Code of Conduct and Mental Health Policy
Equal, enjoyable, and fulfilling scientific and academic work is the goal of all in the Brown POG. We value the participation of every member, collaborator, and friend of our community. As a result we work to ensure the personal and professional enjoyment of all. At its most basic level, this document codifies the basic expectations of members of the Polar Oceanography Group (POG): to show respect, courtesy, and honesty to others at all times. The culture of our group is of our own making and it is our responsibility to make it a welcoming and inclusive one.
Please note that this code of conduct is not a legal document, supplementing, but not trumping, Department- and/or University policies which vary with your level of employment or study. It is expected that group members understand this and superseding documents. Chris Horvat will discuss the Code of Conduct with lab members who violate these rules, no matter how much they contribute to the POG, their professional level, or their specialization.
Inappropriate behaviour that continues after such an informal discussion will be treated through official channels. To report issues confidentially, please contact Chris Horvat. If this does not feel comfortable, please contact members of IBES or DEEPS leadership or the Brown OEID. Other questions related to the workings of the BOG are contained in a FAQ on our group website.
Inclusivity and diversity
High-quality research can only be conducted in a safe environment. Every group member, collaborator, and colleague has the right to a harassment-free experience independent of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, and/or religion. In addition to making group members feel safe and secure, diversity and inclusivity has numerous benefits to us all. The wider range of people, thoughts, and practices in our group, leads to a wider range of skills, experiences, perspectives, and ideas to collectively draw on. The benefits of diversity and equality cannot be fully achieved without creating an inclusive environment.
We do not tolerate harassment by and/or of members of our group in any form. Harassment includes but is not limited to: offensive verbal comments, deliberate intimidation, stalking, sustained disruption of discussions, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
We ask all members of the Brown POG to conform to the following:
Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other group members.
Behave and communicate professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary jokes are never appropriate. All communication, be it online or in person, should be appropriate for a professional audience, and be considerate of people from different cultural backgrounds. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate at any time.
Contribute constructively. Be mindful of talking over others when discussing in groups, and be willing to hear out the ideas of others. Meetings and discussions are intended to be positive and productive.
Do not override others. We are a group, and we all should be heard. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is be silent. If you feel you have been leading conversation for a while, take a step back. See what happens.
Help each other. If others are diminishing others implicitly, and if you feel comfortable to do so, bring this to their attention.
Mental Health
It is plainly true that academia is a world filled with criticism, fraught with vast interpersonal inequities, and with limited advancement opportunities. Being a scientist can often, and frustratingly, be detrimental to one’s mental health. Early-career scientists are poorly paid compared to their peers, have little future job certainty, and operate on short-term contracts. The constant challenges of self-doubt, anxiety, and uncertainty can contribute to a miserable experience instead of what can be an exciting, fulfilling time.
Sufferers of negative mental health include many senior scientists, who by virtue of climbing the ladder, perversely have come to see this struggle as a “rite of passage”. Hard work can be a virtue. But Anxiety, unhappiness, or negative emotions are not necessary, purposeful, or useful parts of your time at Brown. It is important that members of the Brown POG understand they are not alone, at any level of their career stage, and we encourage all group members to take an active and pre-emptive approach towards the maintenance of their mental health.
Negative mental health experiences come in many forms, and are triggered by some of the unique elements of the academic world. These include:
Quality-of-life issues.
Feelings of isolation, self-doubt, and uncertainty.
Challenges of “negative results”.
Burnout.
Exhaustion.
When considering your own mental health, one ought to keep in mind the role of cognitive biases, especially survivorship bias and impostor syndrome.
Impostor syndrome is a comparative bias, where someone feels like they are not to the level of their peers, and thus an “impostor” in the ranks. This is experienced by many academics at all levels, and it has the negative consequence of preventing self-care because the sufferer feels that they cannot reach out and explain themselves to their “clearly superior” peers.
Survivorship bias is the tendency of those who “made it” to rewrite their history, centering it on themselves. Brown University has approximately 500 tenured faculty members. It admits 850 PhD candidates every year. It is clear fewer than 1 in 20 of those highly motivated students might be expected to secure a tenure appointment at a similar university. What does enable a professor to achieve such a coveted appointment is some combination of (unrepeatable) good fortune and unique circumstances. Career advice given by those in such positions can often be flawed, minimize past struggle, be self-aggrandizing, and make a student facing such an uphill battle feel tiny.
Inclusivity in paper-writing
Giving and receiving credit for scientific work, and the manner in which that credit is disseminated to a broader audience, is a key challenge of performing research. In general, within the APOG we strive to adopt a maximalist and inclusive approach. If a researcher has made a meaningful contribution to a project, authors of a scientific paper or report should contact that person to ensure they are comfortable with authorship, or not.
Defining of “meaningful” is not always easy, and differs between people. When trying to understand whether a potential co-author made such a contribution, it is worth using an existing taxonomy, like CRediT which itemizes a list of potential impacts for co-authors and a list of how to describe those roles.
In general, if you are on the fence, ask!
Much of the research in our group may be with groups or individuals who are not academic scientists. These could include community members, stakeholder groups, medical professionals, e.g. Those individuals who provide meaningful research insights and impact remain worthy of co-authorship. In all cases, customary knowledge that helps guide scientific publications must be credited, It is our practice in research to ensure that the transfer of customary knowledge comes reciprocally. This is especially necessary when presenting this knowledge in the form of publications.
Peer review and you:
A major contributing factor to negative feelings is also one of science’s most important tenets: anonymous review.
Especially during a Masters or PhD, the scientific work you are doing is extremely personal and can be isolating. Each presentation, paper, or proposal holds enormous weight. It can often feel like the difference between having and not having a secure future.
Yet part of the scientific process is that these important pieces of our professional lives are sent away to be, effectively, criticized by anonymous colleagues. This can have an immense emotional impact. All senior scientists can relay crushing experiences of the review process. Unfortunately, there are no clear professional standards for conduct in anonymous review, and limited consequences for reviewers who act in bad faith, are spiteful, or rude.
It is important that all Brown POG members understand that the review process is often extraordinarily constructive, and reviewers are frequently acting in their interest to improve science. Those truly acting with malice are in the minority, even if it feels like they are in the majority at times.
Our role (together) in the Brown POG is to support each other and create a constructive, safe, and positive environment. A few great papers is not worth a terrible PhD or postdoc. It is not and likely could not be true that our professional time together will always be happy. But we can work together to make it trend that way. Please feel free to reach out both to Chris Horvat and your fellow members if you feel you are feeling poorly about your science, job, and future. If you feel like this is becoming an undue burden, please reach out directly to Chris or other department members for help - there are many resources available to you at Brown, and we will help make sure you can access them.
Thanks, and please enjoy your time at Brown and in the POG!
This Code of Conduct (CoC) was modified from an open source CoC from Christopher Jackson, in turn was influenced and modified from several open source CoCs: (i) BahlaiLab CoC (Christine Bahlai); (ii) WhitakerLab (Kirstie Whitaker); (iii) Hill Lab (Jon Hill); (iv) Krevorlab (Sam Krevor); and (v) MicroMicEng (Ben Britton).