Corporate scandal as a teaching moment: business school aims to make ethics a flagship, not a fig leaf, of curriculum - Catholic Colleges And Universities - University of St. Thomas' College of Business

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 25, 2002 by Patricia Lefevere

Enron's collapse

"We're also spreading Enron across the semester," Goodpaster said. On Sept. 24 the MBA candidates discussed avenues for ethical analysis in general management. They looked at conflicts of interest in professional life with an eye to recurring patterns and techniques for reconciling them.

The class is examining Enron's collapse from global, corporate and personal perspectives. Its impact on investor confidence in the stock market, how it has affected Enron's competitors and what the scandal has cost executives Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow as well as its laid-off employees are all part of the discussion.

"Speculate whether players like Skilling and Fastow are truly `bad people,'" Goodpaster exhorted the class. "If they are, how did they get to where they were in the corporate hierarchy? If they are not, what happened to them along the way?"

Students want to know what to make of all that's been occurring in the last year. So Goodpaster invited a local business writer to discuss the media's oversight responsibility.

St. Thomas' new dean of the College of Business, Christopher Puto, arrived from Georgetown University in August. Like many at the school he's more disappointed than angry over the current crop of corporate miscreants. "My personal retirement [fund] is down 25 percent," he noted.

However, the scandals present all schools with the opportunity to enhance their values-based education, especially Catholic colleges, because church teaching "is so consistent," Puto said. Faculty members must take these "remarkably complex" issues and get their students to imagine what it would have been like to face such situations.

That's a hard task, he admitted, especially for undergraduates who often lack the framework for distinguishing between what's unethical but still legal, even as the legal landscape in corporate America continues to shift. "When you have an option to reveal data or not, what do you do?" Puto asked, tossing his hands into the cloud of unknowing that confronts many in the business world.

Value structures

That's why graduates are returning for refresher courses. Not exactly one-to-three-day moral boot camps, but a chance for faculty to capitalize on skills the enrollees already have and give them confidence to work through problems as they arise.

"By the time 19-year-olds get to us, our key mission is to get in touch with the value structures that are there, to reassess them, give them a process for recognizing--`I'm in conflict here'--and then let them find appropriate resolutions." Whistle-blowing, which can sometimes result in a cover-up, isn't their only way out, the dean noted.

Puto believes that a St. Thomas graduate would probably close a factory at about the same time as a graduate from any other U.S. business school, given the economic necessity to close. But he hopes that a St. Thomas alum would have first tried to find a buyer for the factory and would have treated its workers fairly.

"We want to be known for producing highly principled global business leaders.... That's why students come here. But is it how they live?" Puto asked. The job of the university is nothing less than transformation of the individual, he believes. "We can shine here; we have the responsibility of reminding ourselves of this on a regular basis," and in so doing graduates--aware of their values--can change the corporate world, he said.