Associate Professor of Government Julie Rose has been named the next Hans ’80 and Kate Morris Director of the Ethics Institute, effective July 1.

“Julie is a brilliant scholar and teacher who has served on the Ethics Institute’s faculty advisory board for several years and has played a central role in developing the institute’s profile on campus and beyond,” says Provost David Kotz ’86. “This is wonderful news for the institute and for Dartmouth.”

“The Ethics Institute serves as a hub for engagement with questions related to values—how society should be organized and how we should lead our lives—and it provides a space for disagreement about those values,” says Rose, who takes on the leadership role as the current director, Sonu Bedi, completes his second term this spring. Bedi is the Joel Parker 1811 Professor in Law and Political Science. 

“The institute has been flourishing under Sonu’s leadership, so my first goal is to maintain that high bar,” Rose says. “I want to continue expanding the institute’s national and international reputation, and to continue our programming for undergraduates, while we think about areas where we can add more.”

The Ethics Institute was founded in 1982 to advance the study and teaching of ethics throughout the Dartmouth community. To that end, it sponsors a range of public events and undergraduate fellowships; provides funding for teaching and research, including a postdoctoral fellowship; and promotes a guide to ethics-related courses from across the institution.

Rose sees an opportunity for the institute to further support Dartmouth-wide initiatives, such as Dartmouth Dialogues, which is strengthening the community’s culture of discourse across differences. 

“The Ethics Institute is a natural home for thinking more about how we can have productive, meaningful conversations across disagreement,” she says. She would like to see the institute model civil discourse for undergraduates, add a fall workshop on topics of public interest in addition to its annual spring Moral and Political Philosophy Workshop, and develop a writing residency for visiting researchers to develop and share new scholarship.

For Rose, whose research focuses on political philosophy related to issues of economic justice, “having a central space on campus for focusing on normative questions is vital for an institution like Dartmouth that is devoted to broad inquiry.” 

Similar centers at other institutions—including Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard—“have been an integral part of my own academic training,” Rose says. “They’ve been essential to the work that I do, and I’ve been fortunate to see the vital role they play for colleges and universities.”

The Ethics Institute is distinguished by its location and Dartmouth’s intimate scale, Rose says. “Our size allows for closer connections, and our location in a place of such natural beauty allows us to draw scholars to visit and engage with our small community. People here interact all the time across divisions, across schools. Having these kinds of personal connections matters.”

Rose, who joined the Dartmouth faculty in 2014, is the author of Free Time, an examination of the justice implications of an unequal distribution of unencumbered time—that is, time free from the demands of paid work, personal and household needs, and caregiving. “In the same way that we worry about money poverty, we should worry about time poverty and the ways in which people’s time can be made not useful to them.”

“Over the past 10 years of technological change, there’s been an explosion of interesting questions about the future of work, and those questions—which involve questions about leisure—have been at the center of my current research,” she says. 

Rose earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and her PhD from Princeton and went on to complete postdoctoral fellowships at Brown and Stanford and a sabbatical as Fellow-in-Residence at Harvard’s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. She is currently associate editor of the American Political Science Review.

“I want to thank Sonu Bedi for his exemplary work guiding the Ethics Institute over the past six years,” says Kotz. “We look forward to seeing the institute continue to thrive under Julie’s leadership.”