On the ethical connection between research, teaching, and public service

I have been asked to say a few words about my recent  statewide Public Service award in light of the fact that I have also won the University Research Award and a college level teaching award.

So I put my thoughts together a bit.  It does seem to me that these endeavors are closely connected and should be.  Every faculty member has something worthwhile to say to the public abour their field or their research, and I think it should be borne in mind when we are teaching.  Every field has ethical implications and they should be a part of classroom discussion. The connection between public service and research is more profound, and I am less happy with how all of us address it.

When I received the Public Service award, I discussed my misgivings about being a professor and the manner in which we divorce ourselves from the world.  I was given the award as a representative of the team which developed the DELV test, bringing modern linguistics to bear on how we detect language disorders.  It seemed to me to be a good occasion to raise the question of ethics in the use of knowledge in general and the responsibilities of intellectuals. I think professors have an unfortunate history in this regard.  As Einstein commented “the conduct of the German intellectuals ..was no better than the rabble” when his friend Max Planck failed to come to his defense against the Nazis. While intellectuals failed to protest the firing of Jewish professors, ordinary parents of disabled children were able by protest to persuade the Nazis to stop their euthanasia program.  Most professors are concerned about the world today—what happens in Iraq and government policies—and many are actively involved in protests. Nonetheless, we somehow easily distance ourselves from responsibility for how our academic fields are involved.  It is easier to protest what the government does than to work on the ethics of our own fields and consider questionable activities by our professorial colleagues or for how PhD degrees are used. We allow ourselves to be “by-standers” in the misuse of knowledge.  In medicine there is a Hippocratic oath that dictates one “first do no harm” and care for all sick people. Without it, I wonder if our medical teams would help Iraqis who we have wounded. In the academic world—there is no personal commitment upon receipt of a degree--and we have the most minimal ethical commitements in any overt form.  We take no responsibility for how people use the PhD degrees that they are granted. One example is that of Abu Graib, as revealed in a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, July 14th, 2005. A Ph.D. in Social Psychology used his training in how people experience humiliation, in order to humiliate detainees as part of the torture process. An article in the Nation revealed how inadequate the code of conduct from the American Psychological Association, (not something that anyone explicitly agrees to) was in this respect. 

I proposed therefore at the Public Service Award ceremony—and  received support from the President, Chancellor , and other recipients--that we find a way to make ethical commitments explicit in the degree-granting process. One possibility would be that acceptance of a Ph.D. degree involve an explicit written commitment to use the knowledge and the credentials in an ethical manner.  It would be very good if every discipline—for instance Computer Science which is heavily involved in the kinds of data-mining undertaken through the Patriot Act----or Psychology which has the connection we just mentioned , initiated discussions about what is ethical and unethical behavior in each discipline. Are the Humanites and Fine Arts free of these concerns?  The role of dialect in life and language is always an issue.  Historians have something to say about the ethics of “tell-all” books about living people, etc. Philosophy has Ethics as a subfield, but “intellectual ethics” is not a known subfield. Many ethical questions are legitimately difficult for individuals to settle, and help from those in the same area would certainly be useful and probably quite welcome.  I can think of difficult questions in linguistics that are pertinent to some of our graduates.

The Chancellor suggested that we form a broad-based committee to make recommendations along these lines to the Faculty Senate. I would like to invite anyone who is interested in this issue to contact me and develop some kind of proposal about the ethical responsibilities of PhD recipients and perhaps others.