Deviance in the Academic Profession

Colleges and universities as organizations serve a wide range of clients. These clients range from prospective donors to and students in the individual college or university, to faculty members, to students as groups and as individuals, to the knowledge base of the various academic disciplines. Critical role positions in institutions of higher education, such as the presidency, the academic dean, admissions officers, institutional advancement officers, and faculty members, serve one or more of these various clients. The occupants of these critical positions experience role ambiguity and substantial autonomy in the performance of their roles. In addition, college and university faculty members possess considerable autonomy in their undergraduate teaching and in their graduate teaching and mentoring.

Both role ambiguity and role autonomy strongly indicate the need for formal or informal codes of conduct to protect the welfare of the various clients [Page 191]served by these critical role positions. Without the existence of formal or informal codes of conduct to provide guidelines for the performance of these roles, college presidents, academic deans, admissions officers, institutional advancement officers, and individual college and university faculty members would be free to make unconstrained and idiosyncratic choices in their performance of their respective roles. Such choices in role performance may result in behaviors that can be considered deviant, including causing harm to the welfare of the clients of these various critical role positions. Harm to the welfare of clients constitutes a failure to adhere to the ideal of service, one of the core defining characteristics of a profession.

Because norms constitute the shared beliefs of a particular social or professional group about desired behaviors in given situations, they provide moral boundaries for the performance of these critical roles in academia. Their importance in providing moral boundaries finds further reinforcement in Robert Merton's definition of norms as prescribed and proscribed patterns of behavior. Norms in the form of proscriptions for behavior exist for the college and university presidency, the academic dean, college and university admissions officers, and institutional advancement officers. Norms also exist for the research teaching roles of college and university faculty members.

Because norms and behavior are never perfectly correlated, deviance from norms occurs in academia, as elsewhere. Because teaching and research constitute the core activities both of colleges and universities and of the academic profession, this entry devotes attention to deviance in research and teaching role performance.