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.

Seek the choice that gives you that peaceful easy feeling

 A lyric from The Eagles' song “The Best of My Love” has been running through my head this past week: “You see it your way, I see it mine, but we both see it slipping away.”

 

The words and melody were implanted like an earworm not because of a sudden desire to relive my freshman year in college, but because of several conversations I’ve had with readers or friends about ethical challenges they told me they were facing.

 

The conversations each started similarly. “I want to do the right thing here,” or a close variation, followed quickly by a description of a disagreement or challenging situation. Each of them was talking with me because I regularly write about how people grapple with making ethical choices, and I have some insight. Most of us have insight.

 

Whether the person asking for it finds it something they want to hear is a different thing.

 

When someone seeks advice on “doing the right thing” or making an ethical choice, all I can do is to help them think through the choice they are about to make. I can listen and offer them feedback on whether what they have done or plan to do seems fair to all parties involved. I can help them try to see how other stakeholders involved might be affected by their choices. I can do all sorts of things to help them try to make the best right choice they can make.

 

What I can’t do is to ensure that their decision to do what’s right will result in the outcome they desire. A business relationship might suffer if they choose to take a strong stand that runs counter to the desires of others in that business. A friendship might be strained. Ultimately, a choice might be made that strikes them as being morally abhorrent. No matter how ethically right someone is in making the choice they make, it is no guarantee that others will see the world the way they do.

 

This doesn’t mean that whoever they find themselves up against is immoral or unethical – at least not always. More often than not, it simply means that one person’s ethical choice is not the same as another’s. They simply disagree.

 

As I’ve mentioned in the column before, Joan Didion wrote in her 1965 essay, “The Insidious Ethic ofConscience,” that “when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something” but that it is a “moral imperative that we have it,” that is when “we join the fashionable madmen,” and that “is when we are in bad trouble.”

 

I will tell you the same things I tell those who seek advice: Choose to do the right thing not because it will result in you always getting your way and not because your righteousness will always win over others, but because ultimately having the integrity to think through a situation and to do what you believe to be right will help keep you from becoming the person you swore you never wanted to become. It just may give you that “peaceful easy feeling” The Eagles first sang about back when I was in high school — and now is another song I can’t get out of my head.

 

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.

As mask mandates get lifted, honor others’ choices

 Like many other workers in the United States who returned to a physical workplace after spending more than a year working remotely, I faced a variety of pandemic-related guidelines. The subway system I use to commute to work required that I and other passengers wear masks upon entering the subway stations and while riding the subway. The city where my job is located had mask protocols in place for large gatherings. My employer required me to wear a mask whenever I was not alone in my office on campus and to test weekly to make sure I hadn’t been infected with any of the COVID-19 variants.

 

While the subway maintains its mask mandate, my employer has shifted the policy. We are still required to test weekly, but the wearing of masks while we teach is now optional. In other words, it is now up to me to decide if I want to wear a mask while I am in the classroom. The same is true for my colleagues and for our students.

 

The key word for me in the new policy is “optional.” That does not mean I am obligated not to wear a mask. It also does not mean I should belittle anyone else at work for whatever choice they make about mask-wearing. I have the responsibility to make certain that students in my classroom do not feel pressured to remove their masks nor to feel uncomfortable wearing them if they choose to do so.

 

In early March, when students filed in behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a political event, he had an opportunity to make the difference between a mandate and a choice clear. But as the students filed in behind him, DeSantis said: “You do not have to wear those masks. Please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve got to stop with this COVID theater.” Most of the students began to remove their masks. When a sitting governor chides you to do so and your fellow students comply, there’s certainly a pressure to comply.

 

To be fair to DeSantis, he continued, “So if you want to wear it, fine.” But he quickly added, “But this is ridiculous.”

 

All the words DeSantis needed to make a clear statement about individual choice were among those he used. If he had simply said, “If you want to wear it, fine, but you do not have to wear those masks” and left it at that, it would have sent a far different message than the one he sent (though he still likely would have risked the wrath of the children’s parents who might have liked to have been consulted).

 

People in a position of power and leadership have a responsibility to use that power wisely and for the good of the people they lead. Belittling is neither sound policy nor leadership. Neither is it an effective way to teach.

 

As we begin to return to some sense of normalcy, the right thing is to show respect for others’ choices. I will work hard to make my students feel comfortable in their decisions about wearing a mask in the classroom. How I teach has nothing to do with whether they wear a mask. I may, however, still chide them about showing up late to class.

 

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.