IN THE NEWS

Is a bigger dose of ethics needed in business schools?
By David Nicklaus
St. Louis  Post-Dispatch, 12/18/2002


This year's business scandals have shaken Americans' faith in many institutions, from accounting firms to investment banks to regulatory agencies. Some business-school professors wonder if they, too, share the blame.

President George W. Bush raised the issue in July when he called on business schools to be "principled teachers of right and wrong."

Thousands of bright graduates enter the business world each year, armed with state-of-the-art skills. But too few, apparently, come equipped with a state-of-the-art moral compass.

Otherwise, why didn't some MBA on Wall Street ask why analysts were recommending stocks that they knew were overpriced? Why didn't some highly credentialed Big Five partner question the practice of earning lucrative consulting fees from an audit client?

"I'm sure we do bear some of the responsibility," said James Fisher, director of St. Louis University's Emerson Center for Business Ethics. "If we are training future managers and executives and not also training them with a view to making ethical decisions, then we are not doing our job."

Such soul-searching has ignited a controversy within the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, a nonprofit accrediting agency based in Creve Coeur.

The AACSB, which is in the process of revising its standards, is proposing to raise ethics to the top of a list of topics that business schools should cover.

But a vocal group of professors says the new standards don't go nearly far enough. They want the AACSB to take a simple step: Make every business major take an ethics class.

The idea is anathema to the AACSB, which prides itself on flexibility. It recommends content, but it does not require specific courses. When it surveyed 25 top business schools, it found that only seven required students to take an ethics course.

Carolyn Y. Woo, AACSB's chairwoman-elect, maintains that "there are really multiple approaches" to teaching ethics. She is dean of the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame University, which requires its master's degree students to take an ethics class.

But, she said, other schools take the equally valid approach of integrating ethics into the entire curriculum, or at least into several core courses. "In fact, if you have ethics standing alone by itself, the danger is that it becomes an ethics ghetto," Woo said.

Diane Swanson of Kansas State University is one of the professors campaigning for a required ethics course. When ethics is supposed to be a part of every course, it usually isn't an important part of any of them, she says.

"It's largely dependent on the will of each professor," Swanson said. "It doesn't add up to something that hangs together for the student."

Ray Hilgert, emeritus professor of management and industrial relations at Washington University's Olin School of Business, taught an ethics elective for 15 years and tried unsuccessfully to get it listed as a required course. "If you believe that it's integrated in all of the courses, then I'm willing to offer you the Brooklyn Bridge," he said.

Several other local business schools require MBA students to take a course with at least a heavy dose of ethics. At Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, it's called "the external environment of business." At St. Louis University and the University of Missouri at St. Louis, the courses combine law and ethics.

Now is a good time, Hilgert says, for all schools to re-examine the way they teach - or don't teach - ethics. Without the proper decision-making tools, "Whatever ethical leanings a manager might have gets lost in all the pressure to produce profits."

David Nicklaus discusses the day's business news at 6:13 p.m. most weekdays on KMOX (1120 AM).

Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post Dispatch

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