Students and privacy experts have criticised a new form at the University of Sydney that requires master’s and PhD students to declare their relationships with sexual partners or ex-partners and with overseas organisations that are “broadly relevant” to their research.
All students studying master’s degrees or PhDs will have to fill out the new form, which asks them to declare relationships that could be “considered broadly relevant” to their studies.
While declaration forms for conflicts of interest are common at universities, this is the first year that the University of Sydney is implementing this broader form for all research students.
A similar form is required for university employees.
A University of Sydney spokeswoman said that the university wanted to introduce these new standards “early” in students’ careers and “sooner rather than later”.
The form requires students to declare any relationships or activities, both financial and non-financial, with any “company, business, industry organisation, professional association, governmental organisation, university research institute or similar entity in Australia or overseas” that could be “considered broadly relevant to the conduct or reporting of your research”.
It also asks students to declare “any personal relationships” that are “relevant” to their research – which can include people who work outside the university.
The form provides the examples of “family members, close friends, de facto partner, sexual partner, ex-partner, financial dependant or business partner”.
It also asks people to declare if they have personal relationships with their supervisors or “anyone within the chain of management of your candidature or progression”.
Failure to “fully disclose” information “may constitute misconduct and result in disciplinary action being taken by the university”, the form says.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the University of New South Wales, the University of Technology Sydney and Macquarie University do not require research students to sign a similar form. At Macquarie, students are required to undertake integrity training and notify any conflicts afterwards.
David Vaile, the chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation, said the form “steps outside of the norm” of what declaration forms usually require.
He said the questions about sexual partners and ex-partners were surprising, and the requirement to declare relationships with overseas bodies that are “broadly relevant” was too wide.
“It’s like a scattergun, a shotgun to take out a pimple,” he said.
Vaile also said that other examples of personal influence – like “old boys networks” or friendship groups – were not required to be disclosed, even as sexual partners were.
A spokeswoman for the University of Sydney said the information would be held “on a strictly confidential basis and only available to relevant staff at the university”.
But Vaile said there was always a potential for a data leak, and the information about sexual partners could be especially damaging to students.
“In Australia, we are uniquely vulnerable to privacy breaches, data disasters, exposures of secrets and all that sort of thing,” he said. “We do not have a commitment or a right to sue for breach of privacy unlike New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Europe, the UK and the US.
“If you have your career ruined by this leaking out, or a rival sharing it, then in the US, you could sue the pants off them. Here, if something goes wrong … you are on your own.”
The president of the Sydney University students’ representative council, Swapnik Sanagavarapu, also raised concerns about the form.
“It’s very broadly drawn,” he said. “Which means it is probably quite difficult for someone in that position to actually figure out what they should report [and] what constitutes a legitimate conflict of interest under these rules.”
Sanagavarapu said this could then have a chilling effect on academic freedom and the kinds of research people choose to undertake.
He added that he was concerned this additional level of inquiry was due to the government’s recent focus on “foreign interference” and research links to foreign universities.
The University of Sydney spokeswoman said the form was to ensure “the high integrity of our research work”.
“These students will graduate and join Australia’s vital future research workforce,” she said. “That’s why we think it important to educate them early about potential consequences of any real or perceived conflicts of interest.”
The chief executive of Universities Australia, Catriona Jackson, said declarations of interest were broadly “an important element of good governance”.
“All universities have policies covering declaration of interests,” she said. “The wording of those policies is an operational matter for individual universities.”
