Today universities face numerous college admissions and harassment scandals, and academic dishonesty gives rise to concerns both inside and outside the academic community. Trying to address these issues, steps are being taken to improve the work of ethical committees, reporting systems, and ensure compliance with honor codes. Gaining momentum, ethics is becoming a force that can change academia from the inside out, but there is also a risk that it can be eroded and primitivized. Nothing can make the case for the reconsideration of academic ethics better than the cultivation of integrity narrowed to the enforcement of elaborate rules and the implementation of plagiarism detection programs. However, the role of ethics in the development of academic communities and of particular individuals is easily overlooked because of managerialism, audit culture, and the efficiency discourse dominating the contemporary university. There are several possible responses to this challenge.
On the one hand, social theory can help provide a new background against which both history and recent developments of academic ethics can be studied in a new way. To reach this goal, ethics should be placed in the broad context of the social sciences and, particularly, of recent studies on the ecology of knowledge, the knowledge society, and academic temporalities. In this respect, time is an especially important topic. Sometimes academics have no time for their direct duties, not to speak of reflection on ethical issues, but it is not only the lack of time that affects academic ethics. The modern-day university is mostly defined by the ever-increasing tempo of academic life and its complicated timescape; ethics also contribute to this diversity since different norms, values, and virtues require different temporalities.
On the other hand, academic ethics can be historicized and viewed through the lenses of specific cases from the past. However, it is crucial not to lose sight of the more comprehensive theoretical frame of reference. To bridge the gap between different approaches, we probably should find a balance between schematism and antiquarian history for its own sake, bearing in mind that even opposites can complement each other.
Chair: Andrew Ilyin (Poletayev Institute)
Mario Biagioli (UCLA), Impact and the cost of time
There are multiple ways in which time is involved in academic misconduct. For example, the "publish or perish" pressure is not uniformly distributed but concentrated around specific career transitions, like the first postdoctoral fellowship, or tenure-track position, or tenure itself. But time connects to misconduct more intrinsically, as we see in the various forms of manipulation or gaming aimed at increasing the perception of the impact of one's research. In this case, I will argue, time is literally of the essence in the sense that impact is defined as an effect of the publication that, as such, can only be measured in time. Impact grows and cannot, by definition, be instantaneous. Impact is in the future, and it will take time for it to be measurable in the present. In its alleged pursuit of an objective measure of academic work, therefore, metric-based forms of evaluation have effectively slowed evaluation down, turning it into a "historical" process. It is this slowing down of the process of evaluation brought about by the new focus on quantitative impact that is spawning, as response, very creative forms of manipulations to make it look like impact is accumulating faster or has already accumulated. Rather than merely manipulating metrics, these forms of misconduct turn the logic of impact-based metrics upside-down, producing time-independent impact.
Ben Eklof (Indiana University Bloomington), Ethical Choices Facing Professors Today: Observations in Search of a Theory
Tenured professors at an American research-1 university are a privileged lot, with light teaching loads, money available for research-related travel, adequate salaries [and generous benefits, something crucial in our unique work-connected health care system]. But many seek to advance their careers on the open market, which in turn often leads to an exclusive focus on their own research at the expense of teaching their students well (measured in terms of outcomes and student well-being), mentoring or collaborating with colleagues at hand, or serving the needs of their department and the university as a whole. This is in stark contrast to the world of academia a generation ago. Changes driven by demographic and cultural forces but also by the corporatization and cost-benefit analysis that now drives administrators here and elsewhere, and even by geopolitics, have fundamentally altered academic life since the “Golden Years” brilliantly described by Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Extremes). Specifically, how have these changes shaped teaching/research/service priorities? How have “postmodernism” and constructivist approaches to research—forfeiting all claims to objective authority—undermined the capacity of research communities to play a role in a democratic polity, posing ethical challenges for professors in a world no longer seen as progressing in a linear fashion fueled by scientific advance? This talk acknowledges the substantial literature summarized in “Accelerating Academia” [Filip Vostal] depicting the structural changes in university life brought about by the introduction of neo-liberal corporatist policies in recent decades. Based on the speaker’s participant observations and background training in social history and anthropology, and four decades as a professor of history at Indiana University, the focus here however is upon the changing ethical choices confronting academics then and now, and how the subjective life-world has altered, given that the long-standing belief one is ipso facto doing “good” [for the universe] as well as “well” by pursuing one’s self-interest in academia has collapsed. Whether we examine tenured professor’s choices in terms of deontology [duty, obligation], consequentialist ethics [outcomes] or virtue ethics [setting an example for others], their remarkable lack of reflexivity and self-centeredness calls for further explanation—whether it be through discourse analysis, microhistory, or even the approaches pursued by some sociologists [Bruno Latour, Karin Knorr Cetina].
Thomas Stapleford (University of Notre Dame), Beyond Morality: Virtue and Academic Ethics
In this presentation, I’ll pursue three theses. First, the concept of morality that commonly undergirds many discussions about professional ethics is incoherent in ways that limit the scope and meaning of ethics in professional life, including academic ethics. Second, a loosely Aristotelian form of virtue ethics provides a richer and more robust framework for thinking about professional ethics, in part because it arises from taking seriously the ways in which humans actually do analyze and discuss their own actions. The bulk of my talk will be spent on this thesis, illuminating how core aspects of an Aristotelian virtue ethics are manifest in our everyday ways of discussing and making sense of human behavior, including the behavior of scholars. From this analysis, we can gradually build a more comprehensive and compelling conception of academic ethics in which our ethical commitments provide ideals for excellence in the scholarly life, not merely bare minimum guidelines barring us from unethical or “immoral” scholarly actions. Third, I show how and why this treatment of academic ethics requires linking scholarly activity to some broader conception of human flourishing. Though virtue ethics per se does not tell us what constitutes human flourishing, it does suggest some characteristics that any such definition must satisfy.
