By El Nicklin
The first search engine result for “CSULB ethics” is Ethics at the Beach, an annual seminar. This pay-to-enter event is run by the Ukleja Center for Ethical Leadership within the College of Business.
The UCEL was founded in 2005, with a substantial portion of its $2.5 million endowment donated by Mick and Louise Ukleja.
With millions in funding and a strong presence on campus, the UCEL has become the university’s pillar of ethics.
Onto the second question: Should the UCEL and the College of Business be trusted to teach students about ethical leadership?
Signs point to no.
For one, the institution’s namesake, Mick Ukleja, has a public record of homophobia. Before his life as a leadership consultant and philanthropist, he was a pastor for 20 years.
Ukleja’s thesis, “A Theological Critique of the Contemporary Homosexual Movement,” was published in 1982.
The next year, he published a work arguing for an anti-gay biblical interpretation.
Conflating bestiality with gay sex, Ukleja wrote, “It has always been wrong to murder, rape, steal, to have sexual relations with animals, and to have sexual relations with persons of the same sex.”
Individuals have a right to their private beliefs; but when someone has a documented history of homophobia, he may not be the kind of person we should name ethics institutions after.
The Current received the following comment from Ukleja regarding his past.
“Actually, I have modified my view significantly. In the last 45 years (almost half a century), I have changed or modified my views on numerous topics,” Ukleja wrote.
“This is one of them, which is not only reflected in the makeup of the UCEL’s governing council, but also in the recipients of our most prestigious award (the Nell and John Wooden Ethics in Leadership Award),” he wrote in the email. “A 30-year-old often has morphed in their outlook by age 77!”
While it is encouraging that Ukleja might have changed his ways, the comment did not explicitly condemn his past writings nor make his present-day views clear, and the Current was denied an interview.
Ukleja continues to attend UCEL events, having recently attended the organization’s award ceremony for its Nell and John Wooden Ethics in Leadership Award in November 2023.
Questionable funding aside, there is a larger problem with ethics at Long Beach State.
Applied ethics addresses real-world, practical issues. Driverless cars, for example, make quick “decisions” on the road with human lives at stake. Technology ethicists can help us program these vehicles.
Naturally, one would hope that the UCEL’s ethics programming would teach students about moral dilemmas and mitigating harm in a given field.
Instead, the annual Ethics at the Beach forum often resembles a motivational speaker panel.
The most recent March 2025 seminar was titled, “Be True To You: Branding Yourself Authentically.” The year before, attendees received a free self-help guidebook.
Multiple now-expired flyers for the March 2025 “Ethics at the Beach” event are still tacked up in the Liberal Arts 5 building. Photo credit: El Nicklin
While pop psychology, networking and corporate engagement might be important to students, these topics do not sufficiently cover ethics on campus.
Good has come from the UCEL. Each year, the institution awards stipends to students and faculty studying ethics across academic fields.
Director of the UCEL Jane Roeder said over email, “All of us connected with the Ukleja Center for Ethical Leadership have a shared vision – having an ethics module in every course at CSULB.”
In line with this goal, the UCEL rewards faculty with a $3,000 stipend if they integrate a 3-hour ethics module into their course(s).
All the while, the department with ethics already in its curriculum lacks support.
Cory Wright, a professor in the CSULB philosophy department, explained the importance of having experts teach ethics at CSULB.
“[J]ust as it wouldn’t make sense to pay instructors with no proficiency or training in physics or linguistics to instruct students on thermodynamics or phonology, so too would it be a pedagogical blunder to do this for philosophy and ethics,” Wright said over email.
Wright explained that the ethics courses taught through the philosophy department are regularly assessed and taught by experts.
Ethics is everywhere, but institutional support for ethics should start in places like the philosophy department, where ethics is a sub-discipline and several courses on applied ethics are taught. With a careful eye, other ethics-related resources can be found scattered throughout campus with events like the Comparative World Literature Conference.
The UCEL does not employ or fund any actual ethicists; nor does it support the Applied Ethics Forum, “the university’s primary intellectual venue for extracurricular ethical programming,” which has not hosted an ethics talk since last year.
With improved funding and support for ethics outside of the College of Business, students and faculty alike will be better equipped to actually become ethical leaders.
