Recently in Responses to Crisis at Penn State Category

Reflections on Ethics Education and Crisis Response

By Barb Edwards on February 6, 2012 6:00 AM | 0 TrackBacks
Penn State Rock Ethics Institute Director Nancy Tuana offers the following reflections on Teaching 'The Kite Runner' at Penn State, an article recently published in The Chronicle Review by our colleague Sophia A. McClennen about her classroom experience in the first days of the current crisis:

One theme of The Kite Runner is moral failure. It includes the story of Amir who witnesses the rape of Hassan, his friend, but fails to intervene and later to even acknowledge the rape or apologize for his inaction. 

People do sometimes fail to act morally. While the ethical violations are often less egregious than Amir's, moral failures--to act with integrity, to tell the truth, etc.--do happen. McClennen asks: "Is the moral failure connected solely to the event, or is the continuing inability to correct it even worse?" 

What do you think? What are some of the impacts of a failure to take responsibility for an ethical wrongdoing: On those who were harmed by the wrongdoing? On the individual who acted unethically? 

McClennen's sincere hope is that her class has offered students "a chance to engage ethically and philosophically with the issues we are facing now at Penn State" and that "it has given them a moral vocabulary with which to think about these events by applying what they were learning in our readings." 

How have your classes helped prepare you to think about difficult and complex ethical issues like those we are currently facing at Penn State? What changes would you suggest we make to classes to improve them in this regard?

Moral Repair In a Town This Size

By Mark Fisher on February 2, 2012 8:47 AM | 0 TrackBacks
On January 29th, the Centre County Women's Resource Center  partnered with the State Theatre to host:
 

The event featured a screening of the recent film, by fine-art photographer and first-time documentary maker Patrick Viersen Brown, documenting some of the effects on an Oklahoma town brought about by the prolonged sexual abuse of children in the community at the hands of a local pediatrician. Following the screening, the film-maker was joined by specialists on, and survivors of, childhood sexual abuse for a community forum moderated by Kristen Houser, a State College native, alumna of Penn State, and anti-sexual assault activist who is currently working for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape (PCAR).

Continue reading Moral Repair In a Town This Size.

Ethics Training at Penn State

By Barb Edwards on November 18, 2011 1:01 PM | 0 TrackBacks
The following thoughts were contributed by Prof. Stephen Schaeffer from the Biology Department at Penn State's University Park campus.

In August of 2011, when Dean Daniel Larsen asked for volunteers to attend a workshop on integrating ethics into technical courses from each of the departments in the Eberly College of Science, I was a bit nervous about signing up. I am a geneticist by training. I had always raised potential ethical issues when genetic information was discussed, but I was really a novice with respect to using the language of ethical arguments. I decided to volunteer to be a participate in the workshop to see if I could learn about how to more effectively integrate the language of ethical thinking into my Advanced Genetics course.

Continue reading Ethics Training at Penn State.

Response to the Current Crisis

By Barb Edwards on November 11, 2011 2:29 PM | 0 TrackBacks

 

During this time of unprecedented crisis within the Penn State community, the Rock Ethics Institute remains committed to fostering careful reflection and dialogue concerning the many ethical challenges facing our community.  We acknowledge our responsibility to participate in addressing the particularly difficult challenges that recent revelations have raised by initiating and lending our support to programs that aim both to increase awareness of and to foster careful reflection concerning issues such as:

  • ethically appropriate responses to the spectrum of harms done to children who have been sexually assaulted 
  • the interrelations between individual and institutional ethical responsibility, and   
  • the requirements for a diverse and multi-faceted organization like Penn State both to advocate for and to exemplify integrity in all aspects of its mission.

The Penn State Rock Ethics Institute will draw on the expertise of members of the community, on the Institute's existing resources in the areas of ethical leadership and moral literacy, as well as on the resources that are emerging from our current examination of institutional corruption in support of this reflection and dialogue. We appreciate input from anyone in the community concerning how we might best facilitate this challenging process. Please leave your comments below.  

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