CARNEGIE ETHICS STUDIO AT LEVAN
The Carnegie Council for International Affairs is housing its first U.S.-based Carnegie Ethics Studio at USC's Levan Institute. International partner universities in Cairo, Beirut, Taipei, Tokyo, and Canberra collaborate via webcam for real-time classroom discussion of ethical issues. USC College IT is the technical hub for the international portals. We'll help your class talk with students around the world about ethical problems. Contact Elizabeth Connely at usclevan@usc.edu for more information.

The vision of the Ethics Studio is a “global, interactive network sharing content and discourse” on international policy issues. Carnegie’s institutional partnerships around the world—from Taiwan to Australia to Egypt—will deliver content from the New York studio and add their own content for use by the other partner universities.

Programs will feature recognizable personalities discussing new ideas about human rights, economic fairness, the just use of force, and the resolution of conflicts. The initial program, established in the Fall of 2008, will result in podcasts, transcripts, teaching modules, and development of new curricula applying to three basic principles:

• Pluralism: the empathy for diversity while seeking what is common in the human experience
• Rights: a basis for moral deliberation which implies both protections and responsibilities
• Fairness: the most extensive basic liberty compatible with similar liberties for others

The Levan Literature and Ethics Series is the beginning of a national conversation to involve students, the public and the world's foremost novelists in ongoing discussions of values, ethics and morality. What literary themes are relevant to our understanding and practice of particular human values?  What do they reveal about ethical choices and consequences?   About the language we use in today’s world to talk about ethics and morality?

This new USC literary event, held four times a year, will feature live interviews with internationally acclaimed fiction authors, whose work focuses on spirituality, morality and ethics. The series, beginning in 2009, will initially engage the USC community and invite participants from a wide range of professional, civic, spiritual, and religious groups.

A blog will help keep the discussion going and allow groups to meet in other venues to continue the discussion. Web support will include podcasts of the event, additional information about the author's complete body of work, and in-depth treatments from other commentators. Eventually other universities will be invited to use our material, interviews and format for their own events and class study.

Program Director: Christine Wicker, award-winning journalist and author

Come share your opinion about ethical questions that matter. Levan Coffeehouse Discussions on Practical Ethics are guided by students and faculty from philosophy, business, law, religion, medicine; all across USC we have experts in every area working on ethics problems. Faculty, staff undergraduates and graduate students from every part of our USC community are encouraged to come to Ground Zero Café and talk about the ethical questions of the day. Free lunch and open dialogue. Come argue for your view, and maybe change your mind.

Directed by Sharon Lloyd, Professor of Philosophy, USC College.

The Teaching International Relations Program sends 200 undergraduate volunteers to neighborhood high schools. USC students teach cases focused on international ethical questions and issues. The Levan Institute will edit teaching plans based on our university-level versions and fund these particular lesson plans for TIRP. TIRP is sponsored by the School of international Relations. 

Levan Learning Community of 20 incoming students linked to PHIL 140: Contemporary Moral and Social Issues.