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Alan Bickford and William O’Donnell, respectively the upper school director and dean of students at a small independent day school, were excited to roll out their plan for a new student leader program that would start the following fall. The school prided itself as being on the leading edge of character education, and the new program would further enable the students to take an active role in embodying and spreading the values of the institution. The program called for the creation of a core group of upper school students who would be at the vanguard of ethics education — leading ethics workshops for all constituents of the school community (parents, faculty, students, etc.) and advising Bickford and O’Donnell on the best approach for addressing difficult situations in the upper school.
After a lengthy application and screening process, Bickford and O’Donnell chose the first group of students to be these new student leaders; there were three rising sophomores, six rising juniors, and four rising seniors. The school then spent a great deal of money training these students in workshop facilitation and ethics education, and Bickford and O’Donnell had great expectations for its potential.
After a successful September introduction for which the students ran a series of workshops, there was an incident in October that caused Bickford and O’Donnell to reevaluate the program itself. Two of the four seniors on the leadership team were called before the school’s disciplinary committee for a violation of the upper school rules of conduct; the infraction was a lapse in judgment, but not an overtly malicious act. The committee levied a fair punishment, but did not address the seniors’ standing as leaders in the community. The committee left the status of the seniors’ membership to Bickford and O’Donnell.
Bickford and O’Donnell quickly convened the members of the student leadership team — minus the two seniors — to provide for them a forum to share their thoughts about the direction of the program. The students were almost unanimous in their wishes that the offending students be asked to leave the team, but Bickford was hesitant to remove them. He felt that allowing the seniors to stay on the team could provide a true teaching moment that telegraphs that “mistakes are made at every level of a community, and everyone deserves a chance to atone for their mistakes.” O’Donnell sided with the students, but deferred to Bickford as his superior and gatekeeper of the program.
Bickford considered, on the one hand, the leadership group’s desire to hold the two students accountable by dismissing them from the group. After all, they were selected as leaders. Endowed with the responsibility to uphold the values of the community, they had failed to do so. Supporting the community interests over the interests of the individual might be right and just. On the other hand, Bickford’s gut was telling him that the higher right would be to uphold the interests of these two individuals despite the wishes of the larger community, honoring the principle of mercy through a “growth not punishment” philosophy. Although Bickford had received the input from his team, the decision was ultimately his: Should Bickford ask the two students to leave the program or allow them to stay?
Resolution: In this case, Bickford chose to go with his gut and allow the students to remain in the program to reinforce the idea that no one is exempt from faulty decision-making. His decision was met with resistance from his colleague, O’Donnell, and the other students in the leadership program. But everyone felt strongly about the success of the program so they eventually supported Bickford’s choice. Unfortunately, Bickford’s decision had the opposite effect. Many students in the community looked skeptically at a leadership program that would allow those seniors to remain. It took a full-year for the program to recover from the incident and build back the trust of the community.
© 2009 Institute for Global Ethics (IGE). All future rights reserved.