Professors Behaving Badly: Faculty Misconduct in Graduate Education

By: John M. Braxton and Eve M. Proper and Alan E. Bayer

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Synopsis: • A faculty member publishes an article without offering coauthorship to a graduate assistant who has made a substantial conceptual or methodological contribution to the article. • A professor does not permit graduate students to express viewpoints different from her own. • A graduate student close to finishing his dissertation cannot reach his traveling advisor, a circumstance that jeopardizes his degree. This book discusses these and other examples of faculty misconduct—and how to avoid them.Using data collected through faculty surveys, the authors describe behaviors associated with graduate teaching which are considered inappropriate and in violation of good teaching practices. They derive a normative structure that consists of five inviolable and eight admonitory proscriptive criteria to help graduate faculty make informed and acceptable professional choices. The authors discuss the various ways in which faculty members acquire the norms of teaching and mentoring, including the graduate school socialization process, role models, disciplinary codes of ethics, and scholarship about the professoriate and professional performance. Analyzing the rich data gleaned from the faculty surveys, they track how these norms are understood and interpreted across academic disciplines and are influenced by such factors as gender, citizenship, age, academic rank, tenure, research activity, and administrative experience.