B-School Ethics: A Contradiction in Terms?

A number of articles have appeared recently suggesting that the fault for the current disaster on Wall Street lies with business school curricula. In a recent article in the New York Times, the dean of Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona is quoted as saying, "We can look the other way, but come on. The C.E.O.'s of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, 'Well, it wasn't our fault' when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership." (Complete article by Kelley Holland can be found at at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15school.html)

So is the solution requiring ethics at business schools? I don't think so. Which may seem surprising, from someone who cares passionately about business ethics.

But 25-year-old business students either have a moral compass or they don't. I doubt that a for-grade semester-long course will make a real difference.

Not when the Chronicle of Higher Education, in its 20 March issue, carries a piece by Thomas Bartlett on "essay mills", and quotes a college senior, majoring in philosophy and religion, by name, who bought a paper on the parables of Jesus for a New Testament class. The student said that paying someone else to do his academic research was like outsourcing labor.

I believe that these attitudes are the price we are paying for a wider "winner-take-all" culture, where education is all about the credential, and not about the learning, where keeping score is all about doing well and not about doing good -- and "doing well" only in the narrowest possible sense of the term.