Senate to develop policy on conflict of interest

By SUE WUETCHER
News Services Associate Director

UB does not have such a policy, Philip Yeagle, committee chair and professor of biochemistry, told the Faculty Senate Executive Committee at its Oct. 16 meeting. "We as faculty would be best served by having a policy of guidance in areas where we now are getting encouragement to explore more and more," such as entrepreneurship and new sources of research funding, Yeagle said.

While the committee within the past few years developed, in conjunction with the Office of the Vice President for Research, policies on the "narrower" issues of financial disclosure and standards for research, any policy on conflict of interest, also referred to as conflict of commitment, would cover much broader issues, he noted.

Yeagle read from a document from the American Association of Medical Colleges that states that conflict of commitment arises when a faculty member's activities "interfere with the paramount obligations to students, colleagues and the primary missions of the academic's institutionŠ."

Moreover, the policy statement on conflict of interest and commitment from The Johns Hopkins University notes that "the primary commitment, in the professional sense, of full-time faculty is to the institution."

Yeagle noted, "You see the kinds of questions that immediately starts to raise."

He said the committee wants input on the issue from as wide a range of faculty as possible, and is investigating the possibility of posting notices on a bulletin board on wings and in the Sponsored Program Notes that is circulated to researchers. He invited faculty members to send him their comments via e-mail at pyeagle@ubmedg.buffalo.edu.

"We need to learn a whole lot aboutŠwhat this issue is in our environment, what our faculty are encountering, what kinds of problems, where is guidance needed. These are the things we need to know, we need to learn about," he said.

In order to get FSEC members' "thoughts going," Richard Hull, professor of philosophy and an RCA committee member, presented several "scenarios" of conflict of interest. They included situations where a faculty member discovers the son of a good friend is a student in his class, a professor cancels class to attend a conference in Europe but makes his class responsible for material he would have covered in class, and a psychologist who teaches all her classes and performs her university duties one day a week and consults as an industrial psychologist the other four days, billing for her time.

"You can get a sense here that there are a variety of ethical issues and professional issues that come in on which universities have muddled through on occasion," said Faculty Senate Chair Claude Welch, Distinguished Professor of Political Science.

"And yet in a litigious society in a setting where we're expected to have and to uphold standards of performance and professional ethics, we need to have, some would argue, an effective way of approaching issues as proposed here. None of us can claim answers, and it may be at times that the best policy is no policy. But in order to decide what policy to have or what policy not to have, you have to wrestle with issues such as those that are hypothetical" and others like those related by Hull.

"They're not hypothetical," countered Provost Thomas Headrick. The state controller is responsible for the expenditure of state funds for proper state purposes, he said. "If it appears that someone is using state resources in order to further their own private gain of one kind or another unrelated to purposes of the university, the state controller will investigate."

Headrick noted that there probably will be more investigations in the future "as faculty divide their time without making it clear what the division of time is." Such investigations, he added, can lead to civil penalties as well as criminal action. "This is not a hypothetical question; it's a very serious question," he said.

Michael Frisch, professor of history and American studies, noted that of Hull's scenarios, the most dramatic ones in terms of ethical issues, involved a conflict between missions, between classroom responsibilities and something else. "What we need to wrestle with is that there are conflicts within the missionsŠparticularly the research mission as it gets more involved in public service definitions, as we broaden out the notion of what research is, who we do it with, who we do it forŠ," Frisch said. "You might say that institutionally, the direction we are moving is getting people in more trouble, or at least risking more trouble."

It would be easy to avoid all trouble, he says, but that would lead in the direction that some community colleges have gone, with faculty members required to account for every minute of their time. "As institutionally we look for ways to become more involved in society, get people functioning in different ways, this is going to be a natural, and in some ways a healthy tension, but one really worth exploring."

Jack Meacham, professor of psychology, said, "Conflict of interest often arises because we're unclear as to what our real interest is. It seems to me that if you are going to formulate a policy, it has to be grounded someplace, and probably the place to ground it is in the university's mission statement. Perhaps if we have difficulty on this campus, it's because the mission statement itself is not sufficiently focused, is not publicized often enough, is too broad, has conflicts within it, tells us areas in which we should be moving, doesn't tell clearly what is not the mission of this campus, what is not our mission of the faculty."

Maureen Jameson, associate professor of modern languages and literatures, asked Yeagle if the committee was planning to consider "personal" conflicts of interest, such as a conflict between work and family.

"While I'm scandalized at the professor who takes four days a week to go off and have some lucrative job and only work here one day a week, I don't know what kind of guidelines you would come up with about minimum number of hours of present on campus, or minimum degree of attention you would be paying to your work while doing these things that wouldn't similarly be applicable to faculty members in the years when their children are young and when they are most often called away or distracted from their work or for some reason not performing at full capacity because their kids are small," Jameson said. "I'm wondering if your deliberations are going to lead you to propose solutions to conflicts where the choice is between getting rich and doing the right thing, whereas the conflict that I think the parents of my generation face is between doing one right thing and doing another right thing."

Many people have elderly parents or sick children and face those kinds of personal situations, Hull noted. Some of these conflicts now are handled by providing notice to immediate supervisors, he said, adding that the committee will look at whether that is an adequate mechanism for resolving appearances of conflict of interest or for balancing the variety of tasks frequently required of faculty members.

Yeagle said the committee's discussions, both in the past and presently, have focused on the professional arena, and have not dealt with the personal conflicts faced by faculty members.

Ernest Sternberg, associate professor of planning and RCA committee member, worried that the committee might make its mission too broad and suggested the committee limit its focus to professional activities.

"I would urge you, however, if you say you're not going to handle such a problem-I think the family one is a particularly important one-that you at least acknowledge the problem exists in your report and don't say, 'forget about it.' It's a very critical issue," said William Miller, professor of stomotology.

"It seems to me from the university's point of view, it shouldn't matter if I take off Mondays and Fridays to work on my private business and earn extra money, or whether I take off Mondays and Fridays to take care of an infant because my wife has a part-time job, because either way the university loses me on those two days," Meacham said. "It seems to me from the university's interest, the issue is merely whether I'm fulfilling my responsibilities to the university, and the reason for the conflict, I don't see how that enters in.

"Is the topic here really conflict of commitment/conflict of interest, or how do we police ourselves, how do we make sure each of us fulfills our responsibilities to our profession and to our careers here at the university?" he asked.