Ethics Bowl deserves support

I am writing on behalf of the Cary Maguire Center for Ethics & Public Responsibility concerning my involvement personally with the Ethics Bowl National and Regional Teams and my concern that they will not be funded next year.

I would like to start by telling you that as a 2002 graduate of SMU, I was very fortunate to find this worthwhile competition and involve myself in it before I left campus. As an undergraduate student, I was involved in many campus organizations from the student newspaper to student government to residence life and student housing. Of all the campus organizations I affiliated myself with, none stimulated me more on an intellectual and academic level as my involvement with the Ethics Center over the past year and a half did.

I first became involved with the team as a senior when I covered it for the newspaper. I had never heard about an Ethics Bowl team on campus and indeed I found that it was the team’s first year of existence.

As I became more and more involved in covering the story, I found the activity to be fascinating as students researched events covering topics such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Patriot Act.

Students not only studied these topics, but they also formulated well-balanced and intellectual arguments to back up an ethical stance taken on each of 15 cases.

When I finished my article for the newspaper, I was so taken by the group and its direction that I volunteered my services as a coach this past year after graduation. After covering the event for the paper, I found myself yearning to be able to compete in such an academically stimulating event. I actually wished that I had one more year of school to be able to compete in an event which stresses what college is supposed to be about: discussion of public topics by highly motivated students who use teamwork and research to back up ideas and formulate arguments.

That is why I promised Associate Director Lorren Timberman that I would remain involved this year if I was employed in the Dallas area. I was, and I kept my commitment for several reasons.

This event and the students that are involved with it are dedicated to its principles. It is what SMU ought to be about, and it brings academic recognition to this university which it cannot receive on similar platforms.

This is a national event whose academic and intellectual content cannot be challenged. Students involved with this event are ambassadors on behalf of the university, using skill and precision in the art of research and debate to present well-thought and sincere ethical opinions.

This past year I was very fortunate to serve as a coach, and our team improved upon its campaign last year. I have no doubt that the team will improve next year and bring further academic recognition to SMU in the coming years.

I also have no doubt that my involvement with this organization served me well in my acceptance to Georgetown University Law School, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, University of Chicago Law School and many other prestigious graduate institutions. Furthermore, I am certain that students involved with this organization will stand out when applying to graduate institutions based on their experience with the Ethics Bowl.

We owe it to the university as a community to ensure that the administration, at a student goverment and university level, knows the importance of this academic event. Too often, SMU gets caught up in so many non-academic endeavors that it loses sight of why we are all at a university to begin with: to enlighten our souls, enrich our minds and stimulate our voices to speak with coherence and intelligibility. The Ethics Bowl team certainly serves all of those purposes.

I want to stress that I am a recent alum and that, although I cannot contribute much to the university financially at this time, I would like to do so in the future after law school.

I have a lot of love for SMU, and my Mustang Pride will surely be hurt if this outstanding academic entity is not given due recognition and preserved for several years to come. I have no doubt that the university will do its best to ensure that this invaluable experience known as the Ethics Bowl is retained so that future years of Mustangs can prosper intellectually and bring national academic accolades back to SMU.