Tag Archive for: University Teaching

Logos Consulting Group is pleased to announce that Logos President Helio Fred Garcia, a member of the Columbia University Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty, has been promoted from Adjunct Associate Professor to Adjunct (full) Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

Garcia is in his sixth year teaching in the school’s Professional Development and Leadership program. He teaches the required course on Ethics and Integrity for Engineers to all incoming M.S. and PhD students. He also participates in the required first-year undergraduate Art of Engineering course to  provide an introduction to ethical decision-making for undergraduate engineering students.

In the M.S. and PhD programs, Garcia teaches a number of electives, including Crisis Management for Engineers, Crisis Prevention for Engineers, Advanced Ethical Decision-Making, and Advanced Leadership Communication for Engineers. He also teaches once-per-semester workshops on Lessons for Leaders from the COVID-19 Pandemic. Garcia also mentors PhD students.

Additionally, Garcia partners with his fellow Adjunct Professor (and brother) Chuck Garcia to team-teach an online course on Leadership, Followership, and Teamwork. The two brothers also co-lead the school’s PDL Fellows program, where a select number of M.S. students participate in a multi-dimensional enhanced leadership opportunity.

Columbia Engineering’s Professional Development and Leadership (PDL) program was launched in the school’s Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, and has since expanded school-wide for all degree programs. The program’s goal is to enhance the Columbia Engineering education by providing enrichment and development opportunities. The program assists students with in a number of ways, including:

  1. Obtaining skills to find and keep a role
  2. Learning how to grow and cultivate a career
  3. Recognizing effective leadership
  4. Learning to become an effective team player and follower
  5. Cultivating ethical behavior and values

… and striving to have fun while doing these things!

Garcia did his graduate studies at Columbia University in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where he studied ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, and political philosophy. His studies included advanced ethics.

In addition to his faculty position at Columbia University, Garcia has been on the New York University faculty since 1988, where, among other things, he has designed and taught courses on business and communication ethics. He is the author of five books on leadership, trust, and related topics.

On November 9, 2020, Helio Fred Garcia spoke with Will Bachman on his podcast Unleashed about how leaders and organizations can understand prepare for, and respond effectively to a crisis. Unleashed explores how to thrive as an independent professional.

During their conversation, Garcia discussed the meaning of the word crisis, several key principles of effective crisis response, and ways that Logos Consulting Group works with clients to prepare for and respond to crises.

Listen to the full interview here:

Logos Senior Fellow Anthony Ewing convened the eighth Teaching Business and Human Rights Workshop earlier this month at the University of Essex in Colchester, England. The seventy Workshop participants included individuals teaching “business and human rights” at universities in Canada, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the USA. The Workshop was co-hosted by the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association.

In 2011, Ewing co-founded the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum, a unique platform for collaboration among individuals teaching business and human rights worldwide. The Forum has grown to include more than 300 members teaching business and human rights at some 150 institutions in 40 countries.

The Forum’s in-person Teaching Workshops provide an opportunity for teachers to learn from one another and share their experiences in the classroom. This year’s Workshop featured thematic sessions on “Teaching BHR and Environmental Rights,” “Emerging BHR Topics,” and “Current Developments in Tools for Accountability,” and discussions on “Launching a BHR Curriculum” and “Classroom Strategies for Teaching BHR.”

Ewing has taught the course Transnational Business and Human Rights at Columbia University since 2001. In 2019, he launched an advanced seminar – Managing Human Rights –  at Columbia Law School. In the Classroom Strategies session, led by Ewing, he noted that

“We are at the point in the evolution of the discipline in which a comprehensive BHR curriculum would include an introductory course covering core topics, more advanced electives on specific topics, as well as clinical offerings that emphasize experiential learning.”

The Teaching Forum has proven to be a valuable resource promoting BHR education worldwide. More than 140 universities have added BHR courses or content to their curricula in the past decade. The multi-disciplinary subject is now being taught at schools of business, law and policy worldwide. Teaching Forum resources have been especially helpful for professors trying to make the case to their universities for creating new BHR courses, as well as for individuals already teaching the subject seeking to add new topics or teaching materials to their courses.

Ewing also edits the Teaching BHR Handbook (BHRHandbook.org), an online resource for teachers. For more information about the Teaching BHR Forum, visit TeachBHR.org.

 

Logos Consulting Group is pleased to announce that Logos president Helio Fred Garcia has been appointed to the faculty of Columbia University.

Effective August, 2017, Fred is an adjunct associate professor teaching in the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, also known as Columbia Engineering.  Fred will teach ethics to all 1,500 incoming graduate students through Columbia Engineering’s Professional Development and Leadership program.  Fred’s course will cover the foundations of ethics and ethical decision-making, the evolution of professional ethics in general and ethics in engineering and applied science in particular. He will also cover particular ethical issues in science publishing and in academic settings.

In addition to this course at Columbia Engineering, Fred also teaches ethical decision-making for U.S. military public affairs officers in the Joint Senior Public Affairs Officer course and Joint Intermediate Public Affairs Officer course in the U.S. Defense Information School.

Fred also taught business and communication ethics in New York University for more than 25 years, most recently in the M.S. in Public Relations and Corporate Communication program.  He remains on the NYU faculty, as an adjunct associate professor of management and communication in the M.S. in Public Relations program, and as an adjunct professor of management in the NYU Stern Executive MBA program, where last year he was named Executive MBA Great Professor.

Fred is the second Logos senior staff person to join the Columbia faculty.  Since 2001 Logos Senior Advisor Anthony Ewing has taught a graduate seminar on corporate responsibility at Columbia Law School. Several other Logos senior staff members are frequent guest speakers at Columbia’s Journalism School, Business School, Barnard College, and Barnard’s Athena Center for Leadership Studies.

During the 1970s and 1980s Fred was a graduate student at Columbia, where he studied ethics. In 1980 he received an M.A. in Philosophy from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He continued his graduate studies in Greek philosophy at Columbia for several years thereafter.

 (Helio Fred Garcia at the Philosophy Building on the day of his M.A. graduation, May 14, 1980)