Purdue Student Government and the Panhellenic Association hosted an event with University of Denver Professor of Business Ethics and Legal Studies Corey Ciocchetti for Purdue Mental Health Awareness Week at Elizabeth Fowler Hall .
The talk, titled “Chasing an Authentic Life,” covered what Ciocchetti describes as the “foundation of how to change a mindset.” The Panhellenic Association’s vice president of operations, Katelyn Carlson, had the idea of bringing Ciocchetti to campus when she heard one of his motivational talks.
Ciocchetti was offered his current job just five days after the death of the university’s former ethics professor, which Ciocchetti says troubled him and showed a lack of ethics in our “transactional world”. Ultimately, he took the job to try to teach an effective ethics class, something Ciocchetti said he hadn’t seen in his time at college.
“How does the honor code work here,” Ciocchetti asked. “Let me guess, you haven’t been cheated here, have you? Of course there is cheating. Honor codes are useless. How are these values (from life) Greeks?”
The reason people disregard ethics and try to be good people, Ciocchetti said, is because they believe that whatever they are trying to gain by ignoring this ethics will make them happy.
“Do I think these things are important in life? Yes, a lot,” Ciocchetti said. “They are just two totally separate things. If you find your worth in it, it’ll never make you happy, and the same is true for self-esteem and popularity and all that. It’s not bad, it’s just wrong.
“Beware of too busy a life,” Ciocchetti said, quoting Socrates, to whom he attributes a phenomenon of loneliness in the modern world. Overwork filling out a resume is common at universities like Purdue, he said, adding that students often end up with multi-page resumes that have no real substance behind them.
“We say, ‘My God, I’m so lonely. I guess I’m not doing enough, ‘and then by doing more we make ourselves more alone,’ Ciocchetti said.
Changing priorities so that what you really want, as opposed to what you feel you need to want — money, good looks, a wide social circle — is what Ciocchetti said. which he believed to be the first step to contentment. He stresses the importance of allowing yourself to be bad at things that don’t matter and focusing on being successful at a few important things.
“I’m so sick of kids saying, ‘I’m going to change the world!'” Ciocchetti said. “How about fixing your residence first?” How about picking something on campus that sucks and fixing it? »
He concluded the lecture with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“To leave the world a little better, whether through a healthy child, a vegetable garden or a redeemed social condition; to know that even a life breathed easier because you lived – that is to have succeeded.
