By: Paul Singer

August 16, 2002, Associated Press State & Local Wire

Posters hanging around the University of Akron business school urge students to enroll in a new philosophy department course- on business ethics.

"The students are suddenly interested in businesses' ethics," said Stephen Hallam, dean of Akron's College of Business Administration. "It used to be if you said 'business ethics' students would roll their eyes. Now it's the hottest topic going." Hallam said that in the wake of accounting scandals that have destroyed some of the nation's largest companies, nearly all of the school's faculty members are revising their courses to make sure they are including case studies about business ethics.

The story is the same at business schools across the country: they are scrambling to beef up the ethics components of their coursework, responding to the upsurge in interest among students as well as the prodding of lawmakers.

Alicia Strong, 22, in her fourth year at Akron, said the scandals have made her look differently at her business major.

"The business world looks a little dirty right now," she said. "They need to reinforce ethics with the students. There are all these ways to make the rules bend that you're not really breaking them, but I don't think that's what business is about."

College curricula are constantly under revision and many of the changes were underway before Enron's high profile collapse last fall.

Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, established the Prudential Business Ethics Center in February, but the center is already planning changes to increase the impact of its courses.

Next year, all full-time business students will be required to take an ethics class, said Edwin Hartman, the center's director.

"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," Hartman said.

The stories about the fall of Enron, WorldCom and other companies will make students take ethics more seriously, he said.

At Ohio State University, the Fisher College of Business is developing a simplified roadmap for ethical considerations in business, and adding it to the orientation week for new students. Faculty will then be encouraged to use the model for analyzing material in the regular classes the students take.

Steve Mangum, Fisher's associate dean, said he also hopes to use extracurricular events such as speakers and workshops to highlight ethical issues in business.

Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management is inserting an ethics segment into the basic organizational leadership course that all students are required to take.

"One of the things we are looking into is the 'codes of conduct' that companies have," said Kellogg Associate Dean David Besanko. "Can these things really work, or are they merely window dressing."

Frederick Winter, dean of the Katz School of Management at the University of Pittsburgh, said his school is considering eliminating ethics as a separate class and integrating it into four or five classes. That way, students see ethics as an integral part of other subjects they are studying, such as finance, accounting or marketing, he said.

In a speech in New York in June, President Bush said business schools must be "principled teachers of right and wrong and not surrender to moral confusion and relativism."

But Winter said, "Schools that think they can Band-Aid in an ethics class will be missing the boat."

There also may be limits to how much business schools can do to teach ethics.

"The curriculum is under so many other pressures - to do technology, the Internet, globalization, the environment - (ethics) is competing with so many other things," said David Vogel, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley.

"The curriculum is finite. You can't put everything in it," he said.

And Hans Grande, 30, who graduated from Haas in May, worries that the interest in business ethics will fade over time, and his colleagues will again be caught up in the moneymaking frenzy that fueled the high-tech boom and bust of the late 1990s.

"I would worry that once the economy starts revving again, and there are more new technologies, people will get sidetracked," Grande said.

Grande notes that business ethics were a popular consideration in the late 1980s after a string of bankruptcies in the savings and loan industry.

Nevertheless, a decade later, Jason Shaheen, 28, in his fifth year at Akron, said "ethics at it applies to business has never really been emphasized" in his classes.