Ethics Newsline®

NEW YORK
As prosecutors try to reel in corruption convictions at Enron, WorldCom, and other scandalized U.S. firms, many observers are examining the breeding grounds of tomorrow’s executives — business schools — to ascertain whether the ethics lesson is being learned.

According to a survey of program changes — or lack thereof — the New York Times last week noted that the signs seem to point in several directions.

While some schools — including Harvard — have announced beefed-up ethics programs, others say they are making no changes, insisting that their programs always have emphasized ethics sufficiently.

But such assurances may not be borne out by a recent Aspen Institute survey, which polled 1,700 graduate business students and found that 20 percent said they were not being prepared at all to make tough ethics decisions.

An informal survey from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, which accredits MBA programs, recently found that only 35 percent of its member schools required an ethics course. That figure is up only two percent from a 1988 survey predating the recent wave of corporate scandals, noted the Times.

More hopeful signs come from the University of California at Berkeley, which recently added new ethics courses and a Center for Responsible Business, and from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which will begin offering a Ph.D. program in business ethics next fall.

“It’s been slow going,” noted Fred Evans, dean of the business school at California State University at Northridge, who told the Times that many MBA professors are not prepared to teach ethics.

“Schools bear some of the responsibility for the behavior of executives,” Evans added. “If they’re making systematic errors in the world, you have to go back to the schools and ask, ‘What are you teaching?’”