Dr. Michael Pritchard, philosophy, honored for 30 years at Ethics Center
Olga Bonfiglio
College of Arts and Sciences staff writer
In August 1985, nineteen faculty from the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Engineering, General Studies and Health and Human Services met to discuss their common interests in studying and teaching ethics. At the time, this was an unusual endeavor since faculty from different disciplines had only occasionally talked with each other about their interests in ethics. Nevertheless, after three days of sharing ideas in a more organized and formal way, the group agreed to form the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society.
Dr. Michael Pritchard, philosophy, helped kick off this “brave new world” and after 30 years at the helm of the Center and 48 years at WMU, he is retiring this June—but not without the recognition he deserves for his years of service, leadership, innovation and imagination. He spoke on “The Course of a Career” at the Center’s bioethics conference held at the Fetzer Center on March 17-18.
“Mike has won friends for ethics all over the world by being a gifted philosopher who happens to think that ethics is not just for philosophers,” said Dr. Sandra Borden, professor of communication and Center co-director.
The seeds of the Center were planted casually and often by chance. It started in the 1970s when Pritchard and Dr. Jim Jaksa, communication, began talking between shots on the tennis courts about Sissela Bok's book, Lying: Deception in Public and Private Life (Vintage Books, 1978). The two men decided to teach a course together on lying and deception for their communication and philosophy students. Eventually, they wrote a book together titled Ethics in Communication: Methods of Analysis (Wadsworth, 1st ed. 1988, 2nd ed. 1994).
In the early 1980s, Dr. Shirley Bach, general studies-science, invited Pritchard to get involved in research ethics by serving on WMU's Institutional Review Board, which she had spearheaded. Then Pritchard and Bach joined WMU's Science for Citizens Center, initiated by Dr. Robert Kaufman, political science, with the support of the National Science Foundation. These efforts led to an Honors College course on ethics and risk that Bach and Pritchard organized along with Dr. Frank Wolf, industrial engineering, Dr. Larry Oppliger, physics, and Dr. Michael Stoline, mathematics/statistics.
As the group looked for other interdisciplinary teaching opportunities, they were discovering that they had many common research interests in ethics. Pritchard and Jaksa, for example, had included the Ford Pinto scandal in their course only to learn that Dr. Ronald Kramer, sociology/criminal justice, who focuses his research on corporate crime, had a whole file cabinet full of documents and notes on the case. These and other coincidental discoveries of professors' interests in ethics finally led Pritchard, Jaksa and Bach to talk about starting the Center.
During summer 1985, the professors began planning for the Center. Dr. Diether Haenicke, WMU's new president, happened to find out about this effort and eagerly participated in the group’s discussions. However, the new center had no money and no home. One day afterward, Associate Vice President Mike Moskovis offered the group $3,000 for expenses and the caution that interdisciplinary projects never lasted at WMU. But this warning only challenged the group to prove him wrong. On another day Dr. Laurel Grotzinger, dean of the Graduate College, offered her college as a “home” along with a modest but stable budget and the endorsement of Provost Phillip Denenfeld. A year later, President Haenicke offered the Center $5,000 of “one-time money” to establish its ethics series, although he later extended such funds as a permanent feature of the Center's annual budget. To further eke out funds that weren’t there, the Center’s members invited their friends and colleagues from other colleges and universities to speak at WMU whenever they were on their way to someplace else.
“When we started our Center back in ‘85, we were inspired by the work of the Hastings Center, a prominent New York ethics ‘think tank,’ which had been working on what teaching ethics should be,” said Pritchard.
In its publication, Ethics Teaching in Higher Education (Plenum Press, 1980), the Hastings Center named five aims and goals:
- Stimulate students' moral imagination;
- Help students recognize moral issues;
- Help students analyze key moral concepts and principles;
- Stimulate students' sense of responsibility;
- Help students deal effectively with moral ambiguity and disagreement.
“An especially noteworthy feature of these aims and goals is that students are not treated as if they are just beginning to engage with moral issues,” said Pritchard. “They are regarded as already having some ability to engage their moral imagination. The aim is to stimulate it further. They, like the rest of us, sometimes need help recognizing moral issues, as the situations calling for moral reflection and decision-making cannot be expected to come to us with a warning light that says, ‘Here I am, a moral issue.’”
Since the 1990s, the Center has been housed in the College of Arts and Sciences. Pritchard has been co-director with Borden. Dr. Shirley Bach, professor emerita of philosophy, is associate director and Dr. Jill Larson, associate professor of English, is publications editor. (Dr. Joseph Ellin, philosophy, served as publications editor from 1986-2011.) The advisory committee has members from across the curriculum in business, chemistry, communication, education, engineering, English, philosophy, physics, race and ethnic relations, nursing, social work, and sociology, and law.
Over the years, the Center has worked closely with the medical community sponsoring programs in biomedical ethics. It has also sponsored study groups on topics of general interest. Other focus areas include research ethics, communication ethics and engineering ethics.
The Center was the home for Teaching Ethics, the official journal for the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum for six years until last year. Pritchard and Dr. Elaine Englehardt, Utah Valley University, are still co-editors and Borden is associate editor.
Each academic year, the Center sponsors 15 to 20 public presentations addressing a wide range of ethical issues. It also publishes a few of these presentations in its in-house publication series.
Although the Center has no academic courses of its own, it serves as a resource for faculty and students. From time to time, the Center offers workshops on teaching ethics for faculty who are encouraged to invite their students to attend the Center's public presentations.
“I continue to use the Hastings Center aims and goals of teaching ethics in my classes,” said Pritchard. “Beyond this, I would like to think that the Ethics Center programs and projects over its first 30 years have also contributed to furthering these ends, not just for students, but for everyone who has been involved in them. All of us are lifelong learners