“Ethics & the Academy”: Making Space for Ethical Reflection
The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society has an array of innovative programs specifically for graduate students to engage in ethical reflection about their research and roles in the academy. The Center offers a yearlong fellowship and grants for grad students to stimulate interdisciplinary community-building and support around ethical questions and quandaries. One of the most interdisciplinary offerings the Center has is the Ethics & the Academy Course, offered through the Stanford Graduate Summer Institute, attracts students from across the university.
Graduate student life is inflected with ethical concerns: As individual moral agents, what do we value, and what are we willing to compromise? As emergent researchers and professionals, what do we hope to contribute for the good of our fields, now and in the future? And as we navigate powerful social institutions like Stanford University, what do we believe they owe to us and to society?
Questions like these have reverberated throughout my PhD experience, though oftentimes in the background of a fast-paced and demanding academic climate. Despite their urgency, it can be difficult to bring the ethical dimensions of our lives to the fore — to critically examine, as the parable goes, the water we are swimming in, so that we can decide why or how to swim ahead.
The desire for ethical reflection among graduate students is one of the core motivations for the SGSI September course “Ethics & the Academy,” designed and taught by Anne Newman, the research director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. I have served as the teaching assistant for this week-long summer course twice, with each iteration bringing new voices from across the disciplines to the seminar table. This year, 18 students convened from engineering, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, and education, among other areas of study. On each day of class, we addressed an academic-ethical topic: research ethics; anti-racist pedagogy and practices; university finances and inequalities; academic identity, collective responsibility, and justice; and university admissions.
Of course, these topics do not stand in isolation. As a series, they demonstrate how ethical concerns are so often interrelated, as Ghufran Alkhamis, a first-year PhD student in mechanical engineering, observed in one discussion about the purposes of Stanford’s endowment. Considering whether to spend money now or invest it in the University’s long-term stability, she probed: “I need to first ask: who is Stanford?” When making financial decisions, who gets priority in this institution — students, faculty, research, in the present or in the future? In order to justify any answer, we must acknowledge that institutions have competing priorities and that whatever action we choose involves tradeoffs. To guide these difficult reflections, we anchored our thinking at three levels of responsibility: the individual, the professional in a given field or industry, and the institutions or society in which these ethical problems play out.
We began with research ethics — what it involves in various fields, and why and how it is regulated by institutions like Stanford. To aid our discussion, we welcomed the expertise of Quinn Waeiss, program director of the Stanford Ethics & Society Review (ESR), and Adam Bailey, director of the Stanford Internal Review Board (IRB). Both the ESR and the IRB aim to balance multiple ideals: academic freedom on the one hand, and ethical conduct and consequences of research on the other. And while they have complementary purposes, they do different work: the IRB focuses on the protection of human research subjects directly impacted by a study and gives definitive “yes” or “no” approval that determines if the researchers can proceed. The ESR examines the possible downstream societal effects of a study, engaging in a reflective enterprise with researchers to acknowledge ethical risks and offer mitigation plans. By design, it recognizes that ethical matters are rarely settled — and that research has both foreseen and unforeseen consequences.
The students pressed Waiess and Bailey on the reach and impact of these bureaucracies, asking why “ethics” often seems like a box to be checked rather than a core consideration in research design. We then ruminated on research culture and how it comes into contact with formal ethical regulation. As Betty Xiong, a second-year MS student in Biomedical Informatics, posed, “What can we do outside of bureaucracies and in the culture of research to better enable the IRB and ESR to achieve their missions? How can we democratize the process of doing ethical research?”
The next day, we interrogated another crucial practice in the academy: teaching for racial justice. We hosted Harriett Jernigan, lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric, to facilitate a discussion on her work in responding to “hot” moments — when someone says something politically charged or offensive to students and instructors of color — in class. Such moments can feel high stakes and emotional, creating tension, discomfort, or conflict that interrupts teaching and learning. Stepping in can feel vulnerable and challenging, whether as a student, TA, or instructor, and Jernigan offered many action-guiding tools for all members of the classroom. We characterized the classroom as a semi-bounded space: although we can set shared expectations for learning together, we bring external norms, values, and personal idiosyncrasies into class. But we also have the potential to bring what we learn in the classroom to the outside world, hopefully extending our transformative learning experiences to new sites for justice.
We then shifted from pedagogical responsibilities to the University’s financial responsibilities. Zooming in from UC Merced, the sociologist Laura Hamilton discussed her research in her latest book, co-authored with Kelly Nielsen, called Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities. Together we considered the possible differences in mission between public and private institutions — and if these missions reflect the goods that higher education is meant to provide. Tommy Ren, a first-year PhD student in Sociology, prompted, “What would it take for us to think of education as a public good, rather than primarily as a private good?” After all, education offers value in society beyond individual attainment. In Hamilton’s view, the central aim of higher education is not to enable individual upward mobility, but to produce society-serving knowledge and determine what society needs to alleviate social, political, and economic harms. Perhaps, then, we have good reason to maintain highly-resourced institutions like Stanford. With this argument in mind, we further explored the question prompted by Alkhamis: who is Stanford, and who or what is it for?
I value “Ethics & the Academy” as a space of inquiry, which is why I so enjoyed the fourth day of class: we invited the students to turn some of these questions back upon themselves, to reflect more directly on the commitments that they hold — and the compromises they might be willing to make — in the nonideal conditions of the university. With time for personal writing and small group reflections, we discussed what it means to cultivate and protect an academic identity, as well as how to build affirming mentoring relationships with peers and faculty who can aid them in the process.
We closed the course with a panel on university admissions with three education PhD students: Sonia Giebel, Leslie Luqueño, and me. Unpacking “merit” in admissions practices, we asked: what does it mean to be meritorious, who is consistently rewarded and harmed by this definition, and how might we reimagine it in a way that brings about diverse access to higher education? Giebel and Luqueño, citing their research and practical experiences, provided examples of the hard decisions that students and families must make in the competitive and expensive context of the college search. Based on prior work in College Communications advocating for increased access to the liberal arts, I described how strategic initiatives can influence admissions policies and shift public discourse around merit. The students saw versions of their experiences applying to undergraduate as well as graduate schools — and they considered what institutions like Stanford owe to their graduate communities.
With “Ethics & the Academy,” Anne Newman has created a dedicated setting in which to explore the ethical matters that resonate in our lives and work as graduate students. In this way, it offers an opening, rather than closing, of ethical reflection in academia. This is why we hope that students take this course to be an ongoing project — a continual engagement with ethical concerns, now with a few more tools in their analytical toolkit. And if their projects would be best served by financial support, the Center offers small grants for exactly this purpose: to bring fellow graduate students together to discuss issues that matter to them, and to build intellectual communities across campus.
Learn more about the Ethics & the Academy Course, a free course open to graduate students through the Stanford Graduate Summer Institute.
Caitlin Murphy Brust is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy of Education and a former Graduate Student Fellow in the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.