Theme: The Ethical Professor: A Discussion with Lorraine Eden, Kathy Lund Dean and Paul Vaaler
Time: 9:00am-10:00 am, Aug 30 (Beijing time)
Speaker: Lorraine Eden (Texas A&M University), Kathy Lund Dean (Gustavus Adolphus College) and Paul Vaaler (University of Minnesota)
Host: Wei He, Nanjing University
Language: English
Platform: Zoom
Register link:https://www.xcdsystem.com/iacmr/forms/index.cfm?ID=SIbG0wG

About the talk

For many of us, defending our dissertation, finishing graduate school and landing our first tenure-track job signal the end of a long process of being trained as an academic. The road ahead to promotion and advancement includes being judged on performance in research, teaching and service, and while each institution may have different weighting schemes for those metrics, none of them may be ignored. Faculty need to have enough top-quality publications that colleagues and external reviewers will judge research performance as worthy of promotion. Faculty usually must teach a variety of courses each semester and get good (preferably great) student and colleague evaluations. Lastly, faculty need to engage in some service activities both at our institutions as well as in our professional associations and journals.  

However, in practice, those three performance metrics may engender a variety of potential ethical pitfalls that can derail plans for advancement and career success in the academy. These roadblocks are mostly invisible, little discussed among our colleagues or in graduate school programs, and have a wide range of parameters and possible responses. 

In this interactive Forum discussion, Drs. Eden, Lund Dean and Vaaler share practical advice in identifying, avoiding and responding to common ethical dilemmas in each of these areas. The content comes from the book, The Ethical Professor: A Practical Guide to Research, Teaching and Professional Life published in Chinese by the University of Peking press (2022). After a short introduction of the book’s contents, each author will share a specific ethical dilemma in research, teaching, and service/professional life. Participants will engage in discussion about each one, identifying the ethical issue and discussing important facts and options for resolving it. We end the session with identifying resources and answering participant questions. 

Speakers

Dr. Lorraine Eden is Professor Emerita of Management and Research Professor of Law at Texas A&M University where she taught courses on transfer pricing, multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the economics of international business. She founded the Transfer Pricing Aggies program, which has placed hundreds of Texas A&M students in transfer pricing and international tax careers. Her current research focuses on transfer pricing and MNE strategies in the digital economy. She has been President of the Academy of International Business (AIB), Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Business Studies and is currently Dean of the AIB Fellows.

Kathy Lund Dean holds the Board of Trustees Distinguished Chair in Leadership & Ethics at Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota, USA. She is also Honorary Professor in the School of Management at University of St Andrews, UK and Adjunct Professor at University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She earned her Ph.D. from Saint Louis University in Organizational Behavior, minoring in Philosophy & Ethics.  Kathy’s scholarship activities include re-imagining post-COVID institutions and academic career trajectories, cooperative infrastructures among municipal leaders, and the ethics of experiential pedagogy. Book projects include “The Ethical Professor: A Practical Guide to Research, Teaching and Professional Life” (2018, with co-authors Lorraine Eden and Paul Vaaler) and “Course Design & Assessment” (2022, with co-authors Nancy Niemi and Charles Fornaciari, part of the engaged learning series from Edward Elgar press. She is also contracted to write “How to be An Effective Editor of a Scholarly Journal: A Guide to Developing Authors” (2023, Elgar press). Kathy has been a leader in the Academy of Management as former division chair and ethics blogger for The Ethicist. Her editorial work has spanned more than two decades, holding an editorial role at the Journal of Management Education and co-founding/co-editing Management Teaching Review. Kathy is delighted to serve as an editorial board member of the Academy of Management Learning & Education as well as the Journal of Management Inquiry. Keen to continue assisting colleagues in academic publishing, she holds a Fulbright Specialist position, helping faculty develop their scholarly profiles and publishing skills, especially doctoral students, newer faculty, and those in countries that are currently under-represented in mainstream academic scholarship.

Paul M. Vaaler is Professor and the John and Bruce Mooty Chair in Law & Business, a joint faculty appointment of the University of Minnesota’s Law School and Carlson School of Management. He teaches, does research, and advises individuals and organizations on risk and investment management issues facing firms doing business in developing countries. Professor Vaaler’s research has been published in various academic journals and cited in popular media such as the Economist magazine and the New York Times newspaper. He has held visiting faculty appointments at Oxford University as the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor of Business and Development in 2012 and at the Universities of Pretoria and Limpopo in South Africa, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2019-2020. Professor Vaaler earned his B.A. in history from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, his M.A. in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and his Ph.D. in strategic management from the University of Minnesota. You can learn more about Professor Vaaler’s background and interests at his faculty websites: https://law.umn.edu/profiles/paul-vaaler and https://carlsonschool.umn.edu/faculty/paul-vaaler.