Joining Someone Else’s Research Project? Check Their Ethics Protocol!

Posted confidentially on the author’s behalf by the ethics blog editors

This post is a reflection on the role that IRBs and other institutional gatekeepers can play in protecting informants and researchers from unethical actions committed in the course of large research projects. It tells the (highly condensed) true story of a team project focused on helping refugees resettled in the U.S. Unsurprisingly, a project with such progressive, socially ambitious goals attracted researchers from several subfields of anthropology, including a couple of graduate students from the department where the project was hosted. A recently arrived refugee worked as a research assistant on the project to liaison with the refugee population.

As an anthropologist hired in as a postdoc to work on the project, I began to feel that some things were “off” when I observed that the refugee who worked for the project was never invited to the team meetings or given a key to the office. After getting to know the person working in this role, I learned that s/he was being paid hourly, barely above minimum wage, and had no health insurance or benefits of any kind. Soon, the uncomfortable feeling of finding myself working for a project that was “all talk and no show” turned into something much worse when researchers on the team were asked by the project director to do things that we felt were serious violations of anthropological ethics. Highly sensitive personal data were being collected, handled, and stored in the most careless way. Informed consent was barely an afterthought. During the months I worked for the project, I witnessed how disrespectfully the project director treated the one refugee employed on the project. In the employee’s own words, s/he felt better and freer at the refugee camp than working for this project! I also noticed that the observations we had made were manipulated at community events and professional meetings. The project director once admitted knowing that the project was “way out of compliance”. But all that seemed to matter to the director was that we appeared to be making progress so the grant could be renewed.

While I worried about the unprofessional and unethical ways in which we were being pushed to conduct research, I also feared being fired. Like others working on the project, my contract was “at will,” and everyone who expressed the slightest difference of opinion to the project director was threatened with being let go. To complicate things even further, the project was being conducted at the same institution where the project director had received their PhD, which made me, as a relative newcomer, wonder if such practices were supported (if not fostered) by that department. Hence I had to ask myself: who can I report to in this institution that will not automatically disregard my testimony?

My first instinct was to take these matters directly to the project’s advisory board. I was extremely lucky to get guidance from my mentors at my alma mater, whom I asked for help. They advised me not to go to the advisory board, as they may have had conflicting interests (for example, the project director’s dissertation advisor was a member of that board). So I contacted the university’s office of research compliance and IRB instead. Upon reviewing the documentation presented, the compliance director and the IRB immediately opened an investigation on the project. After interviewing several team members, the IRB decided to shut down the project until further notice. In addition to the problematic way in which the research was being carried out, I learned that no researchers (other than the project director) were even mentioned in the IRB protocol; hence none of us were technically authorized to be doing this research in the first place. In retrospect, I am shocked at how naive I was, not asking to see copies of the IRB protocol before starting to work on the project. A few months later our contracts were up. Needless to say, the grant was not renewed.

In this situation, the refugees we were working with were vulnerable, but so were the researchers, who found themselves with their backs against the wall: doing research the project director’s way, or “the highway.” What I would like to underscore is that it was the IRB and the university’s research compliance office, not the anthropology department, who were the ones to tell the project director that research could not be conducted in that way. By suspending the project and seizing all the data collected by the team, the IRB not only effectively protected participants’ rights, it also protected the researchers from being pushed to engage in unethical practices. Ironically, it also protected us from having to publish the data that we had collected. As bad as it is for a postdoc not having any publications to show for a year’s work—especially while on the job market—it is better than publishing something that would later have to be retracted.

We sometimes think of anthropologists as sympathetic saints who know more than their IRBs about “research with human subjects” and who would not, by the very nature of their professional commitments, violate the rights of participants in their research. But the fact is that such violations have happened in the past and continue to happen today. It is good and necessary, if at times tedious, to have to show someone that our work complies with federal regulations and the ethical guidelines those regulations aim to implement. Finally, a word of caution to anthropologists moving into postdoctoral positions: never embark on a project without first checking with the project director about their approach to research ethics. Ask to see the ethics protocol. It may be an awkward thing to ask at the time, but it is better than finding out later that you are implicated in an unethical project that renders all your professional efforts totally worthless.

Fighting Academia’s Contingency Crisis Together

Fighting Academia’s Contingency Crisis Together

Work is a virtue. It is how we contribute and give back to our society. It is a source of self-worth and pride. Justice demands that those doing the same job be compensated fairly and equitably. When a gap between individuals doing the same work develops in society, that disparity is a source of injustice. When the size of that gap becomes immense, that injustice becomes a crisis. Academia is experiencing just such a crisis with regard to contingent or adjunct faculty and the crisis is growing rapidly.

Historically, the number of contingents in our colleges and universities was low, representing less than 10% of most faculties. Traditional adjuncts were primarily full-time employees in jobs outside of the school who essentially volunteered their time for a small honorarium. They could do so because they had salaries and benefits provided by their outside employers. They were generally not people who saw teaching as their primary career. The vast majority of professors who saw themselves as educators first and foremost had access to full-time jobs with fair compensation and benefits provided by our educational institutions. That model worked for centuries because it properly valued academic professionals.

Over the past 20 years, college administrators around the country have adopted a new, neoliberal model for higher education predicated on transferring a larger and larger proportion of the teaching responsibilities to part-time contingent faculty paid these same small volunteer honorariums. Administrators saw contingents as a cheap alternative to full-time, tenure track professors. The growth in contingents has been explosive over the past 20 years. In short order, the number of full-time positions fell so far that contingent faculty began to exceed tenured and tenure track faculty. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) estimates that nationwide contingent faculty now make up 73% of those teaching in higher education. Contingency is an attack on tenure. Meanwhile, the number and pay of administrators ballooned on the savings.

As administrations rapidly transformed the make-up of faculties, full-time lines were steadily cut through attrition. Today, young scholars who consider teaching a primary career path find it all but impossible to find tenure track jobs in academia. Many well educated academic professionals have little choice but to leave the field altogether, depriving students of their considerable talents. Those of who stay in academia find ourselves in a situation where we work as little more than part-time volunteers. A whole generation of academics has been left with the Sophie’s choice of either abandoning careers in education entirely or working unstable jobs for poverty wages with no benefits. This is not acceptable.

The new model is also unacceptable for our students. Students deserve the best talent in the classroom. They merit professors that have the stability and pay required to deliver the highest quality educations possible. They do not deserve faculty who are stressed, exhausted and desperately trying to hang on through public aid. They require better than professors who are running from school to school and working excessive hours at a mix of poorly compensated part-time positions just to keep basic needs met. While most contingents work above and beyond to deliver a top quality education even under these difficult circumstances, our students should be entitled to better.

The contingency model has failed. It has devalued academic professionals, led to a de-professionalization of higher education and made teaching a dead end career for many talented academics. Despite this, it has become clear that administrations are addicted to this exploitative labor model. They will never voluntarily choose to fairly compensate skilled and well-educated contingent academics. They have little financial incentive to restore traditional, tenure track jobs. The system is broken and those who broke it were not going to fix it on their own.

Seeing no alternative, contingents and adjuncts are taking it upon ourselves to organize, unionize and force colleges and universities to give us a seat at the negotiating table. We are fighting for a decent wage, job security and basic benefits. We are here to reaffirm the value of academic careers and to provide the best possible education to our students. Contingents at more and more schools are seeing the value of organizing for collective bargaining rights. Newly formed unions around the country are coming out of negotiations with first contract that are significantly improving both teaching and learning conditions at our nation’s institutions of higher education. Those of us involved in this effort can point to many significant wins. However, there is so much more than needs to be done.

This struggle is being waged by the most precarious workers in academia. We are facing opposition from the most powerful figures on our campuses. But, we need not do it alone. The AAUP has been very actively promoting the “One Faculty” concept. They emphasize that all members of the teaching community must work together to “improve working conditions, shared governance, economic security, and academic freedom for all those who teach and do research in our universities and colleges.” Full-time, tenure track academics should be working actively on their campuses to support contingent organizing, resist the expansion of contingency, include contingent faculty in shared governance and treat contingent faculty members as equals. Contingents should be doing their level best to do the same for their full-time colleagues. We are one faculty and we all benefit when we act accordingly. We are in this together.

It is now time for college administrators to ask themselves what value they put on teaching. Contingents are well qualified and hardworking academic professionals. We deserve that our work be fairly and equitably compensated. We deserve a living wage. We deserve equal pay for equal work. We deserve jobs with some measure of stability and security. We deserve careers with a future. We are people not numbers. We insist on policy that is fair, equitable and humane. We will not stop fighting for change until administrations around the country live up to that standard.
Bradley W. Russell, Ph.D.
Chair of the Adjunct Faculty Union
The College of Saint Rose
SEIU Local 200United
bradley_russell@hotmail.com

Class Struggle is the Name of the Game at Universities. It’s the Ethical Elephant in the Room

Brian McKenna

Picture this. You have a Ph.D. in anthropology and are hired, as an adjunct, to teach an anthropology course on “colonialism, economic crisis, peasant struggles, nationalism, indigenous rights, independence movements, and struggles over development and underdevelopment.” That’s an actual job posting. The salary for the position is $3,413.

A tenured faculty member may receive about $10,000 to teach the same course.

Now answer this. How can you NOT talk about your own struggles when the subjects you are hired to teach on – oppression and struggle – apply to you? You are a flesh and blood native of Nacirema (“America” spelt backwards) standing before the students. You can provide insider testimony, as a key informant, about “the other.” And you are “the other.” You are a Ph.D. anthropologist who is actually working in the field.

Many adjunct professors are afraid to speak about the elephant in the classroom. They are being monitored. They are under constant surveillance from customers (student smartphones and course evaluations), middle managers (teaching observations by Chairs), technicians (email monitoring by IT), executive officers (annual reviews read by Deans), and CEOs (Provosts and Presidents). They must be careful. They need that paycheck for food, housing, health care, even burial. At one university where I worked I was informed that, before I arrived, the department had to take up a collection for the funds to bury an adjunct professor after he died from a massive heart attack in his office.

The contradictions within the university are enormous. Self-censorship is the rule for any precarious worker, especially in a factory or fast food job. But for an educator? Surely those educated in the threatening science (Price 2004) and dangerous art (McKenna and Darder 2011) of anthropology would be at the forefront of resistance. Here is a troublesome irony: many of the adjunct’s superiors in the academic hierarchy are other anthropologists. They are often Deans, Provosts or Presidents, academics who have crossed over into administration. Here is another irony, those Deans and Presidents can erode tenured faculty pay, over time, in response to the existence of the dual labor market. Is their primary loyalty to the neoliberal institution or is it to their fellow anthropologists? Are they complicit in the deplorable pay and working conditions?

Of course this is an old, old story. I shared my thoughts with a veteran adjunct, a social activist who once worked as a housing organizer in the 1960s. He asked, “Why precarity now? Where was the association for the past 30 years? I’m sorry; nobody expressed adjunct precarity as an ethical or social justice concern. It was always I got mine, now get yours. There must be something wrong with you, It’s always been competitive; not everyone with a Ph.D. gets a job. The victim-blaming, stigmatization of adjuncts as invisible and ‘other,’ together with the adjunct’s feelings of self-blame, and self-doubt compound the sense of alienation and often even social paralysis. it’s about time that the discipline woke up; however, the train left the station decades ago, and that train has made thousands of round trips.”

Why Precarity now? One reason is because the United States is in its “end times.” The AAA itself recognized this with the title of its 2009 annual conference. America is now a post-Orwellian culture of permanent war, bulwarked by the “terror of neoliberalism” at home (Giroux 2004, 2007). Why precarity now? Because most of us are now treated like adjuncts. “There’s a lot of fear in academia,” explained noted anthropologist and labor organizer Paul Durrenberger in his 2014 Malinowski speech at the SfAA (see his “Living up to Our Words” 2014; See also his “Anthropology of Labor Unions” 2010). Indeed, class struggle is everywhere in the authoritarian university. It’s in the debt peonage of students, new corporate alignments, suppression of dissent, student push-out (drop-out) rates, elimination of humanities programs, and workplace bullying of dissenters. It’s in its focus on STEM for capital not ROOT for people: Revolutionary history, Ontology and ethics, Organizing skills and Transformational humanities.

Class struggle is deeply embedded in the digital revolution as well. E-learning, distance education, and Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)s have come of age. They are said to expand democracy. Some faculties question this. On April 29, 2013 the philosophy faculty of San Jose State University wrote a letter protesting the way in which a Harvard professor’s lecture was taped and disseminated widely for classroom use. The professors refused to teach that philosophy course developed by edX, “saying they do not want to enable what they see as a push to ‘replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities’” (Kolowich 2013). It’s not just MOOCS but e-learning systems like CANVAS and Blackboard too (McKenna 2013).

With their aggressive entry into higher education, the corporate state is consolidating its power in the third leg of Eisenhower’s feared trifecta: “the military-industrial-ACADEMIC complex.” In 2012 major industry officials announced their study showing the “enormous potential for the future of the e-learning market.” IBIS Capital and the Edxus Group, said that “While education as a whole is triple the size of the media and entertainment industry at $4.2 trillion, digital education is currently only 20% of the size of the digital media market. They expect to see fifteen fold growth in the e-learning market in the next 10 years to represent 30% of the total education market,” reported Pippa Cottrell in Realwire (Cottrell 2013). Educators have not yet had adequate time to theorize the darker side of the digital earthquake in their midst (McKenna 2013). It is one thing for computers to be freely chosen by faculty for their creative pedagogical ends (Jandric and Boras 2015); it is quite another for computers to be foisted on them, in authoritarian fashion, as a tool that faculty have to adapt to for fear of losing their jobs. There are few “Teach-Ins” over this ethical dilemma.

In their illuminating article on this blog in March 2015, “Professional Precarity, Ethics and Social Justice,” Avineri and Black noted that Principle seven of the AAA Ethics Statement “is impractical or even impossible” to satisfy at this juncture. They draw attention to the imperative that “Anthropologists should at all times work to ensure that no exclusionary practices be perpetrated. . .” Bev Davenport added, in the comments section, that one way out of this ethical dilemma (of excluding precarious professors) is to offer a “full time lecturer with a multi-year contract . . . an avenue for promotion” into the tenure track. I wholeheartedly agree.

We all know adjunct anthropologists who have worked in departments for 20 years or more, teaching full loads and making poverty wages. Once over the age of 50 they often become permanent adjuncts. They hope to retire with that job. In my estimation you have about five years after getting a Ph.D. to land a tenure track job. Competing against 150 applicants for the same tenure track position, people know the odds are against them. Some reassure themselves that it’s a level playing field, even after reapplying for twenty years straight. I’ve even heard it be said that “It’s a lottery.” Not so. The tenure track jobs tend to go to new Ph.D. graduates from a select group of universities.

Muhammed Ali was mercilessly pummeled for seven rounds by George Forman in the “Rumble in the Jungle,” but was miraculously able to spring back from the “rope-a-dope” and win. Can we? The class struggle in higher education demands a holistic analysis and an insurgent response. We must investigate the political economy, preserve teacher autonomy and bring the precariat into the tenure track where they can gain the dignity and respect they deserve. As applied anthropologists we need to teach organizing skills in our classrooms. As civically engaged activists we need to organize unions throughout academia. Remember, an injury to one is an injury to all. Take back higher education.

References

Avineri, Netta and Black, Stephen (2015) “Professional Precarity, Ethics and Social Justice,” AAA Ethics Blog, March 27. https://ethics.americananthro.org/professional-precarity-ethics-and-social-justice/

Cottrall, Pippa (2013) “Digitalisation of Education Will Result in Fifteen Fold Growth for E-Learning Market Over the Next Decade.” Realwire. May 14.

Durrenberger, Paul and Reichart, Karaleah (eds.) (2010) “The Anthropology of Labor Unions,” Boulder:University of Colorado.

Durrenberger, Paul (2014) “Living up to Our Words” Human Organization: Winter 2014, Vol. 73, No. 4, pp. 299-304.

Giroux, Henry (2004) Take Back Higher Education. Basingstoke, UK:Palgrave.

Giroux, Henry (2004) The Terror of Neoliberalism. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Giroux, Henry (2007) The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Jandric, Petar and Boras, Damir, eds. (2015) Critical Learning in Digital Networks. Switzerland:Springer.

Kolowich, Steve (2013) “Why Professors at San Jose State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. May 2. http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Professors-at-San-Jose/138941/

McKenna, Brian. 2008a. “Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology: How ‘Yes, Sir,’ Necessarily Becomes ‘No sir,’” CounterPunch, Petrolia, CA, December 30.

McKenna, Brian and Antonia Darder, eds. 2011. “The Art of Public Pedagogy, Should ‘the truth’ Dazzle Gradually or Thunder Mightily?” Special Edition, Policy Futures in Education 9:6: 670-685.

McKenna, Brian. 2013. “The Predatory Pedagogy of On-Line Learning,” CounterPunch, Petrolia, CA, June 3. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/03/the-predatory-pedagogy-of-on-line-education/

Price, D. (2004), Threatening Anthropology McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

An Intersectional POV On How the Contingent Faculty Market Is Against Our Other Principles in the AAA Code of Ethics

The author of this post wishes to remain anonymous.

This blog discusses the ways in which people of color, and especially women of color first generation PhDs, experience the contingency market differently because of their intersectional identities and how this undermines the discipline’s goals of contributing a diverse body of knowledge under truthful conditions of knowledge production.

 

This blog entry seeks to encourage a long-needed discussion on how our structural participation in the contingency market can be seen as contra to the general AAA Ethics Principles we, as dues-paying members, hold ourselves accountable to. In their March 27th 2015 AAA Ethics blog post “Professional Precarity, Ethics, and Social Justice,” my colleagues and fellow linguistic anthropologists Netta Avineri and Steve Black focused on how the contingency market compromises the final part of the AAA Code of Ethics. Their focus naturally was Principle Seven, “Maintain Respectful and Ethical Professional Relationships.” I want to expand on their important contributions here to foreground how structural conditions of the most marginalized contingent faculty, which I will define below, impacts the other objectives in more indirect but just as equally consequential ways to the profession, the communities we study, and the students and broader society we aim to serve.

 

Before heading into the principles, I want to make a few important caveats that are often not made when this complex issue is discussed. I am not talking about faculty and administrators at all higher education institutions that rely on contingent faculty. Many institutions have actually created and shared best practices through forums like the Delphi Project at the University of Southern California. (Sadly, these practices are still few and far between and still seen as anomalies rather than innovators in higher education.) Moreover, I am not addressing all members of the contingent faculty class. There are contingent faculty members who are post-academics, or scholars who no longer work full-time in any academic position, and retired academics. These two classes often use contingent faculty positions as supplemental income and, at times, even donate their salary back to the institution. Some even say this is who these positions were originally designed for–people who are able to bring ‘real world’ experience to student instruction. Sadly, this minority of contingent faculty is also used by many to rationalize the current inequities in resources, compensation, and more for these positions when in fact we know this is not the majority of those we hire to teach classes.

 

Invoking Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1989) original framing of intersectionality to recognize not all oppression and ethical violations are felt equally, I emphasize that I am writing from the place of lived experience with the most marginalized of contingent faculty in anthropology departments: those part-time PhDs and PhD graduate students not in post-academic careers that are typically women and scholars of color (if not both–see the New Faculty Majority/New Faculty Majority Foundation’s Women in Contingency Project as well as the statistics from the American Federation of Teachers Report). Many times, like myself, they are also first-generation PhDs without adequate financial and cultural/social capital resources, which also includes knowledge of how to use the PhD as cultural/social capital in post-academic careers because they are often unintentionally cut out from other networks due to ‘pattern matching.’ They return to their home communities after having given a bulk of their lives to academia with their hopes dashed of contributing to knowledge production not only for themselves but also for the betterment of the profession and their communities. Moreover, they occupy a unique place in these discussions. Within their ‘own’ native professional circles that seek to promote ethnic, sexual, and gender diversity in the discipline, these scholars find that, when they make moves to speak of contingent issues, it is often construed as undermining or detracting from the ‘more important’ agendas of anti-racism work underway in academia. What is overlooked is that this is work that only some privileged tenure/tenure track academics get to fight. At the same time, to speak of intersectional identities and their invisibility in the contingent faculty movement risks them being called race-mongers and seen as undermining the labor movement. They are, in essence, in limbo and often relegated as an exception to be dealt with later on both sides.

 

When they face structural discrimination, one cannot tell if it is because of their adjunct status or their ethnic and gender status, if not both. Thus, as Crenshaw reminds us, when we help the most disenfranchised–who often are the most difficult to design new practices of inclusion for because of their intersectional status–everyone gains. So this is the position from which this is addressed, especially since these intersectional beings tend be silenced both in anthropology and in the contingent faculty movement through various micro-aggressions that often reproduce their dual stigmatization. To continue to speak of contingent faculty in general, non-intersectional terms contributes dangerously to the assumption that academic and socioeconomic disenfranchisement is equally felt the same by all and has the same consequences when it does not. Thus, my remarks below come from my position as an intersectional contingent faculty involved in both circles that, in my perspective, have not done nearly enough in creating alliances in the contingent movement due to ‘divide and conquer’ mentalities that pervade academic structural practices.

 

Principle #1: Do No Harm (You Can’t Hurt the Anthropologist and Not Hurt the Field Communities)

In anthropology, interconnectedness is not just a fancy abstract concept–it is the crux of how we do our work. This is echoed in many sentiments that locate anthropological enterprises as embodied and inscribed onto bodies of researchers. When the anthropologist is embedded in and socialized to be dependent on working conditions that do not allow them to disseminate their findings, we hurt field communities by decreasing the possibility of their stories and concepts being told. Every time a contingent faculty person is denied adequate living wages, affordable health care, has health problems that are exacerbated by working conditions that dehumanize them, discriminated against implicitly in tenure-track job searches because they are contingent, and so on, writing and dissemination become distant if not impossible goals. Conference papers do not get written, much less presented live at conferences due to employer-imposed travel restrictions, and journal articles do not get drafted. In short, research findings that could very well do more good than harm to communities–especially critical perspectives from underrepresented communities that push forward and challenge paradigms rather than stagnate knowledge production–end up on the cutting room floor. The (ab)use of the contingent market places scholars, especially persons of color and women, in a position that unintentionally causes harm through silence. Thus, when we speak of doing no harm, it might be best for the AAA to move away from seeing it as an individual, interpersonal aspect and understand it is a structural aspect, like sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva contends about race no longer needing ‘racists’ because it is in the structures we live and reproduce everyday. In this way, we can see that our daily reproduction of the contingent market structure through everyday practice, whereby faculty are not supported to disseminate their research but solely ‘teach,’ creates harm to many underserved field communities.

 

Principle #2: Be Open and Honest Regarding Your Work (Let’s Get Real About Working Conditions That Produce the Work across All Stages)

When this principle is invoked, it tends to focus primarily again at the level of the anthropologist at an interpersonal, micro arena. In contrast, it does not usually concern the honesty of the ways in which academic labor is often not based on meritocracy but on a labor system that rationalizes disenfranchisement in the name of a good cause. We rarely ever disclose that the production of our work by tenured/tenure track faculty relies on the use of contingent faculty who are typically underpaid. For instance, when the money to hire contingent faculty is officially written into research grants and the same contingent faculty is not provided adequate pay, this remains hidden from all of our accounts of how the work was produced. How many times do we see contingent faculty thanked by scholars in books and articles, those faculty who have used the time and skills of a fellow anthropologist at a discount cost? How many times have many said faculty come to observe their contingent faculty counterparts and write letters of recommendation for future teaching and research opportunities? In essence, maybe it should not even be about sponsors but about stakeholders who also help get much anthropological scholarship done and rarely are acknowledged because of their invisible labor, a term coined by one of my colleagues. I wonder, if we were to put this practice into action, how many of us and the general public would see the ethnographic enterprise much differently beyond its claims of deep human understanding when we learn at what cost these understandings are produced.

 

Principle #3: Obtain Informed Consent and Necessary Permissions (I Hereby Consent to Let You Tell My Story at the Expense of Another Human Being’s Well-Being)

In conventional musings on consent, this discussion typically focuses on the consent for prospective research participants to interact with us for our own research to proceed. This often gets to how much to tell them so that we can enter into and sustain research in these communities so as not to impact the findings. What if we were to tell our participants (especially those in vulnerable communities of color) that, in the production of this work, this may (and probably will) involve the use and abuse of another vulnerable population: contingent faculty (including and most often disproportionately women and scholars of color), who will be underpaid and underserved when many of us take our sabbaticals to turn our dissertation findings into book-length projects. If our participants knew about this (just as people rallied to tell others of the harmful side effects of other products we consume in the US), how many would actually agree to the way we produce work in many top institutions? By not telling them each and every time that we make use of the contingency market for the production and dissemination of some stories and not others, do we ultimately deceive them about our own complicity and participation in structures that allow for the simultaneous reproduction of knowledge and socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequity in academia?

 

Principle #4: Weigh Competing Ethical Obligations Due Collaborators and Affected Parties (And Yes, Contingent Faculty Are Affected Parties of Research)

To think of contingent faculty in the broader research game must include a key discussion of how they are affected parties in research, as listed in the AAA Ethics Statement. Contingent faculty are professional colleagues, since they are often anthropologists with PhDs, and also stakeholders in the research process. By stakeholders, I mean that they are brought in to teach courses when a faculty member at a research institution needs to go on leave to delve further into research or, in some cases, cheaply fill a retirement gap so other faculty do not have to compromise their own productivity. By releasing colleagues from their teaching commitments, contingent faculty are affected parties because they contribute to the production of knowledge, many times at the expense of their own and their field communities’ well-being due to contingent working conditions. Yet our ethical concerns around equity and just treatment toward contingent faculty are often ignored or not given strong thought. For instance, how many of us actually ask ourselves what our ethical obligations are to our contingent colleagues who support us with their invisible and marginalized labor? They are not just teaching, but they are also teaching in support of someone else’s research, if not more, for the structure permits this to be so.

 

Concluding Thoughts

This blog has aimed to show how, as we anthropologists continue to engage in the contingent market, we enter into some dangerously murky ethical waters. I often think to myself if this were any other industry happening in our own fieldsites, we would waste no time passing resolutions and creating actionable steps. And yet, we find ourselves often times dangerously silent because, for many of us, we reap many material and personal gains through this structurally-licensed disenfranchisement. This is often because, even in academia, there is a greater incentive to turn activism outward rather than engage in a reflexive, inwardly-turned academic activism. In this light, I encourage us all to act on behalf of the contingent faculty movement not because it is the ‘right thing to do,’ but to show that we as anthropologists can actually live up to our Code of Ethics in order to create quality learning and research conditions for our students and ourselves. As Crenshaw reminds us, when the most marginalized win, we all win. When we short-change even one group, we short-change all of our students and ourselves. So I ask us to be anthropologists not just in name only or in research, but also in academic activism turned inward. Our undergraduates, graduate advisees, colleagues, and field participants from the world over are depending on us. Let us not be slow to act but to actually use the academic freedom many of us possess to leave a more just and sustainable academic footprint that doesn’t come at the expense of harmful silencing of communities and research. It is time for us to use this critical discussion of our ethics as a springboard to create new practices around contingent faculty that support, rather than contradict, our professional ethical stances.

 

Meeting the Ethical Responsibilities of Activist Research while on the Tenure Track

Nelson Flores

University of Pennsylvania

I consider myself an activist researcher whose research is embedded within a larger activist agenda that aspires to dismantle social inequality and improve the conditions of racialized communities. The question I have been grappling with for the past three years is how to balance the ethical responsibilities of being an activist researcher with the demands of a tenure-track faculty position at a research university.

Because the tenure review process usually privileges research over community work it can be tempting to solely advocate for racialized communities at academic conferences or in academic journals. The irony is that many well-meaning researchers end up further contributing to the marginalization of racialized communities by converting them into commodities at the service of the researcher’s tenure process. We, therefore, have an ethical responsibility to engage in direct advocacy work in the communities that we serve. In my work this has included a range of activities in educational settings including facilitating parent meetings, assisting in the writing of grant proposals, providing professional development to teachers and developing curricular materials.

How does a tenure-track professor have time to do all of this community work? The answer is best illustrated by a recent meeting that I had with local school district officials. While we were developing a plan of action one of the district officials asked, “How will this fit into your research?” My response was “What we are doing right now is my research and whatever we plan to do will become my research.” My advocacy work is my research and my research is my advocacy work. Some might argue that this blending of research and advocacy makes me biased. I would argue that it makes me an ethical activist researcher who ensures that I have the time to contribute my expertise to the communities that have opened their doors to me.  

This ethical responsibility to engage in community does not need to become a distraction from presenting at academic conferences and publishing in academic journals. In my work I try to use academic journal articles as venues for developing counter-narratives that refuse to represent racialized communities through the white supremacist frameworks that have historically and continue to permeate social science research. Specifically, in my academic journal writing I develop critical genealogies of hegemonic concepts that are complemented by empirical data from my community work to offer an alternative approach that rejects white supremacy. The goal is to challenge dominant academic framings of ideologies as existing “out there” in research sites and critically examining the ideologies “in here” in academia that have been and continue to be complicit in the marginalization of racialized communities.

My end goal is for these two levels of work to coalesce around a coherent theory of social transformation—the one level embedded in local community struggles that are directly relevant to the day-to-day lives of my community partners and the other level embedded in larger epistemological concerns that are directly relevant to my academic peers. Though working toward a coherent theory of social transformation while worrying about tenure and promotion is certainly daunting, being strategic with how I organize my time has helped me balance these two goals that I hope to achieve.

When a PI Plagiarizes

Posted confidentially on the author’s behalf by the ethics blog editors

In the October 1, 2014 New York Times Magazine, celebrated author Marilynne Robinson paraphrases John Wycliffe as saying, “If you do not object strenuously to a superior’s bad behavior, you are as bad, as guilty as he is of what happens.” However, I can attest to the reasons why so few subordinates do this—or why you have not heard of them even though they may have tried. If you are not a Pulitzer Prize winning academic, things can go very badly for whistle-blowers and rarely badly for their superiors in the academy, protected as they are by university legal counsels whose job it is to prevent public disclosure and its consequences.

Based on my ethnographic research and publication history, I was hired as a research anthropologist on a large grant by a PI with a proven track record of co-authorship with prior junior colleagues in my position. Within six months of being hired to conduct research among a different population than that studied by the PI, I wrote my first article based on a paper I had given at a national anthropology conference. Since my paper described patterns that disagreed with the PI’s previous findings, she rightly asked for evidence, which I gave her from numerous examples in my research notes that I routinely uploaded to a shared folder online. As part of our employment agreement on co-authorship, I gave her multiple iterations of that first article and then other drafts with different emphases, but the PI never worked on them. She told me she was “burned out” from working for decades on this topic and was “having writer’s block.”

Yet, when I attended a university lecture given by the PI, I was taken aback that her talk incorporated without acknowledgement all of my new ideas. Perhaps a different person would have confronted her then. Instead, I excused her by imagining the pressure she must have been under to produce this talk, and by remembering the many high caliber co-authored papers she had written with previous junior colleagues. Yet the PI would never engage with my first authored draft articles I sent her, asking me instead to work on her draft articles where my name was prominently displayed as second author.

Fast forward three years spent working very happily with my research population while experiencing utter frustration that I had not been able to get a single one of my first-authored drafts onto the PI’s agenda for editing toward publication. She held me off by saying that my “ideas were brilliant, but [my] writing needed extensive editing” – precisely what co-authorship in research institutions is intended to help with. And, what I was doing for hers, I thought rather bitterly.

One day, while taking an EndNote workshop in the university library, I entered the PI’s name to get her previous publications into my grant reference section and was shocked to find that she had four recent publications that used my language word for word in some places, with paraphrases in others. In her publications, she claimed sole credit for my original findings and conceptual analyses taken from the draft articles I had given her, even though the data was from an entirely different population than she studied. Nowhere were my contributions cited or acknowledged in any way. I took my concerns to the dean, who contacted the PI. The PI immediately offered to contact the journals to give me first authorship on the first publication and second authorship on five others (as it happened, she had two more articles using my ideas under review). I agreed to these conditions.

But then the university’s chief counsel stepped in. Unfortunately, the scope of the ethical breach made it impossible for the dean to not involve the university’s legal team, given that it received numerous grants from the national funding agency that had sponsored the PI’s research. Six peer-reviewed articles published in as many journals would be far too much exposure: should the funders discover these “irregularities” the institution could be censured and its research programs jeopardized. The university’s senior counsel demanded that I sign a nondisclosure agreement with draconian consequences if I broke it, while stating that our previously brokered authorship agreement would not be legally binding. The PI, protected by the counsel, reneged on her proposal to transfer authorship. I requested “outside” mediation that would be legally binding on the PI, but it failed. I lost the authorship of my ideas as well as the possibility of continuing to work at this institution, along with the chance to receive a recommendation from anyone closely familiar with my contributions to the field from three and a half years of research and writing as a research faculty member there.

Because of past ethical breaches, anthropology has become attentive to the ethical protection of human subjects and the imperative to “cause no harm.” We teach our undergraduates how to cite the ideas of others to prevent plagiarism for which they may be expelled. However, graduate students and junior researchers have minimal or no protection when faculty superiors plagiarize their work. The enormous pressure on faculty to develop new ideas and innovative approaches makes creative and energetic graduate students and junior research associates vulnerable links in the professional chain. Given the hierarchical nature of the academy, the people who are dependent upon tenured faculty for their degrees and research employment have much in the way of intellectual and professional capital to lose. Yet, little or no institutional support exists to protect them against theft of their intellectual property or to ameliorate the professional consequences of its loss.

Professional Precarity, Ethics, and Social Justice

By Netta Avineri and Steven P. Black

“As long as we participate in social systems we don’t get to choose whether to be involved in the consequences they produce. We’re involved simply through the fact that we’re here. As such, we can only choose how to be involved, whether to be just part of the problem or also to be part of the solution. That’s where our power lies, and also our responsibility.”

–Johnson (2005) Privilege, Power, and Difference, p. 89

There is a labor crisis in academia. Scholars throughout the country now recognize that a system of privilege and marginalization is permeating our classrooms, faculty meetings, and institutional cultures, placing many academics in precarious professional positions (see http://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts). As a discipline, anthropology presents unique perspectives on this professional precarity. Recently, the Committee on Labor Relations, the Committee for Human Rights Task Group/ Society for Linguistic Anthropology Committee on Language & Social Justice (Avineri), the Committee on Ethics (Black), and the presidents of the various AAA sections independently recognized the importance of this issue and are now beginning to take collective action. We are collaborating to craft a statement on adjuncting and precarity to present to the AAA Executive Committee (through liaison Rayna Rapp). We encourage you to use the comments section of the blog to share thoughts and experiences with us that might be helpful in shaping our perspective and constructing a statement.

The Ethics of Professional Practice

Professional precarity is an ethics issue. Principle seven of the Principles of Ethical Responsibility, “Maintain Respectful and Ethical Professional Relationships,” is impractical or even impossible in the face of the current situation. The supporting information for this principle states, “Anthropologists should at all times work to ensure that no exclusionary practices be perpetrated on the basis of any nonacademic attributes.” While once there may have been a legitimate distinction between adjuncts and tenure-track faculty in terms of academic attributes, that distinction (if ever there was one) is no longer present. This principle also states that anthropologists, “must not exploit individuals, groups, animals, or cultural or biological materials.” The promotion of a small number of tenured anthropologists while the majority remain untenured/in non-tenure-track positions is a form of exploitation, even if not directly initiated by the actions of particular anthropologists. The research productivity of tenure-track faculty is in many ways dependent upon this existing structure.

The Language of Marginalized Identities

While propelled by institutional policies, unethical practices are also constituted in professional activities and spaces, especially through the unreflexive discourse that occurs within them. The ways that people talk about academic and non-academic positions are rooted in conceptualizations of temporality and spatiality. The labels “tenure-track/tenure-stream” indicate a sense of directionality and future-oriented possibilities. On the other hand, “contingent”/”part-time”/”adjunct”/”visiting” point toward the now, to positions that are dependent on more important things, a temporary placement outside of the system, and finding oneself elsewhere and not truly present. Professional introductions, as a system of person reference, are one example of exclusionary and marginalizing language. At conferences, introducing oneself or others using titles (e.g., associate professor, visiting lecturer) become sites for positioning and identity maintenance. Seemingly less direct questions like, “What’s your teaching load?” index particular identities, priorities, and possibilities. Even the evaluation of affiliations can become problematic–are you in an academic position? Is your university a teaching institution? R2? R1?

Such ranking systems are invalid in the contemporary professional market. The incredible scarcity of available tenure-track positions means that one’s ability to land an academic job at an R1 institution is less a commentary on one’s worth as a scholar or anthropologist and more an indication of one’s professional connections (and in some cases, luck). Our continued use of these terms, and the underlying ideologies they evidence, constitutes a conceptual and linguistic inertia that hampers our ability to be more inclusive, ethical, and just.

Safe Spaces, Leveling Policies, and Creating Communities of Practice

Our goal is to reevaluate professional discourse and AAA policy to promote a more inclusive space that fosters academic freedom, growth, and productivity in the face of the current crisis. In doing so, we hope to  contest precarity at an institutional level while simultaneously shifting our practices and policies to change the scholarly landscape from the ground up. Our suggestions are meant to complement collective action that would rectify the current reliance on contingent labor in academic institutions (eg. higher wages, a higher proportion of stable positions in departments, or changes to the tenure system itself):

Below are three proposals for actions that individuals, groups and the AAA might take in this direction:

1) End the use of rank and/or affiliation for gatekeeping. Currently, one’s rank and affiliation may determine one’s ability to serve on particular editorial boards, gain access to funding (e.g., NSF), or write pieces for venues such as Annual Review of Anthropology. These positive and negative feedback loops become a vicious cycle. Rather than the arbitrary metrics of rank/ affiliation, utilize the evaluation of expertise, knowledge, and quality scholarship.

2) Stop using the AAA Annual Meeting as a venue for interviews. Those in “contingent” positions frequently do not receive funding to attend conferences and are therefore automatically in a less desirable position than those who have the money to make face-to-face contact with potential employers. Once difficult and confusing, digital interviews (eg. through Skype) are now easy and cost-effective for initial candidate screening.

3) Create safe spaces in which academics in a variety of positions are able to share ideas freely and experiment with their pedagogy without fear of being fired because their positions are less-than-secure. The field of anthropology can then move forward through enacting many of its basic tenets of perspective-taking and depth of understanding through experience over the long-term. Adjuncts’ teaching positions are highly dependent on student evaluations but don’t generally have the support they need to do their best in their teaching. For example, as a field we should support one another through anonymous online spaces for support and advice, online writing groups and retreats, teaching resources websites, “non-academic” advisors, and scholarships — where hierarchies can be flattened and various knowledges can be valued to allow for a variety of mentorship models.

Our sincere aspiration is that these and other policies will help to alleviate the current labor crisis in conjunction with direct action, while allowing for more flexible career trajectories and a level playing field. In doing so, we hope to encourage those in a range of jobs to feel confident and proud of what they are doing, to have the support they need to move them in the directions they would like at this point, and/or stay right where they are. Please share with us your thoughts on these proposals, or suggest alternatives, in the comments section of the blog.

LINKS:

http://precaritytales.tumblr.com/

http://ccdigitalpress.org/conjob/

http://adjunct.chronicle.com/

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/184-a-congressman-asks-for-adjuncts-stories-and-responses-pour-in

http://adjunctcrisis.com/

http://stevendkrause.com/2014/04/03/thoughts-on-con-job-stories-of-adjunct-contingent-labor/

http://www.newfacultymajority.info/adjunct-stories/