Misconduct is a word that is always on professors’ minds. Incidents in the news tend to describe the most serious violations of scientific standards, such as plagiarism for fabricating data. But these high-profile infractions (违法) occur relatively rarely. Much more frequent are forms of misconduct that occur as part of the intimate relationship between a faculty member and a student.

Faculty members don’t need to commit egregious acts such as sexual harassment or appropriation of students’ work to fail in their responsibility to their charges. Being generally negligent as teachers and mentors should also be seen as falling down on the job.

What we found most interesting was how respondents had less vehement (强烈的) reactions to a host of questionable behaviors. In particular, they said that faculty members should avoid neglectful teaching and mentoring. These included routinely being late for classes, frequently skipping appointments with advisees, showing favoritism to some students, ignoring those whose interests diverged from their own, belittling colleagues in front of students, providing little or no feedback on students’ theses or dissertations, and take on more graduate advisees than they could handle.

The vast majority of US faculty members have simply not been taught how to teach. And these responses suggest that they are subjecting young scientists-in-training to the same neglect.

To address this systemic issue, we must do a better job of exposing the current and next generations of scientists to the rules of proper mentoring through seminars. For instance, on online modules. The societies of academic disciplines, institutions and individual departments can play a big part here, by developing codes of conduct and clear mechanisms for students to report violations.

The most serious behaviors are relatively easy to spot and address, but “inadequate teaching” can be subjective. Still, if universities establish specific rules for academics to follow, real patterns of abuse will be easier to find. For instance, these rules could stipulate that professors must return substantive feedback on drafts within 15 days, provide more than just negative feedback during a student’s oral defense of their thesis, or be available regularly to answer questions.

To deal with faculty members who consistently fall short, universities should establish teaching-integrity committees, similar to the research-integrity committees that handle issues of scientific misconduct. These could receive reports from students and decide what action to take, either by following a due process laid out in the faculty manual, or simply by adopting the same process as that of other committees, such as for tenure applications.

What, in the respondents’ mind, is the nature of showing favoritism to some students?