Spring 2020 Director's Message

We had high hopes for a spring of teaching workshops, and conducting research seminars, film series, public lectures, and a summit on creating and maintaining a culture of ethics in a University setting.  Alas, nature had other ideas.  We have had to postpone most of these functions and, as you can see from this newsletter, to direct our efforts toward the ethical issues (medical, economic, cultural, and personal) of dealing with the COVID pandemic.   We have high hopes of resurrecting many of those planned activities in the coming academic year. 

I remain convinced, indeed more convinced, that our mission of teaching ethics across the disciplines, engaging faculty in the discovery of ways to incorporate ethics in the substance, as well as the process, of their research, and facilitating a public conversation about ethics is vital to who we are as teachers and students, and to the University community in which we live and work.  In short, we have much to do.  Our benefactors have been kind and we have the resources to pursue this mission in the coming year.

It has been a privilege to have served as Director of the LSU Ethics Institute for the past two years; and it has been gratifying to see a fledgling idea from the Department of Philosophy become a reality in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.  I am honored to have had this opportunity.  I am also pleased to introduce you to the new Director, Dr. Deborah Goldgaber of the Department of Philosophy.  Deborah has been an important supporter of the Institute for the past few years and the source of some of our most successful endeavors.  She assumes the directorship on May 15, 2020.

Dr. Goldgaber is a 2014 doctoral graduate of Northwestern University, with teaching and research specializations in 19th & 20th century continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and moral philosophy.  She brings extraordinary intelligence and vitality to her teaching and research and, now, to the Ethics Institute.  I know you will join me in welcoming her and wishing her every success as she takes over the leadership of this extraordinary endeavor.

C. L. Eubanks, Alumni Professor