What is conflict of commitment?

We’ve all heard the term “conflict of interest” and have some intuitive understanding of what it might consist of. But in academia there is a separate term, conflict of commitment, which is as important to understand (from a job survival standpoint) but for which there is no Wikipedia entry–the term is obscure, yet ubiquitous in the academic policy manuals across the country.

So what is conflict of commitment? To answer this question, I’ll first operate at the level of broad principles and then apply the concept specifically to academics, particularly professors who are either tenured or tenure track. Realize that I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.

If we think about the commitment that we make when we accept full-time employment at a university, one implied part of that “social contract” is that we accept the primacy of our employer as far as the benefits deriving from our professional life. That is, we realize that as far as our research, service and teaching (and especially teaching but I’ll get to that later), our full time salary compensates us (basically in full) for our employer getting the lion’s share of the benefits of the same research, service and teaching.

The broad principle here is that, as with most real benefits in life (think your TIAA–CREF retirement proceeds should you die) there is a primary beneficiary. In the case of our employment and the benefits of our toil in the lab or classroom–well you can guess, it’s our own institution that is the primary beneficiary.

Now to the details for faculty members: as professors, teaching holds a special place in the list of benefits that our employer receives in compensation for our salaries. After all, you don’t need to be a professor to do research or to serve on a committee. It’s the teaching component that sets the profession of professor apart. And therefore academia places special emphasis upon the role of teaching in building up policies dealing with conflict of commitment.

Put simply: it usually raises a big red flag to take one’s teaching (at any level) to another institution of higher education. At the very least, this type of appearance of conflict of commitment should be discussed carefully with administrators. Teaching is very different from consulting for another institution, or serving on the board of directors, or secretly rooting for the other school’s team in a basketball game. Because teaching is central to your identity as a professor, and a university’s identity as an institution of higher education.

There are other instances of conflict of commitment, but none as important for faculty to store away and remember.

Jim

Spring semester begins

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is the first day of the Spring semester here at Mason. Here are three things I want to accomplish before commencement:

–Recruit at least two new thought leaders to the Advisory Board.

–Garner foundation support for our doctoral programs. Both programs are now beginning to have real track records (normative time to Ph.D. is typically five years or so) and it’s time to gain external recognition of what we are doing in interdisciplinary graduate education and research training.

–Double the number of proposals for sponsored research funding over the same period last year. At the same time, we’ll move towards diversification of our grants portfolio–I would like to also double the number of agencies and foundations that we submit grants to.

Jim

The consciousness of John Searle

I met John at an IBM conference a bit over a year ago in California. Here’s David Papineau of Kinds College in London on John.

Money quote:

Quantum mechanics tells us that the probabilities of physical effects are always fixed by prior physical circumstances. If Searle’s suggestion is right, then this principle breaks down inside the human brain, at those points where conscious minds exert an independent influence on events. This implication is not incoherent, but it seems highly unlikely. Serious physicists are unlikely to start looking for violations of quantum mechanics inside the human skull. With free will, as with consciousness, it seems that Searle’s affinity for common sense has left him in a philosophically unstable position.

Jim

Blogs and scholarship

Librarians are learning about blogs in the context of scholarship. Interesting if true. As a journal editor, I have a difficult time accepting that peer review and editing aren’t part of the crucial value-added part of publishing when scholarship is concerned.

Jim

Email and academia: hidden dangers

I came of academic age with the advent of email. I remember during my graduate school years being amazed that by adding a complicated suffix ending in “edu” my email would somehow make it from Ann Arbor to Pasadena in seconds. During those years, my emails became very long and often were an extension of my conversations with others. The Michigan Terminal System (MTS) had a command-line email interface which was quite convoluted and the modems we used for dial up (2400 baud) often resulted in a long email spilling out across the screen like little yellow “pac-men“.

Later, during my years at NIH, I learned that email was a bit more complicated than my previous notion. It wasn’t simply an “extension of conversation”. It was also indexable and potentially of interest to record keepers. I remember laughing with my fellow postdocs at an order that came down from on high to print out and save all emails. We thought the idea was ridiculous.

Of course emails are now viewed by courts and the law in the same way that paper memos used to be. They are certainly much more than an extension of conversation. They are in fact discoverable. Nowadays, we all, at some level know, that there is no way to ever really delete an email. They are all there, in some data warehouse, waiting for some lawyer to e-discover what we wrote about whatever, at some point in the past.

This is of particularly relevance to academia. Particularly because most current faculty members “grew up” with the “extension of conversation” notion that I did. When combined with a strong belief in academic freedom, there is perhaps a tendency to put in an email something you might not be entirely comfortable seeing on the cover of say, the NY Post.

When this small indiscretion pertains to sensitive issues like faculty searches, evaluations, student information and the like, then modern academic email can bite in a really big way. An email that ends up as evidence in a law suit can have consequences that reach beyond your own career and affect your institution.

And that’s where discretion comes in. I have one simple rule for my email: never put anything down in writing, that I wouldn’t mind reading in the newspaper tomorrow. Everything else flows from that. The obvious dangers of forwarding, blind carbon copies, and going into specifics when pronouns work just as well all come to mind.

Jim

What is scientific misconduct?

At a recent meeting, several colleagues raised the point that for whatever reason, new faculty members may not be as aware of what constitutes scientific misconduct as previous generations of professors. It seems that there are two clusters of the confused: 1) those for whom the US definition (and I’ll get to that in a bit) is obscure because they were trained in other countries where the “rules” may be different and 2) US trained faculty members who may be under the impression that the “rules” are somehow relaxed for less formal contributions (such as blogs).

The sense among my colleagues was that it is very important for both of the clusters that the word get out–scientific misconduct can get you very quickly into a whole lot of trouble.

So what constitutes scientific misconduct? It’s useful to remember the mnemonic FFP (fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism). Fabrication is the making up of experimental data. Falsification is the changing of experimental data. Plagiarism is the use of another person’s work (usually written) without giving them proper credit.

It’s never OK to do anything of these things.

Jim