Credit

Credit is an issue that concerns everyone connected to academia from students to professors.  We have names for situations where due credit is not given: plagiarism.  The act of plagiarism can be committed by students, professors, and academic researchers.  While it is a serious offence, it is extremely common, in part due to there being a fuzzy boundary between what is plagiarism and what is not.

Why am I discussing this issue on a blog about mental health and academia?  I am writing about this, because I see my students struggle with it, and I myself struggle with it.  Indeed my struggles over this issue go so deep that they have been the subject of deep worries.  The reason behind these worries is that it is not sufficient to do good work, rather that work must be credited to the one doing the work.

Careers are made by proper credit and destroyed by improper credit.  Credit is the currency of academia, the currency of success, and some people advance their careers by taking credit for the work done by others.  There are professors who believe, correctly or incorrectly, that they are responsible for the work done by their subordinates.  There are labs where the culture is such that the supervisor takes credit for all the work published by people in that laboratory.  Some people do not believe that those actions are plagiarism.  I disagree.  I feel that such a policy is tantamount to the lower power individuals buying the support of the more senior people by essentially ghost writing papers for them.  I think these sorts of policies have no place in academia, because it is essentially plagiarism.

Coming back the students, I have heard my students express concern over the credit on their group projects.  Invariably, it is the students who are succeeding in class that find themselves in a group with weaker contributors and that find themselves carrying their weaker classmates along.  Not only can the extra burden of work be onerous, but also the assignment of credit in the form of a project grade can seem unfair.  Is it not plagiarism if the weaker student takes equal credit for the project?

So, how should we deal with these issues?  In the case of researchers, we need more strict rules defining what is plagiarism in research and more frequent use of ethical sanctions on individuals who violate the ethical rules.  Individuals in low power situations, such as graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, should have ways of speaking up about mis-credited work without fearing for their jobs or degrees.

As for students, they, too, should have ways of speaking up.  For example as part of grading projects, the professor can ask for the students' input on how much each person of the group contributed, including themselves.  While most of the responses will have an inflated self-assessment, the average over the responses of several group members should be more reliable.  (Because of the inflation, there is some difficulty when considering groups of one or two people.) However, grading mechanisms such as this can help give credit where credit is due.

Because of the amount of extreme worry that can result from mis-attributed credit.  I call on all of us to try our hardest to be fair.  We shouldn't just be more than fair to ourselves.  In the wording of Orson Welles our current situation is the following:

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Let us try to be at least as fair to our subordinate and our students, as we are to ourselves.  Let us have strict definitions of what a research contribution is.  Let us not accept having our name on a paper that we did not contribute to.  Let us be open about who contributed what to each paper, and let us give credit where it is due.   Let us not have our judgement about credit be clouded by (potential) acclaim.  And, let us remember that some of us, perhaps those with the greatest ability to contribute to scientific progress, are even more sensitive to unfairness and mis-attribution of credit than other people are.  While many people brush these issues off and play the credit game as it is, there are others, like myself, who are greatly pained by the status quo.

Workplace Bullying in the Academy

Following on the last post about student-on-student bullying, this post discusses workplace bullying situations of the faculty and graduate student variety.  I will say up-front that this is a topic about which I try to be objective, but my experience as student with low power inherently influences my viewpoint.  I will tell the story of a friend who experienced psychological harm as result, and this undoubtedly influences my subjectivity.  Also, there may be some missing details and some awkward phrasing designed to hide peoples identities.

This bullying situation involves faculty and graduate students, so why do I call it workplace bullying?  I call it this, because graduate students in the sciences are typically paid by their faculty advisors to do research.  This is an employment situation where the faculty advisor is the boss and the student is the employee.  Some faculty advisors are extremely collegial with their students and treat them as almost equal proto-researchers.  But other faculty advisors perform the boss role.  Like any employment situation this usually works out quite well.  However, there are times that bullying situations arise.  While it is possible for a faculty advisor to feel harassed and bullied by their students, we tend to hear of situations where the student gets harmed.  However please keep in mind that there are infamous examples of students trying to kill their advisors, so the potential for bullying is certainly not unidirectional.

As before in Student Bullying in the Academy, I will try to avoid discussions of bullies and targets.  I think it is most productive to discuss the harm that results from bullying situations and to talk constructively about what could have been done differently.  This way of discussing bullying opens the conversation to include aggression by individuals who are not always aggressors or who may not have the intent to harm.  Since the target can only perceive intent through the actions of another, this means that the target and bully experiences might not agree.  This perspective also opens possibility that the target might as an aggressor either in retaliation or ignorance.  And the aggressor might be responding to a perceived harm done to them by the target either through action or inaction.

Many, sometimes contradictory, descriptions of bullying exist.  I prefer the description given in Prevalence, antecedents, and effects of workplace bullying: A review which says that bullying can be

"described in terms of: the intentionality of the behavior; the frequency (for example, weekly) and the duration (for example, about six months) of such behaviors; the targets’ reaction(s) to that situation; a perceived imbalance and misuse of power between perpetrator and target; inadequate support; and inability of the target to defend him or herself in that situation, where they have to
face constant negative social interactions, badgering, insulting remarks, and intense pressure. This
strengthens the aspect of power imbalance between the perpetrator and the targets as the perpetrator is believed to be in a position of strength as compared to the victim."  

There are two aspects of this description on which I will provide my opinion, the first is intent which was covered above and the second is frequency which need not be frequent if the person suffering harm has been severely harmed. Because the threshold for harm is lowered, and an aggressor can provoke harm easily with relatively benign or infrequent stimulus.

An Example
In presenting this scenario, I am inherently influenced by having only heard one side.  Because of this I will be presenting what happened to the best of my knowledge.

My friend was approaching their final years in graduate school and had two faculty advisors.  One of these had just moved to a different school.  My friend had gotten along well with both their advisors and had only received one performance-related request of something to change--one advisor had mentioned that my friend did not communicate well enough what was being working on.  Another aspect of this situation is that advisor had a collegial style of working while the other advisor had an boss-employee model of working.

The event that triggered the bullying situation was when the collegial advisor told my friend that they were not working hard enough and that they were lazy.  My friend asked when the problem started and got no answer.  There was no attempt to assess where my friend might be at or what they were doing.  They were also told that the advisor might not write a recommendation letter in support of applications for post-doctoral positions.

This was a situation of intense pressure from which my friend did not think they could escape.  Not only were career aspirations on the line, but as always my friend had a thesis to write which required their advisor's support. As typical in academia my friend was not told what was expected of them or how to retrieve the situation, but they decided the solution was to sacrifice their holidays to finishing a project that was half finished.

This gambit paid off.  My friend finished the project, submitted the paper, and had a successful meeting with their committee.  At this point my friend's advisor seemed very happy with their work and was told that it was good.  This should be the end of the story, however, it was not since a second bullying situation arose that may or may not have been related to the first situation.

My friend had decided that visiting their other advisor would be a good idea, so they arranged a 2 month visit to that advisor's lab.  No sooner had my friend arrived than that advisor took my friend into  confidence and started saying how the advisor was doing as little as possible to organize an event.  This way, the advisor could get credit for organizing the event without it taking up much time.  My friend was horrified, because they knew who would pick up the pieces: the staff.  My friend was also encouraged to manage collaborations with other colleagues so that my friend could minimize their contribution.  Again, my friend was horrified, because this was the antithesis of what they believe in.  Despite my friend's opinion of professed attempts to manipulate other people, they did their best to perform their role in the research project while continuing to work on their thesis projects.

My friend was also told that two of the students had been goofing off.  The students were threatened with the advisor taking away their project and giving it to my friend.  My friend did not find this amusing neither as a threat nor as a potential work-load increase.  My friend was quite disturbed that this comment transformed their social position from being a friendly outsider to being a threatening outsider.

From there things continued to deteriorate.  My friend received a threat that if they weren't productive enough, one of their projects would get taken away and given to someone who could do it.  They experienced sexual harassment perpetrated by the advisor--a reference on the part of the advisor to the potential for a sexual relationship between my friend and the advisor.  They had a rocky relationship with another member of the group  who added to the stress by arbitrarily mirroring the gestures of my friend and by seeming to enact a now-I-like-you now-I-do-not relationship.  This person repeatedly presented a catch-22 to my friend on the point of whether the advisor was a good person.  The stress of not knowing whether this student was a friend coupled with either an ambiguous threat or an ambiguous opportunity to support compounded the stress of the other interactions.

The advisor decided that since the project was not progressing rapidly enough, the students should stay up nights until it was finished.  The advisor did seem to have the philosophy that he should be there with them and that if he could handle being awake so could they.  Unfortunately, the power difference in the situation played a key role.  Over the course of two weeks, my friend watched their two colleagues get warn down and increasingly discouraged.  It got the point where my friend begged the advisor to stop making the students work so hard but was told that the students deserved it.

This last was too much for my friend.  They had been in this situation a short time, but it followed on the stress that had previously occurred.  My friend experience intense sleep-disrupting anxiety for the first time in their life.  They were extremely scared, and they had very negative opinions about their colleagues.  Indeed, my friend ended up interpreting the second bullying situation as being the result of the first.  This made these two incidences, one with each advisor, into one continuous bullying situation for my friend, regardless of the intent of the people involved.

My friend believes that the stress of this situation caused the onset of a sever psychological disorder.  While some people might be tempted to claim that such a disorder might be the source of an invented story about bullying, I would remind them that to jump to conclusions when they were not there is discrimination.  While hasty conclusions are dangerous, questions are always welcome.  My friend's perspective, no matter how it came about, is a valid experience of the world.  I would urge people to remember that it is more productive to entertain everyone's perspective and to constructively find ways to change situations.  It is also very important that people in positions of power consider carefully how their actions might influence those with less power, particularly since bullying situations and harm can occur without the intent to harm by anyone involved.

For this reason, I will not jump to conclusions about the motives of the people involved.  They had their own performance pressures to deal with, and they had other people to keep happy.  However, I do think many people could have acted in more constructive ways even to achieve the same performance outcomes.  Indeed, if there had been fewer threats, less harassment, and fewer negative social interactions, in the second situation my friend believed they would have been more productive.  As things happened, my friend wasted many weeks being too distracted and scared to work productively.  Similarly, the students with the second situation who stayed up nights might have also been more productive if they were not hounded into sleepless nights spent working.

Student Bullying in the Academy

Bullying has become a hot topic in the last 10 years with an increase in awareness at the harm that it causes.  The word bullying usually brings to mind scenarios involving school-aged children.  While bullying is certainly a problem with that age group it is also a problem with other age groups, including undergraduate students, staff, and academics.  The subject of this post is student-on-student bullying at the undergraduate level.

What is bullying?  

For the purposes of this blog, I will define bullying as a situation in which one or more individuals faces constant negative social interactions badgering, insulting remarks, and intense pressure with an inability to defend him or herself in that situation.  This a slight modification of the definition of bullying in Prevalence, antecedents, and effects of workplace bullying: A review by M. Razzaghian and A. Shah.  The definition of bullying is much debated and many descriptions of it exist. Several differences between my definition and Razzaghian and Shah's is that I do not mention bullies and targets or power differences.  This is because I believe bullying can occur in the presence of temporary power differences which might be political or might include the difference in the number of people on each side of the issue.  I also believe that bullies can bully bullies and that anyone can temporarily act as an aggressor.  In short, I do not believe that it is useful to label people as all good or all bad.  As a result I will talk about bullying as a situation which harms some individuals, and I will try to avoid labelling certain individuals as aggressors or targets.  And, I will acknowledge that these rolls might change and that they depend heavily on the perspective of the observer.  I will focus on the harm done to some of the individuals involved in the situation.

An Example of Bullying

I was involved in this bullying situation as a TA for a course that had a large group project involving 7 students.  My roll was to act as a project manager that was a consultant and and advisor, not a team leader.  The students were to select their own rolls and organize their contributions for the successful completion of the project.  Without my knowing, early in the project the group fractured with 2 students  committed to one version of the project and 5 students committed to another version of the project.  From my post-analysis of the situation, it appears that was the event that sparked communication difficulties and exclusionary behaviors on the part of the 5 against the 2.  The 2 students were left out of critical group discussions and were ostracized by the rest of the group even to the point of being given demeaning nicknames.  The point at which I found out about this, was when I informed the whole group that they were under preforming relative to the group size (unbeknownst to me this was because the potential contributions of two group members were being aborted).  This is when I heard accusations that the 2 students were not working or contributing.  Following my comments, the 5 students felt like the 2 under performers were endangering the success of the project and endangering their grades.  Knowing that one side's story is often only half the story, I met one-on-one with all the students to hear their version.  This is where the above description and observations were derived from.

After hearing all the students' stories, I decided to emphasize how the students could correct the situation, by communicating more.  On this point I received a lot of resistance from the group leader who I saw as leading the communication difficulties.  I encouraged them to actually let the 2 students participate.   With 1 week left in the class, the group selected and assigned a task to the 2 students.  In the end, the 2 students almost got their contribution finished, but not quite partially due to a lack of communication from the other group members.  The students were graded by me and by each other.  Due to my opinion of the conflict the performance grade for the group was low.  Due to the 5 students grading the 2 students and the imbalance in numbers, the 2 students got quite low grades.  As far as I know, the sabotaged contributions and the unfair grades were the largest harms that resulted from the situation.  If there was also psychological harm, I was not told about it.  (But because of stigma, it is not surprising that nobody brought this up.)

Even though I tried to prevent and repair some of the damage, I made mistakes.  I was the only person in the position to do something with the authority to do something.  At the time I thought the arrangement of a contribution by the 2 students in the last week with a doable task was reasonable.  However, I did not factor into the equation the pressure, the potential ill effects of the interpersonal difficulties which started at the beginning of the project, or the potential for continued sabotage at the end of the term.  I also should have noted that the 2 students were the outsiders from the beginning due to their ethnic background and their English skills.  If I had been watching for these things, I might have found out about the problem earlier in the term when something could have been done.  

I have also concluded that students should not grade each other.  The problem is that it opens the process up to petty politics and means that the majority group has power over the minority group.  While competition can be a force for good, students who gang up on each other, demean each other, and sabotage each other are involved in bullying situation.  This sort of behavior has no place in a respectful classroom.