- Fewer than 2 percent of MBA programs offer a concentration in
ethics, which ranked 23rd on a list of 28 concentrations, according
to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, which
accredits bachelor's, master's, and doctoral business programs.
Now, in classrooms across the country, business profs and their
students have discussed
Enron's collapse and Arthur Andersen's
missteps, criminal mischief at Global Crossing and Tyco
International, and
Merrill Lynch's mea culpa after shilling for
Internet stocks. They recognize that many of those running the
faulted companies earned MBAs from the top programs in the U.S.
"Business schools deserve a great deal of scrutiny after what has
happened," says Larry Penley, dean of the business school at
Arizona State University and past chairman of the Association to
Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. "There is a great deal more
we have to do, and there are multiple ways to go about it."
WHO'S LEARNING WHAT?
One way may be beefing up ethics instruction. Graduate business
programs are required to teach ethics to be accredited, but the
requirement is more of a guideline than a specific list of
conditions. Accreditation doesn't mandate ethics classes; rather,
graduate programs must incorporate the study of ethics into their
curriculum. The guidelines are so loose, in fact, that it's unknown
how many MBA programs require one or more ethics classes, how many
offer them as electives, or how many simply include ethics
discussions in other courses, such as accounting or finance.
This is not to say that ethics programs don't exist, because they
do. Wharton's, which was overhauled in the early 1990s and includes
courses taught by a philosopher, is regarded as one of the best in
the world. Other smaller schools, such as Case Western Reserve's
Weatherhead School of Management in
Cleveland, offer ethics classes
to differentiate themselves from their better-known brethren. And
schools affiliated with churches, such as Notre Dame's Mendoza
School, often offer both ethics courses and extensive discussion of
the subject in other classes.