Ethics Concerns Draw Many Questions, Some Answers

Kirby and Houle reply: The range of ethical issues in physics is certainly far broader, as noted by Frank Melsheimer and Peter Foukal, than those we focused on in our article. We share Jeffrey Marque’s frustration that abuse and exploitation of graduate students and postdocs has long been overlooked. One goal of our article was to bring this concern to the forefront in the physics community. We hope that with awareness and good leadership, physics departments and their chairs can take steps to prevent and, where necessary, ameliorate abusive and exploitative situations. Joseph West is correct that the mistreatment of subordinates often arises from neglect, lack of management skills, and lack of awareness of the responsibilities that are specific to supervising students. Thus it is critical that departments establish a structure to prevent abusive treatment and to communicate a set of expected ethical behaviors.

While surveying physics department chairs, we heard about several college and university departments that have highly successful ethics programs or courses. The Task Force on Ethics Education of the American Physical Society will, we hope, help the physics community become more aware of such programs so that departments can implement them. Clearly, education about ethics needs to extend far beyond guidelines concerning data fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism to include the development of mentoring skills, understanding of supervisory responsibilities, knowledge of intellectual property rights and obligations, and appropriate processes for resolving ethical problems.