Faculty Fellows Program
About the Program
Every Spring semester up to five Loyola faculty are released from teaching duties to spend the semester as fellows of the center. The Fellows are selected on the basis of a proposal for an ethics research project related to the fellow's home discipline.
The fellows devote the bulk of the semester's efforts to research and writing on that project. They enjoy weekly meetings with the director, other fellows and the Loyola ethics faculty in the Fellows' Seminar, which strengthen their background in ethics and solidifies their ability to explore ethical issues in their home disciplines. They learn from each other, and receive assistance in their research from graduate assistants provided by the center, as they each work on a fellow's project.
The program has resulted in a marked increase in the amount and quality of ethics teaching in the courses of fellows, as well as a number of scholarly articles and professional conference presentations that have grown out of fellows' research projects.
Up to five faculty fellowships are available during the semester for full-time Loyola faculty not primarily engaged in teaching ethics. Under certain circumstances, part-time faculty may also apply. A faculty member who has been a fellow before may apply to be fellow again; but priority in selecting fellows will ordinarily be given to applicants for whom the fellowship would provide an opportunity to set a new program of ethical reflection in motion for their work.
Applicants usually fit within one of four fairly distinct kinds of projects:
1. Some faculty become interested in a topic related to their own discipline, but with an ethics and/or social justice "angle" to it. Such a topic may be oblique enough to their typical work in the discipline that it would be hard to give it careful attention without some special opportunity, which the Fellowship offers. By the end of their semester as Fellows, or more commonly during the months that follow, these Fellows ordinarily complete one or more professional articles or conference papers as the fruit of their project.
2. Other faculty come to believe that there are important ethical and/or social justice issues in their discipline, that they ought to address in their classes. But they find that they can speak of these matters only in vague and general terms because they lack the necessary theoretical back-ground; thus they cannot teach such issues as effectively as they would like to. For them, the fellowship is a time devoted to building up the background and theoretical tools they need for thoughtful reflection on these issues and for effective ethics and/or social justice teaching in their classrooms.
The short term fruits of their fellowship may not yet be a work for presenta-tion or publication, but a report on the "retooling" process that is under way, now with significant issues identified, teaching plans in process, and a program of continued work laid out to yield more sophisti-cated out-comes later.
3. A third kind of applicant seeks to become a fellow speci-fically to develop a particular, needed course for students in the applicant's school or department, focusing on ethical and/or social justice issues that need treatment. The fruit of the Fellowship will be the development of a new course and plans for teaching it.
4. A fourth kind of applicant is a faculty member who, while not primarily engaged in teach-ing ethics, has sufficient training or has done enough personal work in ethics and/or social justice that his or her project will make a significant contri-bution to the scholarly litera-ture of these fields, theoretical or applied. Such a project ordinarily has a strong cross-disciplinary "angle" to it, but will be of interest not only to scholars in the faculty member's home discipline, but to ethics and/or social justice scholars as well.
Fellowships are awarded on the basis of completed applications, which are reviewed and ranked by the center's Fellows Program Selection Committee, chaired by the director.
NOTE: Faculty do not have to neatly fit into one of these descriptions to apply. The center and the Selection Committee are always open to finding new ways to help Loyola faculty enhance their research and their teaching in the area of ethics, values, and social justice. If you only have the beginnings of an idea and would like some help in developing it into a fellowship proposal, talk to a former Fellow or one of Loyola's many ethics faculty, or contact us for assistance.
What follows is a list of some of the projects undertaken by Faculty Fellows. It is illustrative of the variety of topics that can be the subject of research at the Center.
- Blind Justice? Societal Values and the Law
- Civic Literacy & Citizen Responsibility: The Ethics of Political Cynicism
- Develop a New Course: Ethics & Information Technology
- Development of a Course in Scientific Research Ethics
- Dramatic Art as the Pursuit of Self-Knowledge: The Implications For Ethical Inquiry
- Earth Stewardship and Social Justice
- Ethical Dilemmas and Decision Making in the Ethnographic Study of Communication, health, and community in an AIDS Residence
- "First, Do No Harm" in Diversity Programs: An Analysis of Ethical Issues
- Incorporating Ethics into the Chemistry Major
- Introducing Ethics in a Human Reproduction Course and a Survey of Student Ethics/ Values
- Propriety as an Ethical Component of Attitudes about Social Issues
- The Ethical Foundations of International Relief & Development Programs
- The Ethics of Postcoloniality in the United States
- The Ethics of Sustainability: Cultural Survival and Grasroots Community Development in Latin America
- Using Values and Ethical Decision making as the Basis of Teaching Social Policy
For application forms, contact us at ethics@luc.edu, or at 773.508.8349.
If you want specific advice about a project, contact David Ozar at dozar@luc.edu, 773.508.8348, or contact any of the fellows.