Sign over a door at Rudder Center, Texas A&M University. Photo by Vince Cronin.

Steps to improve awareness of geoethics in your department

Revised 17 December 2017

Preface

I don't claim any special virtue or status related to this matter, only that I have thought about it for a long time and have made a good-faith effort to educate myself about geoscience ethics. I have also heard about, directly observed, and been the target of unethical behavior, both in professional geoscience and in various university environments in which I have worked as a geology professor for three decades.

To paraphrase Stephanie Bird (2014), it has become apparent that the practice of simply hoping students will learn about responsible research conduct and ethical behavior by observing exemplary behavior in their department is inadequate and does not serve the needs of the student, the department, the geoscience community, or society as a whole.

How do novice geoscientists develop as ethical scientists and professionals? We who are privileged to be geoscience educators have a responsibility to be part of the answer to that question.

I have a few suggestions, and a request. The request is that you read through the materials I have posted here, and think about how you can help us move this work forward. Share your ideas, suggestions, and links to the geoethics resources developed by/for your department. For example, post your contributions to the AGU Heads and Chairs Community or to the International Association for Promoting Geoethics (http://www.geoethics.org) directly or through its social media outlets (facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc.) . This should be a shared effort to facilitate the ethical development of our geoscience community.

Here are a few steps we can take in our departments that are likely to help improve awareness of geoethics.

Step 1: Begin and sustain a genuine, ongoing conversation about ethics and integrity in your department

Involve every member of your geoscience department in the conversation. Learn about geoethics together. Learn about geoethics from each other, and from the broader geoscience community.

Applied ethics education in your department is not a "one and done" matter, but rather is something that needs to be touched on early in every term/semester because there are new members joining your department all the time.

Your role is to pose questions and facilitate discussion in an intellectually safe environment. You should accept that some department members might be reluctant to engage based on their fear of possible retaliation for articulating their perceptions and experiences.

These conversations should explore the full range of topics that are relevant in the context of your department. Whatever else might be included, emphasize ethical issues your students will likely confront as they move into the geoscience workforce, so that they will emerge from your department better prepared to thrive in an ethically challenging environment.

Step 2: Create a departmental web portal for ethics that is accessed through a simple, obvious, and persistent link on your department home page

This portal can be designed to link students with international, national, institutional, departmental, and personal resources needed to explore the ethical standards of the geoscience community.

AGU maintains an ethics portal (ethics.agu.org), and a draft example of a departmental ethics portal is available at CroninProjects.org/Draft-GeoEthics-Page.html.

Step 3: Use the ethics portal to expose department members to ethics resources from the broader science/geoscience community

This will facilitate access to the ethical codes, standards, values, and statements of national and international geoscience organizations, such as AGU, GSA, AGI, USGS, AAPG, AIPG, and IAPG among others. The reason for doing this is to promote a heightened awareness of "the sense of the geoscience community" concerning ethical issues.

Geoscience ethics codes: the sense of the broader geoscience community

• American Geophysical Union (AGU) Ethics Portal (ethics.agu.org) and Scientific Integrity and Professional Ethics Policy (Scientific-Integrity-and-Professional-Ethics.pdf)
• American Geosciences Institute: Guidelines for Ethical Professional Conduct
• Geological Society of America: Code of Conduct
• American Association for Petroleum Geologists: Code of Ethics
• Links to ethics codes of other major geoscience organizations: www.geoethics.org/codes

Organizations with a special focus on geoscience ethics

• International Association for Promoting Geoethics: www.geoethics.org
• American Institute of Professional Geologists: www.aipg.org

Other important applied-ethics documents

• Gunderson, L.C., editor, 2017, Scientific Integrity and Ethics in the Geosciences: John Wiley & Sons, AGU Special Publications Series, 344 p., ISBN: 978-1-119-06778-8
• US Department of Interior Scientific and Scholarly Integrity Policy: www.doi.gov/scientificintegrity/
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Report: Fostering Integrity in Research (2017) www.nap.edu/catalog/21896/fostering-integrity-in-research
• Cape Town Statement on Geoethics (2016): www.geoethics.org/ctsg
• Montreal Statement on Research Integrity (2013) www.cehd.umn.edu/olpd/MontrealStatement.pdf
• International Council for Science Statute 5 - Principle of Universality of Science (2011): www.icsu.org/cms/2017/05/Statutes_September_2011.pdf
  and www.icsu.org/what-we-do/freedoms-and-responsibilities-of-scientists
• Singapore Statement of the World Integrity Conference (2010): www.singaporestatement.org/statement.html
• The Belmont Report on Biomedical Research (1979): www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/belmont.html

Step 4: Develop statements of ethical norms for the department

Begin a process of developing written public documents that describe the ethical norms, statements, values, or expectations that are relevant to your department. I will use the broad term "ethical resources" here to encompass whatever sets of statements, value statements, norms, guidelines, or rules/policies might be developed to promote ethics within your department. As these ethical resources are created, make them accessible through the department's ethics portal, along with links to the relevant policies of your college/university.

• I suggest starting with aspirational statements, like those developed by the Geoscience Departments at Colorado State University (CSU-Geosciences-ValuesStatement.pdf) and Virginia Tech (VATech-Geosciences-ValuesStatement.pdf). These help to condition the environment in which departmental members interact, work, and learn.
  
  
• Directly, honestly, and unambiguously address issues related to academic integrity, harassment, bullying, and discrimination "based on such factors as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, political or other opinion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or age" (ICSU, 2011). These adverse behaviors pose a direct threat to the health of your departmental community. As Greg Boyle has observed, "Sooner or later, we all discover that kindness is the only strength there is."
  
  
• If there have been particular ethical problems in your department that need to be addressed, think carefully about the most productive and least confrontational methods to confront the problem. I suggest that you focus on underlying ethical principles that should be promoted and that all can agree on. Avoid judgmentalism. Avoid negative ad hominem comments or criticisms, because that will simply lead to further division and hostility rather than to the growth of a healthy departmental community.
  
  
• You might develop resources that are aligned with the needs of various groups in your department and of the department as a whole. For example, some ethical statements would be primarily intended for students, some for faculty or staff, and some for all members. Some would be relevant to the research function, some primary relevant to the teaching/learning function, and some to community outreach and education. Involve the relevant stakeholders in the development of these focused resources.
  
  
• While these resources need to be embraced locally, they should be consistent with the statements published by relevant national and international geoscience organization so as not to induce any cognitive dissonance. Refer to the Code of Conduct in AGU's Scientific Integrity and Professional Ethics Policy for a model.
  
  
• The goal is to capture and transmit "the sense of this community" about what it means to act with integrity, not to provide a means to justify or support judgmentalism.

I hope that a heightened awareness of ethical considerations within the department will lead to discussion of relevant ethical issues in geoscience courses (e.g., the Teaching Geoethics page at SERC that Dave Mogk and his collaborators have compiled), as well as making ethics apparent as an important consideration in geoscience research.

A functional set of ethical norms and expectations relevant to your department can form an important part of the fabric that binds a department together.

Step 5: Provide every geoscience major (and grad student) with useful basic information about applied ethics in science or geoscience

Provide members of your department with with a copy of a brief overview of science/geoscience ethics, such as On Being a Scientist -- A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research by the National Academies (2009) or Honor in Science (Jackson, 2000). These brief texts are of an appropriate scope and scale to be required reading for any undergraduate science major.

Consider making a more extensive text with significant ethical content a required reference text in an early core course for undergraduate geoscience majors. Hugh Gauch's book Scientific Method in Brief (2012) might be an excellent choice.

Step 6: Encourage each member of the department to develop their own personal commitment to integrity and geoethics

Ethics affects how we interact with each other, but ethical behavior must be firmly rooted in how each of us chooses to live our lives. Ideally, people who spend time as members of your department should emerge from that experience with a greater commitment to personal and professional integrity.

Suggest that your department members read the IAPG's "GeoEthical Promise" (www.geoethics.org/geopromise) and perhaps build upon that promise in articulating their own statement of commitment to personal and professional integrity.

Other Suggestions

1. Develop departmental ethics resources in a very visible and transparent process, with the authentic and meaningful involvement of all stakeholders. Ethical statements compiled by 18-to-25-year-old novice/student geoscientists (with guidance and support from more experienced geoscientists) are more likely to be relevant, understandable, and useful to them that ethical statements imposed on them from older geoscientists.
2. Consider departmental ethics resources to be flexible works in progress, always subject to revision and improvement.

Final Words

Facilitating the development of ethical geoscientists is our responsibility.

It is a never-ending process. This is much more like an ultra-marathon than a sprint. Ethical norms and expectations must be reaffirmed every term/semester, because of the steady influx of new members into your department.

Either way, the starting pistol has already been fired, and we need to get moving.

Presentation files

• Original Keynote file created on a Macintosh: CroninProjects.org/Ethics-AGU2017/Cronin-GeoEthics-AGU2017.key (5.3 MB)
• Adobe Acrobat PDF file: CroninProjects.org/Ethics-AGU2017/Cronin-GeoEthics-AGU2017.pdf (4.2 MB)
• Draft script in Microsoft Word: CroninProjects.org/Ethics-AGU2017/Cronin-GeoEthics-AGU2017.docx (162 KB)

References

• Bird, S.J., 2014, Social Responsibility and Research Ethics: Not Either/Or but Both, Professional Ethics Report, v. 27(2), http://www.aaas.org/news/social-responsibility-and- research-ethics-not-eitheror-both
• Gauch, H.G., Jr., 2012, Scientific Method in Brief: Cambridge University Press, 288 p., ISBN: 9781107666726
• Gunderson, L.C., editor, 2017, Scientific Integrity and Ethics in the Geosciences: John Wiley & Sons, AGU Special Publications Series, 344 p., ISBN: 9781119067788
• Mogk, D., 2014-17, Teaching GeoEthics Across the Geoscience Curriculum: serc.carleton.edu/geoethics/index.html
• ICSSU (International Council for Science), 2011, The Principle of Universality (freedom and responsibility) of Science: ICSU Statute 5, accessible via www.icsu.org/what-we-do/freedoms-and-responsibilities-of-scientists or www.icsu.org/cms/2017/05/Statutes_September_2011.pdf
• Jackson, C.I., 2000, Honor in Science: Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, Sigma Xi, 41 p., available at no cost as a pdf through Sigma Xi
• National Academies, 2009, On Being a Scientist -- A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research [3rd edition]: Washington, D.C., National Academies Press, 63 p., available at no cost as a pdf through National Academies Press

Other GeoEthics references: CroninProjects.org/Vince/GeoEthics/EthicsRefs.html

Other resources are described in Facilitating a geoscience student's ethical development by Cronin in Gunderson (2017, Scientific Integrity and Ethics in the Geosciences), chapter 14.

Vince Cronin's GeoEthics page: CroninProjects.org/Vince/GeoEthics/index.htm

This is not a static resource, so please send your suggestions for additional resources to Vince Cronin via Vince_Cronin@baylor.edu.

If you have any questions or comments about this site or its contents, drop an email to the humble webmaster.