Setting the Tone for a Social Conscience

This fall, for the first time, incoming Business School students will spend their first day discussing ethics. The scheduling of this day-long ethics orientation follows two years of B-School indecision about the role ethics should play in its curriculum.

This past year the study of ethics was given a tentative place in the first-year courseload, incorporated as a seven-session, ungraded module which lasted three weeks and was required of all entering students.

The class, approved last winter by the school's faculty, represents a departure from the administration's previous efforts to integrate ethics throughout the first-year curriculum. In fact, following the school's receipt of a $30 million grant for the teaching of ethics in 1987, B-School officials said repeatedly that there would be no required course.

The module has been lauded by students and faculty as a valuable first step in both addressing the study of ethics and providing a foundation for further discussion of ethical issues in other courses.

"The Business School has come through after a lot of talk and question marks to show it's in it for the long haul, after years of people saying it should do something and [President Derek C.] Bok saying it should do something," says the Rev. Robert K. Massie, a doctoral student at the B-School and a former fellow in the University's Ethics and the Professions program. "Ethics is something that could have been blown off, [but B-School officials] have shown they're not kidding about it."

The B-School's efforts to improve ethics instruction were facilitated two years ago by the well-publicized $30 million grant to the school, announced shortly after Wall Street's unprecedented insider trading scandal. Two-thirds of the funds were given by 1949 Harvard MBA John S.R. Shad, now Chair of the Board of Drexel, Burnham, Lambert, Inc., who chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission at the time of his gift.

Next year, according to Senior Associate Dean for Educational Programs Thomas R. Piper, the module will be expanded to include 10 sessions, in addition to the first day of classes.

Those professors who now teach the module will continue to do so next year, says Piper. Afterwards, though, the school will implement a rotation system: in any given year, half of the module's professors will have taught the classes in the previous year, and half will be new to the program, to remain within the module for one or two years before returning to their normal areas of expertise.

Piper says he thinks such a structure should bolster not only the ethics background of the students, but also that of the faculty, few of whom have focused on ethics in their research.

However, some observers say a long road lies ahead before a broad and genuine interest in ethics comes to permeate all aspects of the school's curriculum.

Besides using cases in its own courses, Harvard is the main supplier of case studies to business schools throughout the country; and some outside scholars have noted that the B-School has published few cases dealing with ethical issues.

Joanne B. Ciulla, a visiting scholar at Oxford University specializing in ethics and a former post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, says she often writes her own studies in order to compensate for the short supply of Harvard ethics cases.

In addition, says management professor James W. Kuhn '50 of the Columbia Graduate School of Business, Harvard cases concentrate inordinately on the ethical failings of individual business executives rather than problems inherent in the business world itself.

Part of the reason there is a dearth of ethics case studies may be that the school has only recently taken to emphasizing the field.

In fact, it appears that only after the announcement of the Shad grant did the B-School begin to display concern about retaining its ethics specialists. Shortly before announcement of the gift, the school advised its only junior ethicist, Associate Professor of Business Administration Kenneth E. Goodpaster, not to pursue tenure. B-School sources then said Goodpaster was told that if he sought tenure, he would be denied it.

After the gift became highly publicized, however, the school reversed its stance. B-School officials offered Goodpaster two additional years on the faculty, after which he will again be eligible for tenure review. Goodpaster and school officials have since declined to discuss his extension, which is an unusual arrangement in academia.

After some recruiting during the past two years, Harvard now has a core of about half a dozen ethicists among its 108-member faculty. Only a few of the nine professors who teach the first-year module can be considered ethics scholars, having devoted significant research to issues in the field.

But the B-School is not alone in having few ethics specialists among its faculty. Accomplished ethics professors are a select group, say scholars in the field, and even the B-School's greatest efforts would fail to secure as many professors as teach in programs such as finance or marketing.

"If Harvard went out tomorrow to recruit all the well-respected people in the field and had enough money to do it, there still wouldn't be enough" to amass a respectably sized faculty, says James A. Robins, assistant professor of strategic management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Though the inclusion of more ethics specialists may prove a slow process, the development of a required first-year module has been a highly visible commitment to the subject--a commitment that can only help to attract scholars.

A former Yale School of Management professor who will teach ethics at Harvard next year cites this enthusiastic environment as a primary reason behind his joining the B-School faculty. J. Gregory Dees, a fellow in the Ethics and the Professions program, says that although he favors expanding the required module to a full semester course, the school's new focus has impressed him as a "modest first step."

"I'm encouraged," says Dees. "That's why I'm leaving Yale to come to Harvard."

But despite these efforts, students say discussion of ethics outside the module often fails to transcend token references.

The B-School's grading system gives as much weight to class participation as to exams, discouraging reticence while rewarding those who contribute to class discussions. As a result, students say they often address the ethical elements of a case study only in last-ditch attempts--called "chip shots" in B-School parlance--to offer a relevant comment before class time elapses.

"It's hard to gauge how seriously people took the module," says first-year student Jillian K. Cowan. "I think it has become, sadly, a little bit of a joke. These things have to be taken seriously; but there are a lot of chip shots, and I don't know how to prevent that from happening."

And there remain some B-School students who have yet to be convinced that the study of ethics, either in its own right or in the context of other cases, is a necessary element of business education.

"Ethics is a nice kind of theoretical thing to talk about, but you can't teach ethics," says Heather Simmons, a first-year student. "If you can gain any kind of advantage for yourself that's legal, then do it."