SUNDAY 2ND NOVEMBER, 2014 – UWI TODAY
5
“It was the best feeling in the world,”
says Andre
Earle, captain of the Confucius Institute (CI) at The
UWI St. Augustine’s Dragon Boat racing team. Andre
and his teammates have good reason to celebrate after
their first place finish in B division of the Ambassador’s
Cup.
The race was part of the Chinese Arrival Dragon
Boat Festival held in mid-October in Chagville,
Chaguaramas to commemorate the history and
culture of Trinbagonians of Chinese descent. The
UWI team defeated all competition in their division,
quite an achievement considering they had only begun
practising as a team two days before the race.
“The team (made up of UWI students and staff)
really only started training about five weeks prior to the
regatta. Two days before the race we actually met and
put together the ten-person squad for the race,” Andre
said. “We had five sessions. The people unfamiliar with
dragon boat racing learned how to row and the people
who were familiar learned to row together.”
Yet amazingly they were able not only to win their
race but to do so by two boat lengths, one of the longest
recorded at the regatta. Andre, a second-year student at
the Faculty of Medicine and a seasoned dragon racer,
credits the attitude of the entire team (20 people in total
including reserves).
“Everybody came with the right mindset,” he says.
“We were all open to working together. We wanted to
work together. We wanted to be a team.”
OUR CAMPUS
The UWI will be introducing
a new co-curricular course –
Ethics and Integrity: Building Moral Competencies –
scheduled
to begin in Semester 2, 2015. The latest research findings have
shown that traditional methods in delivering programmes
and courses in ethics have proven to be essentially ineffective
in infusing ethics in the culture. The problem is that such
training only reaches the “head” (cognitive) but not the heart
(affective).
When asked what is the most admirable trait or moral
competency they would like to see in people, most people
identify “integrity” as the leading characteristic. Integrity is
easy to recognise but difficult to define. Persons of integrity
are consistently honest and trustworthy, maintain privacy
and confidentiality, perform high quality work regardless of
pay incentives, follow through on commitments, decline to
participate in gossip or spreading rumors, give credit where
it is due, and so on.
Recently, there has been a growing field in Positive
Organisational Scholarship which advocates a philosophy of
promoting what is good or positive (for example, mental well-
being) rather than focusing on what is harmful or negative
(for example, mental illness). In a positive sense, integrity can
be defined as a state of being complete or whole, in short, a
state of fulfilment or
happiness
resulting in improved quality
of life and performance.
In a recent Harvard Business School Research Paper
(2014) entitled
Putting Integrity into Finance: A Purely Positive
Approach
, Werner Erhard and Michael Jensen argue that the
almost universal assignment of false causes of the actions that
result in damaging effects actually obscures the real source of
those actions, which is
out-of-integrity
behaviour attributed to
a
veil of invisibility
that hides the actual source of this behavior:
a moral disorder of self-deception or delusion.
This co-curricular course addresses this “veil of
invisibility” in promoting integrity by developing moral
competencies (ethical principles and moral virtues). When
we fail to abide and be guided by ethical principles and moral
virtues, the quality of performance goes down and the cost
of doing business goes up. A commitment to doing what is
ethically right (that is, the very definition of personal and
professional integrity) demands continuous reflection in
building moral competencies. The course prepares you for
your journey in life by helping you recognise that nature and
experience provide the “raw material” to “complete or perfect
yourself ”.
We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought
to live
(Socrates in
Plato’s Republic
).
While we recognise that we are imperfect beings capable
of doing the most horrendous or atrocious of human acts
when placed in situations that can encourage out-of-integrity
behaviour, the course provides a “psychological mirror” that
encourages self-reflection in gaining knowledge of our moral
strengths (and how we can build on them) and recognising
our moral weaknesses (in other words, growth in humility)
which are necessary for human maturity and personality
development.
According to the Greek philosopher, Socrates, who
advanced the first view on personal integrity (
to thy own-self
be true)
: “The greatest way to live with honour in this world
is to be what we pretend to be.”
Ethics and Integrity: Co-
curricular or Core-curricular?
The time is always right to do
what is right (Martin Luther King, Jr).
The co-curricular course on Ethics and Integrity will be
facilitated by Surendra Arjoon, PhD, Professor of Business
and Professional Ethics, Department of Management Studies.
Professor Arjoon is one of the leading international scholars in
Business and Professional Ethics and is currently serving as Editor
on “Work, Virtue and Happiness” for the Handbook of Virtue
Ethics in Business and Management, Springer.
Can Ethics be Taught?
UWI introduces new Co-Curricular Course on promoting Happiness
B y P r o f e s s o r S u r e n d r a A r j o o n
Victory!
CI Dragon Boat Racers Beat the Odds
