The Program for Scholarly Integrity (PSI), a Center for Ethics program that provides students with a cross-disciplinary introduction to research ethics for their research, will now include humanities and social science students.
According to Toby Schonfeld, the director of graduate studies for the Master of Arts in Bioethics Program at the Laney Graduate School, the program was restructured to ensure students in the social sciences and humanities have more relevant information for their respective fields of study.
Navyug Gill, a graduate assistant for the program, said the program’s expansion was “the vision of the administration.”
According to Schonfeld, students were hungry for training in ethics and they were only getting it haphazardly in graduate studies.
“Emory has been innovative in broadening [ethics training] to everyone and not just keeping it restricted to the natural sciences,” Gill said.
The program includes a PSI seminar, program-based instruction and workshops.
According to Gill, all incoming Ph.D. students are required to engage in an introductory seminar to scholarly integrity and training in ethics. Included in the seminar are panels, keynote addresses, case studies and lectures.
“Ethics is not just about improper conduct, which tends to get a lot of attention in the natural sciences,” Gill said. “We recognize that ethics pervades everything that we do.”
Amanda Mummert, a Ph.D. candidate at Laney, said she believes the most successful part of the program has been the workshops because they are “focused training sessions that are highly individualized.”
According to Schonfeld, the workshops have good attendance because the topics truly interest students. According to a survey provided by Schonfeld, 26 percent of students said the seminar was excellent, 47 percent said it was above average and 10 percent said it was average.
“The majority of people that are giving feedback express their appreciation for the program in general,” Gill said.
– By Brandon Fuhr
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