Education Ethics Featured in Stories about Military and Business
Dec 7th, 2009 • Posted in: NewsInteractive program at Annapolis educates midshipmen in ethical decision making; anthropologists say their deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan is unethical; survey shows recent MBA graduates want more ethics in the curriculum
VARIOUS DATELINES
Ethics intertwined with education in several major stories last week. Among them:
- The Washington Post last week examined a new interactive training program that is used by cadets at the U.S. Naval Academy, who are forced to make snap decision on ethical scenarios and immediately confront the consequences of their choices as the events unfold digitally. One scenario centers on the actions of a drunken buddy, who asks you to pledge not to reveal his indiscretions and lie to senior officers, saying he has a case of the flu. Alcohol-related scenarios loom large in the DVD series, reports the Post, as it is a “a common factor in most judgment lapses by naval officers and enlisted personnel.” The Navy is “working to escape the legacy of the Tailhook scandal,” the Post notes, “a 1991 incident in which some of the more than 4,000 officers gathered for a convention in Las Vegas engaged in drunken debauchery that tarnished the careers of more than a dozen admirals and 300 naval aviators.”
- An ethics commission formed by the American Anthropology Association has concluded that the efforts of U.S. Army anthropologists to collect counterinsurgency intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise.” The report, according to USA Today, examined what’s known as the “Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program,” which embeds teams of social scientists with troops on the ground in an effort to better understand local leadership, opinions, and customs. But the report concludes that the program violates the anthropological ethics of doing “no harm” to research subjects because there is a “significant likelihood that HTS data will in some way be used as part of military intelligence.” The report was released at the association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia.
- More than half of recent MBA graduates say their programs should have focused more on ethics, corporate governance, and sustainability, according to a survey from the Association of MBAs’ Research and Consultancy Center. According to a summary of the survey in the Raleigh (North Carolina) Triangle Business Journal, 59 percent of the 544 graduates surveyed agreed that business education programs should focus on all of the stakeholders affected by a business, not simply the shareholders. Another item from the report: While recent graduates reported that about half of their programs examined ethics “to a large extent,” only 10 percent of MBA graduates from the 1980s made the same estimation.
Sources: Washington Post, Dec. 4 – Triangle Business Journal, Dec. 3 – USA Today, Dec. 3.
For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Nov. 23 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 2 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 19 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 28 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 25, 2008.
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