The Roger Mudd Center for Ethics is committed to fostering serious inquiry into, and thoughtful conversation about, important ethical issues in public and professional life. It seeks to advance dialogue, teaching, and research about these issues among students, faculty, and staff across all three schools – the College, the Williams School, and the School of Law. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the Center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Its ultimate goal is to provide the tools and resources necessary for thinking freely, critically, and humanely about the complex ethical questions we face in an increasingly diverse yet interdependent world.
About the Mudd Center
The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the University from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. When he made his gift, Mudd said that "given the state of ethics in our current culture, this seems a fitting time to endow a center for the study of ethics, and my university is its fitting home." In addition to enhancing the University’s ethics curricula and sponsoring symposia, lectures, conferences, and other public events, the Center will also continue the tradition of hosting professional ethics institutes in the areas of business ethics, legal ethics, medical ethics, and environmental ethics. These institutes, which complement the journalism and media ethics institutes through the Knight Program in Media Ethics put on each year by the journalism department, were a central component of the former Society and the Professions Program, whose funds have now come under the umbrella of the Mudd Center.