She thought that the ESOL program was a great place to start. One of the things that makes the ESOL program so powerful is the relationships that are formed. Students become more aware of the “other” who is right here, part of their everyday community. Tutor Katie Farrell ’12 observed that there is often a “barrier between those who are employed at Emmanuel and those who attend,” but her experience tutoring her student, Jose, in English “opened doors” that were more than just about verb tenses and vocabulary — it opened the door to a friendship. Sister Peggy Cummins’ vision for the program continues today. Eliane Gomes, the supervisor and liaison for Harvard Maintenance employees, speaks of the respect and appreciation the program builds on campus as the people involved learn about one another and their different cultures. Jose Gonzaga Santos from Harvard Maintenance shares how he was afraid to speak up before his tutoring classes, but now he understands people more and has the self-confidence to communicate in English with co-workers, friends and students. It bridges the gap between strangers when they begin to see one another as part of the same community, to “call each other by name,” as Sister Peggy says. My involvement in the ESOL: Building Bridges program this year has also helped me understand the charism and mission of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. As a religious order, the Sisters are called to have “hearts as wide as the world.” At a time when immigration is a hot-button issue in our nation, we supplant anonymity and tension with relationships and understanding between tutors and students who begin to have a broader world view as they learn about one another through conversation. Moreover, the mission of the Sisters of Notre Dame is to educate for life. One of the first things I talk about with the tutors in their orientation is to remember that their students are adult learners. Some of the ESOL students have very little education, some have college and graduate degrees, but all of them bring their own life stories and wisdom. It is in the mutual
sharing of stories that we model what it truly means to promote the dignity of human life, listening to, honoring and encouraging each other’s best self. ESOL: Building Bridges is one of Emmanuel College’s ways of living out Gospel values and Catholic social teaching. It is how I see our students following the call of discipleship. You do not have to be Catholic to be part of the program (some students are Catholic, some are Christian and some are agnostic), but when I walk through the second floor of the Yawkey Center and see a sophomore tutor nodding and encouraging her Brazilian student, I hear the words of Matthew echo in my head: “… for I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Mt. 25:35). When an Emmanuel student tells me how he is always careful now to clean up his table in the cafeteria to make his ESOL student’s job a little easier, I see stewardship in action. We are reminded again and again to love our neighbor in the Gospels, and philosopher Simone Weil says that loving your neighbor means being able to say, “What are you going through?” When I listen to a tutor and an ESOL student share how they have become friends by communicating bilingually, I know that they have asked one another that same question and rooted their relationship in compassion and care. Values are not just something taught in a classroom, but something practiced, something we all learn by doing. Thus values-based education goes beyond the classroom to educate and engage the whole person, body, mind and spirit. So how do we teach values to “kids these days”? How do we help form students as caring and committed young adults? In the early church, Peter encouraged Christian communities to use their gifts to serve one another. “As each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Peter 4:10). We offer students opportunities to build on the foundation already laid by caring parents and teachers and to use their gifts to help someone struggling to earn a living on campus. Thus we create a culture that values the human dignity of all and builds community in new ways. S
A Disturbing Note
Ethics and Using People for Research Director of Values-Based Education/Professor of Philosophy Ray Devettere
The first-ever large-scale study comparing the attitudes of young adults and those over 40 conducted by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in late 2009 revealed some disturbing facts. For example, young adults ages 18-24 are three times more likely than those over 40 to believe that lying and cheating are necessary to succeed. Perhaps more disturbing is the finding that most of those (87%) who believe in lying and cheating state that they are satisfied with their ethics and moral character. Ironically, 92% of young adults ages 18-24 also believe that schools should be more active in seeking to instill core character values such as honesty in young children. The Josephson Institute has conducted biennial surveys of high school students for many years. The surveys have revealed a deterioration of moral values among high school students over the years. The latest 2009 survey extended to older groups, and some of the data suggests, according to the Institute, that cheaters and liars in high school are much more likely to cheat and lie in their adult personal and professional lives. Although surveys such as this have some value in understanding today’s college students, there is no way of knowing for sure what respondents to such surveys really believe. After all, it is possible that older adults responding to the survey were more likely than the younger generation to lie about their lying and cheating! That being said, most professors are aware that electronic devices and the Internet have introduced powerful new ways to cheat in college and have eroded among the young a sense of what constitutes dishonesty. The hope at Emmanuel is that faculty, by example as well as by word, can integrate such values as honesty and integrity into their course material. For more information see josephsoninstitute.org. S
4 Emmanuel College – Newsletter from the Values-Based Education Program
Using people in biomedical and behavioral research is often the only way we can advance science and develop a better understanding of human behavior. In fact, the FDA will not approve new drugs and medical devices without human trials that involve thousands of people. Yet people are not things or nonrational animals, and we cannot use them as things or non-rational animals in our scientific research without dehumanizing them. Treating people merely as means to our ends, no matter how laudable those ends, undermines their dignity as well as the researcher’s moral integrity. Thus, behavioral and biomedical research that uses people as research subjects presents us with an ethical conundrum. There is something not quite right about using human beings as research material, yet there is something quite right about pursuing biomedical and behavioral science that requires human beings as research material. Unfortunately, recent history shows that both behavioral and biomedical researchers have mistreated people in the name of science. Although Emmanuel faculty members do not use human beings for biomedical research (e.g., experiments using drugs, medical devices, genetic engineering and so forth) they do use human beings for behavioral research, especially in the fields of psychology and sociology. And they do direct the projects of students that use people as research subjects in the behavioral sciences. At Emmanuel, we take ethics seriously; we make it a point to say that one of the goals of an Emmanuel education is to help our students become ethical decision-makers. So how do we deal with this ethical conundrum? How do we reconcile our moral uneasiness about using people in scientific behavioral research with our concern for respecting the inherent dignity of each and every human being, a concern that precludes our treating anyone as an object or simply as means to achieving our goals? How do
we protect the dignity and welfare of the human beings that faculty and students are using in their research? We strive to manage this ethical conflict chiefly in three ways: the assurance that we have given the Department of Health and Human Services; the existence of the Institutional Review Board; and the College’s culture of education shaped by strong ethical values. 1. Emmanuel’s Federal Assurance
Several years ago, the College took a major step towards protecting the dignity of the human beings whom the faculty and students use in their research, when it formally gave assurance to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that all its employees and students will be guided both by the three ethical principles of the famous Belmont Report and by the federal regulations governing research on human beings, known as the Common Rule. This formal commitment to HHS is known as the Federal Wide Assurance (FWA). The FWA is the first line of defense that protects human beings whom professors and students are using in their research. The crucial Belmont Report was published in 1979 by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1974–1978). The report sets forth the three ethical principles that guide all federally funded research using human beings. Those three principles require researchers to: • respect the persons being used in the research, • secure the well-being of the persons used in research, • distribute fairly among the persons used in the research the burdens and benefits of the research. Ethicists and government regulators usually summarize these three principles as 1) respect for persons, 2) beneficence and 3) justice. As adequate ethical guidelines they leave much unsaid, but they are an important starting point in research ethics, especially since institutions that have
formalized the FWA with the department of HHS, as Emmanuel has done, have explicitly agreed to follow them. The primary way researchers respect persons used in research is by obtaining their fully informed and voluntary consent. This means the scientists disclose to them the nature and goals of the research, allow them to choose freely without pressure whether or not they want to participate, and allow them to drop out of the research at any time without any penalty. Investigators who attempt to conduct research using people without informing them that the project is intended for presentation as research, or who do not obtain informed and voluntary consent, clearly violate this principle. If, for example, a survey is going to be used for research (i.e., people intend to publish the data or present it at conferences, etc.) the people taking the survey have to know that the survey is research and not simply a survey, and they also have to know that they can freely decline to participate or withdraw at any time without any penalty. Researchers secure the well-being of the persons they use in research chiefly by maintaining a favorable balance of possible harms to the persons used in the research, to their families, and to the society at large with the expected benefits. Researchers need to consider more than physical harms; behavioral research can cause emotional, social, legal and economic harms. Researchers distribute fairly the burdens and benefits of research when they select people fairly and avoid taking advantage of vulnerable populations such as the poor, the institutionalized, the economically disadvantaged, prisoners, children, racial minorities and so forth. In medical settings, physicians cannot put pressure on their patients to volunteer for research, and in academic settings, professors cannot pressure their students to volunteer for research without violating this principle. The federal regulations known as the “Common Rule” codify, expand and make obligatory these three ethical continued on page 6
Fall 2010
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