Creating a niche for the environment in the business school curriculum - Business and the Environment - Editorial

Business Horizons, March-April, 1992 by A. James Barnes, Janice K. Ferry

* Should we develop a new course or courses, or should we encourage faculty to integrate environmental issues into a number of existing courses?

* Do we need to hire someone to teach environmental issue or should we encourage existing faculty to spend time gaining further expertise in that area and in developing cases and materials that can be used to include environmental issues into their courses?

The business schools' recent experience of merging ethics into the curriculum can be instructive now in designing how to weave environmental issues into the same curriculum. In a study of how to integrate ethics into the business curriculum, Thomas Dunfee and Diana Robertson of the Wharton School concluded (1988) that "ethics should be carried beyond separate elective courses and directly incorporated into key core MBA courses, and that functional faculty must be actively involved in teaching about business ethics." They found that putting ethics "modules" into many popular classes erases students' notions that ethics is a separate issue from business. They also concluded that enthusiastic, functional faculty are necessary to the success of the integration effort. Another reason for having business faculty teach ethical issues is that the students are trying to integrate management concepts with ethics concepts; therefore, they need teachers that are intimately familiar with business management concepts.

If these suggestions are applied to the incorporation of environmental issues into the business curriculum, several conclusions follow. First, core business faculty need to gain more familiarity with environmental isssues and how they have the potential to affect business decision making. At the same time, however, they generally do not need to become environmental experts. If students desire more intensive environmental training, they can turn to courses offered through joint programs like business/public policy or business/environmental management programs.

Second, incoming students need to be somewhat familiar with environmental issues before they can meaningfully learn from course modules that integrate business and the environment. Students coming through the educational system will increasingly have acquired this perspective as science survey courses at the elementary, secondary, and college levels emphasize environmental issues. In the interim, incoming students can be encouraged to take survey courses as part of their preparation, given supplemental environmental reading material, or offered a short orientation course on environmental issues.

The environmental modules used in the core courses should be real business cases that deal with the environment or pose problems that businesses are now or will shortly be facing. Robert Bringer, who directs 3M's pollution prevention program, is a strong supporter of the case method, noting that "every leader of every business sector is impacted by the environment" (Cohen 1990), and therefore executives can turn their experiences into a useful education tool.