In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH Paul D. Eisenberg Whatever may be true of them in other aspects of their lives, academics in thleir professional work and lives face some particularly knotty problems about truth telling. The difficulty is compounded by the many different areas of teaching and research, and even service work, in which such problems occur. In this essay I shall concentrate on some of the problems that arise in the areas of teaching and service; or rather, since the kinds of service work I have in mind may well be regarded as adjuncts to one's classroom teaching, I shall consider teaching and service together. Before turning my attention to these areas of one's academic life, where, it seems to me, problems about truth telling arise both more frequently and in a more troublesome form than is the! case with research, I should like to say a few words, for comparison's sake, about truth telling in research. There one encounters, for example, the kind of case, already much publicized, involving a researcher-usually young or untenuredwho deliberately falsifies his data in order to obtain impressively new and interesting results, and thereby to gain tenure or to become a much stronger candidate for a major research grant. Perhaps we academics tend to think of this kind of falsification as quite new, and certainly in this "high-tech" age there are ways of falsifying data that are new. The basic problem is no doubt much older, however. Thus in Gaudy Night, first published in 1936, Dorothy Sayers makes much of the (fictional) case of a brilliant historian who deliberately suppresses evidence in ord.er to make his own novel argument persuasive. Although that incident is fictional, its plausibility presupposes that Sayers and others in the academic world ofher time knew of real incidents 109 110 I PAUL D. EISENBERG of that kind. And on the Continent in that same year, some German scholars were, presumably, quite deliberately suppressing information or otherwise falsifying their accounts in order to make themselves and their works attractive to, if not indeed usable by, the Nazis.l In this essay, however, I shall deal only with the present-day situation and, yet more particularly, with the situation now in nonsectarian American colleges and universities. Accordingly, there is, I like to think, no need to mention here the obverse case of someone who, like Descartes with 1£ Monde, has come upon an important scientific truth or, at any rate, has written a work in all sincerity that he nonetheless dares not publish because of the fear of reprisals from the church or the university itself. In small church-affiliated schools that problem may persist, however Gust as it is not unlikely that even today a less daring counterpart to J. T. Scopes may be unwilling to advocate in the classroom or, perhaps, even to introduce into it a highly unpopular view that he accepts.) In the major colleges and universities, however, subtler pressures may-indeed do-exist that lead to suppressions of the truth, suppressions that, if not so blatant as those to which I have just referred, are nonetheless real. Sometimes, for example, a junior colleague may be unwilling to confess her interest in such and such a field or line of research-let us say, applied ethics or women's studies-because she knows her senior colleagues look with disfavor upon it. Or such a person fears to make, much less to publish, a rebuttal of a senior colleague'S view lest her attempted cleverness cost her her job or, at least, lest it bring an end to the good will and support of the colleague in question. Senior scholars, however, sometimes face quite siInilar problems. I have heard of one distinguished researcher who, although he was prepared to acknowledge in private the force of a less well known scholar's objection to an aspect of his view, was unwilling to make the same acknowledgment in print or publicly to abandon the view that had made him famous. Although such contemporary situations as I have just described do present the persons involved in them with difficult choices, it seems to me that "we" (that is, fellow academics) already know how at least most such cases should be resolved. From our (external) point of view, the ethical problems that such cases raise do not seem to be particularly difficult. Do we not think that in such cases...

Share