I would start by renaming the department to reflect the idea that the mission is to explore and understand how and why things go wrong socially with the deployment of so-called AI.
I don't know what that name should be. I've had maybe two hours of sleep and this is likely a thing that would require research.
I've had college classes in Social Psychology, Negotiation and Conflict Management and Homelessness and Public Policy. All three of those classes deal with topics you could think of as falling under the umbrella of human ethics. None of them has that word in the title.
You need to first and foremost understand how things happen. You need to understand that before making value judgements concerning ethics.
Speaking of ethics in AI before you even know how and why you get certain outcomes amounts to putting the cart before the horse.
Seeking to understand how things happen for thorny topics inevitably raises hackles.
I was molested and raped as a child. I speak somewhat often on topics like rape and there is a long history of people accusing me of being a rape apologist.
I would like to see rape happen less often in the world. That goal requires one to understand what goes wrong socially without first assuming "Men are just all rapey bastards with hearts of pure evil who do evil things intentionally, knowingly and on purpose."
A lot of people who have already been hurt by the current state of things don't want to understand what happened. They want "justice" by which they typically mean revenge.
You will be facing that same dynamic for AI and issues of racial justice, gendered issues, etc.
Many people will call you a White supremacist or a misogynist for trying to understand what went wrong as neutrally as possible.
But that is the only useful first step for actually redressing a lot of social ills.
Fiction sometimes covers this. People consume it, get jazzed at feeling "their side" understood for once and then routinely fail to actually apply those lessons in life.
Fiction sometimes gives you both sides of a story and lets you see how a+b went kaboom although neither was inherently bad. Research needs to seek that perspective.
Ethics occurs at the point where you apply the research. Simply taking a look at how it happens will not be about ethics and will, in fact, make most people pretty darn uncomfortable.