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The Indiana Daily Student

Ethics bowl team returns to nationals

The IU Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl team will participate in the national championship competition Feb. 21, 2016, in Reston, Virginia. This is the IU team’s second straight appearance.

Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is an academic competition in which students offer moral assessments of some of the most complex ethical issues facing society, according to a Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions press release.

Ethics Bowl is a team-based event that emphasizes civil discourse and consensus building. Teams research and develop positions on cases in medicine, technology, professional ethics, interpersonal relationships and public policy. Sample cases include discussion around police brutality and religious rights.

The team attributes its success to its hard work and time spent practicing, IU team captain Nikhil Nandu said, adding that the team practices a minimum of five hours a week.

“I always tell my friends that ethics bowl is my extra class because Joe has a Canvas page for all our Ethics Bowl outlines and stuff,” freshman team member Alex Johnson said. “I have to go in and study other people’s outlines to make sure like if Nikhil’s case got called up what point would he want me to talk about. Even though it’s not my case, I’d still need to know all the points about it.”

Team captain Ali Henke balances a job with 16 credit hours and about 10 hours a week of Ethics Bowl practice, she said.

“A couple of times during the semester when I felt overwhelmed, Ethics Bowl was essentially the first thing that would have to go, but it was the last thing I wanted to go,” Henke said.

IU sent two teams to the regional Ethics Bowl. The top five universities advance to the national championship. Each team competed in a series of three matches against other universities. IU’s teams finished with records of 3–0 and 2–1. The undefeated IU team ranked fourth in total points.

“I’m incredibly proud of this team,” Coach Joe Bartzel, associate instructor and Ph.D student in religious studies, said in a press release. “Competition at Central States is notoriously tough every year, so for a team of so many newcomers to put on as strong a showing as they did is a testament to the talent we have on this team,”

Bartzel also said he believes the team’s diversity gives them an edge.

“There are a lot of schools that draw their ethics bowl teams, including their coaches, from philosophy 
departments,” Bartzel said.

Bartzel said he has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, but his area of focus is now religious studies. Nandu and Henke study political science, while Johnson studies supply chain 
management.

“We have folks who are doing marketing, public policy, chemistry, neuroscience, all kinds of different majors,” Bartzel said. “So many different areas of knowledge. I feel like we cover more ground in better depth and we’re able to make our positions more concrete and less abstract.”

Bartzel also said he attributes the team’s success to how well they all get along.

“We have really great team chemistry,” Bartzel said. “It was particularly important this year given that we had so many first year members of the team.”

Ethics Bowl pushes its members to think outside the box and understand and relate to all sides of an 
argument, Nandu said.

“I come into the practices with my own views already, and you know just having my friends beat the crap out of the view,” Nandu said. “I change my opinion on most of my cases pretty much always. I definitely think that Ethics Bowl is good at making a person way more 
open-minded.”

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