There is much talk these days about “senior moments,” and having just turned 50, I’m now more aware of these discussions (and of such moments). But I have also started to notice something that I call “Star Trek moments,” when I stumble across something someone wrote decades ago, and in re-reading it, my memory takes me back in time to the point at which it was first read.

That happened to me recently when I was sorting through some boxes of old papers and unearthed a Perspectives article in the TESOL Journal from 21 years ago. The brief, three-page piece, titled “Ethics and Intensive English Programs,” was written by Steve Stoynoff (1993), who recently published an article in ELTJ titled “Looking Backward and Forward at Classroom-Based Language Assessment” (Stoynoff, 2012).

Coming across those two articles at the same time by the same writer, but on two very different topics and written nearly 20 years apart, made me join the two titles in my mind to create a third one: “The Past and Present of Ethics and IEPs.” Those connections were made partly as a result of my current work on language assessment, while at the same time reflecting on and writing about my years as the director of an IEP at a university in Ontario, Canada, from 2002 to 2006.

Ethical Considerations in IEP Administration

Stoynoff started his 1993 article by drawing attention to what he saw as an important oversight or omission: “To date, our profession has directed little attention to the issue of ethics and English language teaching programs” (p. 4). In general, over the last 20 years our field has become much more aware of the ethical aspects of what we do, although the ethics of ELT is still a delicate matter. But Stoynoff focused his general concerns about ethics more specifically on IEPs, in relation to “the ethical dilemmas that confront the administrators of intensive English programs” (p. 4).

Coming across that piece from 1993, I found myself reflecting on what has changed over the 20 intervening years—and especially on what has not. For example, Stoynoff stated that “the IEP administrator is charged with making decisions that have tremendous significance for people, programs, and monetary resources” (p. 4), which in my experience is as true today as it was then. One of the things that may or may not have changed since 1993 is the lack of training for IEP administrators.

As Stoynoff (1992) noted, in spite of the “tremendous significance” of the decisions to be made, “few have the training that prepares them for the decisions they must make. Most have been trained in second language learning and teaching and not in management, law, or ethics” (p. 4). Still today, in 2014, I meet very few IEP administrators who say they have had such training, although there may perhaps be more training provided now than there used to be. This would perhaps be a fruitful area for members of the IEPIS and Program Administration IS to work on together.

In spite of that lack of specialized training, IEP “administrators are expected to make ethical decisions and are regularly faced with choosing between competing and often equally legitimate courses of action, none of which may represent a completely acceptable resolution to a problem. Such situations present ethical dilemmas” (Stoynoff, 1993, p. 4). At this point, it is hard to see what, if anything, has changed, as the IEP program administrators I worked with earlier and the ones I meet today are faced with those same expectations, decisions, and dilemmas. In fact, if anything, those challenges may be even greater today than they were 20 years ago.

Stoynoff focused on three main areas of ethical dilemmas in IEPs: access to information and the right to privacy, maintaining personal and professional integrity, and complying with recognized professional standards and practices. Recent news events involving Wikileaks and the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance program raise many serious questions about access to information and the right to privacy.

Maintaining Personal and Professional Integrity in the Administration of IEPs

In terms of serious questions being raised, the same perhaps could be said about IEPs in relation to complying with recognized professional standards and practices. However, for the purposes of this article, I am going to focus on maintaining personal and professional integrity in relation to the administration of IEPs. Another example of a similarity or sameness now (2014) and then (1993) is how IEPs are funded: “IEPs usually operate on a self-supporting basis. In this respect, they differ considerably from most other units on college and university campuses” (Stoynoff, 1993, p. 4).

Again, the IEP program administrators I worked with earlier and those I meet today are faced with the same financial pressures, and that was certainly the case for the Canadian university IEP that I directed. We had to generate seven-figure sums every year to pay the salaries of all the full-time administrative staff, the full-time and part-time teachers, the other support staff, such as student helpers—and then generate income for the university on top of that. The description given by the university to such programs at that time was “entrepreneurial status,” which was a euphemism for the more accurate description, “zero-funded.”

In my case, and in the case of other IEP administrators, many of the ethical dilemmas arose from that simple fact of funding. Stoynoff draws on the early work of Elinor Lenz (1982) who identified four main challenges confronting administrators of self-financed programs: “(a) maintaining sufficient enrollments, (b) avoiding hidden agendas, (c) presenting accurate publicity, and (d) avoiding conflicts of interest” (Stoynoff, 1993, p. 4). As a result of such challenges, “a program administrator’s personal and professional integrity can be enhanced or compromised depending upon how one responds to these challenges. Each poses numerous ethical dilemmas.”

Maintaining sufficient enrollments was essential in my case, not so much because the university saw the English language program as a cash cow, but because everyone, including myself as the director of the IEP, was on short-term contracts. If enrolment fell below a certain level, everybody’s job was at risk, so we were all highly motivated to maintain enrolment in the IEP. At the same time, we could not make promises in our marketing materials that we could not keep, which represented one set of potential conflicts of interest.

In relation to Lenz’s (1982) second point, about avoiding hidden agendas, I first thought she was referring to the hidden agenda that I was often accused of having, as the director of the IEP, but it is the hidden agendas of others that Lenz was warning about. For example, Stoynoff (1993) wrote that the “IEP administrator is also vulnerable to both the hidden and explicit agendas of students, sponsors, and other personnel on campus” (p. 5). Again, this was certainly my experience, and it was clearly not unique to my position or my situation then, nor does it appear to be today.

Conclusions

In his conclusion, Stoynoff (1993) reiterates the fact that “IEP administrators are regularly required to make choices between competing courses of action. The choices are often difficult and rarely without consequences” (p. 5). I know of no IEP administrators who would disagree with that, but that still leaves the big question: What can we do about such ethical dilemmas? Stoynoff recommends “preparing a personal philosophy statement” in which IEP “administrators critically review and consciously acknowledge the personal and professional standards they wish to reflect in their professional practice” (p. 5). For me, re-reading that line was one of those “aha moments” of “I wish I’d done that back then,” as I remembered all the time and energy I spent writing my teaching philosophy for my teaching portfolio and requiring the teachers in the IEP to do the same.

So why didn’t I do that then? Why didn't I write the same kind of personal philosophy statement for my work as director of the IEP as I wrote for my work as an IEP teacher? The answer is that, when I first read the article in 1993, I had just left clinical medicine and was training to become an English language teacher. I could never have imagined that I’d one day be in charge of a university IEP, with dozens of staff and 1,000 international students from 50 countries. By the second time I read the article, 10 years later, in 2003, I was getting up at 4 am just to stay on top of my work in that role, so I felt there just was not the time to write a personal philosophy statement for my work as the director of the IEP.

As a result of such experiences over so many years, in my work as a mentor and coach to IEP administrators today, I always advise them to take the time to read, to think, and to write about what they’re doing, how and why they are doing it that way, and not some other way. And thanks to the explosion in online publishing in the last 20 years, newsletters like this are one of my first and strongest recommendations!

References
Lenz, E. (1982). The art of teaching adults. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Stoynoff, S. (1993). Ethics and intensive English programs. TESOL Journal, 2(3), 4–6.
Stoynoff, S. (2012). Looking backward and forward at classroom-based language assessment. English Language Teaching Journal, 66, 523–532.