No one can deny that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is known for great basketball, but it is also, less conspicuously, known as the the founder of the National High School Ethics Bowl. The Ethics Bowl is an annual competition intended to “create spaces and framework for students to gather and prepare stances around ethical challenges” and foster “collaboration to create a shared ethical vocabulary and expand your ethical consciousness,” according to Rohin Shivdasani ’18, the founder and President of the Ethics Bowl Club on campus. “Basically,” he said, “it’s a debate that discourages the spirit of true debate. You aren’t locked into a side; it’s just about who discusses better.”
Shivdasani started the club last year, his first year at Choate. Hailing from North Carolina, just minutes from the original founding place, Shivdasani had first competed his sophomore year of high school, and when he got to Choate, he wanted to bring the spirit of the competition with him. He immediately looked for a way to start the club, and after doing so, he quickly noticed interest in other students.
Imran Hyder ’18 was one of the first people who committed to the club, and he and Shivdasani currently run the team together: Shivdasani is the president of the club while Hyder is the captain of Choate’s top team. The team consists of six juniors and seniors: Shivdasani, Hyder, Baji Tumendemberel ’18, Reade Ben ’18, Theo Silverman ’18, and Giorgie McCombe ’19.
The team, only in its second year, recently won the Yale Bowl, allowing them to qualify for a playoff against Phillips Exeter Academy for the New England Championship and the opportunity to compete in North Carolina in April for the National Championship.
Moreover, the team’s commendable achievements are a result of tremendous hard work: “The team meets two to three times a week to discuss the ins and outs of each case and the moral framework that they will bring to the case,” said Ms. Amy Foster, the faculty adviser to the club.
Ms. Foster continued, “The cases are all real cases, or they are based on real things. At the recent competition we discussed the programming of driverless cars and whether, in the event of a crash, the car should protect the people inside or outside. Sometimes there are more personal issues too. For example, if your friend is engaged and you’re the best man but none of your friends like the woman because she is isolating him, what should you do? There really is a good mix of these personal moral dilemmas and these broad problems facing society today.”
Aside from its own competition, the club is also working as a promoter for the Ethics Bowl in the area. Both Shivdasani and Hyder explained that Ethics Bowl hasn’t become popular in the area yet. Because of that, they have taken it upon themselves to try to grow the competition.
The club’s first initiative towards this goal was its work in founding the Yale Bowl, the first competition in Connecticut and a much closer alternative to the Tufts Bowl. Ms. Foster described the club’s work behind the competition, “What [Shivdasani] wanted to do was to get a bowl in Connecticut, and I give him huge credit for his work. He communicated with the people at the national headquarters, he sent emails to all sorts of people, he looked up and contacted people at universities in the area, and, finally, he got a few graduate students from Yale who were interested.”
Hyder added, “The reason we made another bowl here was that there were a lot of schools in the Connecticut area that couldn’t make it all the way up to Tufts. While we have the resources and the amenities to go to Tufts if we need to, but with the bowl in Connecticut, we were able to open up the competition to a number of public schools in New Haven who couldn’t travel all the way to Boston. We are really just trying to bring the competition to a new area and open it up to new people.” Shivdasani concluded, “There wasn’t a lot of organic interest in the Yale Bowl. We had to really reach out to a lot of schools to make them aware of the competition, and hopefully we can continue to grow it.
Looking towards the future, the club hopes to continue growing and drawing more interest, especially in younger students, some of whom have already made their mark. The B team this year was third at the Yale Bowl, an amazing accomplishment for a group of all freshmen. Its development throughout the competition will allow it to really take off in the coming years, and Hyder, Shivdasani, and Ms. Foster all agree that the club is in good hands.
