Weaving Ethics into the Core
Just west of Colorado Springs, at Camp Hale on the back of Pike’s Peak — where the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division trained to fight in harsh conditions during WWII — groups of 10 people are trained for two days in team-building outback techniques: they rappel down steep mountain faces; they’re forced to find their way through dense wilderness. On the third day, various scenarios are introduced to provide challenges. In one, an earthquake has devastated a town nearby and team members must provide assistance to the injured. Suddenly, the team is intercepted by a “terrorist” group that isolates and blindfolds the members, yelling at them through screeching bullhorns and giving them the opportunity to betray each other and break the team camaraderie for freedoms. It’s a classic prisoners dilemma in action — and the ethical stakes are high.
But, no, this isn’t training for a new anti-terrorism division of the government — it’s the first four days of the M.B.A. program at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.
“You can’t teach business ethics as a philosophical exercise,” said Boie Seawell, chair of the school’s Business Ethics and Legal Studies department. “Ethics is a contact sport: the contact with people, [their] different values and how you work in close contact with others. Business in the 21st century should be about working together. We don’t build our ethical connections in isolation.”
While the school’s arduous tactics — which are modeled toward achieving the durable bonds of 10th Division members — may be a bit extreme even within academia, they are part of a trend now taking shape where a number of universities are making distinct strides to embed ethics into the core of their business curricula.
These schools aren’t backpedalling and rationalizing in the face of the current financial crisis that has refocused the public’s reproachful eye on the business programs that “turned out” ethically challenged leaders; they are developing their programs to try to produce a generation of leaders that will shun greed for principles.
“Transparency is a critical element in organizations, and it’s threaded through the entire structure of how we educate. For us, it’s not, ‘Take two ethics and call me in the morning,’” said Seawell, whose ethics department swells with nine full-time staff members.
While the school began offering two stand-alone elective ethics courses nearly 20 years ago when Denver entrepreneur Bill Daniels gave a $20 million grant to the business school, faculty found that many students were not becoming fully engaged in an ethics education. So three years ago, the school began planning for a new “curriculum within a curriculum” to better immerse students in the learning. The university’s M.B.A. program now features a module known as the Daniels Compass, established in 2007, that involves experiential learning and six mandatory classes (20 credit hours) that concentrate on ethics decision making, sustainable enterprises, corporate responsibility, collaborative skills and values-based leadership.
New Degrees
“Whether it’s a course, a seminar, a whole curriculum, I think the trend with schools is to find ways to do this better. There’s no one solution,” said Timothy Fort, a professor of business ethics at George Washington University’s School of Business, in Washington, D.C.
His school has not just launched a new curriculum but two new Master’s degrees that focus on ethical leadership and globalization. Starting in fall 2009, students will have the opportunity to work toward a Global M.B.A. or a World Executive M.B.A., which incorporate values and theory to produce leaders primed with responsible behavior and personal integrity. The programs are composed of 57 credit hours with mandatory international coursework and residencies.
And within every class offered after the initial intensive course on ethical behavior and sustainability that starts the general M.B.A. program are faculty-produced commentaries, case studies and lessons that link the coursework back to the first ethics class — keeping the focus on how values and behavior drive companies.
“That way, a professor of finance doesn’t have to be an expert in the area to relate back to central teachings of the program,” said Fort. “It’s important for the students to have a sense that business is dependent on ethical values to be trustworthy in the society in which it operates. Permeating our curriculum with this message helps students be realistic about this.”
Reaction and New Standards
Like a number of business schools, George Washington’s ethics-minded curriculum was driven by similar factors: a major grant from a benefactor followed by a few years of campus-wide intensive planning and feedback from focus groups. But, in between, the real engine pushing the process forward was a reaction to and then a report by the business school accreditation body, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), after the unprecedented implosions of Enron in 2001 and then WorldCom a year later.
While the AACSB had required that ethics be included in business schools for years before, it responded to the disasters by brainstorming ways to strengthen its role in preparing graduates for management careers. So in 2002 the organization reached out to business schools, asking them to put together core competencies for what business students should be able to do after graduation. The result was new accreditation standards adopted in 2003 and then the report “Ethics Education in Business Schools,” released in 2004 with the mission “to renew and revitalize their commitment to the centrality of ethical responsibility at both the individual and corporate levels in preparing business leaders for the 21st century.”
“The recent debacles have brought the focus to ethics and business schools …. [and that] the assumption of many faculty and program leaders that the majority of students are being adequately prepared in this domain is highly questionable,” reads the report’s introduction.
The new standards for accreditation require each school to “establish expectations for ethical behavior by administrators, faculty, and students … with codes of conduct, values statements, honor codes, procedures for handling allegations of misconduct, and other mechanisms.” Schools were expected to demonstrate a commitment to ethics in their academic programs, assessment processes, research agendas and outreach efforts.
“There have been other waves of renewed interest in ethics in the past — such as after the 1987 stock fall — but the latest wave was post-Enron scandal and then the AACSB push in 2004,” said Carolyn Woo, dean of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and an AACSB task force member that helped compile the 2004 report. “It becomes the guideline for whether business schools have ethics in their programs.”
Notre Dame’s business program has itself established two ethics centers as well as multiple, required ethics courses and a portfolio of ethically minded courses to choose from.
Not Just M.B.A.s
But it wasn’t only graduate schools that heard the call — some schools saw value in embedding undergrad programs as well.
“The AACSB guidelines made us realize that we needed to reassess how we were doing our program,” said Martha Loudder, undergraduate associate dean at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School.
In the last two years, Loudder and her associates decided to phase out a senior-level ethics course and instead make it mandatory for sophomores, a year before students have to declare their majors. Students also get modules in leadership and ethics during their freshman year to sensitize them to thinking in terms of ethical decision making.
“The reason to do this is due to the cognitive development of 18- and 19-year-olds that gives them the ability to think deeply about these issues, so you can’t just have one course in one year,” said Loudder. “Students tend to be very dualistic in their thinking. They need to learn that there’s not just one right answer to every question and that you can be persuaded to do something that could be wrong and violates your ethical principles. We strive to give them simulations to practice their ethical skills in a real-world context.”
The undergraduate school’s ethics education is then reinforced in the junior and senior years within higher-level business courses: an accounting class explores the ethics of auditors; a financial statement analysis class examines ethical issues related to the reporting of financial statements.
“I’d like for them to develop a high level of skill in resolving ethical dilemmas, generating alternative solutions and [being] confident that they’ve made a decision that serves the greater good,” said Loudder.
The Rise of PRME
The United Nations had an interest in students attaining these skills as well.
In 2006, the UN approached the AACSB to set up a sub-unit of its UN Global Compact — an organization of UN agencies, business and government that advances 10 business principles related to human rights, labor and anti-corruption — aimed at educating students with these principles. The mission was for business schools to develop curricula around these criteria and diffuse the learning so students could better understand how to contribute to more stable and peaceful economies.
The next year, an international task force of 60 university deans, presidents and business school representatives created the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), an organization with a set of tenets that lay the foundation for responsible management education: the development of students’ capabilities for sustainable values; the incorporation of social responsibility into educational frameworks; and the engagement in research and dialog to further the goals.
More than 150 major universities have adopted the principles in their curricula so far — and the acceptance and implementation is only picking up speed.
“In the ‘70s, strategic management became part of the overall fabric of business,” said Woo, who serves on the PRME steering committee. “In the ‘80s, globalization became part of the fabric. Ethics is now part of the landscape. This major theme has emerged and will become part of the core of business education for many schools to come.”
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