Educating students about the ideas and methods of public engagement has largely focused on undergraduates. With progress on that front well underway, we propose that the ambitions of the public engagement movement should be extended to graduate students. This is a challenging prospect, because most graduate students — with the strong encouragement of their faculty advisors — concentrate on their disciplinary studies and research. However, there are many reasons to turn in this direction. Graduate students have said that the want to know more about the public aspects of their disciplines. In some fields, and along some lines of inquiry, research requires collaboration with community partners. Experience with community partnerships can widen the range of employment options outside academia or in non-Research 1 universities. Finally, public support for research universities may be enhanced when faculty and students attend to the public implications of their scholarship.

In select disciplines and interdisciplinary programs, attention to the ideas and methods of public engagement may become integrated into the curriculum. In order to incorporate public engagement training into the broader fabric of graduate education — without unduly adding to the time requirements for progress toward a degree — we propose that public engagement become part of the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) or research ethics training that our institutions routinely provide to graduate students. Most RCR training presumes disengagement from research subjects, leaving a void for those seeking to define standards of ethical conduct between university-based researchers and community partners. A focus on the practice of engaged research, particularly its ethical aspects, would substantially enrich RCR training, making it less legalistic and more connected to broader societal concerns. Ethical aspects of publicly engaged research include IRB issues; formulating, reviewing, and publishing research in ways meaningful to community partners; addressing the imbalances of power that usually attend university-community partnerships; compensating partners for their time and effort; and attending to the potential uses and consequences of new knowledge.

In order to encourage the integration of public engagement issues into research ethics, it will be important to develop and disseminate suitable pedagogical material throughout graduate education, a project in its own right. This requires sensitivity to the diverse intellectual and professional settings in which engaged research is practiced, developing case studies responsive to specific disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, and formulating institutional strategies for connecting offices of research, graduate education, and community engagement with graduate programs in the interest of preparing students to employ best practices in engaged research and the scholarship that stems from it.

Because science and technology (and the mathematics that undergird them) so permeate modern society, it is not hard to generate STEM examples worthy of discussion. There are some obvious examples of how science and society have interacted in very public ways, such as the Manhattan Project that led to the atomic bomb, and the Asilomar Conference that led to a self-imposed moratorium on recombinant DNA research until the dangers could be better assessed. From earlier days one has the attempts to reliably determine longitude (engagingly recounted in Dava Sobel’s book of that name) so as to make the oceans safe for trading voyages, and Michael Faraday’s work on electricity and magnetism. (There are two versions of what occurred when Prime Minister Gladstone visited Faraday’s lab and asked what use his research might be. In one version, Faraday is reported to have replied “What use is a baby?” In the other version, “Someday you’ll be able to tax it.”)

These are major developments that have had profound influences on society. They provide rich material for discussion, but that we should probably focus more of our attention on examples of more immediate local significance, in which STEM graduate students might participate directly. These could include:

• Discussing patents and technology licensing by universities
• Developing internships and volunteering in science museums
• Arranging K-12 school visits to talk about science and engineering
• Mentoring younger college students from underrepresented groups
• Making contact with local industries through departmental seminars
• Developing engineering designs for people in need (e.g., water purification)
• Studying toxicology and environmental justice issues
• Developing nutritional awareness programs in poor communities
• Discussing legal and ethical issues in the biological and health sciences
• Discussing the economic and political ramifications of renewable energy sources

It’s important to consider these and similar examples in the light of the definition of engagement adopted by the CIC Committee on Engagement and the parallel NASULGC/CECEPS:

Engagement is the partnership of university knowledge and resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.

CIC Committee on Engagement and the parallel NASULGC/CECEPS

Most science and engineering projects are motivated at least in part by public and private concerns (e.g., when research is sponsored by NIH or private industry), and there is usually little question that they hold the potential to enrich research, enhance curriculum, and address critical societal issues. It’s less clear — though a strong case can be made if we take the trouble to articulate the connections — that scientific research could contribute to the preparation of educated, engaged citizens; and that it strengthens democratic values and civic responsibility through its very practice (see Jacob Bronowski’s Science and Human Values). And, of course, definitions of “the public good” are often contentious these days. But such contentions provide rich opportunities to discuss public engagement in the context of the STEM disciplines with our graduate students.

This list of potential engagement topics needs to be followed up with some reflections about the ethical issues that should be touched upon in teaching grad students about engaged research in the STEM disciplines. Especially important are issues that might arise in working with publics in some kind of partnership.

In the health sciences, ethical concerns about the protection of human subjects are paramount. Not only do regular Institutional Review Board (IRB) concerns have to be satisfied for university researchers, but if work is done in collaboration with a community organization, then those community members who are involved in the research should also have proper training in human subjects protection and data privacy issues. In addition, there’s active debate whether special IRBs, with more than the (usually token) complement of community members, should be appointed to oversee community-based work.

If graduate students take internships with companies, intellectual property (IP) rights are a particular concern. Presumably the IP developed during an internship belongs to the company, but care needs to be taken not to inadvertently transfer IP developed at the university. As debates over the use of indigenous ethno-botanical knowledge for the development of pharmaceutical products reminds us, the ethics of intellectual property are complex and nuanced. Graduate education should be more than an overview of intellectual property law; it must embrace deeper questions such as: Who owns knowledge? Who has the right to disseminate it? Benefit from it? And what are the ethical obligations of researchers who seek to acquire knowledge that fundamentally resides within communities, particularly communities that are disadvantaged in relationship to the universities or corporations that seek to capitalize upon it.

The most frequent ethical concerns in scientific research, in addition to human or animal subjects and intellectual property, are fraud, plagiarism, and authorial conflicts. These could become manifest in public partnerships, particularly with non-academic community partners who may not know all of the canons of data integrity, who may not appreciate the complexities of citing the work of others, and who may not realize the responsibilities accruing to authorship. (On the other hand, academic researchers may be dismissive of the valid claim of community partners to be coauthors.) Taking the trouble to teach about these concerns could be useful not only for the community partner but also for the academic partner who can learn a lot from the process of teaching.

Professor Naomi Scheman, of University of Minnesota?s Philosophy Department, has emphasized the question of community trust in research results: Why should university researchers be trusted when they’re researching things of particular importance and sensitivity to a community, and the community is not given the opportunity to learn about, question, and shape the research. These situations could easily arise in environmental toxicology projects, for example, where studies of local accumulations of toxins could raise concerns about viability of scarce housing stock, accusations of irresponsible parenting, etc. One can argue that in such situations, academic researchers have an ethical as well as a practical responsibility to involve community partners deeply in the conceptualization, execution, and analysis of the research. Tools for resolving conflicts that arise in the process of widespread consultation need to become an explicit part of the graduate curriculum.

Programs that use the professional expertise of students to help communities, such as civil engineering students working on a water purification project in a needy rural community, of course need to exercise all the responsibility and ethical standards of practicing professionals. Yet deeper issues remain largely unexamined in most project-based community work stemming from universities, particularly with regard to the long-term obligations of university-community partnerships and effective strategies for mitigating inequitable power relations between partners.

These concerns about the ethics of engaged research are not limited to scientific, technical, and professional fields. In recent years, oral historians have led the charge against subjecting their research to review by Institutional Research Boards, distinguishing its purposes from standard protocols in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. This campaign led to the exemption of oral history from official IRB oversight, yet significant ethical issues remain for those who collect life histories, including issues of copyright, potential harm to interviewees stemming from the dissemination of research findings, access to information, and other matters. Professional societies, such as the Oral History Association, have formulated ethical guidelines for the practice of oral history research but these remain outside the curriculum of most graduate programs in history, unless they explicitly focus on its public dimensions. Training in the ethics of engaged research is needed to ensure that graduate students and future faculty cultivate the professional judgment needed to successfully navigate these issues.