When I read about the slaying of Officer Brian Moore in the line of duty, I thought about the dangers of police work, the availability of guns, and the amount and kinds of violence we experience all too often. I also thought about the number of incidents in which violence and death have occurred in recent months.
As we enter this commencement season, I ask you to think about our roles and obligations as members of this community, to contemplate our commitment to an education that is as much about the advancement and promotion of character and citizenship as it is about preparation for careers and commerce, and to consider what it means to be an ethical person.
When we consider our ethical roles, we must then ask, can we allow ourselves to remain silent in the face of social and economic injustice, demonstrated, for example, by recent repeated manifestations of racial bias and misconduct in the public square that has led to severe injury and even death?
Don’t we have a mandate to speak out? Shouldn’t our education give us the courage to take a stand for what is just, even when it is inconvenient or when we assume others will take opposing stands that we believe to be political and not principled? I hope it does.
We citizens must employ the ethical “eye” to challenge societal patterns that in total and in summary test our sense of what is just. This takes courage, as well as compassion, but it is our obligation—to identify the fault lines and to seek empirical evidence so that we can arrive at a larger truth and develop appropriate strategies to address injustices wherever they occur.
This is especially true in universities, which are institutions committed to the pursuit of unbiased truth by promoting intellectual integrity and openness to diverse points of view.
The ethical eye helps us to identify the principles required to find the truth that lies beyond the prejudice of racism by focusing on fairness, equity, and justice for all, even those who fit a certain profile, whether they be alleged perpetrators, members of the police force, or innocent bystanders. No one should be an “other” to us if our education has succeeded. We are one species, with each member seeking to find a unity connecting head and heart. There is no progress in Civil Rights if our goal has been redefined as, “Don’t shoot,” instead of “Let us rise up.”
