Download Fourth Purpose Task Force Report: On Directed Action and more Essays (university) Medical ethics in PDF only on Docsity!
To: President Lee C. Bollinger From: Interim Provost Ira Katznelson Re: Fourth Purpose Task Force Report: On Directed Action Date: December 15, 2020 As the 2019-20 academic year began, President Bollinger announced the intention to create two university task forces: the first to ask what the University should be doing regarding climate change, the second to consider how Columbia might advance the aspiration designated as a “Fourth Purpose.” The primary question put to the latter task force was this: “What might be done to magnify our opportunities—and, indeed, our responsibilities, especially at this moment in history—to help bring deep knowledge to the world we serve, and, in so doing, enhance the vectors of university research, teaching, service and impact?” The premise was the sense that the “deep knowledge” of the University is not deployed as fully as it might to affect the human condition. Orientation The group commenced its efforts in February 2020, only to have been interrupted by the pandemic. The enlistment of many colleagues and research shops, working with partners in government, civil society, and the private sector to understand, mitigate, and grapple with the effects of COVID has underscored the central place universities occupy in light of their distinctive capabilities. At Columbia and other leading research universities, an extraordinary base of intelligence and learning across many disciplines, proceeding in collaboration with actors beyond the academy, is addressing the pandemic’s sources and character, remediation and wide effects. Columbia’s COVID-19 Hub (https://covid19hub.cuit.columbia.edu/vivo/) of research activities records 279 current projects at the University. The great majority direct scientific and clinical research toward potentially effective forms of mitigation. Strikingly, this impressive compilation also designates, among other subjects, work on child abuse prevention, qualities of loneliness, ordeals for migrant families, food insecurity, and the role the internet and social media can play to build fact-based public awareness, themes that have mobilized faculty in the Arts and Sciences and across our professional schools.
This cross-University effort reminds us that a keen determination to tackle demanding predicaments is deeply embedded within our intellectual and organizational culture. This disposition is widely shared across the arc of the humanities and social sciences, artistic expression, and the natural and biological sciences in the University’s great variety of intellectual and practical domains. It is grounded in propositions that emphasize the importance of theory for practice and of practice for theory; indeed for the importance of scholar-practitioner ties in research and teaching. More broadly, robust ties connecting scholarship, research, and thinking to practices and actions are widely dispersed at Columbia, certainly, in the arenas of health and engineering, social work and business, climate science and public policy, but also in studies of place and culture in the liberal arts, with attention to historical antecedents. At the core of this purposeful orientation is the conviction that directed action is at its best when integrated with the bedrock purposes of the University, the cultivation of basic research and its dissemination through imaginative instruction. The University, in short, has many reasons to be proud of the contributions its faculty, students, and staff have been making to the Fourth Purpose well before the current activation of collective resolve. As a key example, think about the role ICAP, at the Mailman School of Public Health, has been playing since 2003. Working with partners in ministries of health, large multilateral organizations, and health care providers, as well as with patients, ICAP is principally identified with its family-focused HIV services, especially in Africa, as it works to connect top-tier scholarship to action that broadly addresses urgent health threats. Among the many other instances of scholarly activities that have important policy and practice significance, also consider the wide range of efforts at CUIMC to speed up discoveries to ameliorate or even cure intractable disease, the Columbia Nano Initiative in Engineering and the Arts and Sciences, the Center on Global Energy Policy at SIPA, the cross-school and cross-disciplinary Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, the Institute for Research on African American Studies (IRAAS), and, of course, the Earth Institute (EI). Think, too, of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity and the Obama Scholars programs that bring to Columbia rising leaders from around the world who have demonstrated a commitment to find solutions to challenges in their communities, countries, and regions, and who yearn to deepen their knowledge and skill during their time at the University. Each of these formative programs connects sustained research, collaboration, education, public service, and aspirations for societal impact. The work of these units exemplifies why Columbia is widely admired for the ways colleagues lead across numerous fields—in a wide array of medical interventions, in leadership training, in infrastructure innovation, in policy development, in urban design, in studies of language and culture, in work on racial justice, and in a host of collaborations with NGOs, business firms, and providers of legal, architectural, and
The premise of this report is that a felicitous moment exists at Columbia for directed action as a practical and cultural commitment. After all, the problem stream is overwhelming and pressing. The University backs directed action strongly. We also possess “a stream of ideas” from long-standing Fourth Purpose sites. Sustained and self- conscious work of this character is not only timely in terms of need and opportunity, but has been enhanced by recent scholarly developments, especially in data science, in the social sciences, and in a growing wish in the humanities to engage with public affairs. The University is poised to show how Fourth Purpose activity needs not compete in zero-sum fashion with our oft-stated purposes of research, teaching, and public service. To the contrary, directed action can strengthen these embedded purposes. Our work also can demonstrate how leading universities develop and deploy public goods that both market and governmental institutions make available only inadequately. The moment is right as well because the powerful model of the Zuckerman Institute (ZMBBI), as well as the emerging Columbia Climate School (CCS), each drawing on human resources from across the University, plainly wish to identify interventions based on pioneering knowledge. ZMBBI believes “that understanding how the brain works — and gives rise to mind and behavior — is the most urgent and exciting challenge of our time.” The raison d’etre for CCS is human apprehension about a crisis so large and so fundamental that urgent action based on profound and multilayered knowledge is indispensable. Further, the directed action impulse hardly is restricted to Columbia, or to universities. Among a constellation of organizational types, domestic and international agencies, think tanks, firms grounded in research, and innovation hubs seek to connect thought and action. Nonetheless, universities like ours are distinctive sites, for they contain an unmatched depth of scholarship premised on extraordinary faculty and student talent. Not just Columbia, but other higher education institutions have turned to Fourth Purpose activity. A recent survey at CWP found more than forty such announced organizational initiatives presently underway across American higher education. The task force has examined elements in our institutional life and behavior with the ambition to enhance Columbia’s capacity to help lead and direct this wider trend. The deliberations by the committee as a whole, including the president and interim provost of the University (who has served as convener), have been guided by four committees:
Issues and Implementation
- Terry McGovern (Chair), Harriet and Robert H. Heilbrunn Professor; Chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health; Director, Program on Global Health Justice and Governance in the Mailman Faculty of Public Health
- Heidi Allen, Associate Professor of Social Work
- Avril Haines, Deputy Director, Columbia World Projects; Senior Research Scholar; Lecturer in Law
- Trevor Harris, Arthur J. Samberg Professor Emeritus of Professional Practice in the Faculty of Business
- David Hwang, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts in the Faculty of the Arts Personnel and Governance
- Miguel Urquiola (Chair), Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics
- Jason Bordoff, Director, Center on Global Energy Policy; Professor of Professional Practice in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs
- Nicholas Lemann, Director, Columbia World Projects; Director, Columbia Global Reports; Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism; Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism
- Maya Tolstoy, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences
- Jeannette Wing, Avanessians Director, Data Science Institute; Professor of Computer Science Teaching and Learning
- Samuel Sia (Chair), Professor of Biomedical Engineering
- Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature
- Laura Kurgan, Professor of Architecture; Director, Center for Spatial Research
- James McKiernan, John K. Lattimer Professor of Urology; Chair, Department of Urology; Director, Urologic Oncology in the Faculty of Medicine; Urologist-in- Chief, NewYork-Presbyterian Ethics and Partnerships
- Kenneth Prewitt (Chair), Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs; Special Advisor to the President
- Jelani Cobb, Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism
- Elizabeth Corwin, Anna C. Maxwell Professor of Nursing Research; Vice Dean of Strategic & Innovative Research
- Alexander Halliday, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences; Director, The Earth Institute; Dean-Designate, the Columbia Climate School
- Elora Mukherjee, Jerome L. Greene Clinical Professor of Law; Director, Immigrants’ Rights Clinic
During and after the 1940s, higher education took an intentional turn. Research became more instrumental, with growing assistance from the federal government, especially in areas of science associated with defense and national security, and with the development and growth of large-scale foundation philanthropy. This is the public/private world celebrated for its remarkable achievements by Jonathan Cole’s book of 2010, The Great American University. Much of our present academic world is inconceivable without the knowledge base created at that time. More recent still are great transformations associated with technology, immense data sets, new tools for causal inference, the growth of evidence-based institutions outside as well as inside universities, and the rise, especially in the social sciences, of more collective research efforts that complement the work of independent inquisitive individuals. Universities also have experienced enlarged research and development partnerships in engineering and the life sciences, affiliations with business to enlarge and accelerate innovation, and shifts in professional and liberal arts education and scholarship to focus more intensively on ‘real world’ problems. The core institutions of scholarly life risk rigidity and complacency. In light of mid- 20 th century, then early 21 st^ century developments, universities presently confront external and not always friendly pressure to become ever more instrumental, more driven by short-term demonstrations of impact. One consequence is a growing dependence on funding sources that are rather too impatient with the sheltered conditions and rules of assessment that underpin creative and formative scholarly work. Accompanied by watchfulness, our passion for thoughtful directed action requires accomplished scholarship and offers no substitute for fundamental human understanding. Utility, moreover, often is not predictable. Knowledge cannot simply be willed into impact; and impact, as with the results of the wide dissemination of social science ideas like moral hazard, stereotype, and social capital, may not be properly attributed to the originating academic sources of invention and learning. A university is not a think tank, a business, a political party, or an interest group. With our peers, Columbia seeks to gain knowledge about nature and the human condition with authority and legitimacy based on manifest standards of transparent inquiry and truth claims connected to systematic patterns of accountability. These orientations are buttressed by norms of organized skepticism and the sense that learning constitutes a common human heritage, not a closely guarded secret for elites. University scholars and teachers are insatiably curious. We want to know, comprehend, and instruct independently of external pressures. Combining responsibility and opportunity, and mindful of the particular circumstances of higher education today, we believe the ultimate test of underscoring, augmenting, and advancing directed action as a core purpose of the University must not be one of addition but of mutual effect as we connect impactful activity to the life forces of higher education.
Further, we reject the idea that university studies should be dominated by working back from practical applications or by proof of wider societal value. The desire “to direct scholarly knowledge outside the university in the hope of making a difference in the here and now,” which is how Nicholas Lemann, the founding director of Columbia World Projects, designated the Fourth Purpose, will fail if it elides our commitments to the production, assessment, and transmission of knowledge as goods in themselves. Here lies a central conviction, an emphatically positive claim: Directed action joined to self-conscious implementation presents means to enhance and secure knowledge, pedagogy, and public service. Such activity puts understanding to the test and returns the results of projects and problem-oriented engagement—whether cultural or economic, political or scientific—to enriched scholarship and teaching. Done thoughtfully, there is no contradiction between strong, independent, and reflective scholarly values, tracking inquisitiveness where it takes us, and directing intellectual energy to world issues. It is possible, indeed highly desirable, to pursue Fourth Purpose motivations and objectives in a manner that builds on and enhances academic moorings, fundamental inquiry, rich education, and ethical practices. Settings: A Spectrum Directed action is situated at different institutional levels. We take note of three overlapping sites: large institutions created by central design as galvanizing University priorities; scores of highly specialized centers, institutes, working groups and research programs within the University’s highly decentralized array; and a middle zone constituted by our sixteen existing schools and a series of young institutions, including Columbia World Projects, the Data Science Institute, and the Global Centers. This range of activity, characterized by a combination of assertive planning and bottom- up imagination, is fundamental to the future of directed action at Columbia. The first category encompasses the audacious creation of ZMBBI to focus on the human mind and of CCS to focus on the future of the globe’s climate, each fashioned at a daring edge of possibility, each galvanizing existing campus talent. When ZMBBI was formed, its leadership, including two Nobel laureates, possessed the ability to draw on immense relevant talent located in our Washington Heights and Morningside Heights campuses. Similarly, the existence of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, arguably the globe’s strongest constellation of climate scientists, as well as the experiences of personnel at the Earth Institute who blend “research in the physical and social sciences, education and practical solutions to help guide the world onto a path toward sustainability,” have made the Climate School possible. These institutions, moreover, receive various forms of subvention, including substantial fundraising support, without being inhibited by any entrenched status quo. Necessarily, initiatives of this type are limited in number. The Fourth Purpose cannot expand simply by adding organizational efforts at this scale, though there is much to learn from them, especially how to build on existing scholarly expertise.
Collaborating with governments, NGOs, think tanks, firms, and interested communities, of course, is a major operational feature of the Fourth Purpose design. CWP, for example, values early collaboration, sharing responsibility for problem definition, not just problem solution. No doubt, there are other models of good practice in selecting and working with external partners, a subject to which we return in the section on collaborations. The future of the Fourth Purpose at Columbia will depend considerably on how the University comes to enhance the dimensions of directed action admirably and energetically underway at the University’s widely diffused sites. Not just the elimination of barriers, but finding means to build networks, share information, deepen ties with students, and help define and guide ethical challenges will help determine whether the chance to create new kinds of knowledge, innovate in teaching, and connect both to practical activity will be robustly achieved. The Middle Zone Success in directed action, we wish to underscore, will depend not only on the grand commitments at ZMBBI and the Climate School or on the multiplicity of bottom-up arrangements. Accomplishment for the Fourth Purpose also will depend on what happens at our schools and at a small number of young interstitial settings that, together, compose an institutional middle zone. There is keen interest in the Fourth Purpose among our deans and each of the schools, with much experience, as noted, not just in clinical locations and public health but also at the very core of SIPA, SEAS, GSAPP, indeed all our professional schools, and with many efforts in Arts and Sciences. Most directed action takes place in these settings. Of course, given the diversity of fields and foci in the University, it is likely that many activities in this mode will be idiosyncratic to a given school. What is important is that we develop norms and procedures that will be applicable across these diverse sites, especially as they concern recruiting talent, building partnerships and collaborations, advancing teaching and learning, and grappling with difficult ethical questions. To that end, the Data Science Institute, Columbia Global Centers, and especially Columbia World Projects might perform key Fourth Purpose roles within and across school boundaries. These supple, modest-sized institutions, we believe, could take on enhanced constitutive and coordinating responsibilities, crossing boundaries inside and outside Columbia, not as substitutes for work done across our campuses, but as catalysts. Yet they are too particular in orientation to take on a central university function of managing, directing, and, where appropriate, harmonizing on their own, separately or together.
For this reason, a central proposal, arguably the most fundamental, that we elaborate in the recommendations section urges that the University’s Fourth Purpose commitments should acquire a presence within the Office of the Provost with the appointment of an administrative team led by a Vice Provost for Directed Action. A principal task would be to strengthen and deploy the interstitial, middle zone as represented by the Global Centers, the Data Science Institute, and Columbia World Projects, as well as the Earth Institute as it integrates with the Climate School. In close collaboration with the new Vice Provost, these organizations could provide intellectual and practical assistance to schools across our campuses to help shape opportunities for faculty to develop projects, build partnerships, and generate ideas that would better connect Columbia to environments both physically close and distant. The Global Centers in Amman, Beijing, Istanbul, Mumbai, Nairobi, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, and Tunis seek “to expand the University’s ability to contribute positively to the world by advancing research and producing new knowledge on the most important issues confronting our planet” by “connecting the local with the global, to create opportunities for shared learning and to deepen the nature of global dialogue.” One effect of the COVID pandemic has been to draw these Centers closer to our schools by way of a University-wide initiative for Columbia students located outside the United States that brings them to dedicated spaces to convene, study, collaborate, and benefit from programming opportunities that improve their remote learning and help integrate them into the University community. The Data Science Institute is rooted in the concept of directed action. Its mission orients state-of-the-art data science and its application, collaboration with external partners, and training for data scientists at Columbia with a normative orientation “to improve the quality of life for all,” and “ensure the responsible use of data to benefit society.” Its project areas include cybersecurity, health analytics, and work on smart cities, including energy efficiency, in addition to research on media and society, where it has achieved access to millions of declassified federal government documents. It also has been considering, at depth, how to make Artificial Intelligence trustworthy and inclusive, thus pointing the way toward concern with ethics as projects advance based on scholarship and partnerships. This vibrant resource, mobilizing a wide array of faculty, also is involved in Fourth Purpose pedagogy at the BA, MA, and PhD levels, where it extends a doctoral specialization in Data Science in conjunction with Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, and Statistics. DSI’s conferences and seminars, seed grants and fellowship programs, research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, faculty-led capstone projects, and The Collaboratory that builds interdisciplinary curricula across our schools exemplify what the middle zone can accomplish, not as a competitor to schools and other institutes and centers, but as means to fortify the Fourth Purpose.
Talent Questions concerning the nature of recruitment and the character of appointments are fundamental to the future of the Fourth Purpose. Which aptitudes and endowments do we need among faculty to advance directed action? How should we address matters of content, type, performance criteria, and the issue of tenure? How much, and what kinds of flexibility should be introduced to produce a promising mix of personnel? In what ways can an effective commitment to directed action ‘count’ in reviews of excellence and achievement? How can we build faculties where a significant group of colleagues are oriented to directed action and use both their research and accumulated practical knowledge to help address complex puzzles and train students to do the same? Which measurement and recognition criteria should prevail? Which peers should be chosen for the core task of systematic evaluation? It is inevitable that matters of Fourth Purpose-oriented recruitment, evaluation, and promotion will remain tense. Definitions of success will be controversial and not necessarily consistent across domains. Strains between top-tier research-oriented scholars and more applied practitioners are unavoidable. Nevertheless, success—a University world in which research faculty regard applied practitioners as adding significantly to the collegium, and in which practitioners choose to pursue their work within research universities because of the standards and values they represent and the assets they offer—is within reach. This is possible only if tenure remains central to the talent strategy of the Fourth Purpose. Though not all relevant appointments must pass through the tenure system, this method of evaluation and promotion forces difficult judgments. Tenure assessments were introduced in part to conquer sentiment and kindness during the serious business of evaluating personnel. From the perspective of the Fourth Purpose, the question that presses is whether it is possible to discern and put into operation review procedures within the University’s indispensable tenure system based on appropriate performance criteria. The University’s tenure standards, employed in each of our schools, are demanding. We believe they can accommodate colleagues whose work is oriented, even in some instances primarily oriented, to Fourth Purpose goals. “In every instance,” they state, “the nominee must be an outstanding scholar who has demonstrated the capacity for imaginative, original work and who shows promise of continuing to make significant contributions to scholarship, teaching and service…The essential requirement for the appointment of any nominee,” the text continues,” is scholarly achievement testifying to an unusually original and creative mind. Regardless of academic age, every candidate should have produced work of true outstanding quality.”
To be sure, this statement of standards is primarily geared to scholars who direct research programs that gain standing among senior colleagues. As the record of CWP indicates, the great majority of faculty members who actively lead and generate directed action in fact have earned tenure at the University. As many tens of cases signify, there is no necessary contradiction between thinking at a level worthy of tenure and advancing knowledge into a realm of practice. Moreover, our tenure criteria make clear that there is a good deal of flexibility regarding how to identify persons who meet the test of “scholarly achievement testifying to an unusually original and creative mind,” and the need to demonstrate “an active scholarly agenda that shows strong promise of yielding answers to fundamental questions in his or her discipline.” For the statement goes on to note how “a comparable standard applies when the candidate is in a professional or artistic discipline. The customary academic measures provided by publications and papers may be augmented or replaced by other considerations, such as journalistic achievements, built architectural projects, or creative works of arts” [italics added]. What matters, in short, is not the form but the degree of originality and influence, “regarded by their peers as among the very best in their areas of endeavor.” Thus, the common expectation of excellence is accompanied by a recognition that tenure “criteria must necessarily be interpreted with flexibility to accommodate the differing disciplines of the candidates and the missions of their schools. Because the scholarship candidates pursue can vary, measures used to evaluate the quality of work will appropriately vary as well.” If directed action is to secure legitimacy as a core purpose at Columbia, it must be able to recruit and tenure faculty at the heart of the enterprise. At issue is not whether the University’s high standards should apply. The Fourth Purpose should demand no less. At issue is how to adjudge performance. Provided that no candidate achieves tenure by making contributions, including those of practice, not grounded in scholarship, and provided the person works at a level of originality and excellence in ways that can be appraised by peers, the degree of shift required within our academic culture to recruit and promote individuals committed to directed action should not be exaggerated. In short, rigorous standards for achievement can be fostered within expanded existing and elaborated tenure guidelines, though not alone. For good reason, the University also has established other modes of faculty appointment. Most notably, these include Clinical Professorships and Professors of Professional Practice. As with tenure, the prevailing criteria are clear: “Programs in some professional schools require faculty who have substantial professional expertise but who may lack the scholarly training and credentials expected of the research faculty.” Such appointments are common in schools of Arts, Business, International and Public Affairs, Public Health, Journalism, Law, and Social Work. Comparable clinical appointments are common in
As it turns out, Columbia has such persons, with tenure or eligible to receive it, leading figures who work on implementation in different scholarly modes. This cohort includes social scientists who conduct field experiments to evaluate the impact of project interventions and leaders in public health who are building what their field has designated as the science of implementation, often based on systematic observations that seek to undergird causal accounts. Recently, CWP brought such persons from within and outside the campus for an opening foray for its own work on implementation. For the Fourth Purpose to succeed, it will be critical for Columbia to lead the development of implementation scholarship in a middle range between high theory and anecdote, a location insufficiently developed at present. It will also be critical to identify scholars who understand that approaches to implementation must go hand in hand with critical thinking about how contexts can be causal. Interventions that work effectively in one location may not in others with different legal systems, spiritual beliefs, political circumstances, and other sources of structural and cultural variation. Collaborations Collaborations across fields and disciplines within academia, and partnerships with a range of practitioners outside of academia—including participants from government, non-governmental organizations, intergovernmental organizations, the media, and the private sector—are fundamental to the process of generating, developing, and implementing successful projects and other Fourth Purpose activities. Successful partnerships, moreover, help change our thinking and our culture. They generate a greater focus and understanding of critical tests we face globally and they improve our ability to implement solutions based on study, research, and action. What the experiences at CWP and DSI have taught is how the different substantive and institutional perspectives brought by partners help shape the ideas that ultimately turn into projects. These contributions make it more likely that each project will address an issue critical to solving a fundamental difficulty faced by a given community, and that the proposed intervention can realistically be implemented. Rather than make recommendations to practitioners based on completed research and then leave the policy activists to implement those proposals, practitioners are engaged alongside academics from the very outset, generating ideas for projects, frequently allowing research and practice to develop iteratively. That still leaves open hard questions about how to align the University’s interests with those of partner organizations. Does Columbia enter partnerships on the assumption that it is always the managing partner? What happens when a partner and Columbia consider fundamental orientations, such as the need for transparency, very differently?
Partnerships can be weak or strong, a source of clashing views or deepening cooperation during periods of design and implementation. Projects designed to facilitate the exchange of ideas and the integration of effort shape productive interventions, advice, and assistance as work proceeds. In every case, partnerships require time and energy, and often, a good deal of mutual adjustment. Designing working partnerships may involve aligning different ethical priorities. A government wants to stay in power; a business wants to make money; an NGO might focus intensively on a particular domain to promote social justice at the expense of others, or on how to get organizational funding. Columbia might bring other distinct priorities to the table. Usually, there are complexities to negotiate, potential compromises to make. Particular puzzles lie in the domain of fostering innovation, entrepreneurship, and commercialization, as in the important work of Columbia Technology Ventures, which manages some 400 research-based inventions with practical applications from Columbia researchers each year. Here lie important opportunities for scalable impact, but not without raising questions involving conflict of interest and commitment, financial relationships, and more. There is much to learn from CTV, and much opportunity to integrate its capacity and expertise into the heart of the Fourth Purpose. Ideally, over the course of implementation, partners within a project work together, while also working with affected communities and other stakeholders, to consistently redo and improve the work of the project. In the best of such circumstances, partners learn from each other, and address disagreements as they arise, both practical and ethical. Intellectual collaborations also matter. Fourth Purpose activity enlarges when it cultivates networks that tether Columbia researchers to other colleagues physically near and far, working on topics of uncommon complexity and fundamental importance, as they engage with practitioners and policymakers. As these subjects defy easy answers, take manifold and changing form such that interventions often relocate the problem to new sites, and necessitate expertise across multiple domains, solutions require the participation of more than any one discipline. Inherent complexity compels relationships across subjects and ways of working. Insights accrue, learning takes place, and policy behavior improves as networks strengthen.
Ethics The Fourth Purpose is inherently ethical, suffused with values and an abundance of moral choices. As Karenna Gore, founder and director of the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary observed in a note prepared for our committee on ethics and partnerships, there is no single orientation or standard: Ethics involves determinations of right and wrong (or good and evil, moral and immoral, just and unjust) and the implications for how we live, as individuals and collectives. It deals with values and choice. There is no standard system of how to do ethics. Some ethicists focus on outcomes (John Stuart Mill’s “the greatest good for the greatest number”), some on duties (Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative”), some on religious concepts such as sanctity and love (Paul Tillich’s “ultimate concern”), some on the relationships of means and ends (Michael Sandel’s “the moral limits of markets”). There are also subcategories of ethics depending on who draws the circle of moral concern and why. As it turns out, major research universities long have been guided by attentiveness to ethics. When Columbia transformed in the late 19th^ and early 20th^ centuries to become a significant research university, it substituted secular norms of freedom to teach and learn for the older emphasis on theology and moral reasoning. The new principles, central to the self-identity of the new American research universities, were institutionalized in 1900 with the establishment of the AAU, with Columbia helping to take the lead. Academic freedom was followed by dozens of smaller scale norms and practices that became defining: granting tenure, managing merit-based reward systems, policing plagiarism, promoting transparency, setting teaching standards, arranging fortifications against conflicts of interest, and protecting human subjects. These ethically based practices and policies are inward-looking , designed exclusively for research universities. These rules and arrangements differ from ethics specific to law firms, hospitals, businesses, art museums, think tanks, advocacy organizations, media, and the like, each of which have principles associated with their respective goals. When preparing students for careers in these institutions, research universities treat these institutional ethics as objects of study. By contrast, the Fourth Purpose is outward-looking. Its reliance on collaborating with non-university entities alters the equation. New sites like CWP and DSI are not alone in having to grapple with this circumstance. There already is more blending of the internal and the external than generally is recognized. That is, there are ethics adopted by schools and departments, centers and institutes, some of which are inward looking in the sense already suggested, designating the right and wrong ways to be within an art program, a physics department, or a law school. Simultaneously, however, many units at Columbia have external constituencies and partners.
The medical campus provides iconic instances. Basic science in the lab discovers what promises to be a cure of a rare disease; the next step involves field-testing, then making the pill in an implementation phase; and, for the original discovery to have impact there must be a doctor who prescribes the pill and a nurse who sees that it is swallowed. Each step— discovery, implementation, impact—presents ethical dilemmas particular to its properties: transparency in the lab, no conflicts of interest with Pharma, and fair prices for the patient. The medical world also benefits from a well-functioning feedback loop. Consider ICAP. Starting with basic research, proceeding through implementation and impact phases, ICAP systematically then explores what it learned as relevant to its basic research portfolio. At Morningside Heights, the current landscape is piecemeal. Each school, department, center, and institute decides on its own how much, if any, of its resources to put into implementation and impact, and how much, if any, to create internal linkages across schools. Each adopts ethical principles, often more implicitly than explicitly, suited to its circumstances and goals. It is noteworthy that as emblematic Fourth Purpose institutions CWP, DSI, and CCS have all been explicit about the centrality of ethics, claiming that ethical reasoning is integral to their specific self-identity. This orientation is not an afterthought. We see CWP screening for projects that specifically benefit marginalized populations; DSI focusing on detecting and correcting bias in Artificial Intelligence; CSS making climate justice a prominent feature, perhaps no less important than modeling glaciology. The ethical stances of these organizations are both inward looking, focusing on how they should behave within a university setting, and outward looking, asking how research can be empowered to improve world conditions. Which is to say, these bodies are fully aligned with a university transformation perhaps even more ambitious than their twentieth century predecessors, now pointing to a university-wide redefinition of Columbia’s obligations to society. A commitment to the Fourth Purpose cannot help but impel Columbia to be ever more aware of itself as a moral actor whose choices have ethical effects. Not without difficult choices. As an example, when designing external partnerships it will be important to be guided by a framework that welcomes partners without compromising Columbia’s principles. These matters require persistent monitoring and systematic review. Not easy, but tasks not to be avoided.
