Ethics Across the Curriculum:

Facilitators:

John Helgeland, Ph.D. NPEI Director
Dennis Cooley, Ph.D. NPEI Associate Director

Mission Statement:

For too long a time, ethics was considered to be something that people did in private without reference to their professional lives. Furthermore, as the era of relativism encroached upon places of higher learning, the trend was against teaching objective codes of moral conduct. Instead, there was an attempt to replace objectivity with either silence or a complicit acknowledgment that all moral codes are purely subjective and one code is no better than another. The overall negative result from this approach can be seen in many of the scandals that have rocked corporate America as well as in political, social and private life.

In order to increase awareness and understanding of the moral duties that bind everyone in society, ethics must become imbedded in every area of pedagogy and research on university campuses. It is our mission to facilitate this process in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Goals

Short Term:

• Develop and hold workshops in which faculty and others can receive a grounding in practical ethical theory, which they can incorporate into their classes.
• Provide more classes in ethics for students, which will allow them to satisfy general education or other requirements.
• Develop practical ethics classes and online ethics modules (See Links.)
• Provide guest lectures in ethics to faculty members who would like to incorporate ethics into their courses but feel uncomfortable doing that work themselves.

Long Term:

• Create requirements for students across the university to take ethics courses.
• Create team taught courses with ethicists and faculty from all disciplines.
• Create a department, possibly Philosophy and Religion, which would offer an ethics minor or major.

How To Organize a Think Tank

E-Mail: John Helgeland@ndsu.edu and Dennis.Cooley@ndsu.edu
NDSU Northern Plains Ethics Institute
402 Minard Hall
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105
Phone: 701.231.8654