The Global Ethic Foundation will soon establish a Global Ethic Institute at the University of Tübingen
 
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Thanks to a generous donation of the Karl Schlecht Gemeinnützige Stiftung (KSG)
 
Tübingen, 2011-05-13
 
The Global Ethic Foundation will soon establish a Global Ethic Institute at the University of Tübingen. A corresponding agreement between the University of Tübingen and the Global Ethic Foundation was approved by the Senate of the University of Tübingen at its meeting yesterday, 12 May, 2011. The Global Ethic Institute will presumably take up its work with the beginning of the summer semester 2012. The initial donor and sponsor of this Global Ethic Institute at the University of Tübingen is the Karl Schlecht Gemeinnützige Stiftung (KSG), founded by the Swabian entrepreneur Prof. h.c. Karl Schlecht. The Institute will have a yearly budget of 1 Mio. Euro at its disposal.
 
According to its statutes, the purpose of the Global Ethic Institute at the University of Tübingen (WEIT) is to promote “basic research and teaching concerning the scientific and scholarly foundations of a global ethic for society as a whole and for the global economy in particular by fostering a dialogue of the religions and cultures in accordance with the task areas of the Foundation”. Those central task areas are global ethic and the world religions, international politics, the global economy, education and the schools, and culture generally, Furthermore, the new institute will make an innovative contribution to the teaching programmes of the Tübingen University in its diverse courses of study, by staging events devoted to scholarly and general on-going education and offering lectures in the framework of the Studium Generale programme.
 
An initial thematic focal point of the Global Ethic Institute will concern grounding and concretizing a global ethic for business and the economy. To this end, a professorship for Global Business Ethic will be set up, and the holder of this chair will automatically be the director of the Institute. For limited periods of time, international guest scholars will be invited to study and teach at the Institute. In addition to study and teaching, the Institute will attempt to develop workable concepts for propagating and implementing such a global economic ethic. The programmatic foundation of this work will be the manifesto “Global Ethic – Consequences for Global Businesses” (www.globaleconomicethic.org). Managing Director of the Institute will be the General Secretary of the Global Ethic Foundation, currently, Dr. Stephan Schlensog.
 
The Karl-Schlecht-Stiftung (KSG) was founded in October 1998 by Karl Schlecht as a non-profit foundation, with its seat in Aichtal near Stuttgart. The KSG holds 99 % of the stocks of the Putzmeister Holding GmbH, which has recently become famous for the use of its versatile and powerful concrete pumps in Fukushima. The purpose of the foundation is to promote science and scholarly research, education and learning, as well as to support cultural projects and institutions and to protect the environment.
 
Karl Schlecht was born in Filderstadt near Stuttgart in 1932. He completed his engineering studies at the University of Stuttgart with a diploma thesis describing the plastering machine, which he himself had invented and constructed in 1957 for his father’s plasterer’s business. While still a student, he commissioned an engineering firm in Freiburg i. Br. to produce the first models of this “Gipsomat”, and, in 1958, Karl Schlecht began his own production and marketing firm, KS-Maschinenbau, which in 1961 was renamed „Putzmeister Werk”. Today, Putzmeister has become one of the world’s leading producers of concrete pumps, with some 22 affiliates.
 
The Global Ethic Foundation operates in an interdisciplinary and international manner. Thanks to a magnanimous donation by Graf Karl Konrad von der Groeben, the Global Ethic Foundation was founded by the Tübingen theologian Prof. Dr. Hans Küng in 1995. In an on-going exchange and dialogue with scholars and scientists of the Tübingen University and other universities around the world, the Foundation, under Prof. Küng’s leadership, has succeeded in giving broad anchorage to the global ethic themes within many academic disciplines and has itself developed comprehensive ideas for the communication of the global ethic themes. The programmatic foundation of the Foundation’s work is the “Declaration toward a Global Ethic” issued by the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which met in Chicago in 1993.
 
Since Prof. Hans Küng cannot be reached on 13 May directly by telephone, we hereby refer you to his statement appended to this press release.

Press Release, Global Ethic Foundation and University of Tübingen (13 May 2011)

 
 
At the Karl Schlecht Gemeinnützige Stiftung (KSG) in Aichtal, from right to
left: Dr. Stahl, Mr. Susanek, Prof. h.c. Schlecht, Prof. Küng, Ms. Schlecht,
Mr. Hoer, Dr. Schlensog