References should honor privacy, but be forthright if they screw up

Questions revolving around writing references seem toarise frequently. More than once I've received questions about whether it's OK for recommenders to ask you to write your own recommendation to which they will simply affix their name (it's not).

Now, the question arises of what the right thing to do is when someone writing a reference for a former colleague is not as careful with keeping that colleague's decision to apply for a job elsewhere confidential.

Here's what happened.

A reader, let's call him Reed, received an email from a former colleague, Colleen, telling him that she was planning to apply for a new job and wondering if he would be willing to write her a letter of recommendation. He emailed back indicating he'd be glad to write the letter. Colleen sent Reed some details and he subsequently set aside some time to write the letter.

A few days later, after Reed had written the letter, a copy of it was sitting on his office desk, waiting for him to sign it, stick it in an envelope, and send it off. (Reed is very efficient at getting recommendation letters out in a timely fashion.)

That day, however, Bart, another former colleague who had worked with Reed and still worked with Colleen arrived at Reed's office door. Reed had forgotten that he and Bart had agreed to meet for coffee and to catch up. But there Bart was at Reed's door ready to go -- and there sat the letter for Colleen in open view on Reed's desk.

Bart plopped down on the seat next to Reed's desk and they began chatting before taking off for coffee. Well into the conversation, Reed realized that Colleen's letter was sitting in open view. He reached for it, turned it over, and made a comment to Bart to the effect of, "Sorry, I shouldn't have left that out."

"That's OK," Bart joked. "I learned to read upside down a long time ago." At least, Reed hoped that Bart was joking.

Now, Reed was concerned. He promised to keep Colleen's job application confidential. He didn't think Bart had seen anything or that he would say anything even if he did, but he wasn't sure whether he owed it to Colleen to give her a heads up.

Reed should have been more careful with Colleen's letter once he printed it out. Granted, she didn't work at Reed's new place and no one there knew Colleen, but given that it was a confidential letter, he should have taken a bit more care.

But Reed slipped up, and he wanted to do right by Colleen since he had written her a strong letter.

If Bart did see anything, he should have told Reed that he did. And even if he didn't tell Reed, he should not disclose to anyone what he saw. Friends should not betray friends.

Reed isn't obligated to do anything. He is, after all, doing Colleen a favor by writing her a letter. But Reed chose to do the right thing by emailing Colleen and letting her know what happened. As far as either of them know, Bart either never saw a thing or, if he did, kept it to himself. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Time for colleges to stop charging students to do internships

K.P., a reader from New England, has a daughter attending college. As part of her major, K.P.'s daughter must complete at least one internship during the course of a semester. Neither K.P. nor her daughter minds this requirement. In fact, each believes working for a business might give the daughter valuable insight into the work world that she plans to enter after graduation.

While it concerns K.P. that many of the internship opportunities that are available to her daughter are non-paying positions -- and rightly so, since it's only right for businesses to pay workers for the work they do -- that's not K.P.'s major concern.

K.P. is troubled with the fact that her daughter must take her internship "for credit," effectively paying the university tuition for the privilege of working for free at an approved business. While her daughter will register for the internship and the supervisor at the business will fill out an evaluation on her daughter that it files with the school, there is little in the way of academic requirements.

"Should my daughter really have to pay the university to work for free at a business?" K.P. asks.

The issue of unpaid internships has been a sticky one for years. Lawsuits have been filed over the issue. Arguments fought. It seems only right for companies to pay student workers just as they would regular employees, even if the students are gaining experience on the job.

An argument might be made that fewer internships would be available if pay was required. Perhaps.

But if colleges see value in internships, even unpaid ones, perhaps a way to compensate students would be to not charge them for the credits they're required to sign up for to take the internships.

A handful of colleges do not offer credit for internships. As a result, students are not left paying for the right to work for free.

Other colleges regularly offer students a fixed number of tuition-free credits when they sign up for college activities, such as working on the staff of a college publication. If a free credit toward tuition can be offered for such non-required activities, surely colleges can offer a limited number of free credits toward internship requirements.

Is there anything unethical about businesses asking students to work for free? If the businesses are using interns to sidestep the need to hire paid employees to do work that is essential to running their business, something rotten is happening. In such case, employees lose opportunities to work. And students are being asked to do that work for free. Presumably, these positions are not at charitable organizations to which students are volunteering their time. These are businesses whose goals are to turn a profit. Should they be able to do so on the back of free student labor?

What's worse is expecting students to pay college credits to institutions that may claim to provide oversight for these positions, but that, in reality, do very little that translates directly into the equivalent of the college having to hire a full-time instructor to teach a course.

The right thing is for academic institutions that require students to pay for credits to do internships to re-examine such policies to see if they are truly fair and in the best interest of the students they are charged with providing the best education possible. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Whose words are these anyway?

"I am having a tough time with this one," a reader recently emailed. "Is this ethical?"

The reader is the head of a nonprofit that serves families in her area. Her email was accompanied by a request from a local public relations firm asking her to identify the name of a member of one of the families her nonprofit serves who would be willing to add his or her byline to an opinion column that could run in the local newspaper. The opinion column would advocate an initiative supported by the nonprofit.

The public relations firm had been hired by others working for the same initiative. Its representative assured my reader that the "writer" would get to approve the column, but must be willing to put his or her name on something the public relations firm would write.

The editor of the local paper had expressed interest in running the column, but the public relations rep indicated he needed a quick turnaround, so this would have to be "a rush job."

It's become fairly common practice among politicians and corporate executives to have someone on their staff write a draft of a speech or a column on behalf of their boss. How much the boss gets involved in the actual writing depends on the boss. Some edit the pieces heavily or work with the staffer to make the piece as strong as it can be. Others come to rely on their staffers to mirror the boss's voice and end up putting their name on something someone else wrote on their behalf.

At the very least, the boss should sign off on what ultimately goes out of the office. (There's an old story of an executive appearing on a radio interview to promote his recent book, only to have it become clear that he didn't know what was actually in the book. "I don't care if you didn't write your own book," the interviewer reportedly said. "But I do expect you to have read it.")

While I'm not crazy about the lack of transparency for the reader in knowing who actually wrote whatever words they are reading, because a long-term relationship between the staffer and the boss has been established, it can be reasonable to expect that the words might actually reflect the boss's views and his or her manner of expression. Good staffers become quite adept at matching their bosses' voices.

But my reader's case is different. The family member is not a public figure and presumably has no relationship with the public relations firm. While it might be common practice to have ghostwriters create pieces to which members of the community attach their names to give a sense of "authenticity" to the column, the more honest approach would be to identify someone from the community to write a draft of the desired column first. If my reader and the nonprofit firm wanted to offer guidance on how to write an effective column and then offer editorial suggestions to make the piece as strong as it might be, that makes sense.

But the right thing is to give the identified column writer the chance to write his or her own words, rather than offer to write it and then slap his or name on the column. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of  The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today's Business and The Good, the Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

(c) 2014 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.