Today's topic is bureaucracy, specifically the moral dilemma that bureaucracy at Duke has been imposing on me and my staff. When we post a job position, there are strict rules we must follow: it must be posted in certain places for a specified duration, and we have to conduct interviews. However, sometimes we have an ideal candidate in mind—someone who has been in our lab for a year and is now perfectly trained for the role. Despite this, we're not allowed to simply hire them. We still have to go through the formal posting and interviewing process.
This situation creates a couple of tough moral dilemmas. First, we waste people's time. We post an ad, people get excited about the opportunity to work here, they apply, and some even reach out to me personally. We create hope only to dash them since we likely already have someone in mind for the job. Second, Duke puts us in a moral bind. When these candidates contact us, we can't tell them not to bother applying because we most likely already have someone. During interviews, we can't inform them that the position is probably taken.
Interestingly, Duke's hiring procedures contrast sharply with its approach to research participants. For research, ethical rules are clear: we can't waste participants' time or mislead them in any way. Yet for potential employees, it's apparently acceptable to be less than truthful and waste their time.
This legal hiring procedure negatively impacts both the applicants' lives and ours. Not only do we waste our time, but we're also put in a morally uncomfortable position of being unable to be honest with applicants. I used to think this was a problem created by rigid laws crushing the human spirit—technically correct but morally wrong.
Recently, however, I discovered a legal concept called implied covenant, which emphasizes the spirit of the law over its letter. This concept reassured me that it's not just about what's written but about the bigger picture—certainly not wasting people's time or putting us in moral dilemmas.
Though I was excited about this discovery, I was disappointed to learn that breaches of implied covenants aren't taken as seriously as other breaches. So while the law acknowledges this principle, it doesn't enforce it rigorously enough.
In summary, it's draining to be forced into unethical behavior by institutional principles deemed ethical by those same institutions. I've had numerous unpleasant conversations over the years because of this issue, and it leaves me disheartened.
