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Misuse of Power

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strawberrybird

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I work in an office that relies on grant funding for the majority of its budget. My boss, who writes the grants, is currently working on a degree. During the grant writing process, all the office employees are pulled in to help with research, writing, editing, etc. We do research on particular topic and compose literature searches and research summaries, complete with citations and copies of articles. Frequently, my boss uses our research in the work for her degree, without crediting our contribution either as an office or individually, only rarely going back to the sources and studying them herself.

Recently, I began discussing this with a coworker. We both agree this is unethical; a misuse of power, but other than the fact that she is taking credit for work that is not hers, I am unable to describe why this is unethical. I have pointed out similar unethical situations to my boss, who justifies herself by saying that it is completely common in academia to use the work of your students/employees in your own research without crediting them. I can understand that in the case of a grant proposal, which is by nature a team effort, it is not necessary to cite every individually who took part in its creation, but to then use that work for personal gain seems a misuse of power. It may be common, but I still feel it is unethical to take credit for someone else's work.

Is this truly a misuse of power? Is this unethical? What statements can be made to prove the case?

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This is universally prohibited by the rules of every university -- see the section on academic misconduct. People get expelled and degrees get rescinded for such misrepresentation. If the professor allows students to hire others to do her work for her -- if she admits that she is not doing her own word -- then it's ethically acceptable. However, only the lowest coward of a professor would tolerate such behavior. It is academic fraud, where the student is receiving something under false pretenses, namely a degree under the pretense that she is capable of doing and actually performed the work herself. The whole point of a degree is to pass tests that prove your competence at a certain level.

I don't think it's a misuse of power, unless the boss is only an immediate boss. Is this boss stealing from the company or shareholders by diverting your time to do personal work for her? For example, if y'all are funded by the Blahblah foundation to research a cure for cancer using chicken soup and the boss is having you do her homeworks in an accounting class, that is misappropriation of grant funds, another kind of fraud.

It is also not common and is ethically unacceptable for professional researchers to misrepresent who did the substantive work -- it is not necessary to give thanks to the janitor for taking out the garbage, which played a small role in the conduct research. There are different standards applied to students needing to prove that they are capable of carrying out competent research, and post-graduates who have already done so and can hire lab assistants to do mundane tasks. If your boss wants to hire others to do research for her, she should simply abandon the search for an academic degree.

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  • 4 months later...

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