November 2003

Academic Ethics on the Line?

The IBM Endowment for the Business of Government (formerly the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment) awards “grants” of $15,000 each to those who write papers for IBM-sponsored publications. These grants are awarded upon occasion to senior public administration scholars and, upon occasion, to young junior scholars. The Endowment makes it clear that it does not take into account any of the normal procedures regarding grant payments made through universities that include payments for the administrative support that universities give scholars. It is left to individual universities and grant awardees to decide if writers should give any of the $15,000 payments to universities.

For some of the scholars, $15,000 can be a significant percentage of an annual salary, but, even for senior scholars, $15,000 is a big payment for a single paper. This leads to some potential questions about the ethics of scholarship:

• Should scholars writing papers for IBM competitions make this known to university administrators, or should they even mention it at all in yearly activity summaries?

• If scholars are awarded IBM “grants,” do they have an ethical responsibility to make sure the university gets some of the money as payment for the academic support customarily provided?

–submitted by Fred Thayer (fthayer@yahoo.com)