Through the Center for Ethics, Religion, and Culture, the College will develop a comprehensive plan, based on Catholic Social Teaching and encompassing First Year Seminar through graduation, to infuse ethics and ethical leadership development into all academic and co-curricular programs, and the liberal arts core. Ethical Leadership development will become a hallmark feature of the Elms Plus Experience, and will distinguish the College regionally and nationally.

Preparing ethical leaders is a core function of Elms College, and is an essential component for the College to meet its mission and vision of empowering students to effect positive changes in the community and in the world. The Center for Ethics, Religion and Culture (CERC) is the visible manifestation of the College’s commitment to our Catholic Identity and contemporary academic and public engagement with ethics, religion, spirituality, and culture. It will accomplish this through:

  • Creating and implementing CERC programming, starting in 2020-2021, as an essential step in effectively infusing ethics and ethical leadership development across all programs.
  • Developing a concise definition, at novice, intermediate, and mastery levels, of what we mean by ethics and ethical leadership.
  • Implementing tangible expressions of the importance of ethical development to the Elms community. Core values should be expressed as part of what we mean by ethical leadership.

Elms College will develop principled and ethical leaders as a distinctive feature of the Elms Liberal Arts Core through incorporating the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, spanning the entire student experience from orientation to graduation, and including robust learning outcomes and assessment. To infuse ethical development into all programs at Elms College, we will:

  • Develop a training and professional development program for faculty on embedding ethical decision-making and ethical development into coursework and the curriculum.
  • Expand co-curricular service-learning opportunities for students.
  • Develop and implement a curricular framework that is fulfilled at each point in a student’s development (first year, sophomore, junior, senior, graduate) that includes every major having an explicit formation development experience in applied ethics.
  • Develop and implement interdisciplinary and collaborative programming within Elms and with community organizations.
  • Develop and formalize additional relationships with local healthcare systems as healthcare-related bioethics and medical humanities programming is planned and developed.
  • Develop and formalize additional relationships with community practitioners as ethical programming for other disciplines (business, education, etc.) is planned and developed.

Distinctive new academic programming in Ethics will be created, and will:

  • Expand Bioethics and Medical Humanities (BMH) programming, including master’s, certificate, and doctoral programming.
  • Launch an undergraduate minor in Ethical Leadership.
  • Develop and implement the plan for total integration of Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Ethics undergraduate programming, including the exploration of a joint major or minor.

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