Cameron students can compete with anyone

This is one of those “Cinderella” stories; the kind where one of those small-school basketball programs makes its way into the NCAA’s “Sweet Sixteen.” (I started to use “David and Goliath” but in Lawton-Fort Sill we all recognize that artillery is never at a disadvantage!)

Next month, four Cameron University students will head to Cincinnati to compete for a national title. They are competing in the 28th annual Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Intercollegiate Bowl.

This is no small feat. More than 200 teams from 150 colleges and universities started preparing for the competition last summer. A dozen different regional competitions narrowed that field to only 36 teams – and Cameron is one of them.

There were 28 schools competing in our regional, with Cameron being the smallest. To make it to regionals, our Aggie team outscored the University of Oklahoma in state competition. In the regional, CU faced teams from significantly larger, “name brand” institutions. When it was over, our Aggies narrowly defeated Virginia Tech to qualify for the national tournament. Only Texas State and Georgetown posted higher scores. Duke, Harvard and Princeton were among the schools whose teams went home.

The team Cameron will send to Cincinnati is “home grown.” Its members are Jonelle Dunham and Taylor Spores, sophomores who are pursuing degrees in business administration; Tara Ostergard, a senior accounting major; and Alyssa Martinez, a junior pursuing a bachelor’s degree in strategic communications. Jonelle, Alyssa and Tara are from Lawton, while Taylor is from Apache. The team is coached by CU business professor Ken Masters.

Preparing for competition has required a significant commitment from the students. Teams research a long list of cases that explore a variety of ethical situations, then prepare an analysis of each one. These cases address a wide range of topics – including plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct, personal relationships, professional ethics, and social and political topics such as free speech and gun control. During competition, a case is selected and a moderator poses questions to team members in front of a panel of judges. These questions delve into ethical dimensions of that case. Judges evaluate the team’s answers and sometimes ask their own questions, rating the team on the intelligibility of its arguments, deliberative thoughtfulness, focus on ethically relevant considerations, and avoidance of ethical irrelevance.

Our students’ success at researching these cases, developing their arguments, and responding to judges’ questions was rewarded with an invitation to the national Ethics Bowl.

People’s perception of, and identification with, colleges and universities are often determined by the institution’s higher profile activities, especially in the arts or athletics. But it’s important to take note of student-focused activities in other areas of endeavor, like the ones exemplified by this team of Aggies. If anything, it shows that Cameron students have the ability to compete with anyone in the country, no matter the size of school.

Their accomplishment also reminds us of the importance of community support to complement and supplement the great work done by our teaching faculty. The opportunity for Cameron’s ethics team to participate in this competition was made possible with assistance from the Virginia Brewczynski Endowed Chair in Business Leadership, an endowment created by the Lawton Retail Merchants Association 30 years ago.

The Brewczynski chair is one of nearly 75 endowments established at Cameron over the years and made possible by supporters of our university who saw value in creating programs and activities that enrich the lives of our students and the community at large. These endowments support an amazing array of subjects, including the creation a of summer science program for children, educational opportunities in science, business and the arts, studies in history, leadership in coaching and military science … and even studies in ethics. If you wish to see a more comprehensive list, please visit the Cameron University website and search for endowed faculty positions.

But back to the Ethics Bowl and our students. There are still some “giants” left to slay in Cameron’s quest for a national title – schools like Georgia Tech, Stanford, Vanderbilt and Yale, along with the defending national champions, the US Naval Academy. I will be proudly cheering for Alyssa, Jonelle, Tara, Taylor and Dr. Masters while they are in Cincinnati. I hope you will, also.

John McArthur is president of Cameron University in Lawton.