B-Schools still seeking ways to stress ethics

12 April 2005

5 minute read

B-Schools still seeking ways to stress ethics

The presentation was part of Columbia's latest effort to infuse ethics into the M.B.A. program in an engaging way, a process that's proving to be a slippery slope itself for business schools. Three years after coming under attack for their M.B.A. graduates' involvement in the many corporate scandals, schools are still grappling with how to teach ethics more effectively.

"Ethics isn't getting a whole lot more substantive attention at many schools," says Craig Smith, associate dean at London Business School, which requires both full-time and executive M.B.A. students to study ethics. "It's often just an elective offering at best, arguably preaching to the converted."

Even as corporate executives are being held to ever-higher standards of conduct, M.B.A. students and professors bristle at ethics requirements. Some faculty members resent being forced to squeeze ethics lessons into an already jam-packed syllabus, while students grumble that ethics classes tend to be preachy and philosophical. At Carnegie Mellon University, some students even object to a required ethics course because they contend it doesn't matter to corporate recruiters and won't help them land jobs.

Two years ago when I first wrote about how b-schools were jumping on the ethics bandwagon, some of the programs were just taking shape. In light of the resurgence of ethics and accounting scandals at Boeing, American International Group and other companies, I decided to revisit a couple of schools and check on their progress.

Columbia undoubtedly concocted one of the most ambitious ethics courses ever. It also proved to be one of the thorniest. What went wrong? Clearly, the course's novel but rather convoluted structure proved to be a major flaw. Columbia devised a separate course in which students took a final exam and received a grade, but many of the class sessions were taught within other required "core" courses, such as finance, operations and economics.

"When a professor said it was time for the ethics module, it felt very forced and students didn't participate very much," says Matt Wang, a second-year Columbia M.B.A. "A lot of students were also upset about being graded on a curve. If you received a low grade, you felt you would be viewed as a bad person." (Aware of such concerns, Columbia ended up switching to a pass/fail grading system last year.)

This year's revamped program, The Individual, Business and Society: Tradeoffs, Choices and Accountability, is no longer a separate course with its own final and grade. But it still requires professors in the basic courses to weave in ethics content, such as fair pricing policies in marketing and the boundaries of "earnings management" in accounting. "We still believe in putting ethics in the context of our core courses," says Paul Glasserman, senior vice dean of Columbia's Business School. "When I teach managerial statistics, for example, I deal with the misleading ways information can be represented." The revised ethics program also features many activities outside the classroom, such as the morality play, guest lecturers and panel discussions.

But Olivia Ralston, editor-in-chief of the business school's Bottom Line newspaper, finds that ethics lessons still "feel too compartmentalized" and that "some professors present ethics as something the administration is requiring rather than something we should take seriously the entire semester and in our careers." She gives Columbia's special events mixed reviews: a panel on Sarbanes-Oxley "bored" her, but a discussion of a case involving racism in the workplace proved "provocative."

To be sure, Columbia deserves credit for persevering to integrate ethics throughout the M.B.A. program. And it appears to be on the right track with its broader approach of blending ethics with social responsibility and corporate governance. "The problem with ethics is that it's such a loaded word," says Dr. Glasserman. "What we want to give students are strategies for protecting their integrity in the workplace. We aren't trying to teach them right from wrong."

Harvard Business School's new required course, Leadership and Corporate Accountability, also places ethics within a larger framework and appears to be off to a good start. Using the school's trademark case-study format, the course includes sections on personal values and leadership, governance issues, and the legal, ethical and economic responsibilities of companies to their stakeholders. "The course works well," says Harvard M.B.A. student Julian Flannery, "because instead of a lot of philosophical musings, it focuses on how to apply ethics lessons in the real world." Among the cases: Enron's collapse, WorldCom's recovery strategy, the Tylenol poisonings, and Royal/Dutch Shell's troubles in Nigeria.

Lynn Paine, the lead professor for the class, believes a stand-alone course is essential because "ethics discussion too easily gets crowded out" of other management courses. "The integration model sounds good, but many faculty members have no training in ethics and the law and don't know how to incorporate them well," she says. "The odd thing about ethics is that people assume anyone can teach it because everyone faces ethical issues in life. But just because you shop, that doesn't mean you can teach marketing."