Ethics and educational research: philosophical perspectives
Research for sale – and ‘academic delinquency'
Edited extracts from an essay by David Bridges
Bridges, D.(1998) ‘Research for sale: moral market or moral maze' in British Educational Research Journal 24:5 pp593-608
Bridges, D. (2003) ‘ Fiction written under oath?' Essays in Philosophy and educational research , Kluwer, Dordrecht Chapter11
Bridges begins by attempting to formulate the proposition which he suggests lies in the minds of many of those commissioning educational research. He suggests that it has a number of interconnected elements as follows:
The proposition(s)
(i) research activity can be purchased on an explicit and legitimate understanding that any fruits of that activity will become the property of the purchaser;
(ii ) the knowledge, understanding, invention, discovery and creativity which are the fruits of research -- ‘intellectual property' for short -- are all things which can legitimately be owned, bought and sold like any other commodity;
(iii) in purchasing and owning such intellectual property, the owner is under no obligation to other people with respect to what he or she does with it.
(iv) university academics can appropriately enter into research contracts on the basis of these first three understandings (providing of course the purchaser is paying the full costs, including the academic's time).
Let us note that the purchasers and would be proprietors here include private sector organisations, public service organisations local government and national government departments. Indeed the latter have been among the most enthusiastic in adopting a purchaser/ provider relationship with university departments. Moreover, as MacDonald has observed:
“Government funding of educational research is now conditional upon disavowing ownership of its products and vowing silence with regard to their contents or how Government makes use of them. Invoking Rothschild's principle, never intended by him to be applied to social research, such knowledge has now been commodified and privatised for the discretionary use of the executive and its agents.” (MacDonald 1996 p248)
The counter arguments
Bridges then goes on to discuss a number of arguments which run counter to these views. These are summarised towards the end of the chapter:
(i) I hope to have illustrated ways in which important ethical, social and political issues are raised for the educational and social science research community and for the wider polity by the commodification of research through the development by government as well as private corporations and charities of contract research on a commercial model.
(ii) I have focused in particular on the restrictive view of the ownership of research which dominates this model and its consequences both for wider public access to the research and for access to it by the research community.
(iii) I have acknowledged that those who make a financial investment in research are entitled within reason to whatever economic or commercial return that investment might provide, but that ...
(iv) as far as possible the largely non-competitive ‘moral' benefits of that research should be made as widely available as possible.
(v) Within a democratic polity it is difficult to see how anyone and least of all government can justify any kind of restriction on public access to research findings about educational policy and practice: such information is a condition of people exercising intelligent and autonomous judgement in fundamental areas of human well being -- a fortiori in the case of government departments which are, after all spending public money.
(vi) Following Roszak, I have offered a vision of the university researcher as having a duty of ‘intellectual citizenship' which places on him or her a special obligation to support fellow citizens in the processes of challenge and criticism of those in power -- an obligation which should reinforce researchers' determination to oppose and subvert attempts by those in power to stifle or contain such criticism.
(vii) There are more specific arguments which focus on the case for contracted research being exposed to the critical scrutiny of the research community -- without which the research process is in any case significantly incomplete and without which the research risks ‘epistemic drift' in the form of the replacement of the standards of research design and validity of the research community by whatever requirements satisfy the research sponsor.
(viii) And yet few of these issues turn out to be quite so straightforward in practice. researchers may have duties of prudence both to themselves and their colleagues -- especially perhaps where others will actually have to bear the painful consequences of the researcher's noble moral stand; attachment to the principle of honesty may limit the range of subterfuges and subversive acts which they will feel it legitimate to use even against agencies most deeply in offence against open and democratic principles.
But, finally, the educational and social science research sector risks moral as well as epistemic drift if it does not take its stand on some values -- but neither the tradition of socially isolated scholarship nor subservience to the market provide the kind of purpose which, according to Roszak ‘stirred the souls of the noble and chilled the blood of the base' in the age of the philosophes . The notion of ‘intellectual citizenship' and the duties which might be attached to such citizenship may provide some leverage on, though I suspect little comfort in, the moral complexities which I have attempted to describe.
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Roszak's essay, which is referred to here, is Roszak, T. (1967) ‘On academic delinquency' in Ed Roszak,T. The dissenting academy , Harmondsworth, Penguin.
In this essay Roszak contrasts what he refers to as the ‘service station' ideal of education which has been vulgarised by the multi-university: the university which teaches and researches, in Robert Hutchin's words ‘anything we can get anybody to pay for' (Roszak 1969 p16) . “ The ideal of service ,” observes Roszak, “has matured into a collaboration between the universities, the corporate world and the government, so indiscriminate that the American welfare state has had no greater difficulty finding hirelings for any project -- bar none -- than its totalitarian opposite numbers.” (p17)
Against both this idea of the service university but also in contrast with the ivory tower university which turns its face away from urgent social and political concerns Roszak offers a synthesis that draws on the French philosophes and their notion of citizenship, not just as a legal status but as a moral vocation.
“For the philosophe, intellectuality began at the point where one undertook to make knowledge work. The intellectual was one who intervened in society for the defence of civilised values: free speech, free thought, free inquiry for the sake of reform. He was one who sought to clarify reality so that his fellow citizens could apply reason to the solution of their problems. . .. It meant performing the service of criticising, clarifying, dissenting, resisting, deriding, exposing: in brief, educating in the fullest sense of the word as a member of ‘the party of humanity'.” (p32).
We do not have to look back so far, however, for resonances of these ideals – and in the educational research community. Bridges concludes with a quotation from Barry MacDonald and Nigel Norris:
“If we are in the business of helping all people to choose between alternative societies, that is, to enter into the democratic political process, then it is essential to help effect a more equitable access to the policy making, policy implementation and policy evaluation processes of our societies. We will be stretching what political good will there is in the system to its limits. We will be testing the commitment to the justifying principles of liberal democracy, the egalitarian maximisation of utilities and powers. Yet we can do no less if we want to actualise our mission as a disinterested service to the liberal democratic impulse.” (MacDonald B and Norris N (1982) ‘Looking up for a change: political horizons in policy evaluation, Mimeo CARE Archive, Norwich, p16 but also published in Cae Study Methods ER881, Deakin University)
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