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15
B-Schools Still Seeking Ways to Stress Ethics
Tags: Academia, Business Ethics
Filed Under Articles
WSJ.com
Ronald J. Alsop
April 12, 2005
Read the article here.
Excerpt:
A modern morality play opened recently on Broadway — not in the theater district, but way uptown at Columbia University. Before an audience of Columbia M.B.A. students, actors performed “Scenes from the Slippery Slope,” in which an investment banker is pressured to falsify expense accounts to conceal his boss’s extramarital affair. At pivotal points in the mini-drama, actors called on students to advise the ethically challenged young man.
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.
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