Center Overview

The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, located at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, California, is one of the most active centers in the world for studying and promoting practical ethics.

The difficulty of leading a virtuous life in an increasingly complex modern society, the frequency of temptations and scandals, and the increasing diversity of ethical perspectives in a global world make the study and teaching of practical ethics critically important today.

The Markkula Center is committed to making knowledge about practical ethics available:

1. to professionals and others in the region and the world via a coordinated program of speeches, workshops, conferences, partnerships, online tools, and web resources. The Center's Web site is, we believe, the most visited applied ethics web site in the world, attracting approximately 4,800 unique visitors per day.
2. to every Santa Clara student as a fundamental part of his or her education.

The Center focuses on business ethics, health care and bioethics, local government ethics, and character education in K-12 schools. It also works in the fields of law and ethics, nonprofit ethics, environmental ethics, media ethics, sports ethics, student and university ethics.

The Center is unique among ethics centers in having active partnerships with professional groups and organizations in each of its focus areas:

1. Twelve companies and firms are active participants in the Business and Organizational Ethics Partnership.
2. Three hospitals, a hospice, and a hospital system contract with the Center for ongoing consultation on health care ethics issues.
3. Over 30 mayors, city managers, and other elected officials, as well as selected state officials, participate in the Center's Government Ethics Roundtable.
4. Over 40 of California's 58 county offices of education contract with the Center to participate in a curriculum development program on character education and to use materials developed by the Center in their classrooms.

The Center is able to generate fee and research-partnership income to cover approximately 40 percent of its operating costs, but is dependent on endowment income and annual gifts to make up the balance of its $2 million annual budget. Our administrative overhead is approximately 13 percent of revenues. The Center employs 14 professionals and 10 undergraduate students.

The Center's work focuses on identifying the unavoidable ethical dilemmas in life, studying these dilemmas and how they arise in organizations and in day-to-day personal experience, and designing ethical decision-making tools which will enable people of good will to manage those difficult ethical dilemmas effectively.