Members of the U.S. Secret Service gathered in an undisclosed location in Laurel, MD this week for a two-day ethics training course conducted by professors and administrators from the Hopkins School of Education.
The semi-covert session came two and a half weeks after twelve Secret Service agents allegedly solicited prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, where President Barack Obama had traveled to attend the sixth Summit of the Americas. The ensuing controversy has made headlines across the country and prompted official inquiries into the Secret Service agency; University officials, however, said that the ethics forum was always scheduled to take place and is not remedial.
“We had this course planned long before the Cartagena issue,” Christopher Dreisbach, who heads the School of Education’s Department of Applied Ethics and Humanities for the Division of Public Safety Leadership, said.
Hopkins has been the Secret Service’s official “university partner” since 1997, Dreisbach and other university officials said.
“The training provided to the Secret Service is not unprecedented,” Tracey A. Reeves, Director of Media Relations for the University, wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “The Secret Service has had a training agreement with Hopkins for a number of years.”
Still, Dreisbach said,
Secret Service officials consulted with Hopkins in the fallout of the controversy.
“The directors [of the agency] asked what we might contribute to the Cartagena controversy… and if we could retool the event in its context,” he said.
Although 20 agents were initially slated to attend, 100 appeared on the roster in the two weeks prior to the course. Dreisbach could not confirm if any of the agents in attendance hold a role in the prostitution allegations.
Dreisbach could not elucidate much beyond that: details of the training are clandestine, and its specific venue has not been disclosed. The course spanned Wednesday, May 2 and Thursday, May 3.
Dreisbach did say on Wednesday that the first day of training had gone “particularly well.”
“Basically, we’re discussing what ethics are, and we’re seeing progress,” he said. “The assumption is that they’re already ethical – they don’t need a lesson in it. We’re trying to examine how they will behave in situations of ethical tension.”
Dreisbach is among the undisclosed list of academics from the School of Education’s Division of Public Safety Leadership who spearheaded the seminar. The Division of Public Safety Leadership serves as both an ethical standard-bearer for the university and a liaison between it and myriad federal institutions, offering graduate and undergraduate courses in ethics in addition to its instruction to the Secret Service and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
