Center for Ethics News

2017 High School Ethics Bowl

On Feb. 8, we had our annual High School Ethics Bowl, which was a huge success!

Six area high schools, including 10 teams of 47 students, participated in the competition. Twenty-four judges assisted, including members of the community and UT Tyler faculty/staff. John Tyler High School took first and second place, and Robert E. Lee High School finished in third place.

The UT Tyler Ethics Bowl is associated with the National High School Ethics Bowl Program at the University of North Carolina Parr Center for Ethics, which offers a national competitive path for UT Tyler High School Ethics Bowl winners.

New Center for Ethics Director

Dr. Gregory Bock was appointed director for the Center for Ethics in fall 2016. Bock is assistant professor of philosophy and religion, and program director of philosophy, religion studies and Asian studies programs at UT Tyler.

He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Tennessee (2012), and his dissertation research was on a topic in bioethics at the intersection of medicine and religion. He has served on hospital ethics committees, consulted on cases, taught ethics classes, and published in top-tier ethics journals like the Journal of Medical Ethics, Hastings Center Report and The Journal of Clinical Ethics.

Academy of Collegiate Ethics

We had our 2nd annual Academy of Collegiate Ethics (ACE) event on Nov. 16, 2016!

Students of 27 teams represented mostly engineering and business law, but we had great and ambitious groups from nursing and other disciplines who participated voluntarily. Dr. Greg Bock started the evening with a keynote regarding ethics and civility, and then the top six videos were shown.

The first place winner went to Team 15: Sarah Hargrove, Elise Follett and Rebecca Porter; second place went to Team 3: Jessica Agnew, Obebe Oluwaseayn, Chad Jenkins, Kourtney Childress and Kennedy Bissot; third place went to Team 8: Kim Assunto, Chris Nafrady, Seth Kozsuch, Thane LaCoste and Kylie Pool.

Links to the videos are as follows:

View Team 15
View Team 3
View Team 8

We are looking for a bigger and improved ACE event for 2017, tentatively scheduled for November 2017!

2015 Academy of Collegiate Ethics

The first Academy of Collegiate Ethics event was held on Oct. 22, 2015, and was a huge success!

We had over 170 people present, most of them students! Student groups (33) of three to five students each were assigned an ethical dilemma scenario to which they developed a video that reflected resolution of that dilemma.

Students worked very hard on their videos, but we could only award first-, second- and third-place winners in each undergraduate and graduate division. The winners were:

Undergrad:
First Place: Group 24
Second Place: Group 5
Third Place: Group 13

Graduate:
First Place: Group 19
Second Place: Group 21
Third Place: Group 36

We have so many people who contributed time and efforts to making this such a successful event. We had external and internal judges who spent a considerable amount of time ensuring accurate scoring of the videos.

Our ACE Committee worked very hard to make the UC Ballroom a fun place to hold the event. Our faculty outside the Center for Ethics supported the event with soliciting students and scenarios.