Unethical Conduct

It’s common for social scientists to be frustrated by institutional ethical oversight of their research plans. The whole process seems to be based on the inference of potential harm based on the medical science /psychology model; as if speaking to people about their experiences or opinions were the same as making them guinea pigs for a new drug treatment or behaviourist psychological experimentation. Some universities in Australia currently use the standardised National Ethics Application Form, which is an on-line instrument the convolutions of which are enough to boil the blood. It takes more than a full day’s work to complete one of these forms which works on the principle that the more you disclose the more explaining you have to do. Completed forms are then passed onto what the Americans call Institutional Review Boards, bodies that comprise gatekeepers who demand the production of a range of documents (consent, information forms) and undertakings about the conduct and performance of research, many of which appear superficially reasonable but in practice are often very difficult to comply with. Such bodies can nip well-intentioned research projects in the bud by delaying research or presenting insurmountable obstacles. For example, these committees can sometimes require that ‘community consent’ be demonstrated before research can commence. This request is based on a simplistic and un-theorised notion of community and (particularly in situations of political conflict, where who speaks for the community is up for grabs) difficult to adhere to.

There is also the inference that the research is likely to involve some domination or misrepresentation of participants, by virtue of unequal power relations. However, most social scientists are fairly conscious of their relative privilege and have usually thought it through in more detail than have the ethics gatekeepers. They are usually keen to alienate the advantage they possess and produce work that is useful to those who are the focus of that research. Interviewees/ participants too will frequently relish the opportunity to have their voices heard (‘put that in your book!’): to exert an influence. However, in a society where academic knowledge has very little popular influence, it is easy to over-state the influence of researchers. A quick perusal of the readership stats for academic journal articles is enough to deflate even the most robust academic ego. It is ironic that in a world where the shock-jocks and hacks of the commercial media have very little to constrain their excesses, academic researchers are so closely policed. This is clearly based less on universities’ concern that research be conducted ethically than with the desire to minimize risk and liability if things go wrong.

The entire ethics review process is based on the ‘audit society’ fallacy: that the documentation of ethical intent will guarantee the performance of that intent. It is quite possible to jump through the ethical review hoops but to perform research that is far from ethical in its conduct (in the same way that it is possible to make yourself look like a good teacher on paper, when in fact you are not). In short, whether research is conducted ethically or not will depend on the researcher and has nothing to do with how comprehensive the instrument that seeks to compel ethical research, nor with how each researcher has responded to it. Some years ago I presented a proposal to interview market gardeners about their childhood memories of farming/gardening. The university ethics committee insisted that before beginning the conversations I supply the interviewees with details of trauma counselling services because of the danger that childhood recollections bring up any painful memories. You can imagine how effective this was as an ice-breaker. It is already very difficult to persuade people from socially disadvantaged and/or non-English speaking backgrounds to sign interview consent forms. In my experience they are deeply suspicious of such documents and this works against the establishment of trust on which good research is based.

There is no doubt that some researchers in the past have abused their power but the cost of trying to engineer compliance to certain ethical standards is enormous (has anyone ever done the sums on this??). Those working in research partnership with large organisations often have to go through a second ethical review process. Would it not be better for universities to provide in-service training on ethical research practice and require researchers to pledge commitment to conduct ethical research rather than making them undertake separate and time-consuming applications for each project? Some disciplinary associations – that representing sociologists, for example – have sought to produce their own codes for ethical research, a worthy enterprise and one that enriches collegial culture. But in an era of institutional anxiety universities tend to use neo-liberal quasi-contractual means to regulate more and more of their employees activities. Resistance seems futile. The ethics battlefield is littered with the corpses of heroic refuseniks who have tried to challenge ethics hypocrisy. The easiest course of action is to retreat from undertaking research with human subjects completely. I have seen many colleagues, honours and graduate students do this. Many good research projects have been dashed on the rocks of faux ethical oversight.

The Intellectual Pecariat - Challenges for Academic Unionism

In his brilliant yet blood-curdling study of precarious labour (Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labour in Precarious Times New York University Press) Andrew Ross writes (p.8)

Once an impregnable stronghold of occupational security, higher education in the United States is now awash with contingency; almost two thirds of its teaching workforce have been casualised, leaving a minority in teh tenure stream to exercise the academic freedoms that are the signature of the porfession in a society that still regards itself as a leader of the free world.

These conditions are replicated elsewhere, including Australia where the rapid expansion of higher education over the last quarter century has largely been staffed by an intellectual 'precariat': jobbing seasonal workers, highly exploited and highly vulnerable. In the search for 'maximum flexibility' university managers staff classrooms with a reserve army of postgraduate students and others who are treading water waiting for increasingly elusive tenured job. The situation is particularly dire in those areas - like the humanities, social and natural sciences - with large numbers of PhD graduates with few alternative sources of employment beyond academia. Many teach long hours with two or more universities in order to cover themselves for the periods between semesters (roughly half of the year) when they are unemployed. It is now the norm for casuals to have much higher teaching loads than the tenured staff alongside whom they work.

The pedagogical arguments against such a system have been well rehearsed. Despite the fact that some in the academic precariat are heroically devoted to their students and work beyond the hours they are paid for, it is clearly preferable for students to be taught by staff with more secure employment. Casual staff are not obliged to be around outside the hours they are employed to teach and consult with students. They are often drafted at the last minute and struggle to find their feet in the first few weeks, especially when teaching subjects new to them. Many are preoccupied with research and understand their career prospects depend much less on their teaching performance than their publication record. In general, the experience of students learning in classrooms staffed largely by tenured staff is likely to be better than for those taught largely by casuals.

So what are the prospects for of collective action to challenge casualisaton? Andrew Ross is sanguine (p.8):

For the largely younger ranks of adjuncts and graduate students, the experience of deprofessionalisation has triggered an embryonic labor movement that may yet transform the workplace, regardless of whether it can arouse large numbers of the securely tenured from their apathy

The problem, however, is that the politics of such resistance are complicated. In some ways the interests of tenured and untenured staff are opposed. As governments have required the institutions to respond to rising student numbers by becoming more 'efficient' -staff student ratios have doubled in the last twenty years ago - so universities have used casualisation as a way of sandbagging the wages and conditions of tenured academic staff (and those of the ever-growing managerial class) against the effects of diminishing real funding levels.

Supervisors/ advisors who tell their post-graduate students that they should get some teaching experience are in part acting as mentors. But they are also performing a managerial role, ensuring the academic reserve army is replenished. It does not take much sociological imagination to realise this. Postgrads and recent doctoral graduates who resist such overtures risk alienating those upon whom their future career prospects depend.

So what are academic unions doing to counter casualisation? In Australia, under Howard's Work Choices legislation the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) was prevented from seeking industrial agreements to limit numbers of casual staff. The industrial climate under Rudd's Labor government is now less hostile. However, casuals have only limited power and industrial representation as the executive committees of the NTEU - at local, state and national level - now reflect the ageing tenured demographic. Over the last fifteen years, the union has sought to combat casualisation by pricing it off the agenda, seeking higher percentage salary increases for casual staff than for full time staff. However, this has had only limited effect. Casuals allow universities greater flexibility and to avoid paying the entitlements which accrue long-term staff. Serious decasualisation would require a much, much larger increase in casual salaries than the NTEU is able to deliver.

But casualisation produces its own contradictions. Universities (and specific university departments) which rely heavily on casual staff are houses of cards. Campaigns aimed at encouraging casual boycotts of targetted institutions with the demand that more continuing positions be created in these places, would very rapidly bring things to a head. However, such action could only occur if the NTEU has the stomach to work for the interests of the most precarious workers. This would require the organisation to challenge the arguments often voiced by senior tenured staff (ie those who pay the highest union dues) that there is nothing wrong with casual labour; that it provides a stepping stone for young aspirants towards an academic career.

This is (and always was) a specious position. Over the years I've seen many good people come to the realisation that the stepping stones run out well before the opposite bank can be reached, and give up in frustration at their ambition for an academic career. It has been a long-standing principle of trade unionism that it is better to have fewer secure jobs than many employed as casual labourers. It is time to make the pursuit of this principle a paramount concern for academic unionism.

Global Education/ Precarious Lives

Serap (not her real name) is studying at university but has not yet been accepted into the Bachelor of Arts. My university runs a scheme whereby aspiring students can pay to enrol for a half-time course load. If they pass they are admitted to the degree. Many of these provisional students, including Serap, have poor literacy skills. Many are also the first from their families to progress beyond school and have little understanding of what is expected of them at university. The liberal humanist pedagogy we practice, encouraging students to be critical and independent, is foreign to those used to treating the teacher’s word as gospel. In Turkey, where Serap spent most of her High School years, rote learning was the norm. The habits of deference are hard to break and she addresses me as ‘sir’, declining to call me by my first name, despite being prompted to do so.

She spent her early years in Sydney’s Western Suburbs but was taken back to Turkey as a young teenager where her parents ran a business in a regional city. They brought Serap back to Sydney to allow her to pursue her studies but are ambivalent about this decision. She tells me her father has threatened to take her back to the homeland, to arranged marriage and a life of domestic servitude if she does not succeed at university. ‘But you’re an adult’ I tell her, ‘you can’t be forced to do anything’. She responds with a look of weary resignation that communicates much more than words. How could I understand the consequences of defying her family? Beyond the Turkish community she lacks even the most rudimentary social networks without which the stability and social mobility she craves are well beyond reach. She is caught between the dreams of independence and patriarchal communal expectation.

So far as Serap is concerned I am a gatekeeper, and she deals with me with politeness and frequent visits to my office for counsel and direction. She implores me to go easy on her work, tells me how important it is for her to pass the course. Can I read a draft of her essay? Is she on the right track? Can I give her some hints about the content of the exam? Funding cuts and increases in student numbers has produced a conveyor-belt educational culture and it is very difficult to provide the close attention she demands. But I give her my time and attention anyway.

Her early marks are not encouraging. Students are asked to summarise an opinion piece from The Guardian and it is clear that she cannot write in clear sentences and has difficulty in comprehending the material. The work is littered with grammatical errors. Google, computer checking functions and the assistance of friends and family can mask shortcomings in prepared essays. But many of those who are called on to produce in pressured circumstances are often very dramatically exposed. I do not like to assess students by examination but the epidemic of internet-assisted plagiarism has forced academics to do so more often now.

Mine is an invidious task. Most of those, like Serap, whose lives are on a knife edge, are shy or unassertive and do not come forward with such narratives. I am conscious that by allocating fail grades I consign many earnest and well-intentioned young people to lives very different to the ones they had planned for themselves. But I am frequently angered when students I know are unable to write intelligibly are allowed to slip through by colleagues who are reluctant to take the difficult decision to fail them. The qualification must have some integrity. I am even angrier that my cash-strapped employers enrol students whose intellectual and cultural resources are insufficient to give them good prospects of passing. We try to cater for cultural difference but there is no time to provide the strugglers with the intensive assistance they require. In the end, and whatever we might think about it, English is the language of power and it is our responsibility in part to evaluate the students’ proficiency in it.

Occasionally someone like Serap pierces the cloak of bureaucratic indifference in which we wrap ourselves to remind us that education is a global business and many of our students are playing for very high stakes. As academics we have for some time been aware that universities are no longer the province of the elite, as Western governments have dealt with youth unemployment by directing more and more young people towards degree and diploma courses. But we are only just beginning to understand our pivotal role in global migration flows and in the inter-generational conflicts in which many students from cultural minorities are embroiled. While their children cultivate First World aspirations, migration to the West can frequently lead first generation migrants towards a fierce and embattled traditionalism. Such an outlook threatens to constrain their daughters much more than their sons.

Academic Piecework

Last weekend I went to see Up in the Air in which George Clooney plays a character who makes a living by sacking people. He works for a company which is contracted by other companies to do the dirty work associated with downsizing. When confronting distraught employees with their fate, Clooney gives them a formulaic pep-talk, offers a severance package and the promise of future vocational advice. It's cruel and heartless but at least it marks a clean break.

I was reminded of the movie today when I bumped into a colleague. I have never been particularly close to her but I could see she was distressed. With tears in her eyes she beckoned me into her office and told me that after eighteen years academic employment in the institution her contract will not be renewed. She had survived precariously for so long on a series of short contracts but from the middle of next week she will be unemployed. Glowing student evaluations of her work would not help her, nor would the admiration of her colleagues.

Late last year when she was worried about her future she repeatedly requested a meeting with the Dean and sub-Dean to clarify things, but neither responded to her emails. Eventually, the Head of Department was sent down to tell her that the course she had worked on is to be cut - a victim of efficiency measures. As her last day approaches she hopes for a stay of execution but unlike in the past, when something always came up, it appears this time nothing will. As yet she has not even received a letter from the institution telling her her term of employment is coming to a close and thanking her for her long service to the university. There is no farewell gathering planned - no gold watch, no card . As a contract employee she is not entitled to severance pay and in mid-career finds herself without a job. There is nothing calculatingly callous about the way she has been treated . She has simply been asphyxiated by official indifference.

Untenured staff are the institutional living dead. During teaching weeks they walk the corridors, deliver lectures, meet with students, attend meetings and seminars, but at the close of the semester, they are simply pushed out in the cold. It matters little that many short-contract staff are extraordinarily dedicated to their students to the detriment of their research careers. One day they're embraced as colleagues the next they join the dole queue. Along with the hospitality industry, universities have the highest levels of casual and short term employment of any sector of the Australian workforce, particularly in the humanities and social sciences where the number of doctoral graduates far exceeds tenured academic jobs.

There is, of course, no shortage of work. Student numbers have grown rapidly over the last two decades but the universities have largely absorbed this growth by employing people under precarious conditions. This provides employers with greater flexibility - to restructure and reallocate resources- than exists when most staff have 'continuing employment' (because tenure, as such, no longer really exists). But there are plenty of opportunities for middle managers in the corporate university. If you're prepared to join the chain of command, to contribute to the expanding catalogues of policies and procedures, to take measures to minimize institutional risk and maximize 'effiency', in short to leave your mark on the institution, then, boy, have we got a job for you. But woe betide those who ask whether this work is useful, whether it enriches collegial and student life. Such free thoughts are not welcome in the neo-liberal university.

So what are the prospects of my distraught colleague finding another job? As universities in Britain and the United States (particularly California) make people redundant there, aspiring academics in Australia are increasingly finding themselves competing in an international labour market, even for junior positions. Good people are having their ambitions dashed before they're even able to get a foot on the ladder. But this need not be the case if more real, secure jobs were created. It is clear that achieving greater security of employment should be the highest priority for academic trade unionism/ collective action over the next few years.