During a weekend of partying and frivolity, four Dartmouth students instead buckled down and debated ethics at Williams College. After two months of preparation, the College's Ethics Institute debate team emerged as champions in the first annual Northeast Regional Ethics Bowl.
A lack of Dartmouth-sponsored funding, however, is keeping the team from reaching the next level of debating success at the Feb. 27 national Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The team, which consisted of Catharine Birtley '06, Zachariah Lakel '06, Michael Pryor '04 and Peter Verovsek '06, competed in the Ethics Bowl Sunday against teams from schools including Boston, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Union and Williams colleges.
Beginning in December, the team prepared responses to the contest's 10 possible ethical dilemmas, eight of which they argued in competition. The team divvied up the arguments so that whenever a case arose, one member could speak about it specifically and authoritatively.
During each round, the team had 10 minutes to present its argument and was then questioned by a panel of judges and rebutted by the opposing team. Next, the opposing team was given a different case, and the panel questioned its responses while the other team rebutted its argument.
The ethics team triumphed in three rounds before facing Boston College in the championship. Dartmouth's winning case was a debate on the ethics of photojournalists like Pulitzer Prize-winner Kevin Carter, who took a controversial photograph of a starving Sudanese child being eyed by a vulture.
Speaking for the team, Verovsek pointed out the importance of photojournalists in raising awareness and millions of dollars in contributions for aid organizations.
The team argued that "the reporter had a duty to intervene when a human life was at stake and when it could be reasonably assumed that that reporter's actions could save that life," Verovsek said.
Dartmouth's ethical response to the situation impressed even philosophy professors at Williams, who were "blown away" by the team, according to the team's coach, Aine Donovan.
Donovan, the Ethics Institute's Executive Director, said the debaters were really "impassioned in making their ethical points of view known."
"Their eloquence in public presentation just astounded me," Donovan added.
Unfortunately, despite Sunday's win, the Dartmouth team cannot attend the national Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Feb. 27 due to a lack of funding. The Ethics Institute simply does not have the budget to fund the team's roundtrip flights to Cincinnati, and the Council on Student Organizations could not justify spending $6,000 on one day of competition, according to COSO representative Diana Zhang '06.
"Our treasurer talked to COSO about two weeks ago trying to get funding and was not able to get it. We had some hopes after winning that we might be able to go, but because we had no funding, we had to let [nationals] know we would not be able to attend," Verovsek said.
