It is not surprising that junior members of the physics community would respond so forcefully to questions about professional ethics, or that their major concerns are about abuse and exploitation rather than the more conventional ethical concerns of plagiarism, faking of data, piggybacking of authorships, and the like. When papers that came out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories were shown to be based on faked data, the physics community responded with loud calls for immediate reform and with conspicuous expressions of shock and shame. But when graduate students and postdocs, by the thousands and over a period of many decades, complain about their working conditions and their powerlessness, the physics community shrugs and says, “Yeah, so what else is new?”
Kate Kirby and Frances Houle wrote, “Particularly shocking to the task force was how often the words ‘abuse’ and ‘exploitation’ were used to describe the treatment of graduate students.” However, members in the academic community could be shocked by those words only if their eyes were glued firmly shut to what goes on around them every day. When abuse has become habitual and acceptable, then it no longer is perceived as unethical. Instead, it is perceived as “business as usual.”
As long as we have a system in which the professional survival and advancement of junior members of the profession depend on more established members of the community for letters of recommendation, all the ethics training in the world for professors will be for naught unless someone is held accountable for abusive and exploitative behavior. Many senior physicists, with or without training in ethical behavior, will be supportive mentors, while others will continue to exploit and abuse.
It would be nice to think that professional organizations, such as the American Physical Society, and funding organizations, such as NSF, would make a serious effort to eliminate as much abuse and exploitation as possible from college and university campuses. However, I doubt that significant motivation exists to do so. After all, abuse and exploitation of junior scientists typically do not make the newspapers; they occur away from the spotlight of public scrutiny. Instead, strong motivation at the junior level is what has led to unionization of graduate students and postdocs on some campuses.
Although significant actions may be taken and improvements made with respect to the relatively rare conventional unethical behaviors, I doubt that anything significant will happen to ameliorate the abuse and exploitation that the junior members of our profession so eloquently describe. “Business as usual” is, as a physicist might describe it, a stable configuration.
And in case anyone is wondering, I’m 55 years old, a PhD, and a senior staff physicist in a corporation.
