Chancellor's Ethics Advisory Group: On the ethical climate of the University of Colorado Boulder

Ethics and the Making of a Campus Community

Before beginning our report, the authors would like to stress that none of us wishes to hold her- or himself up as a paragon of ethical behavior. We are all humbly aware of our own mistakes, weak­nesses, and moral blindspots. However, we do not believe that ethics is about perfect behavi­or—if it were, we would face an impossible task. It is rather fundamentally about acknowledging past mistakes, taking public responsibility for them, apologizing for them, and learning from them in order to achieve the entirely attainable goal of building a better community. In that spirit, we re­spectfully submit this report to the CU community, not as an opportunity not to criticize and blame, but as an invitation to talk and, where necessary, to argue with each other on the basis of openness, trust, and mutual respect.

In Fall 2016, the Chancellor, Phil DiStefano, convened the Chancellor’s Ethics Advisory Group (CEAG), a body representing faculty, students, staff, and administrators.  (See Appendix 1 for CEAG’s membership.) The starting point for CEAG’s deliberations was the nature of ethics and the factors most conducive to nurturing a healthy ethical culture. Moreover, the group took its mandate to be not only to report on the campus ethical climate but above all to propose specific actions the community and its leadership can take to improve it.

CEAG discussions stressed from the outset that ethics is first and last a form of communal life rather than a set of formal rules. There are indeed guiding principles, and chief among them justice, fairness, integrity, equality, and transparency. Moreover, these principles do find practical expression in the shape of community practices, policies, and rules. However, we agreed that the core concept is community, for the community itself is at once the source, the object, and the ultimate exponent and beneficiary of the principles that preside over its citizens’ conduct.

This emphasis on community reflects the ancient Greek canons from which the term “ethics” de­rives. In Greek usage, ethos can mean one of two things: individual character, as in Aristotle’s use of the word to describe characters in a play, each of whom is defined by forms of speech and behavior appropriate to the role a given actor plays; and the character of the community to which that character belongs—the ideals, beliefs, traditions, and styles of behavior that set the city of Athens, say, apart from other communities by defining what Athenians collectively understand to be a good or worthy life. Ethics is accordingly to be distinguished both from governing laws and from mere rote obedience to those laws—it is for this reason that Socrates came to be identified as a model of genuine ethical behavior not only despite but also directly because of what it was in his character and conduct that led his fellow citizens to put him to death.

A corollary of this view was the need to draw a bright line between ethics properly understood and compliance—a quite different if closely related concept that current university usage tends to con­flate with ethics as such. It is striking that administrators often loosely speak of “ethical compli­ance” as though ethics were indeed simply a matter of complying with ethical rules and procedures. And it is also striking that CEAG members could readily report as a matter of everyday experience that compliance with university rules aimed, for example, at engendering greater diversity in faculty hiring frequently amounts to ticking off the items on a procedural checklist on the way to recruiting just the sorts of people those authorized to do so would have chosen in any case.

What our community needs, then, is not yet another collection of policies and standards of the kind enshrined in the recent CU System document, the University of Colorado Code of Conduct. The intentions behind this document are undoubtedly of the best. However, it strikes CEAG that the document falls short of its laudable goals. For one thing, it duplicates the mandates set forth in a wide range of comparable documents already in existence—e.g., Faculty Rights and Responsibili­ties, campus policies on harassment, conflicts of interest, and nepotism, or the student Honor Code, not to mention the many state and federal statutes and regulations with which faculty and staff must comply. There is thus little in the new Code of Conduct that adds to what the university already understands ethical conduct to be or expects of its citizens.

The document’s language is, moreover, predictably thin and abstract in that it fails to articulate a grounding vision of the kind of community CU-Boulder hopes to be. Emerging in a moral vacuum, words like “integrity,” “fairness,” “transparency,” and “respect” ring hollow since they are uncon­nected from any fuller and deeper picture of what ethical conduct would actually look like in the daily lives of the members of our campus.

This insight dictated CEAG’s most central topics of discussion and research. Rather than set direct­ly about formulating some new code of ethics or assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the many such codes already on hand, we wanted to learn as much as we could about three core matters:

• what does genuine ethical conduct look like;
• what specific features of our own community impede or even militate against its realiza­tion;
• how can we change how members of the community behave, focusing less on the rules they ought to obey (and should be punished for failing to obey) than on cultivating a genu­inely ethical culture.

A Model of Ethical Conduct

The picture CEAG formed of ethical conduct implies two things. The first is direct personal incor­poration of shared ethical principles, goals, and modes of behavior—those in fact that define the character of the community as a whole. It is important that, though these matters can and should be expressed in the form of positive rules, protocols, and procedures, actually being ethical de­mands embodying them as the basis for spontaneous choice and behavior. The initial answer to the question of why we act one way rather than another should not be “because that’s what campus policy requires;” it should be “because it’s the right thing to do.” Conversely, the answer to the question of why we avoid bad behavior toward colleagues, students, teachers, or staff should not be “because the campus Code of Conduct prohibits it” but rather because “we don’t treat people that way.” At the personal level, then, ethics is a trained mode of behavior that has become a habitual outgrowth of the kind of admirable person one has schooled oneself to be. Ethical people just “know how to behave” even if coming to know it takes time, effort, and training.

The second point CEAG came to stress, a point implicit in everything we have said so far, is that ethics is fundamentally communal. It is not simply that each community has its own culture or ethos; it is that that ethos is a collective achievement grounded in a shared determination to realize the goals and ideals we hold in common. This is obviously the case in an institution like our own: a major public research university actively committed to teaching, learning, creative self-expres­sion, and the ever-widening pursuit of knowledge, as of such truth as imperfect creatures like our­selves are capable of grasping. Given these goals, it should be self-evident that the university exists to enable all of its citizens to find their chosen place and flourish. This in turn entails still more: a shared commitment to create a culture of mutual support, mutual recognition, and above all mutual care; a shared determination to achieve inclusion and justice for all members of the community, students, staff, professors, and administrators alike; and a shared commitment to pursue the com­mon good both within the university itself and in the larger society of which we form a crucial part.

It is worth reminding ourselves that people tend to talk about ethics when something goes wrong—when rules are broken, colleagues are hurt, rights are denied, and promises fail to be honored. Indeed, if the Chancellor decided to convene CEAG in the first place, it is precisely because recent experience on our own campus shows how far short of our ideals we continue to fall. But it is also worth reminding ourselves that, if this is the case, it is not because we lack codes and policies or the offices meant to enforce them. What we lack is the clear and, above all, active communal embrace of ideals and expectations we already possess.

General Assessment of the Current Campus Ethical Climate

It would be wrong to characterize the campus ethical climate as deeply or irreparably flawed. As we explain below, bad behavior is frequent and pervasive—no part of the university community escapes instances of misconduct, nor, realistically, could we ever hope to eliminate all vestiges of rudeness, selfishness, prejudice, or dishonesty. Still, in the main, most students, faculty, staff, and administrators go about their business peacefully and productively, and with unwavering commit­ment both to the university and to the intellectual ideals it represents. To cite one stellar example, though diversity figures still have a way to go before reaching the levels CU aims for, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement (ODECE) has become an ever-stronger pre­sence on campus. Enrollment from under-represented communities has gone up from 15% in 2009 to 23% in 2015, which reveals a 53% increase. ODECE also regularly organizes summits in which students, staff, and faculty share experiences and best practices, provides support for campus ef­forts at diversity recruitment and retention, and grants funding for department, school, and college initiatives aimed at creating a more inclusive atmosphere and a deeper sense of inclusive excel­lence than has been the norm.

Moreover, in reviewing the results of climate surveys and the annual reports of offices concerned with ethical matters, we were often pleasantly surprised to discover that the situation was not as dire as it sometimes feels. For instance, reports from the Office of Student Conduct indicate that, while the total percentage of students charged with misbehavior of different kinds has not fallen, the number remains low and the majority of the incidents logged occur during the freshman year, when newcomers are still finding their way. There is also little indication that research misconduct is at all epidemic; great strides have been made in ensuring that animal research subjects are treated humanely and are used only when necessary; and the administration has made good progress in informing members of the community of the many resources available to help victims of harass­ment, sexual assault, or abuse—to cite only the most obvious, the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC), the Office of Victim Assistance (OVA), the Ombuds Office, and the Office of Faculty Affairs (OFA). True, in conversation with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and as a result of our own investigations, we found that citizens are not as aware as they might be of some of these resources or of the variety of services they provide. For instance, many of the inter­personal issues that arise among faculty could be managed with OFA’s help as well as through mediation in the Ombuds Office; and the Ombuds Office itself offers many confidential counseling services beyond mediation for staff and faculty.

Nevertheless, our community does face serious challenges. Some of these challenges are matters of public notoriety. CU’s Athletics program once again faces public charges of misconduct, this time on the score of the behavior of a football coach and the confused reactions of members of the campus administration. In addition, despite administrative efforts to protect both women and LGBTQ members of the community at all levels from harassment, discrimination, and active harm, gender relations at CU-Boulder remain fraught. CEAG has also found that too little has been done to advance the cause of inclusive excellence not only in faculty hiring, student recruitment, and retention but especially in creating a culture of genuine openness, welcome, and respect. We note, for example, that junior female faculty and junior faculty of color often encounter hostility in the classroom, and that the university has so far failed to find a way to engage the campus community in actively addressing this problem.

Further, we are concerned about the experience of both students of color and international students given the current state of national politics. We were delighted to see the active steps the Board of Regents took at its meeting in Aurora on April 6, 2017, on behalf of students covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy instituted by the Obama administration. We particularly applaud the Board’s decision to seek private financial support for students who risk losing state and federal aid under the new federal administration. Still, though like many other colleges and universities across the land, our campus has voiced support for undocumented members of the community, the campus administration has to date given little indication of its own response to the plight of students threatened with identification and deportation. It is likely that the administration’s silence on this score reflects a desire to avoid unnecessary conflict with Regents who are less sympathetic to the situation of DACA students than we could wish. However, as we have said, ethics is not merely a matter of inner attitude and intention. It is above all a mode of communal conduct—an open and active public commitment to saying and doing what is right.

Finally, we are led to stress issues of rank, status, and “class” in campus life. We heard and read a good deal about how staff are treated poorly by faculty, how graduate students working in labs are often treated poorly by supervisors, how powerful members of the faculty abuse people in compli­ance and enforcement offices, and how high-power faculty often make life miserable for depart­ment chairs and lower-status faculty. We were surprised indeed to discover how deeply many members of the community perceive the existence of a privileged faculty caste and how pervasive status-based incivility and unprofessionalism appear to be. The problem’s scope would seem moreover to be peculiar to CU. Several informants among the SMEs we consulted remarked that they had never encountered anything of the kind at other institutions and that many of the behaviors they have observed would not be tolerated in private industry.

To be sure, none of these difficulties is unique to our own campus, and we are pleased to acknow­ledge that CU has so far avoided some of the more distressing acts of racial, ethnic, and religious hate witnessed elsewhere. And we note with pride that our campus has handled recent conflicts around public political speech many in our community find threatening or offensive with greater calm and a clearer grasp of both First Amendment rights and the university’s responsibilities as a forum for open and often heated debate than a number of our peers. Still, there remains a great deal for us to do if we are to achieve the Chancellor’s stated goal not simply of confronting the ethical challenges we share with the nation at large but, further, of creating an ethical community that could serve as a national model.

Ethical Problems in Need of Redress

During CEAG’s discussions, we came to identify a number of specific issues that demand our collective attention. We have already mentioned five of these:

• abuse of faculty privilege and incivil treatment of people at lower ranks in the campus hierarchy
• ongoing disrespect toward and mistreatment of women, whether students, faculty, or staff
• an ongoing failure to make rapid progress in inclusive excellence;
• the ongoing need to step up diversity efforts not only in terms of recruitment but in creating the genuinely open and welcoming environment required to retain as well as recruit students and faculty of color;
• the need for greater public explicitness, consistency, and resolve in ethical matters on the part of campus leadership.

To these should be added other, broader and more fundamental concerns:

Communication

Communication between the campus community and the upper administration leaves much to be desired despite the dramatic increase in the flow of news, information, and administrator communi­qués emanating from central offices. There is little sense of genuine bottom-to-top as well as top-to-bottom communication. Emblematic of the situation is that, since the closure of the Silver and GoldRecord in 2009, the campus has had no independent news source and no public forum for voicing opinions and initiating discussions. Such news as we receive comes directly from the administration and almost invariably takes the form of either feel-good stories or spin. The result is a deepening sense of administrative intransparency and growing cynicism about the administra­tion’s intentions. We learned in conversation with the Chancellor and Provost that the administra­tion is working with the Office of Strategic Communications to provide faculty and staff with new outlets for public discussion and debate. However, to the extent that these new outlets would be established by rather than independent of administrative offices suggests that they would remain under administrative rather than communal control.

The unsatisfactory state of campus communication is exacerbated by the lack of real shared gover­nance. To be sure, like its counterpart in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Boulder Faculty Assembly (BFA) exerts some influence; and so does the Staff Council. However, the interventions of bodies like these often seem chiefly reactive and advisory. And we witness a good deal of un­necessary confusion and suspicion—as when, earlier this year, the administration accounced CU-Boulder’s participation in system online course programs in such a way as to leave the mistaken impression that curricular decisions had been made without the faculty approval mandated by the Rules of the Regents.

CEAG further discussed the role that communication plays in establishing the “tone at the top” needed to foster right attitudes and conduct throughout the organization. This demands that leader­ship embrace and emphasize ethical values and an ethical culture, and that it do so not merely in terms of buzzwords or occasional corporate-feeling talking points but as a matter of its own public conduct. People respond best to a genuine high-level embrace of integrity, fairness, trust, etc., especially when leadership’s repeated actions show it to be authentic.

But CU’s communication woes are not restricted to relations between leadership and those over whom they govern. They also arise “horizontally,” in relations between students and other students, faculty and their colleagues, and across departments, centers, schools, and colleges. One of the fundamental goals behind the creation of the new College of Media, Communication, and Information, as behind the recent reform of the College of Arts and Sciences’ core curriculum, was to foster a spirit of collaboration and exchange that would enable not only individual programs and departments but the campus community as a whole to integrate our many enterprises along produc­tively interdisciplinary lines. Ventures like these can only succeed when channels of communica­tion across our many personal as well as institutional frontiers are open and active; and in this area, too, much remains to be done.

Administrative Structure

Campus administration has not only expanded but become increasingly decentralized. The result is the growing perception that campus administrative offices of all kinds operate more or less inde­pendently both of each other and of the rest of the community. This situation has created tensions around OIEC, for example. Rightly or wrongly, it is viewed as a black-box organization from whose judgments there is no appeal and whose operation leaves both many of those accused of misdeeds and many of those who believe themselves to be their victims deeply dissatisfied—the former because they do not feel that their due-process rights are protected, the latter because they do not feel that they have received justice. Similarly, it is far from clear that the Office of Finance and Budget, that Human Resources, or that the Office of Information Technology (OIT) make decisions based on the actual needs of students, faculty, and staff as defined by the institution’s fundamental mission as a public research university. Part of the problem stems from what members of the community regard as the “corporatization” of campus life—the tendency to think that models and procedures that seem to work in business can be imported directly into the university without making systematic adjustments for the many ways in which teaching, learning, research, and creative work make different kinds of demand and answer to different sorts of standards. Students are not just “customers;” nor are faculty members mere “employees;” and the university’s day-to-day business is more efficient as well as more fulfilling when staff are acknowledged as colleagues and participants rather than as servants. People form the very heart of the institution. Without them, CU could not exist and would have no earthly point.

We also noted that the combined proliferation and decentralization of administrative offices often hinders the work of those offices themselves, especially where ethical concerns are involved. We note with gratitude, for example, that the officers charged with maintaining high ethical standards in research work extremely hard to ensure that research misconduct is carefully monitored, that animal research subjects are treated humanely, or that campus laboratories are safe and secure. However, during our conversations with campus SMEs, we learned that a recurrent problem is the difficulty often encountered in coordinating efforts across units and in ensuring that everyone is working from the same ethical playbook.

Faculty Misconduct

We have already noted frequent reports of incivility on the part of some members of the faculty, especially at higher ranks. This is in part related to the endemic risk at a university like our own of valuing research, scholarship, and creative work not only above but also at the expense of other factors that are just as important to the institution’s ethical as well as academic health. It really does seem that high-status faculty members enjoy privileges that are both out of proportion to their contribution to the life and work of the campus as a whole and exact a price in terms of abusive treatment of those of lesser status—students, staff, and faculty colleagues alike. This is an issue that not only needs to be discussed at length but also requires soul-searching on faculty’s part.

Ethics and Compliance

At the same time as the campus administration has grown bigger and (paradoxically) more uncoor­dinated, campus policies on ethics have increasingly emphasized compliance over active, adult moral reflection and judgment. An ironic byproduct has been the way in which policies that ought rightly to empower members of the community are increasingly felt as disempowering all con­cerned—especially on the score of compulsory reporting rules that now extend beyond explicitly criminal matters.

The understandable emphasis on reporting and compliance is often accompanied by a relative un­deremphasis on the development of an ethical culture and the related need for active ethical modeling at all levels of campus administration. There have been moments when administrators have risen to the challenge. For example, many chairs and directors work hard to create healthy unit climates, often with little or no training and support. We also commend the Chancellor for his resolute conduct during the recent ethical crisis surrounding the Department of Philosophy; and we have already expressed our gratitude to the Board of Regents for defending the rights of DACA students. However, there have been many other occasions on which campus leadership has failed to measure up to the ethical standards expected of everyone else.

During our deliberations, we came to recognize the crucial importance of what the ethical literature defines as “tone at the top” as a prerequisite for achieving a healthy “mood in the middle” and what we ourselves came to call (partly in jest) “belief at the bottom.” It is hard for chairs, super­visors, and directors to do the right thing if they do not feel confident that their own supervisors will do so, too; and this in turn promotes cynicism and unease at lower levels, from regular faculty and staff to students.

Funding

CU’s funding base continues to be debilitatingly precarious, impeding efforts of all kinds, inclu­ding those directed toward enhancing our ethical culture. During CEAG’s conversations with SMEs, the lack of necessary resources was a recurrent theme. For example, we were told that, in the absence of adequate campus support for grant writing, some Principal Investigators feel they lack the time to monitor the activities of the graduate and post-doctoral students working in their labs. As a result, unnecessary errors and (occasionally) the fudging and forging of test findings occur simply because no one in authority was able to mind the store. Or again, a lack of proper funding makes it hard to care for experimental animals in the way the university needs to in order to ensure not only humane treatment but the integrity of research results.

Needless to say, the campus faces many challenges in the area of funding, many of which are beyond its direct control. Nevertheless, CEAG wishes to underscore the fact that funding is very much part of our overall ethical climate and that efforts to alleviate the financial strain are as such ethical as well as fiscal matters—especially at a time when the collapse of state funding, coupled with the threat of a dramatic drop in federal research support, places a greater premium on partnerships with private corporations whose motives and habits may not be as pure as our own ethical standards require.

Above all perhaps a concerted effort needs to be made to explain to the state legislature and to the population of Colorado in general that support for public education, scholarship, creative work, and research is an ethical duty. It is not just that institutions like the University of Colorado provide employment, prepare students for jobs, and contribute mightily to the health of the state economy, making funding a matter of economic common sense. In pursuing knowledge, expanding the forms and frontiers of human self-expression, and achieving the goal of what we have come to call “inclu­sive excellence,” we enlarge and enrichen the scope of human freedom and of responsible as well as informed public citizenship. The state accordingly owes it to itself to take its fiscal duty to the university seriously.

Campus Vision

Most important of all, no one seems able to articulate a coherent and persuasive vision of campus goals and ideals or of CU-Boulder’s character (or ethos) as an institution. As we have insisted throughout our report, ethics is an expression of shared values, standards, and ideals—it is an expression of community. But community is a good deal more than the sum of the many individu­als it houses and of the activities in which its citizens engage. It is a life-form whose perfection and fulfilment implies shared awareness of its existence and meaning.

This last question surfaced as early as CEAG’s first meeting in August 2016. It was remarked that, in contrast to many peer institutions, CU lacks a credible public image capable of identifying it as a university imbued with a specific, readily recognizable culture like no other. This is not to say that peer institutions are without ethical flaws of their own or that we would (or should) embrace them as models. On the contrary, we are proud to observe that CU-Boulder has responded to the challenges to free speech emerging from our current national political turmoil far more wisely and effectively than counterparts elsewhere. However, in the absence of a distinctive cultural identity of its own, CU still struggles to make headway in convincing the citizens of Colorado of its importance or in making significant progress in developing its endowment, in large measure because alumni give in astonishingly small numbers—only 8% whereas, at other Pac-12 schools, 15% of alumni give back to their universities. In our view, the reason for CU’s underachievement in both areas is not a lack of excellence and innovation in either teaching, research, scholarship, or creative work. It lies, rather, in the fact that CU lacks a clear institutional character as a place possessed of a specific, readily recognizable campus culture.

Many things contribute to this lack, from the history of the university to the often conflicted nature of its relations with the four-campus University of Colorado system as a whole, and from the state’s remarkable inability (and perhaps unwillingness) to fund the institution properly to feudal warfare among CU’s rival schools and colleges. However, the fundamental problem is the absence of vision on the part of campus leadership, highlighted in many ways by recent moves to contract vision out to Strategic Communications, a body that, for all its technical and PR skill, has no real connection to the day-to-day life of campus scholars, researchers, creative artists, students, and staff.

The current “Be Boulder” branding campaign offers a telling case in point. What we have, in place of the kind of shared ethos exhibited by peer universities elsewhere in the nation, is a string of honorific adjectives whose sole common denominator is the bare name, “Boulder.” But “Be Boulder” begs the question. For what in fact is “Boulder”? It is a basic element of style that the best adjective is the right noun. Until we can articulate a substantive account of who we are, one grounded in what students, faculty, and staff do here, and why, it will be hard for the university to achieve the greatness that perpetually seems just around the corner. We will instead continue to find our forward march blocked by still another needless yet readily foreseeable scandal of the sort that has dogged us for decades.

On completing the main body of our report, CEAG gathered one last time to draw together a series of recommendations based on our findings. Some of these recommendations are aspirational in content. However, we aimed above all to formulate action items. These items are addressed more­over not only to campus leadership but to everyone—students, staff, and faculty as well as upper administrators. As we have repeated stressed, ethics is a matter of at once personal and communal commitment and responsibility. The following recommendations are accordingly of concern to each and all of us as both individuals and members of a single community.

Recommendations

1. ETHICS AND COMPLIANCE: The current campus overemphasis on compliance needs to be tempered by an active and inclusive communal conversation about ethics and ethical community.

• Make it clear that ethics and compliance are two closely related yet very different things, neither of which can replace the other.
• Aim for a shared commitment to strive to do what is right, not just what is required, in all situations.
• Respect and support individuals’ personal responsibility for upholding the community’s ethical norms and ideals.
• Continuance of CEAG in the form of a standing committee of faculty, students, and staff reporting on campus ethics both to the Chancellor and Provost and to the general community.

2. CAMPUS CULTURE: The campus should engage the community as a whole in the active work of cultivating and embodying a shared cultural identity as an institution.

• Encourage and support integrated campus activities that foster celebration of shared com­munity values and build pride in the institution, such as enhanced CWA involvement, or­ganizing a campus-wide “day of service,” or presenting documents like the Norlin Charge to students when they arrive at rather than just as they leave CU.
• Focus on CU’s historical achievements in ethics during orientations and in both internal and external communications.
• Identify ways to emphasize and reward ethical behavior among students, faculty, and staff.

3. LEADERSHIP AND COMMITMENT: Campus leaders should demonstrate an ongoing and, above all, personal commitment to the institution’s ethical values and well-being.

• Consider ethical behavior as a factor in hiring and promotion decisions at all levels.
• Ensure transparency, justice, and fairness with regard to the punishment of those who viol­ate community ethical standards.
• Improve funding for ethics and compliance officers to allow greater outreach on ethics and more proactive compliance activities focused on community values as well as rules.

4. COMMUNICATION: The campus should work to achieve open and constructive com­munication between leadership and the community, across schools and colleges, and among faculty, students, and staff.

• Greater commitment from the offices of the Chancellor and Provost to engage stakeholders in decision-making that impacts them.
• Improved communication on the part of all administrative offices, including those charged with ensuring compliance, reporting issues such as misconduct, harassment, or discrimina­tion in greater detail while continuing to protect privacy rights in order to increase transpar­ency and enhance the community’s assurance of justice.
• Improve channels of communication between offices and organizations tackling compar­able or related ethics and compliance tasks.

5. TRAINING IN ETHICS: The campus should take steps to provide ethical training to all members of the community in the form of direct discussion and debate about the ethical challenges we face in seeking justice, fairness, equality, community, and mutual care and respect.

• Commitment to improve ethics trainings to emphasize case-based ethics lessons and “dif­ficult conversations” in meaningful, thought-provoking, engaging, and community-building ways. Important here is recognizing that traditional computer-based “trainings” are often compliance-based and impersonal, and are therefore almost universally disliked, ignored, and dismissed.
• Provide incentives to faculty and programs that seek to integrate ethics education in their courses or curricula.