic life.
In this case, you find yourself in a situation that
emphasizes the sometimes conflicting nature of the professional
responsibilities you assumed when becoming a faculty member at
Western Tech. You have been required to assume a heavy teaching
load that has prevented you from conducting the research you
would like. You see the summer faculty fellowship program as a
welcome chance to pursue some research that you have neglected
during the academic year. It is also clear that you are valued
for the service you have given to your institution since David
Jackson, Vice-President for Research, has asked you to serve on
the review panel for the faculty fellowship program. In this
instance, your responsibility for faculty service conflicts
with your desire to pursue a research project which was delayed
due to your heavy teaching load.
How do you balance these competing demands on your time and
potential conflict of interest? In this case, you agreed to
serve on the faculty panel even though it will be considering
your application for a summer fellowship. Vice-President
Jackson has stipulated the guidelines for your participation,
and you decide that you can serve under these conditions.
Happily, the panel awards you a summer fellowship.
This case should lead you to think very seriously about your
own definition of conflict of interest. You may feel that your
participation on the committee was ethical because you received
an invitation from Vice-President Jackson, and you followed the
procedures he established for reviewing proposals. But does
following someone else's procedures absolve you from ethical
conflicts?
Obviously the time to have thought about all of these issues
was when the Vice-President first invited you to join the
committee. He asked you to "leave the room" when your proposal
was being considered. Although you can physically leave the
room, can you ever leave the room in the minds of the other
committee members? Imagine judging the proposal submitted by
the colleague sitting next to you at the table even though she
has left the room. Does your impression of her as a committee
member affect your judgment? Does the fact that she will soon
reenter the room affect your decision? Do you feel that you can
make an objective decision about someone else's proposal if he
or she is on the committee? Could you expect other committee
members to make an objective decision about your proposal?
Of course, you have to balance your sense of potential
conflict of interest in this situation with your duty to serve
on university committees when asked. You need to be a good
university citizen without compromising your ethical standards.
In this case, how might you have contributed to the summer
faculty fellowship program without actually serving on the
committee that considered your proposal?
There is an exercise called the "nine dot problem" in which
you are given a picture of nine dots arranged in three rows of
three dots. You are asked to connect all the dots with four
straight lines without lifting your pen from the paper. Most
people who try to solve this puzzle draw an imaginary box
around the dots and never think of going outside of this line.
The problem is impossible to solve, however, without drawing
lines that go beyond the boundaries of the nine dots. In the
same way, when we are asked to do something we often think that
our only options are to do what is asked or not to do it. But
often there are more than two options in a situation. This case
provides a clear example in which the initial choice became
either serving on the committee or not serving on the
committee. Alternative options might have been available if
someone had explored them.
The balance between teaching, research, and service is a
complex one. Faculty members face conflicts in these areas
every day. In fact, this case reminds me a situation that
occurred at my university. The chair of a department was
appointed to a committee to review proposals for special grants
for projects to improve teaching at the university. One of the
proposals was from a faculty member in the chair's department.
The chair felt it was inappropriate to review a proposal that
would, in effect, bring money into his department so he did not
rank this particular proposal. Others on the committee did not
perceive a similar conflict of interest and ranked proposals
from their departments highly. When the voting was concluded,
the proposal from the chair's department did not get enough
votes to be funded. Many of the other proposals did. What did
the chair learn from this experience? One conclusion, of
course, is to vote for his department's proposals. But the
lesson that he learned was to make sure that the criteria for
making a decision are agreed upon in advance by the people who
are making a decision. If the committee had decided on criteria
before voting, the chair could have expressed his concerns
about conflict of interest and at least made sure that everyone
was playing by the same set of rules.
Sometimes we play by rules that benefit us, and sometimes we
don't. But remember, you must live by the rules you play by.
Conflict of interest is a serious issue that is prohibited by
the NSPE Code of Ethics for Engineers. Deciding what
constitutes a conflict of interest, however, is often a
complicated manner that requires an individual ethical
judgment.