Ethics Through Earthquakes: Using University Administration as a Resource for Simulation Exercises

Abstract

Simulation pedagogies, while offering powerful potential benefits to students, often have difficulty in combining two desirable outcomes: experiencing the consequential stakes associated with true crisis situations, on the one hand, with the direct relatability associated with more “realistic” hands-on scenarios, on the other. In this respect, we believe many faculty members may have an unrecognized resource readily available to them: their own university. At our university, we led a collaborative effort between the Department of Political Science, the University Honors Program, and the Department of Public Safety to construct a simulation exercise for use in a class on political ethics based on the same tabletop exercise the university’s own administrative leadership used to prepare for a major earthquake scenario. The professor and the Assistant Chief of Public Safety worked together to reconfigure the earthquake scenario simulation with “ethical land mines” (potential harm to students or rescue workers, concealment of relevant information from the public, etc.) designed to illustrate course concepts and problems. In this article, we describe the exercise we constructed from preparation to enactment to post-exercise analysis. In conclusion, we offer suggestions as to additional potential opportunities for collaboration on simulation exercises with universitiy administrative offices.

Keywords:

• Simulations
• role playing
• institutional support
• university administration
• political ethics

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Richard Battistoni, Dorothea Herreiner, Brian Klunk, Jeffrey F. Kraus, Joseph W. Roberts, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this project and to Alfredo Hernandez for his valuable research assistance. Thanks as well to the students who participated in our two simulations; to the Loyola Marymount University administrative leaders who made themselves available for student interviews, particularly David W. Burcham, Joseph Hellige, and Timothy Law Snyder; and especially to our colleagues Lynne Scarboro, Hampton Cantrell, Simran Sandhu, Treemonisha Smith, and all our coworkers at Loyola Marymount University’s Department of Public Safety.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John M. Parrish

John M. Parrish is Professor of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University, where he teaches courses on political theory and political ethics. He is the author of Paradoxes of Political Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and coauthor (with Alex S. Tuckness) of The Decline of Mercy in Public Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Devra Schwartz

Devra Schwartz is the Vice President of Campus Safety and Security at Loyola Marymount University. Devra also serves as a Senior Advisor to the Los Angeles Homeland Security Advisory Council and as an Advisory Board member for the UCLA Extension Emergency Management & Homeland Security/Enterprise Risk Management Certificate Programs.