A Gift to Fund Ethics Education
Dorothy Fine, a staunch supporter of Indiana University, has arranged a bequest to the Poynter
Center that will support the teaching of ethics in higher education. Mrs. Fine's gift is the largest
single private donation the Poynter Center has received since Nelson Poynter's founding gifts,
which were awarded in 1972 and 1976.
In a recent interview that appeared in Cornerstones, a newsletter published by the Indiana University Foundation, Mrs. Fine said, "I have very strong feelings about what's happening to the fabric of our society." She continued, "Young people get a warped view of rights and freedoms -- they don't realize their decisions about those rights affect others, that they have responsibilities to others."
Mrs. Fine's concern stems in part from the modern university's focus on technical skills and knowledge, to the exclusion of training in ethics. She believes that students also need guidance in ethics that will equip them to make crucial life decisions.
Mrs. Fine has been working with Poynter Center Director David Smith and with the IU Foundation in planning a gift that will address that need. Her bequest will fund the Jesse Fine Fellowship in Practical Ethics, which will be awarded each year to an advanced graduate student who is committed to teaching ethics at the college or university level. The Fellowship specifically provides that candidates may come from any academic field; the award will not be restricted to students in Philosophy or Religion, the disciplines where theoretical ethics is usually taught. A fellowship recipient might be a student in a professional school, such as Journalism, Nursing, Law or Business, or an individual who is seeking a degree in Political Science, Psychology, Biology or History.
Mrs. Fine, a graduate of Smith College, came to know Indiana University through her late husband, Jesse Fine, who received his undergraduate and law degrees from Indiana. The bond grew stronger through her participation in Mini University, a summer program that features lectures and presentations by IU faculty on a wide array of subjects. She has trekked from her home in Hollywood, Florida, to Minu U for several years, often with recruits in tow.
NSF Support for EEP Training
The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $52,385 to the Association for Practical
and Professional Ethics to fund a project entitled "Graduate Research Ethics Program." The grant
is renewable for two subsequent years.
In an effort to ensure that research institutions incorporate discussions of research ethics into their graduate curricula, federal agencies including NIH and the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration have mandated instruction in the responsible conduct of research as a requisite for receiving National Research Service Awards training grants. Research institutions all over the country are now searching for the best strategies to fulfill the ethics requirement in training graduate students, and students have begun to receive instruction. Unfortunately, guidelines are lacking, and many students will be taught by science faculty whose own training may leave them feeling ill-prepared to offer instruction in ethics.
The new grant will fund a program that will provide training in ethics for the next generation of scientists and engineers. It will address issues such as: What data are to be included in the analysis and publication of research results? Who is properly credited as an author of a paper? With whom should scientists share data, and when? How can confidentiality be maintained in the review process for grant proposals and manuscripts? Do scientists and engineers have social responsibilities that reach beyond their laboratories?
The program, a collaboration of APPE and the Poynter Center, is aimed at graduate students and post-doctoral fellows in engineering and the physical and natural sciences, building on the contacts established by the Poynter Center's TRE project. (See page .) It will enroll 15 participants each year in an intensive four-day workshop, bracketed by advance reading and follow-up activities. Students will be asked to inform themselves of their discipline's current ethics codes or standards of conduct, if any, and to write a case study in research ethics drawn from their own experience.
The project will be directed by Brian Schrag, APPE Executive Director. Faculty will include Karen M. T. Muskavitch; Deborah G. Johnson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Michael S. Pritchard, Western Michigan University; and P. Aarne Vesilind, Duke University. Guest lectures will be presented by David DeMets, Professor of Medical Biostatistics, University of Wisconsin, and Robert Proctor, Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University.
Moral Issues in American Professions
The Poynter Center's project "Religion, Morality, and the Professions in America" (RMPA) has
completed an important phase of its work. For the past three meetings (September 22-23,
February 16-17 and May 11-12). the fifteen seminar participants have been presenting the results
of their research. At each of these meeting, five members of the group submitted drafts of their
essays in progress, which were reviewed and discussed by the entire group. Participants will use
the summer to do any needed follow-up research and revise their essays. When RMPA re-convenes in September, co-directors David Smith and Richard Miller, Religious Studies, will
present drafts of introductory and concluding essays for a collection of essays from the seminar.
At that point, RMPA will enter its final phase of revising and coordinating this collection of essays
for publication.
The RMPA seminar has taken a unique approach to the study of moral and religious belief in the life and work of various American professions. Seminar participants have combined traditional textual study of these issues with the field research methods of ethnography and oral history in an effort to determine the role played in the professions by religious and moral concepts.
RMPA is also unique in the wide range of professions undertaken for study. Seminar participants and the focus of their work are: David Smith, biological research scientists; Richard Miller, intensive care pediatricians; Dan Conkle, law; Carol Greenhouse, anthropologists; David Boeyink, journalists; Tom Schwandt, public school administrators; Paul Camenisch, DePaul University, cardiac nurses and physicians; Dena Davis, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, physicians in India; James Donahue, Georgetown University, Congressional employees; Edmund Lambeth, University of Missouri, journalists; William Meyer, Concordia College, clergy; Louis Newman, Carleton College, judges; Lisa Parker, University of Pittsburgh, genetics counselors; David Krueger, Baldwin-Wallace College, advertising creators and executives; and David Schmidt, Fairfield College, business finance executives.
RMPA is a three-year project funded by the Lilly Endowment, which provided an earlier planning grant on "Religion and Moral Discourse." The RMPA project grew out of that initial grant.
The use of ethnographic methods in the study of such a wide range of professions may open new research avenues. The project's planned book may indicate a starting point as much as the conclusion of new research.
"Teaching Research Ethics" -- Year Two
Big Ten faculty wielded the utility principle, took a crack at writing case studies and developed
potentially long-lasting collegial relationships May 21-25 at the second Teaching Research Ethics
workshop.
The 28 workshop participants represented Indiana University, Indiana University/Purdue University-Indianapolis, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and Urbana-Champaign.
Participants were nominated by administrators and received support from their universities to travel to Bloomington for comprehensive training in teaching research ethics. TRE is funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education with additional support from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.
The core faculty for the workshop were: Pimple, Research Associate at the Poynter Center and Visiting Instructor for IU's American Studies Program; TRE Project Co-Director Karen M.T. Muskavitch, Assistant Scientist and Assistant Professor of Biology; our own David H. Smith; and Muriel J. Bebeau, Education Director, Center for the Study of Ethical Development at the University of Minnesota.
Smith set the tone for the workshop during the opening session on "Teaching Ethics in the University," in which he argued that higher education is largely about developing the character of students. He followed up with a comprehensive overview of ethical theory and sessions on the use of human and animal subjects in research.
Pimple led several short pedagogical sessions, including a demonstration of "Case Builder," a HyperCard stack for creating interactive case studies now available on the Poynter Center's Gopher. Muskavitch modeled the use of case studies in teaching research ethics.
Bebeau made two presentations on assessment of student learning in ethics. Workshop participants had a chance to take the Defining Issues Test for measuring moral development and to apply assessment criteria being developed by Bebeau with Poynter Center staff. Drafts of the criteria, as well as several research ethics cases and facilitator notes, are available for $7 to anyone who agrees to critique them. Contact the Poynter Center for the package, called "Moral Reasoning in Scientific Research: Cases for Teaching and Assessment."
Several visiting faculty members rounded out the workshop staff: Michael J. Zigmond, Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh; C.K. Gunsalus, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; David DeMets, Biostatistics, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Robin Levin Penslar, Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research at Indiana University; Deni Elliott, Mansfield Professor of Ethics and Public Affairs, University of Montana; and Nicholas H. Steneck, Historical Center for the Health Sciences, University of Michigan.
Workshop participants took charge of the final stages of the workshop. This year's participants shared teaching materials they had developed on a specific topic in research ethics. Small group facilitators were Julia Anne Pedroni (Ph.D. candidate in bioethics, Georgetown University); Peter Finn , Psychology; Noretta Koertge , History and Philosophy of Science; and Brian Schrag, Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. The final session featured presentations by TRE workshop alumni on courses and projects they had undertaken in research ethics since they went through training in 1994.
On May 26, the TRE participants were joined by more than 60 other faculty members and graduate students on May 26 for a brief seminar open to the academic public. Keynote speaker Stephanie Bird, Special Assistant to the Associate Provost at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, addressed the seminar's theme, "Mentoring and Teaching Research Ethics." Bird also led a case discussion that probed mentors' obligations to their students. Responding to the case was an all-Indiana University panel of students Angela Betker, Physics, and Thomas Palmeri, Psychology, and faculty members Peter Cherbas, Biology, and Diana Henshel, Public and Environmental Affairs.
Wilkerson on Hansberry's Life and Work
Margaret B. Wilkerson presented a lecture entitled "Ethical Imperative of Lorraine Hansberry:
Playwright of the Civil Rights Movement" on April 24. Her talk was co-sponsored by the Poynter
Center, the Department of Theatre and Drama, and the Women's Studies Program.
Wilkerson, Director of the Center for Theater Arts and Chair of the Department of Dramatic Arts, is Professor and former Chair of the Department of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on historical and cultural dimensions of theatre; her most recent book, Nine Plays by Black Women, is the first anthology of its kind.
Founder of the UC-Berkeley Black Theatre Workshop, Wilkerson is American Theatre Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. She is the first recipient of the Black Theatre Network's Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding scholarship.
Wilkerson's interest in Lorraine Hansberry began when she saw the original cast of "A Raisin in the Sun" on Broadway. She began her presentation with slides evoking the racist atmosphere of the United States in the 1950s. Hansberry began working for Paul Robeson and Freedom Magazine in 1951, and she studied African history under W. E. B. Dubois. By 1952, she was an associate editor of the magazine. Like Robeson and Dubois (and many others during the McCarthy era), Hansberry was scrutinized by the FBI.
Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer in 1965 at 34. Robert Nemiroff, her husband and literary executor, has given Wilkerson access to the playwright's private papers for a literary biography of Hansberry to be published by Little, Brown.
Culture and Conflict
Continuing as Director of the Culture and Conflict working group of the Indiana Center on Global
Change and World Peace, Ken Pimple organized four meetings this spring.
On February 23, Carrie Pomeroy, Visiting Scientist at IU's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, discussed "Foundations of Conflict and Cooperation in Inter-Tribal Fishery Management: The Skagit System Cooperative." An intertribal fishery management organization, the SSC has achieved unusual success in averting conflict among its sovereign, member tribes over the allocation of fishery resources. Pomeroy's talk focused on (1) intertribal differences in capabilities and interests in the fishery as potential sources of conflict and (2) intertribal cultural and social commonalities as foundations for cooperation in the commons.
On March 1, Weizheng Zhu, Distinguished Professor of History at Fudan University, Shanghai, talked about "Concepts of 'Culture' in Twentieth-century China." Controversies among Chinese scholars about culture, have occurred in at least three periods during this century: the years preceding the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911; the time of the establishment of a government of national unity by the Nationalists (Guomindang/KMT) in 1927; and the years since China undertook reform in 1979. Although these controversies focused on the future course of Chinese culture, discussion also has looked to history; the main concern of that retrospection has been evaluating the Confucian heritage. It seems that every round of controversy has been a replay of the previous one, and the concept of culture has never been argued with any degree of clarity.
On March 20, Sin-kiong Wong, a recent Ph.D. in East Asian History from IU and visiting instructor of history at Purdue University, discussed "Alice Roosevelt, an Overseas Chinese, and the Anti-American boycott of 1905 in Canton." Wong described how unpredicted events such as the visit of President Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice and the suicide of an overseas Chinese changed the course of the 1905 anti-American protest in China, as well as why these events prolonged the boycott in Canton for a year after the nationwide boycott withered after September 1905.
Finally, on April 5, Derek Penslar, Associate Professor of History, and Robin Levin Penslar, Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research and former Poynter Center staff member, led a conversation on "Life in Israel in 1993-94." The Penslars spent the year in Jerusalem, arriving only a few weeks before the first Israeli-Palestinian peace accord was signed.
Ken also chaired a session at ICGCWP's year-end conference.
"Ethics and the Educated Person" Finale
The Poynter Center's project on "Ethics and the Educated Person" sang its swan song on March
9-10. Participants from all six years of the project's life, representing 42 institutions, were invited,
and some 80 persons attended all or part of the event.
William F. May, Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University, gave the keynote address, which was cosponsored by the Addison Locke Roache Memorial Lectureship, the School of Social Work and the Office of Faculty Development of IUPUI. May spoke on "Money and the Professions: Medicine and the Marketplace."
May began with a discussion of money's potential as an important and positive force. "Money feeds," he said. "If professional services depended entirely on love, then service. . . would tend to rise and fall, wax and wane, but money supplies a bit of constancy to the relationship." Money is also a motivator. "Above and beyond the bread it supplies, money often marks personal worth, especially when the good being sold is not simply a commodity but one's own skill." Third, "money connects us to the stranger. . . [transcending] even national boundaries as it opens out toward the faraway, the strange." Finally, money talks "whether it barks out commands or it sweet-talks, it persuades; thus it mobilizes and organizes resources and talent."
On the dark side, money "vulgarizes, distracts, corrupts, distorts, and excludes and thus endangers the integrity of the professions." May concluded, "I have not sent up these warning signals about money in order to dismiss it, but in order to let money do its proper but limited work. . . . Money is a useful but unruly servant. We need to take care that it sustains rather than obscures what we profess on behalf of patients, clients, students, and parishioners when we dare to cut, burn or laser their bodies or advise them. What we profess ought to come down to what our patients surely hope for: Healing here. What our clients surely hope for: Sanctuary here."
On March 10, Kenneth D. Pimple, Poynter Center, and Charlene Brown, Honors Division, led a discussion on "Computers and Ethics." Pimple described the development of case studies using Hypertext; Brown discussed the ethical issues raised by the growing dependence upon computers. Brian Schrag, Executive Secretary of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, convened a panel entitled "Why Bother? What's the Point of Ethical Criticism of Public Life?" Panelists were David Boeyink, Journalism; Barry Bull, Education; and David Hadley, Political Science, Wabash College.
David Smith led a discussion on the impact of the project. Small groups discussed: "What have we learned about faculty and curriculum development?" "What have we learned about the teaching of ethics?" and "What should we do next?" Lively conversation ensued when the large group was reconvened to share thoughts, with unanimous acclaim for the project and expressions of disappointment that it was coming to an end.
Fun with the Fellows
The Poynter Fellows met three times during the spring semester. Karen M. T. Muskavitch,
Biology, led the first session on January 18. A mainstay of the Catalyst project, she is co-director
(with Ken Pimple) of Teaching Research Ethics (TRE). For her session, Fellows read and
discussed her short manuscript, "Some Pointers on Writing and Using Case Studies."
We continued to tap our colleagues in Biology with a March 21 session led by Peter Cherbas, also an alum of the Catalyst project. The topic was ethical issues in genetic testing. Discussion was intense, and nothing was resolved -- but participants left with a new grasp of the complexity of the ethical issues presented by genetic engineering and genetic testing.
On April 18, an intrepid band gathered for Ken Pimple's demonstration of Case Builder, a HyperCard stack he helped develop.
Available as shareware, Case Builder is designed to help create interactive case studies, especially in ethics. If you and your students have access to Macintoshes, Case Builder offers several benefits: 1) Students must interact with the case, rather than simply read it. Reports on students' sessions include the students' responses and a "history" of their progress. 2) It's fun, both for the case developer and the students. 3) It is useful for designing and modifying complex cases, which can also be distributed in paper versions.
Case Builder is available on-line via anonymous FTP, Gopher or the World Wide Web (see page 6), a manual and several sample cases. Ken Pimple is the best source for all details about Case Builder.
The working group analyzed cases featuring autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD), familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) and familial breast cancer, in addition to HD. We presented our work in progress to a meeting of genetic counselors and patients or families at risk of HD in September and to the project's four consultants at a meeting in May.
Our thirty completed cases raise some deeply challenging issues. For example, how may conflicts be resolved between one individual's right to know his or her genetic status vs. another individual's right to remain ignorant, if testing the first person will disclose the status of the second? Are family members entitled to know they are at risk for a serious genetic disease, or are counselors obligated to protect a consultand's privacy? When a research protocol bars informing research participants of significant information such as genetic status, how can beneficence be balanced with the obligation to withhold information? How should genetic counselors approach consultands who have received results from linkage testing that are contradicted by subsequent direct gene testing?
Our conclusions are significantly affected by the availability of cure or treatment. For example, a majority of our group opposes presymptomatic testing of children under 18 for HD; however, we do not oppose such testing for FAP, where a negative test may relieve children and their families of the need for burdensome and costly surveillance.
We agree that it is essential for clients to receive more than factual information during the pre-test counseling process. We conclude that the primary ethical obligation of genetic counselors is to provide information and create an atmosphere that will facilitate clients' informed decision making rather than leaving them in a decision-making vacuum, although we acknowledge that that position represents a movement away from the conventional ethic of nondirective counseling.
Several cases illustrate the crucial importance of anticipating ethical problems from the very beginning of a research program or the first encounter with a potential client. Failure to think through the ethical ramifications of counseling and testing inhibits professionals' ability to handle problems and prevents them from creating the optimum circumstances for confronting these challenging situations.
During the project's third and final year, goals will be 1) to enhance awareness of the project and to seek feedback from a wider network of geneticists and others and 2) to produce a book-length manuscript for submission to Indiana University Press. The book will include an essay defining the issues we have encountered and describing our methodology. Extrapolating from our case analyses, we will propose guidelines for testing.
Here's how you can find us on-line:
Bruce A. Kimball, "The Emergence of Case Method Teaching, 1870s-1990s: A Search for Legitimate Pedagogy"
Last updated: 22 January 1996
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~poynter/nl1995-1.html
Comments: pimple@indiana.edu
Copyright 1996, The Trustees of Indiana University