Ethics centers’ activities and role in promoting ethics in universities

Abstract

In modern and well-structured universities, ethics centers are playing a key role in hosting, organizing, and managing activities to enrich and guide students’ ethical thinking and analysis. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the goals, activities, and administration of ethics centers, as well as their role in promoting ethical thinking for academic, career, and business purposes. The paper also gives an overview of the most common activities organized by these hubs in order to highlight their contributions to pedagogy, student learning and intellectual growth, research development, and community service. This study is based on an intensive review conducted on seventy-five ethics centers established in universities and colleges around the globe. First, it provides administrations of academic institutions with the basic knowledge needed to plan for potential new ethics centers. They can benefit from the present expertise of described ethics centers and project the practical methodologies on their university needs. In addition, directors and coordinators of established ethics centers would enhance their experience by including new activities and collaborations to their plans. Finally, ethics course instructors can benefit from the listed activities to increase student involvement by including practical methods and discussions beyond the classroom.

Keywords:

• Ethics centers
• ethics activities
• ethics in universities
• community service
• research development
• teaching ethics

Acknowledgment

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Ms. Hind El Hajj in the linguistic proofreading of this manuscript.