Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Conflicts of Interest

Rita Hays
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

In my career as a medical research administrator, I have been on a lot of committees. Committees often make decisions that affect the lives and careers of people who probably don’t even know who is making the decision. It is imperative that the committee be made up of people who understand the issues, are fair in their appraisals and have no personal vested interest in the issue being decided. Right?

The only problem is how to find all of these qualities in the same person. An expert is very likely to have strong opinions about the field of expertise. An expert is also likely to be personal friends with other experts in the same field, including those whose work or plans are being evaluated. The expert may come from the same company or university. The expert may receive income from a company that is involved in the project or report being evaluated.

In other words, there may be a conflict of interest.

Everybody knows that we must avoid conflicts of interest. Organizations, most notably the Federal Government, have established rules to prevent such conflicts. For example, anyone with any sort of affiliation with the same institution as the applicant must leave the room. That rule extends to the whole California higher educational system. So someone with a courtesy appointment at UC San Diego can’t evaluate an application from someone who works for Fresno State University, even though they may never have heard of each other. Strictures of this type, which must be applied rigidly if you work for Uncle Sam, have sometimes made it impossible to recruit really knowledgeable members to evaluation committees.

When I was growing up in a small university town, there were strict nepotism rules at the university. These had been put in place to stop professors from hiring their wives to supplement the family finances. But the result of these nepotism rules was that if both husband and wife were faculty material, only one — the husband — could be hired by the university. Since there were no other opportunities in town, this left the wife with few options. Or the couple might go somewhere with less restrictive rules and the university would lose the contributions of both. Nowadays most nepotism rules are less restrictive, perhaps preventing a person from supervising a relative. An institution must balance the needs for getting the best people to do the job against the need to be fair.

How can those of us in the real world avoid conflicts of interest, or at least recognize them and make allowances for them? First of all, we must acknowledge the factors influencing important decisions. We must balance the need for excellence against the need for fairness. We need to look within ourselves to make sure that we are being evenhanded, to try to understand our own prejudices. In our everyday lives, thank goodness, we don’t have arbitrary rules to tell us when there is a conflict of interest. As with all moral values, we UUs must think for ourselves and make, and take responsibility for, our own decisions.