Welcome to the 2025 -2026 Academic Year!
I'm delighted to welcome you to the Center for Ethics and Human Values (CEHV) at The Ohio State University! Whether you've found us through curiosity about civil discourse, an interest in research ethics, or a desire to engage with the most fundamental questions of how we can make meaning and live well together in a pluralistic society, I'm glad you're here.
CEHV serves as Ohio State's most trusted hub for rigorous and respectful discussion of the ethical challenges that shape our university and broader community. In our work, we are dedicated to being multidisciplinary, foundational, and discussion based. We do not only publish and speak about ethics; we are hard at work creating spaces where students, faculty, staff, and community members practice ethical engagement together. This work sits at the heart of our commitment to "Education for Citizenship," preparing people not just for careers but for lives of meaning and democratic participation.
Our programs reflect this philosophical orientation in action. Through Civil Discourse for Citizenship, we're building a culture of constructive engagement guided by our 4Cs framework: Be Curious, Be Charitable, Be Conscientious, and Be Constructive. Our Civil Discourse Fellows moderate forums on contentious topics, and students can pursue academic or co-curricular certificates in civil discourse. COMPAS (Conversations on Morality, Politics, and Society) brings diverse voices together for year-long explorations of challenging themes. Our CARE (Conversations Around Research Ethics) program convenes researchers across disciplines for discussions that go beyond compliance to explore complex ethical challenges.
The interdisciplinary nature of our work is essential. CEHV brings together faculty and students from more than 40 departments across a dozen colleges—from philosophy and political science to medicine and public health, from education to engineering. We gladly provide leadership for the growing Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major, serving talented students who are learning to analyze society's most pressing challenges from multiple perspectives.
I am incredibly proud of what our dedicated community accomplishes each year. I come to this work as a philosopher of education and my own research examines the relationship between education and politics, exploring how we learn to live together across difference, and what schools and universities owe to democratic society. These aren't abstract questions. They're urgent and practical, shaping how we teach, how we conduct research, how we engage in public discourse, and how we build communities of mutual respect and shared purpose at OSU and beyond.
I see CEHV as a place where theory and practice come together. Last year alone, we held 75 public events and workshops, reaching thousands through programming and over 135,000 through our videos. Beyond these figures, we are energized by successes in what matters most: the undergraduate who learns to moderate difficult conversations with grace, the researcher who thinks more carefully about the ethical dimensions of their work, the staff member who creates a values-based initiative in their department, the community member who engages with their neighbors’ ideas with authentic curiosity for the first time. These moments are the metrics that keep me excited about CEHV’s impact.
I invite you to join us. If you're a student, consider applying to be a Civil Discourse Fellow, enrolling in our courses, or pursuing one of our certificate programs. If you're a researcher, join us for a CARE panel or our training program in responsible conduct of research. Faculty and staff can participate in our ETHOS Fellows program to develop values-based projects in their units. And everyone—regardless of affiliation—is welcome at our COMPAS events, Civil Discourse Forums, and other public-facing events.
The questions we explore at CEHV are as old as philosophy itself: What is justice? What do we owe each other? How should we live? But they're also urgently contemporary: How do we constructively disagree in a polarized time? How do we conduct research with integrity in an era of rapid technological change? How do we educate for citizenship in a complex democracy?
I hope CEHV can be a resource for you as you grapple with these questions in your own work and life. Please don't hesitate to reach out; I look forward to learning what brings you to ethics and how we might collaborate.
With warmest wishes, always,
Dr. Winston C. Thompson
Director, Center for Ethics and Human Values
William H. and Laceryjette V. Casto Professor of Interprofessional Education
Professor, Educational Studies
Professor, Philosophy (by courtesy)
The Ohio State University