Article: SSU’s New Ethics Center Compromised

[Shepherd]

By Shepherd Bliss
WaccoBB.net

Sonoma State University’s new Center for Ethics, Law, and Society has caused quite a stir among my colleagues and students during the first week of classes, as well as from others in Sonoma County.

The notorious AIG gave two-thirds of the Ethics Center’s $16,000 first year budget. What might AIG’s intentions have been for funding the Center? AIG

has not been known for its ethics. In fact, the insurer’s risky bets on derivatives were central to the 2008 economic crash. They received a $182 million bailout.

Retired SSU Professor Robert Plantz reminded the university community on the faculty email list that AIG is “talking about suing our government for what they think is a lousy deal in the bailout.” So much for gratitude and ethics. They are one more mega-corporation jumping on the bandwagon to further privatize SSU and influence the education it offers students.

“Any entity designated an ‘Ethics Center’ has a special responsibility to scrutinize the moral and ethical correlates of its own supporting foundation, structure, and functioning, especially its filtering of acceptable and unacceptable issues,” noted Sociology Professor Noel Byrne.

The public first heard about the Ethics Center in an article headlined “Some Topics Too Close to Home for SSU Ethics Center.” The sub-head of the Jan. 17 Press Democrat article by Jeremy Hay was “Director of new venture opts not to weigh in on donor AIG’s role in economic crisis.”

“The Ethics Center has a basic challenge to speak to the ethics of taking money from AIG,” noted retired Political Science Professor John Kramer. “The goal of conservatives is to so starve the public-caring institutions of funding that they are overwhelmingly beholden to private and corporate interests. Now they are often intimidated about speaking their truth.”

“Such filtering merits close scrutiny,” added Professor Byrne. “Hay's story suggests that this latter issue is currently and conveniently lost in the fog of myopic oversight.”

“The implications of sacrificing academic freedom in the name of ethics are mind boggling,” wrote Tim Nonn, who has a doctorate in ethics, in an unpublished letter to the PD. “What if a corporation based in the South had provided a grant to a university’s history department, but forbade teaching the history of slavery in America? Would the grant make the surrender of academic freedom acceptable?

“I had always assumed that a university existed to free, not enslave, minds. In this case, I was wrong. The popular motto on the walls of many universities throughout the world, veritas vos liberabit (the truth shall set you free), will never adorn the walls of SSU,” Nonn added.

“What good is an Ethics Center that won't discuss it's own ethics?” asked Thomas Morabito of Occupy Sebastopol. “They want to discuss your ethics, but not their own. They preach ‘do as I say, not as I do.’”

When asked by PD reporter Hay if the Center would deal with the controversy of financier Sandy Weill receiving an honorary doctorate for his $12 million gift to the controversial Green Music Center, the Center’s director, philosophy lecturer Joshua Glasgow, responded, “I don’t think I can comment.” What happened to free speech and academic freedom at SSU?

“The funding of SSU's Ethics Center is one more example of the privatization of education,” said SSU alumna Susan Lamont of the Peace and Justice Center and a key organizer of the ShameOnSSU protest against Weill’s honorary doctorate.

“The wealthy and corporations make sure they pay little or no taxes, public institutions become financially stressed, bonds are sold and the wealthy profit at both ends of the deal. ‘Philanthropists’ or corporations come in as saviors with wads of cash, the public is grateful, and academic freedoms are chipped away slowly, but surely.”

The Ethics Center’s first event will be a Feb. 6, Wed., lecture by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman on “Big Law, Small Law: Old and New Civil Rights in the 21st Century,” at the Warren Auditorium in Ives Hall at 4 p.m. I hope that such presentations will become forums to discuss controversial issues and encourage critical thinking.

The Center plans to deal with issues such as immigration, water use, food ethics, clean technology, and income inequality, according to director Glasgow. We shall see. SSU is not known as a champion of free speech. One wonders how long Glasgow will survive as a teacher, unless he strictly follows the administration’s directives.

What other mega-corporations or millionaires like Weill might already or soon be knocking on SSU’s door? Wal-Mart? Monsanto, which funds UC Irvine’s agriculture department?

Shepherd Bliss {[email protected]} teaches college, farms, and has contributed to two dozen books.

[Noel Byrne]

Shepherd Bliss' discussion of the PD news article about the SSU Law and Ethics Center directs attention to important matters. Most significantly: SSU Director Josh Glasgow's cautious and seemingly evasive responses to questions about ethical issues attached to large AIG funding of the center, as well as about the campus controversy to SSU's granting of an honorary doctorate to Sandy Weill (publically identified as one of the 25 persons most responsible for the US economic downturn since 2008, and who happens to have contributed many millions of dollars to the SSU Green Center).

The obviously ethical issue prompted by Bliss' discussion: What ethical issues attach to such seemingly evasive responses as the SSU Law and Ethics Center is in the process of being established? A properly ethical foundation for an ethics center must be grounded in a readiness to direct attention to the very ethics of its own foundation.

[caverly]

Ethics ??? Corruption ???? Just like with politicians , money is what determines who and what will be heard ;
Ethics is not part of their personal vocabulary or what matters . So bizarre that AIG would fund an Ethics Center !!!
and now SSU is totally caught in a bind .

Great article Shepherd and so glad you brought this to our attention. Good work done .
And AIG got $182 BILLION of taxpayer assistance , since they got their fingers caught in the cookie-jar
of their own malfeasance . Ridiculous that they got all that money and home-owners got screwed .