A Note from the Director

This is the second issue of Issues and Perspectives. We hope that you will find something of interest here, perhaps even something that is useful in your personal or professional life.

Reading on you’ll find brief articles about the conference announced in the first issue, “Resolving the Shortage of Organs for Transplantation: Ethics, Science, and Technology,” that took place in Charleston in mid-November; the EMRGE (Ethics in Medical Research and Genetic Engineering) project that involves high school students in Anderson District 5; what the Center for Academic Integrity has been up to, including its annual conference held at Washington University in St. Louis in mid-October; our international activities; and Ethics Across the Curriculum. In addition, you will find part 2 of C. Calhoun Lemon Fellow Stephen Satris’s article “Three Ethical Tools,” and an invited piece by David Gill, “Building Ethically Healthy Organizations.” David Gill is a respected organizational ethics consultant and author of It's About Excellence: Building Ethically Healthy Organizations. In the spring of 2009 Gill was the speaker for a morning program, “The Six Essential Questions for Ethical Excellence (and the Answers too!),” at the Greenville Chamber of Commerce office; this program was the third in a series of Ethics Forums the Rutland Institute put on in collaboration with the Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce. We appreciate his willingness to write a piece for Issues and Perspectives.

In the previous issue I talked about the expansion of the Institute’s collaborative work with the MBA program and the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. In particular, I mentioned the course in Ethical Leadership that I was then team- teaching with Dave Wyman. There were two sections of the course. One met on campus and the other met in the evening at the University Center in Greenville. I enjoyed the experience and look forward to continuing to team-teach the course with Dave Wyman. I’m pleased to say that the logistics will be less of a challenge in fall 2010 because Clemson’s full and part-time MBA programs will be relocated in a new facility in downtown Greenville at 55 East Camperdown Way –Clemson at the Falls; but there’s more to this story: RIE has an office in this facility and our presence there will substantially expand opportunities for outreach in the business community. I am grateful to College of Business and Behavioral Science Associate Dean Caron St. John for this development and many other things as well. http://www.clemson.edu/media-relations/article.php?article_id=2401

I am team-teaching a new course, “Genomics, Ethics, and Health Policy,” which is a required course in one track of Clemson’s Healthcare Genetics Ph.D. program. One hope I have in this connection is that teaching this course may enhance our ability to expand outreach activities in the healthcare community. After all, teaching the course is a learning opportunity for me as well as the students, since they are all experienced health care professionals.

In closing I want to invite you to contact us if you have any questions or would like to learn more. We welcome your comments and suggestions.