Wake Forest Ethics and Leadership Debate Team Wins NC Ethics Bowl for Third Time
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The Wake Forest Ethics and Leadership Debate Team took home top honors in the North Carolina Ethics Bowl held Feb. 7-8 at Campbell University School of Law in Raleigh.
This competition was sponsored by the North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities (NCICU). Twenty of its thirty-six member institutions competed this year, the most in the four years that this competition has been held.
The Wake Forest Ethics and Leadership Debate Team is comprised of undergraduate students from a variety of major fields of study. The team is sponsored by the Wake Forest Allegacy Center for Leadership and Character. Team members who represented the school in the North Carolina Ethics Bowl included George Bader (the Team Captain) (’15), Katrina Barth (’18), Cara Huskey (’15), Jake Kerman (’16), Paul Okoyeh (’17), Thomas Poston (’18), and Samantha Sells (’15). The debaters were Barth, Huskey, Okoyeh, and Poston. The remaining students served in supporting and research roles.
“Our team made us very proud. The theme of this competition was ‘Ethics in Education’ and our students participated in some very close rounds as all of the teams struggled with some profound ethical dilemmas that face faculty, students and learning institutions every day. The Wake Forest team demonstrated exceptional command of ethics, philosophy and public policy as well as the skills needed to frame compelling and logically sound arguments,” said Charles Lankau, Ethics Debate Team Faculty Advisor and Associate Teaching Professor at Wake Forest University Schools of Business.
Lankau co-coaches the team alongside Stephen Oldham, a second-year law student at Wake Forest School of Law. Oldham has vast experience in this type of competition; his team at the University of Central Florida won the Ethics Bowl National Championships in 2011.
Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl teams receive a set of cases in advance, which contain fact patterns based on contemporary ethical issues in society. These cases are researched, ethical frameworks developed, and policy solutions prepared, prior to the competition. During the debates, teams of three to five students each are paired against one another. One of the cases are selected and the teams are asked to answer a unique question based that case, present their solutions in turn, and then present a challenging question to the opposing team for a thoughtful response. A panel of judges score each round and select a winner. The event consisted of six rounds of debates and Wake Forest won each of their rounds over two days. This is the third time that Wake Forest has won this Ethics Bowl – having earned top honors in 2012, 2014, and 2015. In 2013 Wake Forest won second-place. They hope to continue their tradition of excellence in 2016.