ethics news & views

Gearing up in Ethics Leadership in a New Millennium

During 1999-2000 the Center for Ethics and its director underwent a five-year review. Conducted by the Provost’s office, the evaluation brought three distinguished scholar-ethicists to Emory in March. They spent two days on campus, speaking with numerous faculty members, administrators and a number of students. The review team included Dr. John Fletcher, founder of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Virginia, Dr. Elizabeth Kiss, Director of the Kenan Center for Ethics at Duke University, and Dr. Bernard Lo, Professor of Ethics at the Medical School of the University of California at San Francisco. The report they presented to the Provost reflected careful listening and great thoughtfulness. Their evaluations strongly affirmed the Center’s growth and development since 1995. They also challenged the Center by pointing to areas of potential excellence that beckon as it continues to strengthen its teaching, research and service components. On the basis of both an internal review and this committee’s external evaluation, President Chace and Provost Chopp invited the present director to continue in the leadership of the Center. I have accepted this invitation with enthusiasm and excitement, and I am eager to continue pursuing their mandate to foster the growth of ethical teaching, research, and service at Emory.

This summer the Center faculty and staff began to shape a vision and a strategic plan to guide the Center in this development. To enrich, clarify and test this emergent vision, the leadership of the Center will hold meetings with several focus groups in the early fall. These groups will offer the opportunity for Center staff to engage in dialogue with deans, faculty, students and staff throughout the University. As we plan for the Center’s growth across the first decade of this century, more than ever, we want the members of Emory’s compact and richly variegated “polis” to have voice in helping us shape the Center’s future.

The Center for Ethics at Emory is unique in the breadth of its mission to serve the entire University. Such a task is made less daunting by the creation of a new affiliate organization, Emory’s new Office of University/Community Partnerships, directed by Dr. Michael Rich, and by our partnership with Theory Practice Learning, and Volunteer Emory. These partners help support our commitment to collaborate effectively with the Schools and Departments that are Emory University. They bolster our ongoing efforts to serve and to lead Emory in pursuing the following goals: (1) to expand and strengthen the teaching of ethics in each of the colleges and graduate and professional schools; (2) to foster research in ethics related to our many varied fields, professions, and contexts of leadership; and (3) through the D. Abbot Turner Program in Ethics & Servant Leadership, to engage in partnerships with the University, the city of Atlanta, and beyond, to encourage the development of leaders grounded in practical ethical skills and experience.

One of our guest lecturers this year will be the brilliant young author, Jedediah Purdy, who wrote For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today. Purdy argues that our society suffers from a pervasive sense of irony that undercuts and neutralizes our readiness to own, and to speak from, and act in public on the basis of, our ethical and moral commitments. He writes:

Irony is powered by a suspicion that everything is derivative. It generates a way of passing judgment—or placing bets—on what kinds of hope the world will support. Jerry Seinfeld’s stance resists disappointment or failure by refusing to identify strongly with any project, relationship, or aspiration. An ironic attitude to politics and public life never invites disappointment by a movement’s decline or a leader’s philandering. There is a kind of security here, but it is the negative security of perpetual suspicion…The great fear of the ironist is being caught out having staked a good part of his all on a false hope—personal, political, or both.

The Center for Ethics exists to pose alternatives to the moral paralysis of the ironic temper in its various forms. We invite you to join in strengthening our work.

We will communicate with you in many ways this fall: Through this newsletter, through a new website that will include continually updated news and materials, and through the ecology of focus groups I referred to above. We want your ideas, your involvement, and—we hope—your commitment. Help us build the Ethics Center that Emory University needs and deserves for this 21st Century.

[ Posted by James Fowler at September 1, 2000 07:26 AM | More Opinion articles ]

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