Professors Behaving Badly: Faculty Misconduct in Graduate Education by John M. Braxton, Eve Proper, Alan E. Bayer (review)

Autonomy is one of the features of academic work that can be very attractive to motivated, hard-working faculty members committed to contributing in important ways to their fields, their students, and the broader society. Autonomy is a privilege that carries with it the obligation, recognized by most faculty members, for acting responsibility, ethically, and with considerable self-monitoring. Unfortunately, some faculty members fail to live up to the privileges and responsibility of the position. In Professors Behaving Badly: Faculty Misconduct in Graduate Education, John Braxton, Eve Proper, and Alan Bayer present the results of their research on the norms that guide academics in their teaching and advising in graduate education.

The book’s Introduction provides a well-referenced discussion of the theoretical basis for studying norms guiding academic work. Key assertions are that norms provide a “moral compass” (p. 3), guiding faculty members in their professional practice and supporting self-regulation. Considerable previous research has focused on norms pertaining to research, and this book’s first author previously analyzed the seven inviolable and nine admonitory norms constituting the normative structure for undergraduate teaching (Braxton & Bayer, 1999). This book responds to the gap in knowledge about norms that guide faculty as they engage in graduate education and mentoring. In the context of power-laden and often close working relationships at the graduate level, norms play a particularly important role in protecting students and preventing misconduct on the part of faculty.

Chapter 1 illustrates the importance of the topic by summarizing disturbing scenarios of graduate faculty improprieties that have been reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education. These situations include examples of faculty members demeaning graduate students, modeling, encouraging, or enabling research malfeasance, plagiarism, fraud, and authorship problems, or engaging in sexual harassment. Chapter 2 delineates the study design, which paralleled Braxton’s earlier empirical work on undergraduate teaching norms (Braxton & Bayer, 1999). This project involved a survey of full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty in four fields—biology, chemistry, history, and psychology—who responded to a large set of items pertaining to questionable behaviors.

The middle chapters of the volume present empirical research concerning the normative structure associated with graduate teaching and mentoring. Chapter 3 describes five inviolable norms concerning graduate study that faculty believe deserve severe sanction (i.e., disrespect toward student efforts, misappropriation of student work, harassment of students, whistle-blowing suppression, and directed research malfeasance), and three admonitory norms worthy of avoidance but not necessarily severe sanction (i.e., neglectful teaching, inadequate advising and mentoring, and degrading faculty colleagues). In the next three chapters, the authors examine patterns and differentiations in these normative structures pertaining to institutional type (research intensity) and academic discipline, and influences on normative structures relating to such factors as personal attributes (gender, citizenship, and age), and professional attainments and involvement (academic rank, tenure, administrative experience, research activity, and participation in graduate study). Chapter 7 reports the results of further statistical analyses indicating that four inviolable norms, but no admonitory norms, are “core” norms (undifferentiated by institutional type, discipline, and personal attributes).

Drawing on socialization theory, chapter 8 discusses the role of graduate education in facilitating graduate students’ internalization of the five inviolable norms associated with graduate teaching and mentoring. The chapter also describes the less consistent extent to which graduate students internalize the admonitory norms. A particularly interesting discussion focuses on the ways in which faculty norm violations may contribute negatively to students’ decisions about dropping out of their graduate education, their views and interest in faculty work, and their sense of professional identity and commitment. Reviewing conduct codes offered by the AAUP and various disciplinary societies (chapter 9), as well as the statements in reform-oriented monographs and advice books (chapter 10), the authors conclude that the literature offers little guidance on conduct pertaining to teaching and mentoring at the graduate level.

In the final chapter, the authors...