Stop unpaid college internships now

A few weeks ago, several other alumni of Bethany College and I were interviewed about our college experience. I loved my time at Bethany in West Virginia. I had transferred there after having attended a few other colleges, and from the first day on campus onward it felt like home. I made good friends, took challenging courses, and formed relationships with a few professors that remain strong.

 

When the interviewer asked me about my internship experience while in school, my response was short. I didn’t have any. There were plenty of internships available, but most all of them were unpaid, and even if I wanted to consider them, I couldn’t afford to work for free.

 

Twenty-some years after graduating, I was in my first job as a college professor at a small liberal arts college in Boston. Internships were a big deal for students at the college, and many of them were still unpaid. What complicated things further was that many of the internship sites would only hire interns who were doing the internships through the college. At the college where I taught, for many students this meant working for free and paying tuition for an internship course as well.

 

While internships can be a great way to get a foot in the door, to make connections, and to be exposed to the inner workings of a job, asking anyone to work for free is wrong. Asking them to pay tuition for the privilege of working for free is equally wrong.

 

The most obvious reason why unpaid internships are wrong is that the unpaid-ness of them makes it unlikely for those students who might not be able to afford to work for free to even consider one. As a result, those students lose out on potential training or job opportunities. In other words, the students who are least likely to have the advantage of getting a foot in the door are having that door shut on them because they can’t even consider walking through it.

 

Granted, internships are supposed to be learning experiences and not a cynical method of allowing employers to not have to pay for positions that are essential to keep the business running. But there is something unseemly about colleges making money by charging tuition to students solely so they can gain the privilege of working for free.

 

If unpaid internships are to continue, one solution is for colleges to offer free credits for students who were required to take an accompanying course. But this doesn’t address the fairness issue of accessibility to all qualified students and not just those who can work for free.

 

Some colleges do offer modest stipends to students working in unpaid internships. But the right thing is for businesses to pay for interns. Even if the pay is modest, that’s a start. And colleges should not charge students for internship courses that are essentially catch-all courses where all those completing internships are required to check in. If a business requires that a college sign off on student internship, the college can do that without seeing it as low-cost revenue stream. If a company can’t afford to pay for an intern, but insists it needs them to run the business, it’s time for them to rethink whether they are simply and, perhaps illegally, trying to find short-term employees to work for free.

 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Do three wrongs make a right?

 Deciding who is more wrong or the most wrong when all are engaged in behaviors that are wrong can be a challenge. But that’s what a reader I’m calling Thalia would like to know.

 

Thalia wrote that she was excited to be returning to the theater to watch the live performance of a play for the first time in more than two years. She had been a regular theater-goer prior to many venues shutting down or going virtual during the pandemic and was eager to return now that she had the chance.

 

“I was enjoying the play, but toward the end of the first act the glare from someone’s phone distracted me," Thalia wrote. Apparently, a woman sitting a few rows in front and to the left of Thalia was on her phone.

 

“The man next to the woman finally pulled his mask down and told her sternly to turn the phone off," she wrote. "She kept her head down and ignored him.” After audible tsk-tsks from the man, the first act ended and the woman with the phone left her seat.

 

Soon, the man returned to where he was sitting with an usher. “They looked like they were waiting for the woman to return so the usher could talk to her,” wrote Thalia. “But the whole time they were waiting, the man didn’t have his mask on!”

 

To get into the theater, everyone had to show their vaccination cards, and they were told masks were required. They were also asked to silence their phones and refrain from using them during the performance.

 

“While they were waiting, the usher never asked the man to put his mask back on,” wrote Thalia.

 

A phone-using woman, a maskless man, and an un-enforcing rules usher.

 

“Who was most in the wrong here?” asked Thalia.

 

Let’s start with who did the right thing here.

 

The man was right to ask the woman not to use her phone during the performance. Rather than ignore him, she could have told him it was an emergency call – if it was – something Thalia believes might have been the case since the woman didn’t return for the second act. The usher was right to return with the man so he could remind the woman not to use her phone during the performance.

 

But each player in this performance could have done better. If the woman received an emergency call, the right thing would have been to leave the theater to take the call in the lobby. The right thing for the man would have been to keep his mask on while lodging his complaint, not just because you lose some credibility when complaining about a rule-breaker while you are breaking the rules yourself, but because it was an effort by the theater to keep all attendees as safe as possible. The usher would have been doing the right thing by reminding the man to wear his mask.

 

If each had taken a moment to do the right thing, the disruption to others could have been avoided. Other than that, Thalia wrote that she thoroughly enjoyed the production.

 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

How not to behave when caught in a lie

 My son, Ed, has been a high school English teacher for 27 years. In the late 1990s, he told me the story of an assignment he received from a student that looked suspicious.

 

Ed noticed that the typeface in the student’s paper was inconsistent, but also that a URL for a webpage was at the bottom of the last page. When Ed went to the URL on his computer, he found that the majority of the student’s paper had been cut and pasted from the website into a Word document, an original introduction had been written (thus the different typeface), and the student handed in the paper as their own work.

 

The student received a zero for the assignment and was asked to meet with his teacher. When Ed called up the webpage from which the paper had been lifted word for word, the student’s response was: “How did my paper get on the internet?”

 

Ed’s story came to mind as I was exploring how people respond to getting caught in a lie or misdeed. Sadly, a natural response to getting caught is to deny the action and, if confronted, to double down, insist on innocence, or to tell more lies to cover up the original lie.

 

I’ve told the story before of how as a 12-year-old, I found a pinball machine at a local arcade that had free games on it before I deposited any money and that kept offering more free games no matter how long I’d played, regardless of my score. When the arcade operator came over and asked if I had paid for the games, my initial response was to say “yes.” After his eyes went to the coin slot that was covered by tape, I knew I had been caught in a lie. He let me leave without comment, but the shame of getting caught stuck with me.

 

But for many, when the tape is not on the coin slot, the temptation is to go from fear of getting caught to shame of getting caught to panic that if you don’t embrace the lie with vigor, all is lost.

 

Such behavior is in common view not only among us common folk, but also in high relief among politicians, celebrities and others in the news. Often when the high-profile person is caught, their top-notch handlers go into action and concoct a sincere statement of contrition. It’s rare but sadly not uncommon for some to show no remorse and go on to engage in more lies.

 

It’s not always a lie. Sometimes it’s getting caught laughing at a joke told at someone else’s expense, recognizing that such behavior was wrong, and then doing something to compensate for our original inappropriateness but doing something far worse.

 

Most of us don’t have the luxury of high-priced handlers to do damage control. The right thing, of course, is to avoid lying or engaging in acts we know to be wrong before we do them. But when caught, the ethical response is to acknowledge the wrong, to avoid casting blame or excuses, and to apologize.

 

Sure, doing so might result in undesirable consequences. But more often than not, it’s not only the original lie we tell that wreaks havoc on our and sometimes others’ lives, but also the lies we tell to cover the lies we told.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.