The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship is proud to announce its guest speakers for the Fall semester:

September 19th—Dr. David Schweickart

September 26th—Dr. David Kelley

October 31st—Dr. Alexei Marcoux

Each speaker has a different expertise and opinion about Capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses.

Dr. Schweickart is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He will be speaking on “Marx’s Democratic Critique of Capitalism and Its Implications for a Democratic Socialism.” Dr. Schweickart holds Ph.D. degrees in both mathematics and philosophy. He is the author of Against Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and After Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

Dr. David Kelley (Ph.D., Princeton University) is a former professor of philosophy at Vassar College and is currently Senior Fellow at the Atlas Society in Washington, D.C. Dr. Kelley will be speaking on Ayn Rand’s moral defense of capitalism. Dr. Kelley is the author of The Evidence of the Senses, The Art of Reasoning, and The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand.

Dr. Alexei Marcoux (Ph.D., Bowling Green State University) is Associate Professor of Business Ethics at Loyola University Chicago and a policy advisor for the Heartland Institute. He will be speaking on the social philosophy of Friedrich A. Hayek, the 1974 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Each talk will be held in Scarborough 4 at 6 PM, in connection with Professors Hicks and Rezazadeh’s Capitalism in the Modern World course.

We are hoping for a lively and controversial semester, and we welcome you to join us for any of the talks you are interested in.

In the meantime, please contact us at if you have any questions or would like more information.

Excerpts from this interview appear in the Fall 2007 issue of Kaizen, CEE’s newsletter. Below is the full interview.

John Gillis has been a practicing architect in New York City for more than two decades. He has designed hundreds of residential, commercial, educational, and institutional projects throughout the United States. Gillis has also written widely on architecture and art for publications such as Economic Affairs (London), Interiors, Aristos, The Freeman, and Reason.

Kaizen: Why did you decide to become an architect?

Gillis: Well, I was interested in buildings from the time I was a small kid. By the time I decided to become an architect, at about age twelve, I had already been focused on things that I didn’t quite know were architecture, but were architecture. I just loved building things when I was a little kid, like various specialized toys, and making up things out of materials. I was interested in building as such.

My earliest memories are of buildings like the church that was visible from my window when I was three years old—it was a big, prominent structure. When I got bored in school as a young child, I used to sit and draw from memory the plans of buildings that I was in. I didn’t know that they were plans—I didn’t fully understand what was going on, but it was interesting for me to be able to look from above and see the organization of the house I lived in, or the school I was going to, or other buildings that I had been in, wondering how it all worked, drawing the next room, and seeing that things were organized in a certain way.

So I was fascinated by all those things. And then, when I was in seventh grade, going into eighth grade, I realized that I wanted to build—that that was what I wanted to do. I remember telling my parents that I wanted to build. I didn’t even call it architecture, because it wasn’t yet a case of clearly wanting to do something artistic. Instead, it was really a case of wanting to create buildings, and it was all in one big ball. It wasn’t organized or clear, but as soon as I realized that that was what I wanted to do, and because I was always a big reader, I started looking for books about architecture.

I realized quickly that there was a whole issue about how you organize things, how things look, as well as the mechanics of the function, materials, construction, and costs. It appealed to me because it was almost everything in life rolled up in one—it was artistic; it was business; it was engineering; and it was practicalities. My goal was, from that point on, totally clear, and I never changed. I went to technical high school to study architecture and then onto university architectural programs.
(more…)

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

It features some of the Center’s faculty, last semester’s student prize-winners in Business Ethics—and a feature interview with New York City architect John Gillis.

We hope you will enjoy it.

You can also download a PDF of this issue of Kaizen.

If you would like to receive a complimentary sample issue of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE @ Rockford.edu.

Rockford College, the Department of Philosophy, and The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship are proud to welcome our new professor of philosophy, Shawn Klein.

Professor Klein received his Bachelor’s degree from Tufts University in Massachusetts in 1995, obtained his Master’s in Philosophy from Arizona State University in 2001, and he is completing his Ph.D. at Arizona State.

Professor Klein’s specialty is normative ethics. In addition to his various publications, he is the coeditor of Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts, published by Open Court in 2004.

For more information about professor Klein and the courses he will be teaching, view the announcement in PDF format.

Robert Bradley, Ph.D., visited the center and Rockford College on March 28, 2007 and gave a presentation to an audience of about 115 students, professors, and interested members of the greater Rockford community. Dr. Bradley was a longtime employee of Enron, the collapsed corporate giant. During the company’s last years he served as speech writer and regulatory advisor for Ken Lay, Enron’s CEO, who was convicted in May 2006 on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. Bradley is now president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER) in Houston, Texas, and is completing his sixth book, Political Capitalism: Insull, Enron, and Beyond. His previous books have been on energy history and policy. The theme of Dr. Bradley’s talk was how philosophy—not only business economics and political economy—is key to unraveling the Ken Lay Paradox to understand the rise and fall of Enron.