Misinformation can acquire power through repetition, creating an illusion of truth. Such dangers lead the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics in their three-prong approach to spreading the truth this election season.
Social distancing and self-isolation, “requires discipline, mental toughness, and courage; not traits I particularly associated with myself.” This was an early realization shared by Southern Methodist University junior Rylee Bailey in her March, 2020 pandemic blog. Bailey, a student staff member at SMU’s Maguire Center for Ethics & Public Responsibility, began writing and sharing the blog on social media when the campus shutdown.
The pandemic fractured normal life, creating a call to action for the public-facing Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. By the end of May, the Institute had issued a white paper, An Ethics Framework for the COVID-19 Reopening Process, to aid decision-makers from small business owners to governmental leaders at the local, state and national levels.
Ethics Bowl was the springboard for campus-wide ethics at Santa Fe College, a public community college in Gainesville, FL. Although the team won the national two-year college competition twice in four years, that was only the beginning.
A university ethics center founded on a Presidential apology for unethical research has practical application written into its DNA. Today, The National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University continues a 20 plus-year tradition of addressing health, health disparities and social justice.
If innovation is to be responsible, consideration of a technology’s ethical and social dimensions must be made a systematic part of the innovation process. Notre Dame Professor Mark Bourgeois wrote his successful Responsible Innovation NSF proposal with that goal in mind.
Elaine Englehardt was an instructor at the Utah Technical College in 1986 when she designed the first grant-funded Ethics Across the Curriculum (EAC) program. The National Endowment for the Humanities agreed that a required course in ethics might help the 1,700 vocationally minded students to examine their own lives.
When a university makes teaching ethical reasoning skills a ten-year project, people notice.
“People don’t always know how to talk about ethics,” said Piers Turner, the Director of the Center for Ethics and Human Values (CEHV) at Ohio State University. “But there is a hankering for ethics once they look at it with something that interests them.”
Marian University Indianapolis, prides itself on transformational leadership. So, it was no surprise that duties for the new Semler Endowed Chair in Ethics include providing expert consultation on ethics issues faced by the university itself.