At the risk of becoming unpopular with some good folks, I have to offer a different perspective on unpaid positions to that given in the letter posted by Eiren Jacobson on 2nd July, addressed to the leadership of the Society for Marine Mammalogy. The authors of the letter are of course correct in that unpaid positions favor those who can afford to work for free, and as such they exclude numerous people, including minorities. Maybe a few institutions do intentionally exploit younger people in this way. However, for many, this situation is a simple reflection of the state of funding in marine mammal science.
Many institutions - notably smaller non-profits - have a hard time raising enough money to pay their own staff, support basic field work, and keep the lights on. If you ban advertisements of unpaid positions, you are depriving countless people of the only opportunity they may ever get to participate in marine mammal science. I'm a good example. When I arrived on Cape Cod in the fall of 1980, I volunteered at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. They weren't about to pay me, a young guy with zero experience; no one at the institution was receiving much or any salary, and our research budget for the entire year was a few thousand dollars. Yes, I was able to support myself (barely) for a few months. And yes, that was forty years ago; but for many small institutions, life today isn't radically different in terms of funding. Indeed, these days there is more competition for money than there was when I entered the field.
If I had insisted on being paid, or if the student internships we later offered were subject to a ban on advertizing, I and many other individuals who are today well known in the field would never have had that chance to work with a research program, and try out for themselves the idea of a career involving study of these fascinating animals. My wife, Dr Yulia Ivashchenko, has a similar story: had she not volunteered for an underfunded whale research project in Russia, she almost certainly would not be involved in the field today.
By accusing underfunded institutions of unethical or illegal behavior, and depriving everyone of such opportunities just because some are disadvantaged, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We'd all like to see everyone who wants to be involved, paid and given health insurance. But the harsh reality of funding is that this is often not possible.
Funding is hard enough to come by in the US, and far more difficult in many other countries. Do people really want to hobble projects in the developing world from recruiting assistance with poorly funded studies which sometimes involve critical conservation issues?
There is a much broader issue here which the letter does not address, and that is the failure of society in general, and the education system in particular, to encourage minority and other under-represented school kids to enter science. During the ten years or so that I directed the internship program at the Center for Coastal Studies, we were able to offer internship positions that included accommodation and a small stipend; it wasn't much, but was at least sufficient to keep our interns fed during the two or three months they spent with us. Every year, we had anywhere from fifty to a couple of hundred applicants for the five or six internship slots we offered. They were almost all undergraduates - and, tellingly, close to 100% were white. I suspect that many institutions offering paid internships see a similar disparity in applicants today.
Given that our internships were actually paid at a basic level, what this says is that the lack of minority applicants had little to do with financial inequities. Rather, the problem begins much earlier than the undergraduate level. As the infamous Sheldon Cooper once said in an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which they're trying to recruit more women into science, you have to start at least in middle school. As is well known, girls are still often actively discouraged from pursuing STEM careers early on, and by the time you're dealing with the university level, as Sheldon noted, it's too late. The same applies even more markedly to minorities. I've been involved in this field for forty years, and I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of African-Americans I've known who've been significantly involved in US whale or seal research.
So yes, try harder to fund internships and other entry-level positions. But there also needs to be a concerted effort by the Society, and by the field in general, to reach out to schoolchildren, notably girls and minorities, and to aggressively promote programs that encourage kids from all backgrounds to see careers in science as achievable (and cool). Put bluntly, you can offer paid internships all you want, but you probably won't see people from under-represented populations flocking to apply when an interest in the field was never cultivated - or was culled out of them - at an earlier age.
Given the dismal statistics regarding minority involvement in our field and the current explosion of attention on minority issues, I would think that the time is ripe to seek funding from foundation or other sources for well-thought-out programs aimed at recruiting under-represented young people - including school kids - into science. I would respectfully suggest that those who signed Jacobson's letter concentrate on this potentially game-changing idea instead of berating and hamstringing underfunded researchers. Most of these are well-intentioned people who are just trying to keep things going, while giving at least some students potentially invaluable opportunities to jump-start a career in our field.
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Phillip J. Clapham, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Smithsonian Institution
National Museum of Natural History
Senior Scientist
Seastar Scientific Inc.
Vashon Island, WA