With diversity at every corner of the University and value and ethical decisions always looming over students’ heads, college can be a daunting four year experience.

The BGExperience program can create the vessel that will carry students through questions of values and ethics for the next four years of their life and beyond.

Dr. George Agich, a bioethicist and past professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, is the new director of the BGX program and he spoke to faculty, staff, and students yesterday afternoon at Olscamp about the importance of the program and what he has to offer.

“We want people and students to recognize that there are diverse types of values and ethics,” Agich said. “That [students] can come away with a much greater comfort in discussing values and ethics.”

Don Nieman, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, believes Agich has a lot to offer the BGX program.

“He’s been trained as a philosopher, he’s spent his career talking about ethics with non-philosophers,” Nieman said. “He’s been talking to doctors, medical students, patients, hospitals, and family members of patients about very difficult ethical issues and decisions that they were in the process of making.”

Nieman thinks Agich’s background adds insight to the goals of the program.

“We want to help students to make thoughtful decisions concerning the different kinds of moral and ethical issues that they confront every day,” Nieman said. “The real difficult decisions, you don’t make by reading it in a text book.”

One of Agich’s goals is to provide first-year students with a wider variety of class choices.

“We want there to be some vast courses,” he said, adding that another goal is to get students to learn to live with other people who don’t share their beliefs.

“These are life skills,” he said.

An example of one exercise done in class by BGX peer facilitator Julie Thibault, is having first-year students read a book with a running theme of values and then talking about the values mentioned.

“We discuss what values were expressed in the book, why they’re important or not important,” Thibault said. “We use them to see how we can make our lives as university students better and more fulfilling.”

Both Nieman and Agich think students’ university experiences are sprinkled with value and ethical decisions each day and these values are imperative to the identity of each person.

“Values tell us who we are,” Agich said. “They define our orientation in both our lives and our discipline.”

The BGX program, started in 2002, has influenced a number of students, including Kurt Schroeder, freshman.

“It has kept us in touch with our values,” Schroeder said. “It kinda reminded me of what mattered.”

Schroeder’s lessons have recently been put to the test.

“I went to a party the other day and there was alcohol there and the temptation to drink but I thought back to some of my morals and ethics,” he said. “I ended up not drinking.”

Agich emphasized the significance of values in society and life.

“Life matters and life is all about values,” he said.

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