St. Anselm College’s Center for Ethics in Society: politics minus the polarization
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October 16, 2024 – Liberalism

St. Anselm College’s Center for Ethics in Society: politics minus the polarization

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The mission of St. Anselm College’s Center for Ethics in Society is to improve collaboration among individuals, organizations, and communities in orders to address important societal challenges. It achieves this mission by fostering the values of hospitality, humility, listening, learning, community, and a respect for the common good. The Center has served nearly 2,000 students, including Michael “Mac” Connors, a politics major and a member of St. Anselm’s class of 2025. We spoke to Mac about his experience with the Center. 

CKF: What drew you to St. Anselm and to the Center for Ethics in Society in particular?

Connors: At a college fair, someone told me that if I was interested in politics, I should look at St. Anselm. I visited during the COVID pandemic and loved it. I was drawn in particular to the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, which is nationally known. Every presidential candidate since John F. Kennedy in 1960 has visited the campus. It has such a rich history.

I really got involved with the Center during my sophomore year. I had Professor Latona [Max Latona, the Center’s executive director] for classes my freshman and sophomore years. My sophomore year, he invited me to one of the Center’s colloquiums. It was on Frederick Douglass, and it was fascinating to read these works that I wasn’t familiar with and to discuss them with people interested in, and knowledgeable about, them.

CKF: What is one of your favorite memories from being part of the Center?

Connors: I’ve loved the Ethics Bowls. I participated in one of these before I was really involved with the Center, as a freshman. An ethics bowl is like a debate. You work with a team, though, instead of individually. Your team is given a topic, it can be really obscure, and then together you have to determine if the question is ethical or not using a specific framework — utilitarianism, for example, or natural law theory. Then you argue your case, the opposing teams and judges ask questions, and the other team does the same. After several rounds of wrestling with different issues, the team with the highest score from the judges wins.

The bowls exposed me to current issues, the various ways to think about them, and to argue for or against them. Also, the teams are made up of people from many different majors — philosophy, history, or science — so we were all coming at these questions from different angles. These debates were a great way to apply the things we were learning in class to an argument. I participated in several bowls, and later judged ones the Center hosts for local high school students. My junior year, I also taught high school students an ethics course in the College’s Access Academy Program, which serves underrepresented high school youth. My co-teacher and I designed the whole course, and we included an Ethics Bowl at the end of the course that St. Anselm professors judged.

CKF: What are some of the core principles or ideas you kept coming back to in the debates and colloquiums the Center sponsored?

Connors: Dignity is definitely one of them. This goes back to that first colloquium in which we wrestled with the works of Frederick Douglass. A central question in all his writing is “what is human dignity?” and “what constitutes an affront to it?” Dignity is definitely something that comes up consistently. Another big topic we talk about is the importance of education and how it complements a person’s dignity — how education helps a person understand themselves and their purpose.

CKF: CKF’s mission is to empower individuals to live lives of meaning. Do you think this program advances that goal? If so, how?

Connors: The Center just does good work, and not just in the St. Anselm community, but in Manchester, the rest of New Hampshire, and northern Massachusetts as well. As humans, we’re constantly taking in information, but we’re not really contemplating what it means. We’re not asking what the ethical questions at stake are. The Center helps people take what they see in the news and think about what it really means for their own lives. It asks people to dig into problems and contemplate what’s really going on. In helping students and people in the community find meaning in what’s going on around them, the Center also helps us find meaning in our own lives and through our own actions.

CKF: That’s wonderful, and how has the Center helped you to find meaning, or maybe purpose, in your own life and in what you want to do in the future?

Connors: When I first started at St. Anselm, I was determined to go right into politics after graduation. Just roll up my sleeves and go. Now, I’d like to delay that a little bit longer, especially given how polarized things have become. I really love the intellectual side of politics — the debate, the discussion, the reading — and I’d like to explore that more. I’m planning to do a master’s in public policy at St. Anselm and then, hopefully, go to law school. I’d love to go into intellectual property law.

CKF: That exciting! It’s clear the Center has given you opportunities to wrestle with difficult topics. That will be helpful for law school. But how will it help in life? It’s harder than ever to have respectful debate, on college campuses in particular. When it comes to sustaining a functioning society, why are programs like the Center for Ethics in Society important?

Connors: The students involved with the Center hail from across the political spectrum, traditionalist conservatives to liberals, but we come together to wrestle with the writings of people like Aristotle. The Center helps to elevate our discussions above the typical political fray. We have some crazy debates in the colloquiums, but we are animated by ideas, not ideology. At a basic level, the Center helps us look into tough questions without allowing us to talk past each other. We really have to understand what the person sitting across from us is talking about. We have to contemplate their arguments. St. Anselm and the Center provide a kind of refuge from politicization while still allowing us to engage in politics. It’s really been a blessing to be here.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.