Duke's Elizabeth Kiss to Head to Agnes Scott

Elizabeth Kiss, the founding director of Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics, has been named the eighth president of Agnes Scott College.

Kiss will begin at Agnes Scott, in Decatur, Ga., in August. Kiss, who joined Duke in 1997, is the Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute and associate professor of the practice of political science and philosophy.

"Elizabeth has been a wonderful inaugural director for the Kenan Institute," said Provost Peter Lange, Duke's top academic officer. "The job was an enormous challenge: to create and then implement a vision for an institution that was to promote the agenda of ethics across the university and in the larger community. Elizabeth has fulfilled every ambition we could have had for her and has done it with great skill, grace and impenetrable good spirit."

A Rhodes Scholar, Kiss earned a doctorate in philosophy from OxfordUniversity in England in 1990. She has held fellowships at the Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, the National Humanities Center and Melbourne University's Centre on Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. She currently serves on the boards of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the Center for Academic Integrity and the Durham Nativity School.

As director of the Kenan Institute, Kiss played a leading role in integrating ethics into Duke's undergraduate curriculum. She was co-director of the Humanitarian Challenges at Home and Abroad program for first-year students, helped to establish a two-course ethical inquiry requirement and launched the Undergraduate Certificate Program in the Study of Ethics that will begin this fall.

At Duke, her leadership also promoted a focus on academic integrity, including a new honor code and signing ceremony; the implementation of a research ethics requirement for all Ph.D. students; the creation of the Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy at the Institute for Genome Science and Policy; and the launch of Scholarship with a Civic Mission, a research service-learning initiative that has grown from 32 to almost 600 students in three years.

Nationally, Kiss and the Kenan Institute worked to infuse ethics in K-12 education, business practices and higher education.

"This was a difficult decision because of my love for Duke, the Kenan Institute and my colleagues across and beyond the university," Kiss said. "From academic integrity to research ethics to campus culture, Duke has demonstrated a willingness to be innovative and to tackle complex ethical issues with honesty and courage. As I embark on my new adventure, I look forward to taking vicarious pride in the Kenan Institute's growth and accomplishments."

To view the Agnes Scott news release on the appointment, click here.

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The Kenan Institute for Ethics is a university-wide initiative at Duke that supports the study and teaching of ethics and promotes moral reflection and commitment in personal, professional, community and civic life. For more information, contact the institute at (919) 660-3033 or kie@duke.edu, or visit the website.