First, Do No Harm...
The (Moral) Obligation of the Faculty
Brian P. Coppola
Department of Chemistry
The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1055
bcoppola@umich.edu
This paper was part of an electronic conference being sponsored by the Division
of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society. No
registration is necessary, feel free to visit the site (at URL below) and just lurk!
This paper was discussed by the participants between February 13-19, 1998. The discussion
can be accessed at the Conference Web Site at same URL.
ChemConf '98 On-Line Conference on Chemical Education
http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/Chemistry/ChemConference/ChemConf98/
I. INTRODUCTION
A Brief Historical Perspective on the Role of Moral Development in Higher Education.
Formal education in the physical sciences shares many traditions with medical education.
In the late nineteenth century, substantial progress in highly technical areas emerged
all over the industrialized world, including medicine and the physical sciences.
This progress was accompanied by a corresponding increase in sophistication in the
educational training programs of these areas. After a century, for example, medical
education has come a long way from admissions standards that were often not much
more than a passing literacy in Greek and Latin and a good bedside manner. Regardless
of how the technical aspects of medical education have developed, training physicians
has also been dominated for over two millennia by the same, simple moral imperative:
The Hippocratic Oath. Interpreting and analyzing the Oath is its own scholarly domain.
I favor the clear and direct lay version of its moral meaning: this above all else...first,
do no harm.
Most colleges in the United States grew out of an ecclesiastical tradition. The primary
goal of the liberal arts education was the development of character. Most of the
faculty were not scholars and the education was at a somewhat low level. The capstone
course on moral philosophy or ethics, usually taught by the president, was concerned
with how a "Christian gentleman" should conduct himself in a sinful world.
Even without a Hippocratic Oath, the notion of moral development was the tradition
in the rest of higher education.
Changes in American Higher Education in the Twentieth Century
In the twentieth century, the demands of an increasingly industrial and technological
society dramatically changed the intrinsic nature of American higher education. The
need for technical and professional training took precedence over the cultivation
of virtue. The German model was adopted and colleges and universities became places
to receive a specialized education leading to a career in such fields as engineering
and science. Faculties became populated by scholars rather than young college graduates
aspiring to be clergymen. The teaching of the important human virtue of character,
once thought to be the hallmark of the educated gentleman, was largely left to others:
parents or religious institutions.
We all recognize the rapid rate of advancement that has occurred in the technical
and scientific disciplines. This century opened fresh on the heels of the Industrial
Revolution and with the emergence of the engineering and physical science disciplines.
In the United States, two World Wars, a space race imbedded in a Cold War, and the
institution of federal public funding only further accelerated the rate of direct
and indirect (spin-off) technological developments. Scientists receive a highly technocratic
education, where attention to notions such as character and virtue were significantly
decreased or altogether absent. In this essay, I argue that this education has translated
itself to a faculty who, while hardly a group of immoral hooligans, show signs of
this deficiency. This has had a global impact on the science education of undergraduate
and graduate students, and ultimately on the faculty itself. As the century closes,
our colleges and universities are populated by the first generations of faculty who
were trained by mentors who were in turn the first products of our twentieth century
technocratic milieu.
Why Scientific Integrity Does Not Serve as Our Hippocratic Oath
Unlike our colleagues in the medical school, no simple moral rejoinder pervades our
work in a way that is meant to guide our behavior as scientists. I have not overlooked
scientific integrity, which would certainly be the argument advanced to contradict
my assertion. Scientific integrity, what Feynman called "utter honesty",
is indeed the legacy we scientists carry from Aristotle, but it is not a moral code
for our behavior as citizens in the scientific and science education communities.
Scientific integrity is an important technical practice that is being increasingly
overwritten by unethical and even immoral choices on the part of some scientists.
One of the reasons for these bad choices is that academic scientists face an increasing
number of high-risk dilemmas. The need to raise funding to sustain a modern research
program has gone up as the actual pool of funding has gone down, and a great deal
of value is assigned to dollars and cents. The decisions made by a faculty member
who is acting as the "CEO" of a research group are not necessarily the
same ones that would be made by a research mentor overseeing the education of graduate
and undergraduate students. Productive students are needed by faculty to help advance
a research program, yet this can pit the demands for a faculty member's own professional
advancement (including tenure) up against the needs of the student for an independent
education. Even the value of a research area is measured by its ability to attract
funds and citations rather than what might now be the quaint and unjustifiable intrinsic
merit of an area of basic research. Cases of scientific misconduct are increasing.
In part, this is due to the perceived (and actual) advantages to cheating that can
overwhelm the moral choice. Efforts to address these issues have begun, but they
cannot impact behavior if they are only marginal. There are programs and centers
on most campuses that are now trying to educate graduate students in the carefully
compartmentalized categories of bad research and mentorship practices. There is also
an inevitable backlash from faculty who think that these lessons only belong in the
authentic context of the laboratory or field experience. After all, one does not
learn moral behavior by only taking a course any more than one learns how to do research
by only reading journals. Yet some of these same faculty are unwilling to actually
provide these lessons as an explicit component of the graduate education, preferring
the wholly inefficient and tacit approach of trial and error. Worse than that are
faculty who present themselves with the contradictory "do as a say, not as I
do" philosophy. The most powerful lessons we learn are "by example"
as opposed to simply studying "the example", and the education of our future
faculty has not been attended to within a broader moral context.
The obligations for educating undergraduate and graduate students in science is wholly
owned by the science faculty. Every precollege science teacher and all future faculty
members are in our introductory science courses. Some of these individuals take advanced
courses, and fewer still join our research groups. Science faculty are the sole caretakers
for what constitutes acceptable practice in the educational and professional development
of students in science courses, regardless of whether they are the minority who become
scientists or the majority whose formative understanding and attitudes about science
rest on these classroom experiences. Education is not a neutral activity. Since it
is designed to affect the way students look at the world, education will have some
effect on their character. Even those students who end up poorly educated in the
subject matter learn many things from their instructors that transcend the lessons
found on a syllabus. Every decision we make and every action we take as educators
contains an ethical lesson. Decisions about course content, pedagogy, even scheduling,
involve a choice of competing priorities and therefore communicate a sense of values.
How we relate to the students in class, how we relate to the subject matter, how
we respond to issues from other disciplines, and how we respond to questions in class,
all provide lessons that are powerful insights into our own character because we
are providing them "by example" rather than "as examples." As
heretical as it may sound, we can learn a great deal from the moral development of
our medical school colleagues when it comes to "treating" all of our students:
this above all else...first, do no harm.
II. EXTENDING THE METAPHOR TO SCIENCE EDUCATION
Here I will suggest three obligations of moral medical practice that can be metaphorically
elaborated to lessons which can inform the behavior of faculty. In each case, I will
describe a problem (call it a "harm" if you will) and then the way in which
the generic medical ethic might provide a recommendation for instructional practice.
A. Informed Consent: The Interaction between Scientists and Students
Our colleagues in the arts, humanities and social sciences have retained an understanding
that education automatically includes the affective dimensions of learning. Even
though much introductory science instruction has ended up emphasizing factual subject
matter, lessons that we do not attend to are still inferred by our students. We instructors
do change the worldview of our students, including their beliefs about science. We
intend to help them learn how to critically examine and, in most cases, broaden their
beliefs. We expect them to develop an appreciation and respect for things outside
of their immediate experience. We want to modify their motivations and, quite literally,
to change their minds. Physical scientists are not trained in this tradition, while
nearly all of our non-science colleagues address these aspects in their educational
programs in a fully integrated manner. The lessons of science exist within the imaginary
boundaries of non-affective rationality and objectivity, or at least our instructors
would have us infer this...and so when we get the chance we dutifully pass on the
implication. The harm here is two-fold. First, we learn to pretend that we operate
in a way that is different from how we actually operate, and second, we learn to
tell others this fiction. This means that we are not accustomed to giving out the
rules of the game even as we appear to openly invite others to play. So we have a
no-win situation for people who are educated in science classes, who can end up not
understanding science even if though they end up with a wealth of scientific information.
We have non-scientists who do not understand the actual basis of science, we train
scientists who buy into and propagate a public view of science that is at best naive,
and then we end up with scientists who sometimes have a good deal of unlearning to
do if they are reflective enough to see past the contradictions in their education.
For science instruction, informed consent has two meanings. As with all disciplines,
we must acknowledge that science also relies on affective and social dimensions.
This is not to say that I agree with those who argue that all scientific knowledge
is socially constructed, because I do not. We do conduct procedures that can be replicated
and we create objective information, especially measurements, that can be reproduced.
These measurements are assessments. Evaluation of these data, on the other hand,
is strictly interpretive. In fact, progress in science relies on the debate between
interpretations. Experimental design typically hinges on discriminating between different
understandings that arise from the same objective information. Science advances more
slowly, however, when scientists only seek to prove their interpretation of some
phenomena, when (I argue) the inability to differentiate between the objective and
subjective has not been appropriately learned. The first aspect of informed consent,
then, is to ensure that students understand that their scientific understanding is
not solely a consequence of objective rationality, and this means the faculty must
both understand and demonstrate this principle. If we give out the actual rules of
science, after all, then others will understand science better. The second aspect
of informed consent is for science instructors to understand and make clear the full
range of educational goals for students in science classes as well as how the instructional
plan seeks to achieve these goals. If learning how to do anything from solving a
synthesis problem to solving the Schrödinger equation has value beyond their
specific disciplinary applications, then these must become an explicit part of instruction
in the subject matter of chemistry. After all, only chemists understand chemistry
well enough to be able to answer these questions of value. Furthermore, if we intend
for students to respect the motivations and operations of science, especially if
we want them to change their beliefs and their existing learning skills in order
to be successful, then we must make this an explicit part of the subject matter.
We must also behave in ways that signify these principles as our own underlying beliefs.
Scientists have the bad habit of circular reasoning when it comes to respecting any
other part of the academic community: scientists readily accept and see science as
a superior form of scholarship because they have already made the decision to do
so, and students, it seems, must simply buy into the self-evidence of this value
system.
Testing as a Mode for Diagnosis
We use tests, just as physicians do. Faculty use them to diagnose the cognitive development
of our students in our courses after we have provided a treatment program. Expressing
ideas about teaching and learning in these terms sounds unusual, and this is symptomatic
of the non-reflective tradition that characterizes the scientific education. Another
aspect of informed consent is to ensure that treatment and testing are congruent,
and that the classroom discourse makes this understanding clear. The rhetoric of
introductory science classrooms is filled with notions of higher level learning and
broad benefits for the educated citizen. Unfortunately, these words too often do
not match the clear message students learn from the examinations themselves: success
is constituted by accumulating and organizing retrieval strategies for patterns of
objective facts and decontextualized algorithms. Sheila Tobias has recently turned
her attention to testing, what she calls "the hidden curriculum". This
is version of an another less-familiar aphorism: if you want to understand a class,
look at the exams and not the syllabus. Tobias observes that unless testing (and,
by implication, other assignments) accurately reflect the goals of the course, students
will learn what the exams expect and ignore everything else. Put another way, changing
the content and the pedagogy of the course will not be effective unless the exams
and other assignments are also changed. Students are not stupid; they know what matters.
Tobias describes the story, for example, of a physics professor who made significant
changes in the content of his course, emphasizing broader issues, but soon found
his students ignoring all the interesting historical, philosophical and societal
issues that he raised. Since he had not changed the problem assignments or the tests,
the students focused on the "old fashioned" material on the exams, judging
that everything else was window dressing. In hundreds of general chemistry classrooms,
faculty conduct demonstrations in order to link observable phenomena to the chemistry
lesson. It is not surprising that students tend to only acknowledge the entertainment
value of these demonstrations after the faculty neglect to roll their demonstration
tables into the examination. If you do not test whether students have learned to
link the chemistry with the phenomena, and you do test other things, then the value
of demonstrations is made clear. If development of critical thinking and expert problem
solving skills are important objectives, then the exams should not only test those
skills but also anticipate and preclude undesirable strategies such as the solitary
reliance on memorization.
B. Private Health: The Intrapersonal Effects of Scientific Training
The vast majority of faculty earn their salaries by receiving a teaching assignment
from their institution. On the other hand, even the appearance of excellence in undergraduate
instruction can be automatically (and rather irrationally) attributed to inattention
to one's research program. Do good teaching but do not do too well, and whatever
happens do not get a teaching award. This is one of many conundra facing young science
faculty, in particular. The most successful, independent and self-motivated graduate
students from the most active research groups in the top-20 institutions become faculty,
and the situation of their graduate department hardly ever matches that in which
they find themselves. Some fraction of new faculty, I suspect, are selected precisely
because they lacked any need for mentoring or education in the broader aspects of
a life in science: they matched perfectly the prevailing culture in their graduate
program. No wonder there is such a dramatic period of adjustment, something one of
my colleagues calls the "assistant professor syndrome", where organizing
and motivating the behavior of young scientists who are quite unlike the new research
director becomes the task. The challenge of mastering these significant responsibilities
comes as a surprise to new faculty members, and takes place alongside the formidable
task of developing an independent, international identity within a five or six-year
time period. The scientific training of future faculty neglects most of these broader
professional development issues. A new faculty member should not have to invest so
much time simply learning how to do these things because it automatically reduces
the available time for actually getting the work done. On top of these demands, this
new faculty member will also be assigned to organize and carry out instruction in
undergraduate and graduate courses, the preparation for which is an area nearly neglected
during graduate school. Graduate student teaching assistantships in science are remarkably
different from those in the rest of the university. Unlike many disciplines, we use
our students when they are least experienced, we do not invest them with decision-making
responsibilities about what they are teaching, and the majority of programs provide
little in the way of guidance beyond survival strategies for being in the classroom.
Whether it is the first time these individuals are assigned to an introductory graduate
course or to an undergraduate course, as new faculty members their most common teaching
strategy is not at all surprising: "Who has a good set of notes for this course?"
Perhaps there is also another issue of informed consent here, too. If we do not provide
as much training as we can for the demands of a professional life in higher education,
then we put our young faculty into situations where they must make choices that would
not be necessary with more appropriate preparation.
Concerning the Future Faculty
The education of Ph.D. students who will ultimately be responsible for training future
teachers and future scientists has become more and more distanced from the instructional
(and practically all other non-research) aspects of their professional development.
An implied question remains unanswered: how can we attend to the broad educational
needs of future faculty in a meaningful way? Our current system is highly inefficient
and its cost (in poorly educated students and frustrated faculty) is unacceptably
high. In every aspect of the scholarly development of our students to conduct research,
we have created an infrastructure of experiences from coursework to research, from
the undergraduate to the postdoctoral level, that produces individuals capable of
creative and independent thought. The usual answer to how this training affects the
development of other skills is either woefully naive (“it transfers”), merely ignored
(“they just pick it up”) or outright discouraging (“it does not matter”). The unanswered
question becomes refined: where is the infrastructure to support the scholarship
of teaching (and other non-research aspects) in a student’s professional development?
Graduate students in our programs are first and foremost studying for the Ph.D. in
chemistry. My philosophical position is clear: pedagogical strength comes from depth
of knowledge and experience. Our students are not studying for a “Ph.D. in Chemical
Education” nor do I support that model. My vision is that discipline-centered scholarship
in instruction and learning is an area that emerges from the discipline itself, and
it requires the greatest understanding of science to be coupled with additional literacy
in areas of education science. This literacy could take the form of meaningful cognate
courses in appropriate areas outside of the chemical sciences along with a departmental
program that allows future faculty to link their learning outside and inside of chemistry.
Consequently, we must begin to think about the training of our future faculty in
the same way we have been treating the intersection between chemistry and either
biological chemistry or materials science: as an emergent area. In addition to curriculum
development, there are many other components to the non-research arena that are significant
topics for future faculty to consider. Topics that represent a fraction of what should
comprise an explicit discussion include such things as proposal writing and review,
mentoring research students, departmental and university citizenship as well as participation
in the professional organizations. What I have described here is part of a program
that my institution plans to institute in 1998. We are not alone. The University
of New Hampshire has had a campus-wide certification program in place for 3 years,
and the University of Wisconsin-Madison is organizing an internal proposal to its
Chancellor for a similar campus-wide effort.
Concerning the Current Faculty
University faculty, outside of schools of education, are notorious for their disdain
of pedagogy. As scholars we seem to feel that knowledge of content is all that matters.
If we provide a good course, full of the latest developments in our field, students
will learn. We focus on teaching rather than learning, often with disastrous results.
Lunch table conversations about how our courses are going are filled with destructive
nostalgia about how much better students were "in the old days." Facilitating
a broad-scale conversation about pedagogy is a difficult task, particularly in a
research university where faculty are engaged in exciting scholarship, but a morally
reflective educational practice (which is a type of content) demands that pedagogy
be taken as seriously as factual content. At least in the public eye, students are
the reason for the existence of the university. Their interests in a high-quality
education that prepares them to be effective participants in the society are paramount.
We must move beyond the views that (1) teaching is merely the organization and delivery
of content, and (2) the primary goal of pedagogical innovation is the production
of "artifacts" such as textbooks or, currently, interactive computer programs.
Pedagogical innovation requires changes in faculty behavior, the most difficult change
of all. It is the difference between knowing (intellectually) that a good diet and
regular program of exercise are truly the right things to do and the observation
that the world has plenty of overweight, sedentary physicians who also smoke. Since
this concerns a change at the core, the process will be slow. The first step is to
facilitate a public discussion of pedagogy among university faculty, initially at
the department level, and eventually broadening so that ideas can be shared across
disciplines. Such a discussion has begun among chemistry faculty nationwide. While
the current discussion is stimulated in part by the systemic initiatives program
for curriculum reform, the core problems of sustained reform will not be solved unless
the behaviors persist after the funding is removed.
The Interaction Between Teachers and Students, Including When Students are Teachers
A core issue in education is the perspective that anyone in the "teacher"
role takes with respect to anyone in the "student" role, regardless of
whether the teacher is a faculty member, a graduate student instructor, or a peer
collaborator. The point of view of the "student" must either be respected
(as I recommend) or not. I have suggested that anyone who is a "teacher"
must learn to "teach with trust." We must default to one of two positions
when we examine the work of "students": they act with consistency or they
do not. We use the products of student work (their answers) to infer how the students
produced them. By taking an inventory of what looks right versus what looks wrong,
from out perspective, we assume we gain insight into the student's perspective. This
assumes that a mixture of what appear to be correct and incorrect answers follows
from an inconsistent (right and wrong) application of the proper rules. I have used
the following as a training exercise to get faculty and students to realize that
there is a benefit to trying to better understand the student's perspective when
looking a student's work. Imagine that you have asked a student to generate six examples
of multiplication. What advice do you give to the student who presents the following
examples to you?
2 x 2 = 4
-1 x 0.5 = -0.5
1.1 x 11 = 12.1
3.5 x 1.4 = 4.9
2 x 4 = 6
-3 x 0.75 = -2.25
At first glance, the student's error appears to be not knowing that 2 x 4 = 8.
Many faculty and graduate students, coming from the perspective that such a student
has done most everything correctly, will recommend that support and encouragement
are the best advice. The more prickly respondents take a more condescending attitude,
remarking that the "silly student" has gotten the hard ones correct and
easy one wrong. [Author's note: if these answers are what occurred to you, look again.
By shifting your "teacher's" perspective to becoming a problem-solver for
understanding a student's perspective, you will realize an indication that our student
has acted inconsistently may be the worse advice to give. It is a bit more work,
but it is also an intrinsically more interesting task for a teacher to treat student
work as a puzzle, an artifact that will give insight into the rules being used by
the student, even for how the rules you think you are teaching are being learned.
In this case, our student has mastered addition consistently and perfectly well,
and may not understand multiplication, or what the multiplication sign triggers,
at all. Teaching with trust means really listening to students, taking them and their
understanding seriously and then using their understanding as a starting point for
instruction.
C. Public Health: Scientists in the Community of Higher Education
The public health of science encompasses many dimensions, including the nature of
scientific understanding, the role of faculty in the university, and the education
of students in science.
The Obligations of Teaching and Research
After dinner, over coffee and dessert on a recent seminar trip to a large university
on the East Coast, one of my hosts asked an intriguing question: "Fundamentally,
what business does a research university have being concerned with undergraduate
instruction, anyway?" The conversation, you might infer, related to the typical
conflict between the "teaching" and "research" missions in the
modern academy. Regardless of its origins, the debate about the relative roles of
"research" and "teaching" within the professoriate has taken
on a "good versus evil" fundamentalism. Over the last 40 years, a second
generation of faculty has been raised against this epic backdrop of warring Titans.
My reply, which follows, reveals my prejudice. As sternly as possible, I asked my
host: "How can any institution that calls itself a university NOT be concerned
with undergraduate instruction?"
The character of the faculty impacts the education of undergraduates in science.
This aspect of education has been overlooked during each cycle of curriculum reform
and development. All characteristics of the science faculty impact instruction, and
these characteristics are direct translations from the scientific training received,
that is, learned. Science faculty, for example, identify external problems to solve.
In instruction, this external problem usually ends up being the student. We know
for a fact that the character of the student body in higher education today is different
than it was after the second World War, and that that these differences are significant.
Concluding that the good old days were simply better is hardly a strategic response.
The ways things were (especially the way we learned them) is always perceived (or
at least recalled) as the best and most rigorous way to learn or teach. Changing
instructional strategies is incorrectly equated with reducing the level of instructional
goals and decreasing the demands on students. I do not think that a simple comparison
of what we ask of the students who are in higher education today, in both their academic
and social development, upholds this conclusion. Setting goals is only the beginning
of instruction, not the end. We are obliged, whether we do it or not, to understand
our students in order to help plot a course for them to follow. Faculty often criticize
this by reflecting on the fact that they were able to succeed without this kind of
assistance. How naive! It is much more likely that others were indeed looking out
for them and simply did not waste time demanding credit for having done so; or, and
this is likely more true in recent times, future faculty succeeded in spite of the
system in which they were educated. The body count of failed and disillusioned peers
grew at each step, but the future faculty member was finally deemed tough enough
to survive. This is not responsible education, it is an obstacle course. Interestingly,
we do not examine the character of the faculty, as though they are an immutable baseline
against which valid measurements can be made. I question this assumption. Just as
for our students, the academic and social milieu in which all faculty find themselves
continues to change over time. Over this century, the situation for science faculty
has changed greatly, and particularly in how they assign values to their roles as
researcher and educator. Another characteristic of science faculty that can impact
instruction is standing behind the unbearable rightness of scientific truth. Rather
than providing an education of operational utility and a framework for building future
learning, these faculty have only one audience: themselves. Speaking with a group
of undergraduate first-year students is the same as giving a seminar, and both of
these are treated like a proposal defense in graduate school: our scientific culture
is one of brinkmanship and "defense", and the worst thing that can happen
is to be revealed to be wrong (the "loser" in the game). I argue that the
extraordinary benefits of scientific progress in the twentieth century have come
with a unacceptable price that was exacted in the character of scientists. I should
say clearly that I am not talking about the majority of scientists, but rather an
emerging sub-class who have begun and will continue to come into the stewardship
of the next generations of academic science.
The Obligations of Self-Governance and Self-Regulation
To bring the moral dimension back into balance with the sophisticated intellectual
training of the modern university we need to once again address the questions of
character and virtue. The most prized privileges of the professoriate are self-governance
and self-regulation, and these represent responsibilities and obligations that are
only mediated by the character of the faculty. These responsibilities and obligations
can also represent power. My concern is that our privileges have been reinterpreted
as rights, which then opens them up to the dual specters of the culture of entitlement
("I am owed...", "I deserve...") and the opportunity for abuse
("...and at any cost..."). I worry about what looks like the loss of conscience
in many young faculty in their need to achieve their entitled positions in the university.
Professional training, what constitutes acceptable behavior, and the adoption of
values are all oral traditions in the professoriate; they are all learned. In addition
to self-governance and self-regulation, the other "self" that we are privileged
to hold is self-propagation. Our students are always ourselves, once removed. Scholarly
competition and the drive for intellectual ownership have always been a positive
part of academy, so before I am accused of being simply naive of the past it is indeed
the moral context in which the faculty operate that is at issue. The decisions made
by young faculty are always a reflection of what they learn to be necessary, important,
and acceptable. Therefore, their behavior reveals important lessons about ourselves.
In my own career, I have observed first hand or heard from authoritative sources
too many examples of behaviors that we should not only not allow, but that we should
not have allowed as options for those who do these things in the first place. It
should not be inevitable that some assistant professors will have a "body count"
of failed graduate students whose careers are cut short as new faculty members learn
how to manage their programs. It may be inevitable that some graduate and undergraduate
students will be driven to tears, but it is not acceptable to set out to do this
so that "the message" will get out, and it is not appropriate to brag about
having deliberately done so. It is not right for a graduate advisor to create and
invoke false rules of authorship, in the name of the professional society, in order
to remove the name of a graduate student collaborator from a publication after the
student has changed mentors. Responsible teaching in any course does not mean releasing
texts of information at what students call "the speed of light" and providing
condescending "you mean you don't know that" sneers to disinvite classroom
discourse. The content and direction of an undergraduate course should not be unilaterally
changed because a faculty member, acting alone, prefers to offer his or her graduate
specialty instead because less preparation time is required. These are uncomplicated
issues of right and wrong. If we remain silent when we see or hear of these incidents
then we are as guilty of abandoning our responsibilities as are the perpetrators.
If we demonstrate our hypocrisy with "do as I say, not as I do" then we
are as guilty as they. We must have the moral courage to simply go to our intellectual
offspring as say "no, what you are doing is wrong" instead of meeting behind
closed doors and making whatever decision about these individuals fits our local
custom.
In 1997, a small group of administrators at a large, mid-western university (not
mine) were found to be guilty of misconduct. After these faculty were removed from
their administrative posts (but not from their faculty positions, and retaining most
of their administrator's salary), the Chancellor explained that these individuals
needed to be "rehabilitated." This rehabilitation was to come in the form
of returning to mentoring graduate students, all of whom were relying on their advisor,
after all, and getting back to their research labs. This particular road to salvation
is remarkable if, as I have argued, it is the place where the behaviors and attitudes
that led to the misconduct were learned in the first place.
A provocative exchange of letters about faculty behavior was published in a weekly
news magazine last year between two faculty colleagues from a university on the west
coast.
I would like to take exception to Professor X’s depiction of the "tribal
culture of research scientists" as "overwhelming desire for name recognition...brutal
competition...Nobel Prize lust," and so on. As a research scientist most of
my adult life, I have never belonged to that tribe, nor subscribed to that culture.
The same is true regarding most of the research scientists I have met.
The described behavior is rather more likely due to the cult of unremitting self-centered
egoism, which in the adult is the hallmark of an arrested, juvenile personality.
Science, like all human endeavors, is infected with personalities of that type. In
the professions, this failing is often conceived to be synonymous with ambition.
The studied observation of such people, mimicking astronomical practice, is an empirical
indicator that high analytical intelligence does not guarantee global intelligence.
What is the acceptable level that constitutes "most...research scientists"?
Is it 95% or 85%? What if it is 75% Not all cultural changes are revolutions. Some
move by the slow march of generational turnover. What is the location of the line
that divides indiscretion from unacceptable or even immoral behavior? Wherever it
is, one of the additional problems is that it is less a thin and defined line and
more a murky gray area five meters wide. Solutions that only focus on young faculty
miss the point. We are the creators and caretakers of the values that are learned
and guide their actions. If we do not live by whatever guidelines we create, then
we are like the overweight physician who smokes and drinks too much: we cannot be
taken seriously.
The debate about teaching and research, where I began, is distracting and not meaningful.
The conditions under which such a conflict could arise are important to understand,
however. Our obligations as members of the professoriate are at issue, and our moral
obligations derived from self-governance are at stake. Like it or not, the behavior
of our academic progeny is learned, as much of a reflection of us as of them. Our
tenured positions in higher education carry the responsibility for stewardship of
the public health of science as well as the professional development of all scientists.
Bibliography
Coppola, B. P.; Daniels, D. S. "Mea Culpa: Formal Education and the Dis-Integrated
World" Science and Education, 1998, in press.
Coppola, B. P.; Daniels, D. S. "Structuring the Liberal (Arts) Education in
Chemistry"Chem. Educator, 1(2), S 1430-4171 (96) 02018-3. Avail.
URL: http://journals.springer-ny.com/chedr
Coppola, B. P.; Daniels, D. S. "The Role of Written and Verbal Expression in
Learning. Promoting and Improving Communication Skills for Students in an Undergraduate
Chemistry Program" Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 1996,
1(3), 873-878.
Coppola, B. P.; Ege, S. N.; Lawton, R. G. "The University of Michigan Undergraduate
Chemistry Curriculum. 2. Instructional Strategies and Assessment" J. Chem.
Educ. 1997, 74, 84-94.
Coppola, B. P.; Pearson, W. H. "Heretical Thoughts II: These on Lessons We Learned
from our Graduate Advisor that Have Impacted on Our Undergraduate Teaching"
J. Coll. Sci. Teach., in press.
Coppola, B. P.; Smith, D. H. "A Case for Ethics" J. Chem. Educ.
1996, 73, 33-34.
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Hoffmann, R.; Coppola, B. P. "Some Heretical Thoughts on What Our Students are
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About the Author:
Dr. Brian P. Coppola is an Associate Professor of Chemistry, the Coordinator for
Undergraduate Organic Chemistry Curriculum at The University of Michigan, and a Faculty
Associate at the University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching.
He recieved his B.S. degree in 1978 from the University of New Hampshire and his
Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984, having
joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater as an Assistant Professor
in 1982. In 1986, after moving to Ann Arbor, Dr. Coppola joined an active group of
faculty in the design and implementation of a revised undergraduate chemistry curriculum.
His recent publications range from mechanistic organic chemistry research in 1,3-dipolar
cycloaddtions to educational philosophy, practice and assessment.
Professional URL: www.umich.edu/~michchem/faculty/coppola
Personal URL: www-personal.umich.edu/~bcoppola
Dr. Coppola routinely teaches in the 1200-student introductory organic program (Chem 210/211 & 215/216:
theStructure and Reactivity sequence, which is a first-year course at Michigan),
including a special section of the second term course (Chem
215H/216H) for highly science-motivated students that uses a studio learning
component and integrates lecture, lab and high technology. He also provides undergraduate
and graduate level instruction in teaching and learning in chemistry, as well as
a newly instituted course, Professional Development in the Chemical Sciences,
that seeks to enhance the most broadly defined expression skills of science students.
In 1994, Dr, Coppola received the 4th campus-wide "Golden Apple Award"
for outstanding teaching, a recognition organized and administered solely by undergraduate
students. He has received the Dean's Excellence in Teaching Award each year since
1991. In 1996, he received a United States Department of Energy, Undergraduate Computational
Science Education Award. He has recently been named an awardee in the first group
of Carnegie Foundation Teacher-Scholar Fellowships. He is a member of the editorial
board of The Chemical Educator and the editorial advisory board for the Journal
of College Science Teaching. and a co-creator and artist for the cartoon strip
"Under the Hood", which appears in The Chemical Intelligencer.