It has been a stimulating year for those interested in how knowledge is conveyed and how the truth is separated from the overwhelming roar of misinformation. It seems, unfortunately that those, like Diogenes wandering about seeking an honest man, have just thrown hands up and conceded that lies have become the new reality. From the FTX crypto trials of Bankman-Fried in the business world to the political ethics concerns of congress representatives such as Geroge Santos or Supreme Court justice Thomas Alito it seems that no segment of American society is secure from those that stray from the sands of ethics to the murky waters of fraud and devalued integrity. Throughout the past decades business schools have rushed to respond to accreditation agency and ranking demands that programs include ethics. How this got started no one seems to know but once started the idea has been an uninhibited snowball careening downhill growing in size with each yearly tumble.
Please do not confuse my concern over teaching ethics with ethical behavior. I tend not to accept that the first necessarily leads to the second. I might suggest that often business school cases confuse unethical behavior with illegal behavior. It is also questionable if business instructors are the ones best trained for the job of accepting the teaching ethics handoff from the parents of a student with 18 years of development. This somehow strikes me similar to an accountant teaching the meaning of beauty. Getting a Ph.D. to prepare to teach ethics generally meant one remained isolated from real world business conflicts for an additional six years. Far too few business ethics classes actually revolve around a classics foundation that includes discussions of Plato, Socrates or even more current contributions of French or German philosophers but involve situational case studies where students have nothing to lose by taking a moral high ground. Oh contrar! If anything has been taught by the antics of politics over the last two years it is the bigger the lie the more the believers. So with that background how would one expect to instill any belief in the value of truth with a forty hour course? Consider for a moment the math of 40/52000. This about represents 40 hours of ethics class divided by the student’s 18 years (or around 52,000 aware hours) of life experience or a .00035 impact. Most research would seek a .01 to be significant. Granted there are some small experiences, such as life effecting accidents, loss of very significant person, witnessing (or part of) of a horrible terrorist attack that are so powerful that they can actually change the course of a fifty-two thousand life hours base. One might question that a theoretical case driven ethics class or even a smattering of it through a few courses would qualify as life changing. If it were possible to make matters worse it seems that a significant portion of the American population now is seeking to bring back the limiting of information in the name of morality. One might ponder what morality, which is for the most part an off spring of a specific religious sects thinking, has to do with teaching a broader truth? Many states, lead by Florida, have instituted bans on particular school books. Book banning has always been a form of information limiting whether it was to assure the sun went around the earth or more recently that children must not be exposed to certain aspects of life. Both seek to assure that others will not be exposed to a different thinking. Without promoting a discourse of the need to be exposed to “different thinking” the concept of ethics is rather meaningless. How does one discuss what is right or what is wrong (ethical or not ethical) if opposing sides are restricted? When we are no longer exposed to opposing ideas or deeper values one’s concept “right and true” can be distorted by the collective power of those that hold the same opinion. In some cases this is a simple blocking of contrary thought or joining a group reorganization of the facts to fit a needed outcome. In other cases it manifests in a hatred and mass killings. Florida is no stranger to the latter.
Universities are no exception of holding disparate values. While academically proclaiming the importance of truth and ethics the corporate side may tend to stray. I cite but a couple of better known cases as examples but in no way mean to point out these schools as outliers. Temple University has prided itself on ethics training and within the business department and offered two courses, an undergraduate (3101) and a graduate (5088). An odd aspect of the graduate class was (from the catalog) that “This course may be repeated for additional credit.” Maybe if you want to be ethical you take it once and if you want to be really ethical you take it twice? I do not mean to focus on Temple as the business department is not all that different from the others around the U.S. What does make one striking difference is the business school got caught not living up to it’s undergraduate course object. In July (2018) Temple University fired its business dean, Moshe Porat, for falsifying, over a number of years, data that was presented to U.S. News and World Report for MBA rankings.
Unethical business behavior is certainly not a new problem and laws such as Securities Exchange Act of 1934 addressing accounting transparency or the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, concerning bribery of foreign officials which essentially made unethical behavior illegal, were written to address the issue. These legislative acts made it clear (for U.S. citizens) that certain which might have previously been considered unethical, were now illegal. There did, however, seem to be a more public awareness, initially highlighted in 1991 when Michael Milken, a Warton MBA, was found guilty of massive fraud, of connections between individuals and universities. His endeavors, however later paled in comparison to Madoff’s (political science bachelor’s, Hofstra University) ponzi scheme defrauding 65 billion dollars from almost five thousand clients. Granted, these were individuals with academic degrees not the schools themselves. Shareholders do hold companies responsible for the actions of corporate officials and malfeasance often is reflected in downward stock prices. Should not academic institutions be held accountable to the ethical standards of our case study teachings? A search of the major case study distribution centers resulted in scores of company ethics cases going back to the Union Carbide 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy. I, however, found no cases involving university transgressions. Is there an elephant in the classroom?
Is the distance between what is being taught and what members of academic institutions do increasing or is the ability to hide questionable behavior just becoming more difficult in a social media world? The prestigious Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard states its mission as, “to advance teaching and research on ethical issues in public life. …. we not only produce ground-breaking research but also endeavor to spread it, engage in public discourse, and translate our academic outputs to various constituents on campus and beyond.” Aside from producing ground-breaking research, Harvard appears to have produced a series of rather savory students and administration. Many recall when Harvard failed to deal severely when the editor of the prestigious Harvard Business Review, Suzanne Spring, was extoling high praise on Jack Welch’s management style at GE while having an affair with him resulting in divorce. In 2006 academic researchers were found guilty of stealing samples of their work on antibodies, designed to prevent organs from being rejected by transplant patients, and attempting to sell them to a Japanese company. Prior to that two Harvard College students, responsible for running charity events to benefit children with cancer (Jimmy fund), stole $132,000 of the money collected. Then there were Gomes and Pomey who absconded with $91,000 stolen from the funds of Hasty Pudding Theatrical. Last year Harvard Law administrators, DeMarco and Saylors, were arrested for stealing $110,000 in scholarship funds (of all things) for students with disabilities.
Returning to Temple University and the rankings data scandal. It is possible that universities, while striving to make money like any business, are taking on some of the business flaws we have so long cautioned about as Moshe Porat hurt Temple in the same manner unethical behavior has hurt companies, organizations and government image throughout the years. Perhaps the broader lesson Temple provides is the moral high ground that academics have enjoyed when teaching business ethics has been truly shaken. As such, business school faculty and administrators, most of whom have taken few “real life” risks or faced frightful internal pressures, might now be a bit more humble when expounding from the classroom pulpit about business ethics. Is there a difference between Porat altering the data to show Temple to accreditation and ranking organizations in a better light than showing them we have ethics classes and thus produce ethical graduates? Perhaps it is timely for business schools to recognize the enormous nature of the task and question if they realistically up to it, or if it is even their job.
The journal of transnational management is the official journal of the international management development association (IMDA)
Readers of the Journal who are not familiar with the IMDA are encouraged to consult the IMDA web site at http://www.imda.cc for information concerning the professional organization’s activities as well as the complete listing of prior and the next congress site. World Congresses are held in a different region of the world each year and serve to provide the opportunity for members to come together to share ideas concerning international management development.
The Journal of Transnational Management seeks the interesting balance in maintaining its self as a high quality professional publication while continuing to distinguish itself as a leader in providing authors from developing nation’s editorial assistance. This is deemed essential in order to optimize the opportunity for these authors to present their management articles to an international audience. The journal has a dedicated editorial board that is multinational in scope and prepared to provide the assistance needed to encourage authors from nations that are not the traditional contributors with their submissions.