Ethics debate planned for fall

The Journalism Club at North Lake College will host an ethics debate on Oct. 29 from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. in the Gallery.

In the wake of recent ethical scandals in the business and journalism arenas, the club felt that students would benefit from a healthy debate on issues they might encounter in their careers.
The panelists will begin by debating certain pre-determined questions and then the students will have the opportunity to present their questions to the panelists.

Professors from business, journalism and psychology along with a few members from the community and the president of NLC have been invited to the debate.

Betsy Simnacher, a journalism professor at NLC, said that it's interesting to talk about ethical questions because there are so many sides to them.

"College students need to be aware of the ethical questions. College is a time for discussing what’s going on in the world," Simnacher said.

Christian Amundsen, a psychology professor at NLC, echoed similar thoughts as Simnacher's. "When you miss things like this, you miss the real educational opportunities that the college has to give," he said.

Amundsen said that the psychological aspect of ethical issues is immense. "That is the most important aspect of this because how we are relating to our world, how we are relating to one another shows up within business, within our politics, within our economic structure," he said.

"That sort of social Darwinism, which becomes predatory, the survival of the fittest and the strongest eclipses our ethical approaches to life," he added.

But what will the students learn at the event that they would not otherwise learn in a classroom environment? "What you would get here that you wouldn't get in classrooms is that you are going to get a wide array of different professors, different thinkers bringing their discipline to bear on this issue and so it is a dialogue in such a way that you don’t ordinarily get in a class," Amundsen said.

Jim White, the coordinator of the management program at NLC, said. "What you are going to get is different points of view which none of us can give you that kind of thing in the classroom. We try to as much as we can but we could never re-create all of these different points of view," White said.

Simnacher said that she hopes that students will come out of this event with a new understanding of a partnership with the business department.
Amundsen, White and Simnacher encourage students to attend the event. Simnacher plans to give extra credit to her students and so does White who hopes to encourage his colleagues to do the same.

Amundsen said that he would release his class to attend the event. "It’s that important and I will encourage my colleagues to do the same so that we can have this very powerful, maybe ground-breaking sort of symposium sort of experience here. We're not doing enough of this," he said.