The Center for Ethics and Human Values COMPAS exhibition celebrates over 10 years of the program. Credit: Brooke Tascar | Lantern Reporter

In its 13th year of facilitating the “Conversations on Morality, Politics and Society” program, the Center for Ethics and Human Values celebrated the past decade of events with an exhibition in Hopkins Hall. 

The exhibition, which opened Feb. 8, celebrates the COMPAS program’s many-year-long series of events, including conferences and panels to encourage civil discussion and debate on a topic of public concern chosen by the center, said Piers Turner, the director of the Center for Ethics and Human Values, “Ohio State’s hub for rigorous and respectful discussion on the ethical challenges that shape our university and the broader community,” according to its website.

“This program started because we wanted to model informed civil discourse but also bring people together from different disciplines to talk about these hard problems,” Turner said.

This academic year’s program is titled “COMPAS Directions: A Decade of Ethical Exploration,” and in addition to the exhibit, includes several events. A Friday seminar will focus on identity politics and income inequality, and an April 5 seminar will center around generative artificial intelligence. 

Both discussions will be held in Thompson Library, Turner said. 

Peter Chan, a member of the design team for the exhibit and an associate professor of visual communication design, said they built the exhibit to focus on this year’s topic by individually highlighting the 10 former programs and spotlighting speakers from each year. 

The exhibit includes 10 posters spread throughout the building’s lobby, each with various quotes from speakers that participated in past years’ COMPAS events, Chan said.

“[The exhibit] is not only to emphasize the ongoing relevancy of these conversations but also to celebrate the thoughtful directions our participants and speakers have pointed to,” Chan said. “I look at this event like it is a brand mark [where] people can connect to it, look at it visually and get inspiration.”

Each bit of the design represents the goals of their discussions. For example, this year’s logo features a dynamic display of colorful bubbles in constant motion that eventually merge to form a singular bubble. Chan said it symbolizes the convergence of all past topics, each retaining its individuality while still evolving, shifting and coming together. 

Previous topics selected for the program included immigration, inequality, technology and COVID-19, Turner said.

“We just really believe in the mission of the university where the idea is to hear different ideas, bring people together [and] try to have really good versions of these conversations you don’t always see,” Turner said.

The exhibit is another way to commemorate these distinct yet interconnected topics, Winston C. Thompson, the COMPAS coordinator, said at the exhibit’s opening.

“Even as we look back on these 10 years of conversations, remember that they are not artifacts of the past,” Thompson said. “They are alive, dynamic and ongoing and for that, I am so very grateful.”

Turner said as a large university, Ohio State is uniquely built and positioned to promote civil and informed discussions of core ethical challenges. 

“The main thing to say about this program is we try not to just be critical,” Turner said. “We encourage our speakers to try to make proposals, so we can really talk about how to solve these problems [and] not just about the problems.”

Turner said the program aims to not just shed light on these conversations but to offer a diverse range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the topics.

“The two ideas here are modeling informed [and] good discussion, but also being interdisciplinary, where we bring together ethicists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and economists to have a well-rounded discussion of these issues,” Turner said.

All seminars, panels and additional events for this year’s COMPAS topic are over Zoom, recorded beforehand or held at local locations like Thompson Library, Turner said.

“We’re trying to create a space on campus through multiple programs where people can talk seriously about ideas, disagree, agree and have the disagreements be constructive,” Turner said.

Past events included presentations from individual speakers, panels, conferences and other university events related to the chosen topic that are co-sponsored or advertised by COMPAS, Turner said.

“Each [Ohio State] department is doing their own thing, so you have to create these spaces where people are talking to each other and ideologically, we try to bring in diversity of voices so it’s not just one kind of view,” Turner said. “We don’t just present one political view.”

Past sponsored events included films about immigration shown by the Wexner Center for the Arts and an event held by Ohio State’s Department of Political Science where speaker Juliana Bidadanure, an assistant professor in political philosophy at Stanford spoke about equality in basic income, Turner said. 

“We’ve had a lot of faculty from Ohio State, from a wide range of disciplines, take part in our events in a way that I don’t think anybody else on campus is doing, bringing people together consistently like this,” Turner said.

All COMPAS program events are open to Ohio State students and anyone from the Columbus community, Turner said. The exhibit closed Tuesday.