The academic as fiduciary: More than a metaphor
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is increasing interest in the role of the university teacher, both from a pedagogic point of view and from a legal one. The first part of this article looks at various pedagogic models or metaphors of the relationship between the academic and the student. It concludes that thinking of the relationship as a “fiduciary” one is a useful metaphor, drawn from the law. The main part of the article returns to the legal (or equitable) origins of that concept. Building on the case law and commentary from Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK, the article explores what would be required to bring the obligations of the academic to students within the legal/equitable definition of fiduciary obligations owed by academics to their students. The conclusion is that even if we do not want to force the extension of enforceable fiduciary obligations to encompass the academic-student relationship, the adoption of those obligations by academics should be part of “best practice”.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.044 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it