Senior Austin Foushee’s commitment to the National High School Ethics Bowl has helped encourage the next generation of deep thinkers and inspired the program’s first alumni scholarship.

This Spring, the Director and Executive Committee of the National High School Ethics Bowl are proud to announce the Austin Foushee Alumni Scholarship, and excitedly invite applications from prospective students.

On the weekend of March 31-April 2, the Parr Center was proud to host NHSEB10: The 2023 National High School Ethics Bowl Championship. This event was a special one, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the NHSEB program’s founding in the 2012-2013 academic year

Parr Center Graduate Assistant Delaney Thull is a 2022-2023 recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award from Carolina Center for Public Service’s APPLES Service-Learning Initiative for her work on the Philosophy Department’s innovative PHIL 292 course, Democratic Deliberation Across the Rural-Urban Divide.

NHSEB Director Alex Richardson has been appointed to a three-year term on the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Pre-College Instruction in Philosophy. Alex’s term will begin July 1 of this year and run through 2026.

To culminate the National High School Ethics Bowl’s largest and most competitive season yet, the Parr Center for Ethics is thrilled to announce NHSEB 10: The 2023 NHSEB National Championship. This year has been a historic one, and will mark the tenth anniversary of NHSEB's original founding in the 2012-2013 academic year.

This month, the Parr Center team was pleased to welcome over 100 volunteers from NHSEB Regional Competitions around the country to a series of Judge Training Clinics on NHSEBAcademy Live.

As institutions around the country cautiously return to normal operations in a new phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, most NHSEB Regional Competitions, too, are returning to primarily in-person events. In 2022-2023, 95% of NHSEB Regionals will be conducted in-person. From the very first iterations of NHSEBOne, it has always been NHSEB HQ’s intention to make its features generalizable post-pandemic, while keeping its video-conferencing centric use model available for scrimmaging, outreach events, and NHSEB’s new Divisional Playoff Circuit. This year’s major update to the NHSEBOne web app, which we’re calling Companion Mode, is a bold initial step in this direction, and we look forward to sharing it with you during the 2022-2023 Season.

A Year-End Letter from NHSEB Director Alex Richardson

Due to the National High School Ethics Bowl’s prodigious growth across the country, the NHSEB Executive Committee has designed a new Divisional Playoff system to replace NHSEB’s previous Regional Playoffs. Starting in 2022-2023, the country’s existing Regional Competitions will be sorted into four geographic Divisions. Each of these Divisions has been assigned to a host institution responsible for conducting Divisional Playoffs in partnership with the Parr Center in order to set the team roster for the 2023 National Championship.

The Director and Executive Committee of the National High School Ethics Bowl are proud to announce the program’s inaugural Student Advisory Council. These four students were selected for appointment from among a field of over 50 excellent applications, and each will serve a one year term, through July 31, 2023. 

Check out this recent op-ed by NHSEB Director Alex Richardson and Parr Center Outreach Director Michael Vazquez.

As part of its tenth anniversary season in 2022-2023, NHSEB’s leadership team will appoint the program’s very first Student Advisory Council in order to bring student experience to the very center of NHSEB’s programming and governance. Later this Fall, four students from around the country will be selected for appointment to the NHSEB Student Advisory Council, and will advise NHSEB’s Leadership and Advisory Board on all things Ethics Bowl from the student perspective. Appointed students will also serve as a conduit for informal feedback from other students in their respective Competitive Divisions, ensuring that the voices of our diverse and dedicated student population are heard as much as possible.

A new partnership between the Parr Center for Ethics and Gravitas: A Global Extension of the Stony Brook School will bring the Center’s award-winning National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB) program to new areas of the country via an innovative online-first competition structure, drawing on the successes of the NHSEBBridge access initiative. Each year, the NHSEB brings together thousands of high school students from across the United States to think, talk, and work together on some of the most complex and controversial moral issues of our time.

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of our founding, we’re proud to announce an expanded partnership with the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, produced by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE IEB®). In its earliest days, the National High School Ethics Bowl was based upon the APPE IEB and has enjoyed a close relationship with the organization since, as well as with its creator, Professor Robert Ladenson. 

Welcome to NHSEB10: The tenth anniversary season of the National High School Ethics Bowl.

As we prepare to launch NHSEB’s tenth anniversary season, the Parr Center for Ethics is excited to announce the first-ever national, longitudinal impact study conducted on the National High School Ethics Bowl. This study will be the first attempt to gain substantive insight into whether and how participating in the NHSEB program promotes the development of key intellectual and interpersonal traits among high school students.

It’s been ten years since the National High School Ethics Bowl’s founding in 2012. In that time, the program has grown by leaps and bounds. As we approach our tenth anniversary season in 2022-2023, NHSEB is bigger, better, and more inclusive than ever. This year, our team thought it was time for a new look.

NHSEB Director Alex Richardson and Parr Center Outreach Director Michael Vazquez are both featured in a new volume from Rowman and Littlefield, designed to introduce the Ethics Bowl activity and the dialogical pedagogy methods that underlie it to the broader public. The Ethics Bowl Way: Answering Questions, Questioning Answers, and Creating Ethical Communities, edited by Roberta Israeloff and Karen Mizell is available now!

The award-winning National High School Ethics Bowl teaches students how to thoughtfully engage with divisive topics — and with one another.