SHA Academic and Professional Training Committee
Linda M. Ziegenbein, University of South Carolina
Who Owns Your Ideas?:
Students and Intellectual Property
A report of the student subcommittee, Academic and Professional Training Committee
Academia, like other professions that require specific, skillful use of ideas and materials, still adheres to the model of training through apprenticeship. Just as an apprentice learns smithing through imitation and working side-by-side with the blacksmith, students learn the craft of academia through their close relationships with their professors. In archaeology, where students learn the skills of excavation and analysis through their experience in the field and tutelage in the classroom and laboratory, this is especially true. However, the proximity with which students and their advisors work means that the lines demarcating the ownership of intellectual property occasionally become blurred. When this happens, it is important that students understand how ownership in academia is defined and what avenues of recourse are available to them.
While most universities have some sort of intellectual property policy in place, these policies tend to deal with issues of copyright and patent law. Usually, ideas or inventions created by faculty or the students who work for them are owned by the university. Unfortunately, most intellectual property disputes in archaeology do not lend themselves to being resolved by a careful examination of the relevant laws and policies. Further, these situations are not always as simple or clear as someone appropriating an article or grant that a student has written. Instead, most intellectual property disputes in archaeology reside in gray areas that have not been codified and are thus difficult to untangle. Here are three scenarios to consider:
Scenario One: A student takes a class with a professor focusing on the professor's area of study. A year later, the student reads a recent article published by the professor and recognizes ideas that they had presented during in-class discussion. The student is not cited or acknowledged.
Scenario Two: An archaeological student is hired on a per-hour basis to do data analysis for a professor. The student's spouse is a statistician and writes a computer program to automate the analysis in order to analyze more data in a shorter amount of time. When the student asks to renegotiate pay based on volume of data analyzed, the professor fires the student and hires a student from the statistics department to duplicate the described program written by the student's spouse.
Scenario Three: A graduate student runs an archaeological project for their professor with the understanding that the student will write an article on the site when the project is completed. The student and professor discuss questions that can be addressed at the site and develop an excavation strategy for the site together. After the project is completed, the student processes and analyses the artifacts from the project while continuing to discuss preliminary findings and conclusions about the site with their advisor. Later, the professor publishes an article on the site describing conclusions that had been discussed with their student. The student's contribution is not acknowledged.
These three hypothetical scenarios underscore the ambiguous nature of intellectual property and the difficulty in determining when appropriation has occurred. Regardless of whether any of the scenarios is determined to be one in which theft of intellectual property has taken place, they are all obviously episodes in which professors have been ethically ambivalent, at best. There is a real danger in this because this behavior not only demoralizes students, but also weakens the foundation upon which academia was founded.
There is a vast power differential between students and professors. For example, since students rely on recommendations from professors, students may feel that filing a grievance against their professor might have negative consequences for them and elect to not do anything. Unfortunately, this may lead to the further exploitation of the student or future students. The following discussion presupposes that students will elect to have their grievances addressed, but the reality is that students may decide that it is more prudent to keep quiet.
Intellectual Property Disputes: What To Do
It is often unclear what is to be done when a student feels they have an intellectual property grievance. At many universities, the grievance procedures for dealing with issues of sexual harassment, for example, are more clearly defined than they are for intellectual property. The professional codes of ethics do nothing to clarify this issue. Neither the code of ethics for the Society for Historical Archaeology nor that of the Society for American Archaeology discuss intellectual property or even the ethical responsibilities of professors to their students. Thus, determining the appropriate course of action is left to the student.
A good first step is to talk with the professor with whom one has a dispute. If talking with the professor is not possible or is fruitless, the student should make a record of what has occurred and the basis for the grievance. Next, they should talk with the chair of the department and/or the director of undergraduate/graduate studies for the department. They will usually intervene and try to mediate a resolution to the grievance to keep the problem in the department. If the chair or director is not willing or not able to reach a resolution to the grievance, a student should be willing to go beyond the department. The dean or associate dean for the college the department is housed in can be called upon to mediate, as can the dean for the graduate school, if the student is a graduate student. Peer groups such as graduate student associations can also help a student navigate the bureaucracy of the university.
