Curricular innovation and emergency management in higher education: Making the general education connection.

OBJECTIVE: As a distributed function, emergency management in higher education must involve students from outside the field. An introductory emergency management course was redesigned to be attractive and visible to nonmajors via approval for inclusion in the university's core general education curriculum. DESIGN: Pre-/post comparisons were made of enrollment data for two interventions intended to broaden the course's audience. Later, a survey assessed why students took the course. SETTING: A land grant research university serving over 14,000 undergraduate and graduate students. PARTICIPANTS: Participants were students taking the Department's introductory course. INTERVENTIONS: Two interventions involved the Department's entry level course originally titled, "Introduction to Emergency Management" and numbered at the sophomore level. First, the Department retitled the course, "Emergencies, Disasters, and Catastrophes," and renumbered the course at the freshman level. Second, the Department later requested and received approval to have the course accepted in the University's general education curriculum. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Interventions were assessed by examining the average, annual number of nonmajors in the course, as well as, the academic diversity present among nonmajors. RESULTS: Both interventions, and especially the general education intervention, increased both enrollment measures. CONCLUSIONS: A rapid approval for the course's inclusion in general education validated faculty's acceptance of emergency management as an academic discipline while each intervention increased both the number and academic diversity of nonmajors. Long-term, the result should prepare nonemergency management leaders for emergency management as a distributed function.

Practical moral codes in the transgenic organism debate.

In one study funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, people from North Dakota were interviewed to discover which moral principles they use in evaluating the morality of transgenic organisms and their introduction into markets. It was found that although the moral codes the human subjects employed were very similar, their views on transgenics were vastly different. In this paper, the codes that were used by the respondents are developed, compared to that of the academically composed Belmont Report, and then modified to create the more practical Common Moral Code. At the end, it is shown that the Common Moral Code has inherent inconsistency flaws that might be resolvable, but would require extensive work on the definition of terms and principles. However, the effort is worthwhile, especially if it results in a common moral code that all those involved in the debate are willing to use in negotiating a resolution to their differences.