Deans' Weblog: Dalhousie Graduate Studies

So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, adieu...

... to you, and you, and you.

This is the last Friday of June as it turns out even if it's only the third full week of the month. Technically this is the last Friday blog of June, although Dieter will likely write one for the last week of June and post it on Thursday, or alternatively release it on the first day of July. Whatever the case, it will be my last blog in this space.

Next month, Dalhousie University welcomes a new Dean of Graduate Studies - Dr. Bernie Boudreau from Oceanography. Speaking from personal experience, he will have an interesting "learning curve"! Of course he will have the same advantage as I had on my arrival in Grad Studies 5 years ago - an excellent team of folks to support him. Grad Studies is a happy place. It's meaningful work that contributes directly to the success, happiness, and well-being of best and the brightest of the next generation.

The very worst thing I could say about Grad Studies at this university, and likely at many others, is that it is easy for the institution and its participants to overlook or take for granted the kinds of value FGS consistently delivers.I don't know what we can do about this. Maybe it doesn't matter, as long as FGS continues to deliver value and is a happy place to work. I wish Bernie every success in his new role helping this team make progress.

In the meantime, I've taken this opportunity to look back over the history of this blog. Much to my astonishment, we have been producing it weekly with very few exceptions, posting 255 times in 6 weeks shy of 5 years (the 5th of August will be our anniversary, so to speak).  My own contributions run to over 40,000 words on topics running from academic writing, academic integrity, the interdisciplinary PhD program, defending your dissertation, and the writing made visible initiative WHIPS.

Writing a blog has its challenges, beginning with the question of audience. We know there is an audience, because we get the stats. But who that audience might be is something of a mystery. So who should the blog be aimed at? 

My answer is simple - I aim it at me. The blog is my opportunity to think through for myself some issue related to the life of FGS and being a Dean. The outcome is, to quote one fan, that this blog "puts a human face on academic administration". I count this as worthwhile. So your tolerance of this modest effort has been encouraging, and helpful.

My last public thought from this perch in Grad Studies is how privileged I have been to serve with members of Faculty Council, the many FGS committee members, and most especially the committed staff of FGS. "Thanks" is simply not enough, but it's the best I can do here in this my last blog.

 

 

Sunny

Plagiarism - the Never Ending Story

It didn't take long for the story to get around the world. For his convocation speech, the Dean of Medicine at the University of Alberta apparently used extensive material created by an American professor last year, without attribution. The Edmonton Journal reported that a number of students had read the speech last year, recognized it immediately, and were able to download said material to their phones in mid-speech.

Most, but not all, of the smoke from this fire cleared away by today, and the Dean has resigned his appointment but not his position. In other words, he is no longer the Dean but he still has a job. One of my colleagues said he understood the professor in question was going on administrative leave for a couple of months, which seemed odd to him.  Our workshop on paraphrasing and citation practices is, at most, a half-day.

My colleague is one of those Academic Integrity Officers (AIO) at his university, you know, the ones that hear the original allegations made by professors of their students re: questionable integrity, the most common of which is plagiarism. He works exclusively in a graduate setting so the bar is set rather higher than it might be for undergraduates. He said he had noticed a pattern at his university in that there were a disproportionate number of complaints directed at PhD students who had earned a Master degree from a particular faculty and school on his campus.

"I'm tempted," he said, "to go to the library and randomly grab a dozen Masters theses from that program."

"That's a lot of reading," I pointed out.

"Oh, I'm not going to read them," he smiled. "I'm going to digitize them and then turn them in to turnitin.com."

This approach invites some really exciting results. The rule at this university is that if we find significant integrity violations after someone has received the degree, we rescind it.

Take back from the graduate.

It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. As a matter of fact, we are in the process of identifying the rescinded degree recipients of the last 20 years now to make sure that their submissions are pulled from the permanent record held by Libraries and Archive Canada (LAC).  LAC is in the process of digitizing their own collection, hence the concern. This digitization is going to increase the likelihood that plagiarism will be much easier to find in the future.

That's something to think about. Imagine - you get out of university with your PhD, where you cut a few corners getting done. Ten years later, you're running for public office, and someone discovers exactly where you cut the corners. As has been noted before in this blog, that is exactly what happened to the Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and he paid a heavy price for it.He resigned and his chances for Chancellor seem very slim now.

When I wrote my Master thesis lo-these-many-years-ago, it was bound and put in the library too, where it languished, save for 11 people who checked it out over a 25 year period. If I had cut corners, discovering it 25 years later would have been impossible.

Not today with digitization. Not even for a document 25 years old.

But I digress. Back to my colleague about to test his implied theory about the qualtiy of teaching and supervision on the research front in the program I haven't yet identified, by randomly testing theses from ten years ago.

"And what happens if you find half of them have serious problems that warrant further investigation?" I asked him.

This line of argument gave him serious pause. The role of AIO is painful, time-consuming, and dispiriting enough dealing with what is happening today, without dredging up the past.

"That would create a serious ethical problem," he said. "But of course, that fact I have these suspicions also creates a moral dilemma too, whether I can ethically choose not to act."

There doesn't seem to be an obvious answer to the implied question, does there? It just seems to me that his life would be a lot simpler if he weren't quite so thoughtful.

 

Sunny

INSIDE HIGHER ED: Advice for Graduate Students

On June 6 and June 8, Stephen C. Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, wrote two colums in Inside Higher Ed entitled "Advice for Grad Students" and "Advice for Grad Students -- II." The first column offered advice on non-writing issues such as being prepared for the worst, knowing why your work is important, managing your advisors, etc. (Advice for Grad Students). The second column focussed on writing issues for science graduate students (Advice for Grad Students -- II). Both pieces triggered a lot of comments worth reading.

When it comes to writing issues, my ultimate advice is that whatever you write should be good. Quality (content-wise, presentation-wise) is what matters. There are two many crappy papers appearing in the literature already.

That was easy. Enjoy the weekend.

 

Dieter

Intercultural Communication

The Faculty of Graduate Studies serves all graduate students and post docs (at least the ones we know about!) here at Dalhousie University. Most of the time we deal with them indirectly, through the routine administrative systems handling applications, admissions, scholarship applications, grade results, convocations preparation. For many of the students, the only time we actually see them face-to-face is at convocation. And that's usually a good thing, not because we don't enjoy contact with students, but because it means that everything has gone as planned.

Of course, not everything goes as planned. As the old proverb has it, "man plans; God laughs". When a graduate student's program goes off the rails, or there is confusion about requirements, that is when the staff on the team come to a renewed understanding of educational administration as a contact sport. More contact than sport, really.

Today all of the staff of FGS got together as a group for a professional development session. A trained facilitator collected data before the meeting on where we are regarding our understanding of the challenges of intercultural communication. Then she took us through some theory and practice. An interesting business, to be sure.

It's easy to dismiss these kind of sessions as nothing more than a mildly amusing morning out of the office away from the phone and email. After all, something in the order of 80% of our students are Canadians. And when you reflect on the contact we might have in a year with the other 20% of the students, the vast majority of the communication is respectful, straightforward, and apparently successful on both sides of the exchange. I have nothing in the way of empirical data apart from my own thoughts about overhead conversations between staff and students, and the regular exchange of information we have as a team. But if I had to guess, well over 90% of the exchanges are non-problematic, probably over 95%, if we include email. Problem intercultural exchanges are probably less than 1-2% of them.

So what's the big deal? Why invest any time improving the effectiveness of intercultural communication?

There are a couple of reasons that spring to mind.  First, there is a trap in the phrase "apparently successful". This is not quite the same thing as "successful". Second, we have a special obligation to the international students - the ancient (and some would say sacred) obligation of hospitality. Third is the question of simple human compassion in the context of our mission to support students in the search for success. We have invited these students to study with us, notwithstanding the obvious and not-so-obvious challenges. Fourth is the question of risk management.

Risk management?

Yes. My good colleague Jack Duffy (professor emeritus from the biz school) and I have done research on the serious risks to Canadian faculty members. One of the patterns that emerged is the increased risk of threat where there are serious differences in power, high levels of frustration, cultural disconnects, and high stakes. Failing out of graduate school as an international student is, for some cultures, higher stakes than even for North Americans.So getting the communication right for the small number of students with serious problems (and those that aren't so serious) pays off.

 

Frankly, there are other reasons to give us pause to think about how to anticipate the possibility of a misunderstanding in intercultural communication. Improving our skills in this area by suspending judgment, thinking about alternative ways of understanding the situation especially from other points of view, looking for variety of solutions before coming to judgment - this has got to be good for communication with people we don't normally think of as coming from a different culture.

Say someone like me, from Alberta. Or someone from Cape Breton.  Or Toronto. Or an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer, an economist, an actuary. All different cultures. Each culture presents  opportunities for mistaken judgments enabled by communication disconnects.

I used to have long drawn out painful arguments with a business partner, Brian Harrington, who was not at all shy about telling me I was wrong. After 18 months of excruciating exchanges, he finally said to me: "you realize I'm an engineer, don't you?"

"Of course," I replied, "what has that got to do with anything?"

He patiently explained. "When an engineer says you're wrong, most of the time it means that he didn't understand what you said."

A major intercultural communication barrier evaporated.

So the big lesson for me today was one I already knew. The most common thinking mistake there is, and likely the most important one in terms of impact, is rushing to judgment before exploring.  It's an easy thing to forget when your in-box overflows with requests for judgments, and as soon as possible. And that improving intercultural communication might just improve communication period.

That would be a good thing.

 

Sunny