Graduate students take ethics training

Professional ethics for graduate students frequently remains a focus unique to science and medicine, but beginning this year, all incoming doctoral students at Duke are required to undergo Responsible Conduct of Research Training.

The program seeks to broaden the narrow definition of ethics in research and includes a variety of faculty-led forums over three years. The training will also require the cohesion of the ethics faculty and the organization of a variety of department-appropriate case studies. Leigh DeNeef, associate dean of the Graduate School, and Douglas James, administrative coordinator, created the RCR program. Both stressed that the seminars are not intended as tedious lessons on the avoidance of misconduct, but as an addressing of the positive obligations graduate students have regarding research.

DeNeef said RCR training emerged in the early 1990s in response to National Institutes of Health funding in the biological sciences, as NIH funding requires that the recipients undergo certain ethical preparation.

"Since the Graduate School did not know which of the biological science students would end up working for certain faculty members, the best way to handle it was to simply require this training for all students in departments who had any NIH funding," DeNeef said.

At the time RCR training was in development for the biological sciences, the Graduate School's executive committee began entertaining the idea of requiring this training for all incoming students in all departments with any NIH funding.

"[The executive committee] decided that, as quickly as we could, we should try to make it a formal requirement for all Ph.D. students in the University," DeNeef said. After a decade of delay, the proposed changes are now coming into fruition.

"In general, many students wanted more ethical training in specific topics related to their discipline," James said.

To fulfill this need, each department has been asked to identify one faculty member and one graduate student to facilitate ethics training. Administrators have gone through a range of case study materials and are planning to give each of these departmental groups a number of case studies suitable for that field. The faculty member and graduate student will then be asked to pick a few that would be appropriate for their department.

This requirement has been met with little objection from graduate students and faculty members. DeNeef explained the only problem has been finding people who believe they are competent enough with ethical issues to serve as facilitators.

"Our job is to make sure that the faculty feels comfortable keeping discussion going," he said. "They are not there to teach about ethics. They are there to facilitate case study discussion. I have not seen or heard any resentment against it."

Similarly, post-workshop graduate student surveys enable graduate students to tell the administration what they believe did or did not work. In this way, student feedback is encouraged and a stronger program can be built.

"Ethics case studies are obvious--they are in the newspaper all of the time," DeNeef said. "Anybody realizes that these are an important element for anyone who is going to be a researcher. Our goal is to provide a sufficient number of training experiences."