coursework > CI
916 > Ethics
Brief Reminder of Research: I am doing a site history on Flying Moose Lodge, a small woods camp for boys. It's been around since 1921, and has been run by someone in the Price family since 1940. When Harrie Price III ran it, from 1940 to 1986, he was a teacher in Philadelphia, and there was a lot of integration of camp responsibilities and teaching that he could do. When he retired in 1986, his son Harrie IV took over. Harrie IV was also a teacher, 5th grade, and he lived closer to the camp, in Maine. When Harrie IV died of a heart aneurism, in 1994, at 49, there was a fear that the camp would close because the other son in the Price family, Chris, was a Nurse in Cape Cod and couldn't get summers off to run the camp. But he did. It's a huge hassle to find a hospital that will hire you full-time, but let you have June-August off. It's a hassle to arrange for a travel nurse in your specialty to come each year. But he does it.
I look through a lot of old photographs. I ask a lot of questions of Chris Price. He's a busy man. Besides preparing for next summer's camp, he holds a full-time job as a Nurse anesthesiologist, and helps his partner raise two-year-old twins. And, after just building a new "dream" house they're selling it and moving into a less dramatic, more toddler-friendly one. Right now, I need to leave him alone. I recently emailed him with a proposal that I scan in and database old FML photos. His reply?
I have more "shoe boxes" of photos than you would imagine. I don't quite understand your request and plan. It would be lots of work for me and time which I don't have. We're selling our house and buying another one not far from here and the twins and the real job and the the the etc et al.......talk to me on the phone Leave your number if you call again and e-mail it to me.
Even after knowing him for ten years, and earning his trust and friendship in camp matters, I feel I need to tread carefully during the off-season. It is imperative that I understand that he has his priorities and I have mine, and the two are not always shared, although they at times overlap to a certain extent. For example, we both struggle with the seemingly perpetual disorganization at camp. We both promise each other that, as soon as camp is over, we'll work on all these great ideas that we have "for next year" -- but of course we both have lives outside of camp that are equally full, and that rarely leave room in them for "camp stuff".
One of the ways I am offering compensation for his time and energy -- he did actually send me the first two of the "more shoeboxes than you can imagine" -- is by choosing tasks where the outcome will benefit both the camp and my own research. In the case of the photo albums, I need to use the photographs as data, so I need to make copies of them. Since these albums date back to the 1920s, there is some decay in them that I can fix. In order to make copies of them, I need to prepare them for scanning: re-glue the loose ones, unfold and mend the bent and torn ones, un-bind the albums and re-bind them when finished. Since I will organize the scanned photographs for myself, I can also offer him a CD copy of the image database I construct. I can pull out some of the more interesting photographs for the FML website, and in return for my thought and effort, I can use the website to identify potential participants for my PhD dissertation where I will look at the thoughts of FML alumni.
This interplay, while convenient for both the camp and myself, can get tricky, and this is where it becomes an ethical balance.
Like Harry Wolcott, I am researching a subject who just happens to be in my backyard. How convenient! Here I need a research topic, and here's this great camp that I've been involved with for 10 years. How nice! As long as I don't have sex with Chris's 37 year-old wife (co-director) or 22 year-old daughter (just started working at FML this summer), I should be fine, right?
Well, I know that even without getting sexually involved with anyone I am walking a dangerous line. Chris could get too tired to help. I could ask a wrong question and shut down his willingness to help me. His 24 year-old son, who has always seemed to be in a bad mood might see me as a political threat to his taking over the camp. The camp might suffer an accident next summer, get sued, and shut down. This research business is fragile.
I've spoken at length about camp, my research, and this paper with my friend Ali, who in 1992 after working with me at a camp in Seattle, introduced me to her Oberlin housemate -- a Flying Moose Lodge Assistant Director. We've talked of starting our own camp, loosely based on FML, but for girls. Many of FML's campers have sisters who would love to go to FML or a similar camp. Ali asked whether there was an ethical issue in learning and leaving -- issues of loyalty. Since much of this research is about understanding how the camp works, I thought this idea to start my own camp might be taken as an exploitive move; enter as a spy, learn their secrets and move on.
However, when I mentioned to Chris and Shelly (FML directors) about possibly opening a girls camp, they were exceptionally supportive, offering to send me leads on camp properties for sale and directorship openings from the New England camp grapevine, to share their mailing lists, recommend me to their customers, etc. In this view, the girls' camp aspect of what I'm doing is of great benefit to FML. If parents came to them and asked about a camp for girls like FML, Chris and Shelly would love to be able to recommend a place that they knew and trusted.
In "The Problem of Speaking for Others" Linda Martin Alcoff relates of a time she went, as an insider, to a participant's house outside of town, but when she commented about how nice and quiet it was "out here", the participant became upset and cold. Alcoff attributes her intended compliment as the reason rapport was never gained with that participant. At Flying Moose, Chris and Shelly tend to be fairly closed and defensive with people who feel they have a right to run the camp. They rarely get privacy, and are bombarded with questions, suggestions, and comments from campers and parents who feel that because they were at camp and had Chris and Shelly's attention during the summer, they are free to make themselves welcome whenever they want. Consequently, Chris and Shelly hole up, and vigorously defend their privacy during the year.
Even at camp, counselors will make suggestions, and if they do so too assertively, or at the wrong time and place, Chris and Shelly will get mad, vent to each other, and hold it against the counselor regardless of the circumstance of the suggestion or intentions involved. Having seen this over and over during the past 10 years, and witnessed it first hand (with bitterness directed at me), I've learned to identify opportune and inopportune times to comment, and am aware of appropriate and inappropriate ways to approach them with ideas. This said, I've become a sort of mediator at FML, urging patience and understanding to counselors with good ideas who don't accept the line "because that's how it's been done for 80 years" -- and urging patience and openness to Chris and Shelly who tire of new ideas that have been tried and have failed twenty times over the last 80 years.
One of the reasons I am so interested in researching the history of this camp is to be in a better position to understand and mediate this struggle between tradition and change. This will help in the short term because if I better understand the successes and failures of the past, I can better help FML chart a course that negotiates a third path that better satisfies both sides. In the long term, if Ali and I get a girls' camp going, we will face the same challenges with our campers' parents, and counselors.
Debbie, from class, and I were recently discussing how researchers often don't do enough self-reflection. We cite, as an example, Harry Wolcott, who -- had he thought about his own needs, fears, hopes, etc. -- might have avoided much of the trouble he ended up in. Can we learn from this? So far in this paper, although I'm central to it, My own fears, needs, and wants have not been the focal point. And contradictions. Did I mention contradictions?
I am uncertain about much of my research. I recognize a personal need to make a living someday (as opposed to squeezing by on PA, and summer camp pay), but I don't want to give up the freedom of having my summers at camp. I have a good life at camp and don't want to leave, but at times I severely want and need to leave FML, to start my own thing, to follow my own dreams rather than live and work under the structure of a fairly rigid camp tradition. I am enthralled by the history and tradition of the camp, but there sure were a lot of rich white boys who aren't learning much about racial or class diversity. I believe boys should learn with girls, but if we had even one girl in camp, the dynamic would change, I fear, for the worse.
Here's the crux of the problem: while I know that I am very capable, I always feel that there is more I can learn. Generally, that's a good thing. It keeps me curious and open to new and different knowledge, wisdom, cultures, skills, etc. However, in a way it also makes me hesitant to forward movement, and larger leaps of faith. As an example, Chris and Shelly asked how serious I was about buying a camp -- do I have a source of funding? No. I don't have funding for my own rent, much less $1.5 million to buy a camp. How can I get it to happen within five years as a professor or consultant? I am crawling to the edge, and trying to figure out how to lower myself down, too scared to run and leap and trust that I'll be fine.
Is this an ethical problem? It might be, but only insofar as non-action is a form of action. In this respect, it may be a huge ethical crime against myself and those who might benefit if I actually made the leap.
An assignment for my Spring 2003 "Life History Theory and Methods" with Mary Louise Gomez
