Rutland Institute for Ethics adds new 2022 advisory board members

The Rutland Advisory Board is delighted to announce two new members for the 2022-2023 year. The new members share a passion for ethics, a strong belief in the mission of the Rutland Institute and a love for the Clemson community.

Dave Diamond, president of Walter Wayne Development in Illinois, is one of this year’s new Rutland Advisory Board members. Diamond works with Rotary Youth Leadership as part of Rotary International’s mission to provide leadership training for our youth. He works primarily with high school students in Illinois. A Rotary Club chair member in his district, he works to put on a leadership conference for high school students in the area. Diamond hopes to bring the leadership conference to Clemson, where he sees the University playing a huge role in expanding the conference on a national level. In the early 1990s, Diamond was asked to speak at the youth conference he now plans. At this conference, he spoke to 60 high school students and fell in love with making meaningful connections with students.

“I was also genuinely concerned about how they define leadership and how it was valuable to them in their life, so that became a romance,” said Diamond.

Since then, he has played a vital role in the leadership conference and hopes to continue to make this impact on students to come. When asked about his definition of leadership, Diamond says, “I would say that leadership is one’s awareness about themselves, their limitations, their possibilities, their potential, awareness about the environment around them and the people living in that environment.” Diamond believes that the best way to impact youth is to help bring them together and help them realize humans don’t have to be so divided.

Harskin “H.J.” Hayes Jr. ’08, director of Sona Specialty Pharmacy in North Carolina, is the second new member of the Rutland Advisory Board. Hayes is a South Carolina native, and graduated from Clemson with a Bachelor of Science in biology in 2008. After earning his bachelors degree, he attended the South Carolina College of Pharmacy, where he decided to focus on community pharmacy. In his current position, Hayes handles specialty medication for patients dealing with anything from cancer to HIV. The medications he deals with are expensive, strong and come with many side effects. Hayes enjoys taking his time with each and every client, so they have the best care and resources available.

Due to the importance of his work, Hayes describes many instances where ethical dilemmas occur in his work. When working through these challenges, he always thinks of the patients he is working with as if they were his own family. He goes the extra mile to stay on the phone with patients or to help connect them to grants to lower the cost of life-saving medication. Hayes believes ethics plays an important role in how he interacts with patients and believes it is important for all students, especially those in the medical field, to think about. He is excited to begin his work with the Rutland Institute and help spread education about ethics to the University community.