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New business ethics courses arise in wake of crises

By Gaveliers, The Gavel Media Team, on December 7, 2009 8:26 PM

By Sue Byun, Contributing writer -

Increasing focus on ethics in business education has been a common trend in the past decade. Although approaches vary by school, there is a general pedagogical consensus in rethinking the role and integration of ethics in business school curricula.

A 2008 report by the Global Foundation for Management Education (GRME) identified trends and developments in management education. It called for business schools worldwide to move beyond simply offering high-quality education and obeying the law to actively addressing social, environmental, and economic problems. Further, it specifically called for fundamental shifts and practices in business curricula. So far, many undergraduate business schools have responded to the call.

Although ethics have always been a part of the college business curriculum, the Wall Street meltdown, globalization, and cases of accounting and financial fraud like Enron, WorldCom, and Madoff’s Ponzi scheme have shone the spotlight on the role that business schools play in shaping the leaders of tomorrow.

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the accrediting agency for business schools, requires ethics to be part of the curriculum, but business schools have a lot of flexibility in how they execute that requirement. There is an ongoing debate about the best way to achieve a shift in ethics education. The difficulty surfaces because ethics issues do not always fit into a neat framework.

Grant Yang, CSOM ’10, a finance major who, upon graduation, will go on to work for a hedge fund in Manhattan, has found it most helpful when topics surrounding ethics were integrated into upper level business courses.

“This advanced mutual fund class I’m taking right now is mostly discussion and case study centered, which brings up a lot of gray areas, and now that I have some finance background I can formulate my own opinion,” Yang said.

At Boston College, starting for the class of 2013, the Carroll School of Management’s ethics requirement is being expanded to an intensive three-credit course called “Portico.” According to Dean Andrew Boynton, the course is grounded in ethics philosophy and is part of a general makeover of the CSOM ethics curriculum. Boynton hopes Portico will eventually be integrated throughout CSOM.

In past years, the ethics requirement was less extensive. The CSOM requirement was a one-credit discussion based course.

“The case studies we did in the class made me think, ‘what could I have done differently?’” Yang said. “It presented the questions that might come up in the real world and set a good foundation going forward, but I think people didn’t take it too seriously because it was a pretty relaxed course with a light workload.”

In 2005, CSOM also established the Winston Center to engage business leaders, faculty, and students in ethical training and leadership formation.
Richard Sorensen, Dean of Virginia Polytechnic Institute’s Pamplin School of Business and Chair of the Committee on Issues in Management Education of the AACSB, said that the development of ethics programs such as Portico and Winston Center is growing across the country.

“Some schools have had an ethical focus for years while some programs are new,” Sorensen said.

“Business schools need to step up to take some responsibility for the leadership skills and ethical orientations of their graduates,” Todd Henshaw, a professor at Columbia University and panelist for The Washington Post’s “On Leadership” blog, wrote.