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Ever since details emerged regarding how much the ethical climate at Enron contributed to the frauds that its employees perpetrated, business schools and their accreditation agency, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), have struggled with the issue of what higher education can do to prevent future generations of business executives from following in the footsteps of Enron's senior management. This includes issues such as whether or not a professor can "teach" ethics and whether embedding the coverage of ethical applications into every business course is preferable to offering one or more required stand-alone ethics courses.
University teachers of ethics are understandably upset that society seems to be giving them a major responsibility for avoiding business scandals involving ethics. Some of their comments include:
* "Ethics courses in B-schools are not a 'quick fix' for a lifetime of questionable training, cultural differences in how cooperation is viewed, and/or sociopathic behavior. Nor are they a palliative for entire curricula that are devoted to short-term profitability at any cost."Donna J. Wood, University of Northern Iowa
* "We can't make people morally better than they were before they took a session or course on ethics, but it's pretty clear that a steady diet of egoism in one form or another can have the opposite effect of at least reinforcing antisocial and unethical attitudes and behavior."James Gaa, University of Alberta
* "There are so many classes where students are taught or even encouraged to use cutthroat techniques, that the winner takes it all, and that the only thing that counts is the bottom line. Aren't people in our society smart enough to realize that students are being socialized with far more deviant ideologies that are then generalized to domains like the classroom?"-Robert Giacalone, Temple University
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