Excerpts from this interview appear in the January 2008 issue of Kaizen, CEE’s newsletter. Below is the full interview.

Michael Newberry’s painting career has spanned three decades. He has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and taught life drawing, drawing and composition, and painting at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He has established the Newberry Workshop, sharing his knowledge through a series of online mini-tutorials. He has also published several essays and lectures on aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

Kaizen: When did you first become interested in painting and start thinking about it as a possible career?

Newberry: I started painting when I was about eleven, after falling in love with Rembrandt’s art work. My grandmother bought me a book of his work for my birthday. I enjoyed going through it, and I began drawing and painting. But as far as a career, that didn’t happen until much later, in my twenties, when I started examining what the life of an artist would be and whether or not I had the skills to make it worthwhile to follow up on painting.

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The Center is pleased to announce the winner of the Spring 2008 Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship Essay Contest: Erik Torres for his essay “Social and Business Entrepreneurs: Big Bucks and Some Change.”

The four runner-ups are (in no particular order): Richard Walters, “False Advertising as an Impediment to Reason”; Almir Causevic, “Final Paper on Minimum Wage: Case Studies at Coyote Blog”; Andrew Tuttle, “Italian Tax Law: Justified Fraud?”; Scott Danielson, “The New Belgium Beer Company.” Congratulations to the winners!

This week the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship is proud to welcome its guest speaker for the Spring Semester, Dr. Eric Mack. Dr. Mack (Ph.D., University of Rochester) is professor of philosophy at Tulane University and a faculty member of Tulane’s Murphy Institute of Political Economy. He has written extensively on the philosophical foundations of individual rights, property rights, markets, and toleration. He is currently working on a book on the political philosophy of John Locke.

Professor Mack will be speaking Friday, April 25th, at 3:00 pm in Scarborough 4, in connection with Professor Klein’s Business and Economic Ethics course. He will give a talk on the political philosopher Robert Nozick’s theory of entitlement, and the propensity of liberty to upset social patterns. Professor Mack’s talk is open to anyone and everyone interested.

Please contact us if you have any questions or would like more information.

On April 5, Professor Stephen Hicks spoke at the annual conference of the Association for Private Enterprise Education on the topic “What Ethics Can Learn from Entrepreneurship.” The conference was held in Las Vegas, Nevada.

To be offered in the Fall 2008 semester. In this course students will consider a range of ethical, political, and economic issues about sports: Why are sports so universally popular? What physical and psychological values do they provide? Does the playing of sports develop good character? Why are many sports fans so fanatical? What is the proper place of sports in higher education? Is there anything wrong with ticket-”scalping”? How should mega-sports complexes be funded—politically or through the market? See the Sports Ethics flyer.

Philosophy professor Stephen Hicks and economics professor Robert von der Ohe will co-teach a new course this fall 2008 semester at Rockford College: Entrepreneurship and Ethics. The purpose of this course is to integrate entrepreneurship, business history, and business ethics. It will consist of case studies of major entrepreneurs in modern history, e.g., Commodore Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Samuel Insull, John Johnson, Martha Stewart, Bill Gates, and others. Part of each case study involves learning the entrepreneur’s business practices and how he or she achieved business success. What traits and practices did they have: intelligence, risk-tolerance, leadership, ambition, ruthlessness? And part of each case study will involve learning about the ethical controversies their activities generated: Were they “predatory competitors,” “monopolists,” “robber barons”—or were they extraordinarily productive individuals who benefited both themselves and their customers? Students read and analyze business histories and biographies by both proponents and detractors. See the Entrepreneurship and Ethics course flyer.

Philosophy Professor Matt Flamm, author of the essay on George Santayana in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and co-editor of Under Whatever Sky—Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, will be speaking in Indianapolis on “The Impious Naturalism of the New Atheists.” The conference is sponsored by the Santayana Seminar Series and The Institute for American Thought.

Philosophy Professor Shawn Klein, co-editor of Harry Potter and Philosophy, will be speaking at a colloquium at Tufts University in Massachusetts, his alma mater, on the theme Why Take Harry Seriously?

Update: Here’s a Tufts Daily article about the talk and Professor Klein’s web log entry.

The second issue of our glossy newsletter, Kaizen, has been published.

It features news about some of the Center’s faculty, last semester’s student prize-winners in Capitalism—and a feature interview with New York City painter Michael Newberry.

We hope you enjoy it.

You can also download a PDF version of the issue.

If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford.edu.

Rockford College philosophy professor Stephen Hicks’s essay entitled “Ethics and Economics” was published in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David Henderson, Ph.D. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics is the second edition of The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, which was published to acclaim in 1993, and includes essays by “Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker and George Stigler, former presidential economic advisors, financial columnists, and economists such as Armen Alchian, Don Boudreaux, Deepak Lal, Anna Schwartz, Lawrence Summers, and Murray Rothbard.”