Business schools offering ethics courses

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

By PAUL SINGER
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AKRON, Ohio -- After recent accounting scandals, the University of Akron business school is urging its students to enroll in a new ethics course -- in the philosophy department.

"Certain words are sort of owned by certain departments," said Stephen Hallam, dean of Akron's College of Business Administration. "One of the words that is sort of owned by the philosophy department in lots of universities is the word 'ethics.'"

There is no clear consensus of how best to expand ethics offerings for business students, but a recent spate of accounting scandals that have tarnished once-mighty companies including WorldCom and Enron have given the subject a boost.

"We will take the students to a prison and let them talk to some people who didn't believe that ethics would be very important," said Edwin Hartman, director of the Prudential Business Ethics Center at Rutgers University in New Jersey. All full-time business students there will be required to take an ethics class next year.

Business schools, President Bush said in June, must be "principled teachers of right and wrong and not surrender to moral confusion and relativism."

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International -- the major accrediting body for business schools -- is in the midst of revising its curriculum requirements for business schools, Chairman Jerry Trapnell said.

"I suspect the issue of ethics and related matters will get some careful attention," Trapnell said. "Are we doing enough? Are our standards sufficiently clear? Are we setting the bar so this will be an important consideration for our students?"

Hartman said business schools in general did not focus heavily on ethics until the late 1980s, when they had to face the junk bond scandals and the savings and loan crisis.

Since then, most have increased their ethics offerings, he said, but the current bookkeeping scandal is raising attention again and making people take another look at their courses.

It is hard to shoehorn ethics into a two-year business curriculum with other basic requirements, said David Vogel, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California.

"The curriculum is under so many other pressures -- to do technology, the Internet, globalization, the environment -- (ethics) is competing with so many other things," Vogel said. "The curriculum is finite. You can't put everything in it."

The Katz School of Management at the University of Pittsburgh is considering an approach that seems counterintuitive -- eliminating ethics as a separate class, said Frederick Winter, the dean.

Winter said it may be better to integrate ethics into other classes.

Add P-I Business headlines to