Because not every ethical matter involves serious misconduct, or even conscious efforts to grab someone else's credit, I thought I'd describe an utterly mundane scenario and canvass your reactions.
Let's say you've worked very hard on a project. You've been part of the organizing from the outset. You've done a lot of thinking and writing and rewriting. You've worked hard to build consensus. You've done loads of personal outreach to try to build a community around the project (including "cold-emailing" people you don't know personally). You've been the dependable facilitator. You've even shelled out your own money to laminate a sign.
You are the first to acknowledge that the project that you've been working very hard on is a local implementation of someone else's broader project. Because, after all, one should give credit where credit is due.
Let's further suppose you are a lowly assistant professor trying to build your tenure case. Your colleagues in your department have an inkling of what kind of effort you've put into this project (which will appear under the heading of "service" in your list of accomplishments).
So, you open the student newspaper and, in a story about a professor from another department receiving a service award -- one you are very much inclined to feel this professor deserves, mind you -- you discover a quote from an administrator crediting the professor who has won the award with "creating" this project.
Who did the what now?
You struggle with the sense of "create" that could be appropriate here. Certainly, award winning professor didn't create the idea ex nihilo since some other guy did (and wrote a book about it!). Award winning professor did raise the idea of trying a local implementation of this project, in an ongoing online discussion that award winning professor can legitimately claim credit for. But, while award winning professor has been a font of encouragement and moral support, award winning professor has not been involved in the torturous details of getting the project to actually come off.
Let us be clear that we have no reason to believe award winning professor is trying to seize credit for this project. Instead, we have a high-profile administrator heaping this credit on award winning professor in a periodical whose headlines are sometimes misspelled. So, there is a non-zero probability that the administrator was misquoted. All the same ...
What ought you to do? Arguably, your significant contribution is being overlooked. And, a claim that the achievement really belongs to someone else is being publicized to (among others) people outside your department who will judge your tenure case on College and University Retention, Tenure, and Promotion Committees. If they believe what they've read in the paper (and, with no glaring misspellings in the article, why wouldn't they?), it is entirely possible that your claim that this project constitutes real service on your part will be regarded as puffery or worse.
At the same time, recall that you're a lowly assistant professor. It's not like you can be all "'Fraid not!" with regard to the high profile administrator's quote.
Is there any way to set the record straight without stepping on a political landmine? Or do you have to just let it go?
(It's interesting, I think, how this scenario illuminates the trickiness of power relations in academe. As a lowly assistant professor, your contributions often don't get the notice of high profile administrators or other powerful people of note. Instead, there's an assumption that really good things that happen are due to the known galaxy of powerful people. Yet, the lowly must somehow jump up and down to get their contributions recognized, else they don't get to stay in the club long enough to become powerful people of note themselves.)
Janet:
This isn't a matter of ethics but rather a matter of bad luck.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first give kudos to their enemies (or peers).
The "solution" would be, I think, to publish a humble account of what was done and how it was "inadvertently" attributed to another.
That publication would then go to various venues so that it obtains a ubiquity which the wrong attribution doesn't obtain.
But even then, one has to suck it up and move on, appeasing the gods somehow, so that in future they won't mock good work by giving its due to someone else.
RR
Janet,
I would also chock this up to bad luck and essentially move on. I definitely wouldn't do anything "public" like writing the newspaper to request a correction be published.
Perhaps one thing you could do is just try to bring up your contribution when speaking with your colleagues in any venue that becomes available -- conferences, meetings, e-mail correspondence, etc. If you can just let a few of your colleagues know about the contribution you made on this particular project, who knows -- you may be invited to participate in something far bigger.
Just to be clear: This is a thought experiment, not an actual situation with which I'm currently grappling.
(Which is not to say that I haven't grappled with a similar situation in the past. But in academia, who hasn't?)
So, sage advice is welcome in the discussion, but feel free to explore less tried-and-true responses, given that I won't actually be staking my career on them.
Convince the student paper (or get a grad student to do it for you) that the project itself is worth doing a short article on and, when that article is written, you'll have an independently-generated detailed account of where the credit lies.
If the award-winning professor is a good sort of person, he or she might be inclined to write a letter to the paper thanking the administrator for the kind words and also thanking the other people who have been helpful in initiating the project. The trick would be in getting the award-winning professor to think of this gracious gesture if the thought doesn't arrive unprompted.
Alternatively, if you know a student who writes for the paper you could suggest that the project is so interesting a follow-up story might be in order. In the follow-up story you could provide a "fuller" account of the contributions that have gone into bringing the project to fruition.
I think the last thing you would want to do though, is to publicly appear as though you are trying to take credit for the project because that will just come off as sour grapes. This is certainly a situation that calls for a gentle touch.
At the risk of sounding rude, I have but one pearl of wisdom: suck it up.
I am not in academia, and in fact, am not even a scientist. I do, however, work in the high-tech world (think Dilbert), and I can say that I would be stunned into paralysis on any given day that this did NOT happen to someone at my lowly level.
Success is always given to a superior, and blame is always laid at the feet of an inferior. A hard lesson to learn, but since I am about to enter my fourth decade on earth, I have seen the light.
Nothing can be done that will not make you look like a spoil sport, poor loser, whiner, complainer, or team-wrecker...
The victim in this case must know in their heart that they were responsible for a large portion of the success, and find happiness in that alone...
Sorry to seem so negative... I'm normally quite well-adjusted :-), but I have experienced this personally, and seen it happen to others too many times to count....
If the project is amenable to this, said junior faculty member could publish a website or online forum that keeps all participants updated to progress and developments of the project. This could be done starting now forward, or retroactively. Such a website would provide an account of work or offer chronologies of past action. If appropriate, the project could publish a short annual report detailing the past year's activity.
Credit should be appropriately assigned in said accounts or reports, but is should also be clear who wrote the reports.
This is only slightly more work than the assistant professor already has put in to the project.
What ought you to do?
Flat-out ask award-winning prof (AWP) for help. If AWP is a decent person, you're fine. If not, you may be screwed. Owen above has a good idea about a follow-up in the same paper, but what you really need is a letter to the tenure committee from AWP.
Congratulating the award-winning faculty member while mentioning the ongoing work of the project might be one way of dealing with this. Genuine kudos to the award winner may prompt him/her to publicly recognize the assistant faculty member for all the work on the project. And it can't hurt to mention to the award winner what was actually printed in the student run newspaper.
If all else fails, the assistant professor has no choice but to "suck it up," but this need not be the first response (in academia or corporate America).
I think that a polite email to the administrator laying out what the situation really is would be the best course of action. Hopefully, the administrator simply made a mistake, in which case they should be willing to contact your committee informally to give credit where credit is due. Administrators (at least in theory) are there to facilitate a well-functioning university and should understand that this kind of thing breeds resentments that are very counterproductive.
I'd suggest getting an acquaintance to send a note to the newspaper, correcting their faulty interpretation of the issue.
It's possibly a bit underhanded, but it's not as likely to be perceived as blowing one's own horn.
If the assistant professor has been so fortunate as to have acquired a mentor, and the mentor is tenured and full professor, and wise in the ways of academic politics, then the mentor can work on Assist. Prof's behalf behind the scene...a gentle visit with AWP for a friendly chat prior to a joint email to the Administrator, suggesting Administrator write a clarifying note to the paper. Of course, Mentor and AWP supply the Administrator with some suggested text - brief, but informative and clarifying, and supplying plenty of kudos to everyone - so that Administrator need not compose the letter him/herself. Administrators are busy, busy, busy and are much more likely to produce a letter/email on behalf of your pet cause if said letter is presented to them already written and waiting for their signature. They may edit a sentence or two (or not) but you will save them time, and enable them to do their job more effectively. And they will not forget how helpful you have been - you have saved them time, you have saved face in the community, you have aided a junior faculty member in a tough spot, good will has been built all around, everybody wins.
Ah, how I miss academic politics...
Junior Faculty should also build the web site suggested above AND do the annual reports. Document, document, document. Working tirelessly without doing some appropriate tooting of your own horn is foolish. Make sure the right people know just what you are up to and how hard you are working.
You studiously (and probably intentionally) avoided mentioning gender, but these situations are more likely to happen to women than to men. Note: "more likely" does not mean "always happens to women and never happens to men"!
Other related scenarios: when discussing a potential hire in a faculty meeting, Senior Scholar accidentally changes the authorship order of a paper so that the male coauthor's name comes first. (I've seen this magical authorship order switch happen in grad seminars, too, thereby teaching the next generation of scholars who *really* deserves credit for a paper.)
Or, in a faculty meeting, a woman makes a suggestion and no one follows up. A man makes the same suggestion in slightly different form, and the Chair says, "I really like Bob's idea..."
Or, at a conference, Discussant shortens "Jim and Jane's paper" to "Jim's paper." (I'm in a non-lab field in which truly equal joint coauthorship is common.)
As the low-power, low-status person, it's a Catch 22: point out Senior Scholar's error or Chair's misattribution or Discussant's shorthand and you look petty; don't point it out and you don't get due credit. They're little things, to be sure, but they add up.
I've only seen this type of behavior stop in the context of repeated interactions (e.g., faculty meetings) where a senior scholar is constantly on the lookout and constantly willing to go to bat for the lower-power, lower-status person. Call people enough times on their biases, and most will eventually learn. [snark] The ones that don't, though, end up as president of Harvard [end snark].
I am not a tenure track academic, and nor do I play one on TV. However, in my career (teaching) we do have something that seems to be similar to a tenure file. In order to get qualified, and to bump up various levels of pay, you need to have a file of evidence that shows how you have met certain standards. Now, to me it seems that the example at hand would be something along the lines of "Engaged in the corporate life of the school" or some similar standard.
If I was in the situation described above, I would congratulate the guy who gets in the paper, but then go about getting evidence of my involvement from some other source. Perhaps a letter of thanks from whoever was upstream from me in the project. Perhaps some meeting agendas that detailed the tasks I had engaged in on the project.
My point essentially is that it isnt a zero-sum game. The AWP can get his moment in the sun and the adulation and fame that comes from being in a student newspaper article, and you can also get the lovely money that comes from being all tenured and stuff.
Well, it sounds to me like AWP should be assigned some heavy action items, since this is all AWP's inspiration. Email AWP with action items and due dates, thanking AWP for his/her large contribution to the on-going success of the project, and publish them on the report web-site along with a tally of actions completed. [You'll have to add other action items to the tally that you and others of lesser status have and are completing, of course.]
But then, I'm into alternate solutions.
I don't know if it works differently in academia, but I can tell you that in the equivalent situation in corporate life, in 99% of cases what was written in the paper would have absolutely NO effect on the career of the associate-professor equivalent. The people assessing the (equivalent of) tenure won't read the newspaper, or remember what they read, or in any case imagine for a moment that an AWP-type actually did any of the hard work. The senior administator person will just have reached for some handy positive thing to be quoted saying; they won't think it actually means anything.
In corporate life, if you tried to "set the record straight" except perhaps by the most gentle word in the ear of someone who knows you well, you would just be registered as mildly nuts by the powers that be, because they wouldn't think that there was any relevant record that existed.
When your tenure decision comes around you'll have allies who will testify to your contributions to this and other projects. You'd be shooting yourself if you did anything at this point to correct the account in the paper.