From physics to photography, the Rapaport Everyday Ethics Across the Curriculum initiative is one piece of Union's push to help students understand ethical issues.
For Michael S. Rapaport ’59, the goal of the Everyday Ethics Across the Curriculum initiative is simple: equip Union graduates with the ability to perceive ethical issues so they can make conscious choices.
The concept was seeded in Rapaport’s mind during the Enron scandal, which began in 2001 after the Houston-based power company suffered huge financial losses and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched a wide-ranging investigation. The investigation uncovered what the Houston Chronicle later called a “growth-at-any-cost corporate culture” and led to several criminal convictions of the company’s top executives. Rapaport was stunned by their apparent lack of ethical awareness.
“My motivation for this project grew from the totally bewildered response that business leaders, who were overwhelmingly college graduates, had upon their conviction as felons. Our collegiate system failed to give these people the insight to realize that they had approached and crossed the line into criminality,” Rapaport said.
Rapaport, a real estate lawyer in White Plains, N.Y., is the major benefactor behind the Everyday Ethics Across the Curriculum program, which will enter its third year next September. The curriculum initiative is one of several ethics programs at Union ranging from long-standing philosophy courses to the Ethics Bowl team. But what’s unique about Ethics Across the Curriculum program is that it impacts classrooms ranging from physics to photography.
The ethics program is modeled after a pilot project begun in 2003 by Professor Harold Fried, which introduced ethics into the economics curriculum. That program still features about 12 lessons taught within a variety of economics courses. Based on that success, Rapaport recruited Robert Baker, the William D. Williams Professor of philosophy, to chair the program as a college-wide endeavor.
Union is now among a handful of colleges across the country that offer a broad based ethics module in their curriculum.
“The initiative could transform the Union College experience for students by sensitizing them to the ethical dimensions of everyday life and equipping them to cope with ethical dilemmas. We hope some students assert moral leadership at work and in the community,” Baker said.
Baker is joined by Anastasia Pease, the program director and visiting assistant professor of American literature, who has designed and taught a course entitled “Diversity and Equity in America.” The ethics initiative also supports faculty who develop ethics segments in their courses by giving grants for materials, research, travel and guest speakers. The program also funds periodic luncheons at which professors discuss ways to incorporate ethics in the classroom.
“The initiative hopes to help students realize that all of us are swimming in a sea of ethics all our lives. Every day we all make dozens of decisions that have an ethical dimension. As educators, we hope to help our students recognize that, so they become more ethically sophisticated thinkers. The skill should serve them well, whatever paths they may choose,” Pease said.
By the end of next school year, Union faculty members will have introduced ethics segments in more than 50 courses.
One lesson created with help from the ethics initiative is presented by Seyfollah Maleki, professor of physics, and Mark Walker, professor of history. They ask physics students to consider what constitutes ethical conduct for a scientist living and working under a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany. Students debate questions like: Can one be ethical in an unethical context? Students in the class were fascinated by the debates and saw no separation between being a scientist and grappling with ethical issues, according to Maleki and Walker.
In a photography course offered by Professor Martin Benjamin, students listened to a National Public Radio interview with Canadian journalist Paul Watson. Watson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of a dead American soldier being dragged and beaten in the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. In the interview, Watson said he heard a clear male voice speaking to him while he photographed the desecration of the body of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. William D. Cleveland Jr.
“He said, as clearly as something inside your head as outside, ‘If you do this, I will own you forever,” Watson said in the radio interview.
Students were captivated by the interview and eager to discuss Watson’s ethical dilemma, according to Martin. The interview spawned a discussion of the ethics of photojournalism in a combat zone. Students also wrote essays in response to the interview.
Beyond Ethics Across the Curriculum
Elsewhere on the Union ethics landscape is the Ethics Bowl team. The team competed in the 2007 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championship in Cincinnati, Ohio and considered questions like: Are prisons obligated to satisfy the dietary requirements of vegans? The group is sponsored by the Philosophy Department but the students have a variety of majors. Professor Michael Mathias, of the Philosophy Department, leads the team and said preparation is so rigorous that “it’s like taking two extra courses.”
This year’s team competed in the Bioethics Bowl in April at the 11th annual National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference, which was hosted by Union. The squad battled teams from Dartmouth College, The National Hispanic University and Williams College in debating such questions as whether states can require parents to have their 11- and 12-year-old daughters vaccinated against a pre-cancerous sexually transmitted disease.
The National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference is run by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. Each year research universities such as Princeton University, Harvard University and Dartmouth vie to host the conference. Union became the first liberal arts college to host the conference because of the close collaboration between Union’s Ethics Across the Curriculum initiative and the Union Graduate College, which offers a graduate bioethics program with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Both programs are headed by Baker. Co-organizing the conference with Baker was philosophy major, Jessica Handibode ’09.
“I was pretty busy organizing the backstage aspect of the conference. But I did I hear one presenter argue that it is unethical to donate kidneys to strangers because you might be denying a loved one in the future. I found it interesting to hear her argument and the counter-arguments,” Handibode said. “During the conference, I met two students from the University at Pennsylvania and another from Brown University and we spent a lot of time at meals and in between sessions debating the ins and outs of bioethics.
Facing ethical dilemmas
Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski was arrested at his cabin in Montana by federal authorities on April 3, 1996 in connection with a series of bombings that spanned 17 years. His reign of terror as the so-called Unabomber was stopped after two members of his family, his brother David Kaczynski and sister-in-law Linda Patrik, a professor of philosophy at Union, reported their suspicions to the FBI.
The family’s story became front-page news across the nation and was, according to David and Linda, unfairly reduced to a tale of a man turning in his brother. In reality, the couple navigated through shared deliberation and co-operative moral labor over the course of several months beginning in August 1995. They are today seeking a publisher for a book to be called Sharing a Moral Decision that would put forth a new model of shared ethical decision making based on their ordeal.
“Most people not only consult with other people but actually share the decision making with others. This sharing of moral deliberation and responsibility does not contradict the fact that there are good and bad moral decisions; it only suggests that many decisions result from joint ethical deliberation,” Linda wrote in the book proposal.
While vacationing in Paris in July 1995, Linda read newspaper reports about the Unabomber’s ongoing threats to blow up an airplane leaving from the Los Angeles airport. Dating back to 1978, the suspect dubbed Unabomber by the FBI had sent 16 homemade bombs disguised as mail packages that left 23 injured and three dead. By the summer of 1995, the investigation had stalled and the FBI began releasing more details to the media about the suspect, and Linda matched facts such as a strong anti-technology stance and advanced woodworking skills with her brother-in-law.
When David arrived in Paris two weeks later, Linda voiced her suspicions and the couple began a dialogue that would last four months. Their deliberations led to a complex process of shared decision making that ultimately led to the arrest of David’s brother.
In October 1995, at Linda’s urging, the couple read the Unabomber Manifesto and saw similarities between it and letters from Ted. When David read the manifesto, he was not immediately convinced the author was his brother, but was nonetheless willing to review Ted’s letters. The letters revealed more connections and by late 1995, the couple contacted Linda’s childhood friend, Susan Swanson, who was a private investigator in Chicago. Swanson engaged a writing analysis expert, who was a retired FBI agent. The writing analysis estimated a 60 percent chance of a match between Ted’s letters and the Unabomber Manifesto. The couple knew they had to act to prevent another attack.
In a 1998 Union College magazine interview, Linda discussed the ordeal. She said: “I think that what this experience has revealed is not an answer but an understanding that sometimes ethical decisions need to be made that have nothing to do with self-interest or self-benefit. Sometimes, ethical decisions are simply called for.”
To assure a safe arrest and preservation of their confidentiality, the couple hired a lawyer in January 1996 to help them contact the FBI. The FBI’s promise of confidentiality was broken on the day of Ted’s arrest. That night the couple watched CBS News anchor Dan Rather report that David had “fingered his brother.” The news kicked off a media onslaught at the couple’s home that forced the couple to retreat for several days.
A couple years after the trial at which Ted Kaczynski received a life sentence without possibility of parole, David became executive director of the nonprofit organization New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty. He has become a widely known death penalty opponent who travels around New York and other states to give speeches about his brother’s mental illness and flaws in the death penalty system. Linda has continued teaching at Union. She also lectures and publishes papers within her area of expertise, which is Asian philosophy with a concentration in Buddhist philosophy.
Their joint book effort would feature David’s recounting of events, followed by philosophical analysis by Linda. In their book proposal for Sharing a Moral Decision, David writes:
“How do we know what we know? The process of ‘knowing’ is so routine that we seldom stop to analyze it. Maybe in a college philosophy class the question gets raised from time to time. But for the most part, our knowing overwhelms our questioning, until some day a particular question stops us cold and refuses to be ignored. Something is at stake—someone’s happiness, a relationship, perhaps even life itself—and in that moment we come to grips with how difficult it really is to know something. In that moment, we suddenly understand that the eyes we cast on the world see nothing clearly unless they are able to look inward as well.”
Off the record
In the fall of 1991, Neil A. Lewis ’68, then a Washington, D.C. correspondent for The New York Times, had a chance to break an exclusive story about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. News organizations were in a feeding frenzy for fresh stories surrounding allegations of sexual harassment made by Thomas’ former colleague, Anita Hill, during his nomination hearings.
But to break the story, Lewis had to break an off -the-record agreement with a source.
“Off the record, it’s like a religious promise. I would never disclose information unless, and this is the exception, I make a balancing test that proves it will enhance my career significantly,” Lewis joked.
The “balancing test” bit is a pointed joke. A reporter from a competing news publication who had a similar relationship with the same source ran the story about Thomas. The story revealed that Thomas had joked with Yale Law School friends about visiting pornography theaters near campus. The Thomas anecdote had been relayed to Lewis by an acquaintance weeks before Hill’s testimony, which became a watershed moment for public awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace. Lewis contacted the source and asked to be released from the off -the-record pledge but was denied.
“I didn’t think much of it at the time. But then when the episode exploded into the allegations by Anita Hill, it became kind of relevant. [The source] had told me this is off the record and I didn’t use it,” Lewis said. “I gave my word when I got the information. That was the transaction. That was the contract. I couldn’t violate it without the agreement of the other person.”
The Times Washington bureau editor did not agree. Lewis was castigated for failing to report the story.
Lewis has been a correspondent at the Times since 1985. He has covered presidential elections, the U.S. Department of State, judicial nominations and legal affairs. More recently, he broke the story about prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He has reported on a number of major trials including the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was in March 2007 convicted in connection with CIA identity leak.
He is co-author, with fellow reporters Tim Weiner and David Johnston, of Betrayal (Random House, 1996), a book about Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer-turned-spy. The book has been called “The inside story of the biggest mole hunt in the history of American intelligence.”
After graduation from Union, Lewis obtained a master’s degree from Yale Law School. He has worked as a correspondent in England and South Africa for Reuters, the British-based news agency.
Lewis has on several occasions appeared as a featured speaker at Union including an April 8 lecture as part of the Alumni Writers Series.