New Staff Bring Expertise to Center Programs

Photo by Bryan Stofferahn

Barry Stenger
Director of Ethics Programs

"All ethics are social," said Barry Stenger, newly appointed director of ethics programs at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

Stenger, former director of the Center for Ethics and Social Policy at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, said he believes "we need to broaden our appreciation of ethics-it can't be limited to an individual's behavior in this or that circumstance. We must locate ourselves in a moral community-a community that forms, enables, and sometimes restricts our actions."

In his work at the Ethics Center, Stenger hopes to raise this connection with SCU students. "As people prepare for professions-business, law, psychology, teaching-we must invite them to understand their work within a broader context. They can't just say, 'I'm a good, moral person because I don't lie or cheat' but, at the same time, structure their business or conduct their research or approach their patients in a way that undermines a social commitment to justice."

As director of ethics programs, Stenger will work with SCU faculty and students to integrate ethics throughout the curriculum. He will also conduct in-service courses, workshops, and seminars on applied ethics in a variety of corporate, nonprofit, and educational settings.

Stenger's experience includes a stint as a staff member of a diocesan social justice center. He received his Ph.D. from University of Chicago. A professor in Christian Ethics at GTU, he recently served as its acting dean.

Photo by Bryan Stofferahn

Nipa Rahim
Coordinator,
Expedited Removal Study

What happens to someone fleeing political persecution who seeks asylum in the United States? As coordinator of the Expedited Removal Study, Nipa Rahim will look at how new amendments to U.S. immigration law affect asylum seekers and other noncitizens entering the United States.

A program of the Ethics Center and the Refugee Law Center in Cambridge, Mass., the study is supported by grants from the Ford and Joyce Mertz Gilmore foundations.

Rahim serves as liaison between the study and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, nongovernmental organizations, and other institutions. She has been working in immigration law since she was a law student at U.C.-Davis, where she served as a student attorney at the school's Immigration Law Clinic.

After completing law school in 1995, Rahim became a human rights researcher at the Law and Mediation Center in Dhaka, Bangladesh. One of her major responsibilities was developing a model affidavit and taking testimony from Bengali migrant workers who had been tortured while they were detained at Malaysian detention camps. She also coordinated a study on Bangladesh's migrant labor laws and policies.

Rahim was raised in Hawaii, where, she says, "the immigrant past is very close to most people, so immigration and its various impacts on local communities were always at the forefront of my mind as I was growing up." From her own experience and from working with immigrants, Rahim has concluded that contemporary global trends in immigration need to be examined in new and innovative ways. "Things are so connected," she said, "that borders are an ineffective way to define communities."

Photo by Bryan Stofferahn

Jane Kerney-Ogle
Director of Corporate and Community Relations

As a health care administrator for the past 25 years, Jane Kerney-Ogle saw ethical questions in her field mushrooming-end-of-life issues, managed care, privacy. At the same time, society's ability to discuss such hot-button topics was being sorely tried.

"It became clear to me that what people needed in order to lower the volume was a good framework for the conversation," said Kerney-Ogle. "That's what I think is the Ethics Center's vision-to create a framework for people to talk to each other."

Kerney-Ogle becomes part of that vision as the Ethics Center's new director of corporate and community relations. One of her immediate projects will be staffing the Ethics Roundtable for Executives, which brings together CEOs, company presidents, and other business leaders to discuss the ethical dilemmas that confront them in the workplace. She will also work with the Advisory Board to identify new programs that would serve the Center's constituents in fields such as health care, business, politics, and education.

Kerney-Ogle comes to the Center after 11 years at the Medical Center at Princeton in Princeton, N.J., where, most recently, she served as vice president for communications and planning. Her responsibilities included strategic planning, new business development, physician relations, and marketing.

"What attracted me to the Ethics Center," she said, "was the people and their commitment to investigating ways to bring ethics into everyday life."

Photo by Bryan Stofferahn

Yraida Gildez
Administrative Assistant

Yraida Gildez, the new administrative assistant at the Ethics Center, has her own personal mission: "to discover, to nurture, and to celebrate character."

Gildez has been able to mesh that mission with her work as she provides administrative support to the full range of Center programs. Her fluency in Spanish and English has been of particular service to the Center's International Human Rights and Migration Program, which sponsors a human rights leadership exchange, most recently with Guatemala. At an October Ethics at Noon program, she helped translate the presentation of Juan Pu, an activist from COPMAGUA, the umbrella organization of Guatemalan indigenous peoples.

Gildez was born in a "very small town" in the Andes Mountains of Venezuela. At 18, she moved to New Zealand, where she attended Aukland Technical Institute and the Gillian English Secretarial College. She moved to the United States in 1978. Before coming to the Ethics Center, Gildez worked in the Publications Department of Larus Corp., designers and manufacturers of microwave telecommunications systems.