Making Room for Ethics in
Business Schools

Criticism and blame surrounding corporate scandals in recent years didn’t stop at the boardroom door. Business schools also have been faulted for not deterring and for possibly encouraging executive misconduct. In fact, several surveys suggest that, historically, no more than roughly one-third of business schools made ethics or related subjects a course requirement.

That is something that Duane Windsor, an expert in business ethics at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, would like to see change. Windsor argues that, until ethics is accorded at least equal curriculum importance with other subjects like accounting, finance, and economics, the current concern over business ethics won’t last—until the next major scandal. In the Journal of Business Ethics Education, Windsor advocates that business schools require a foundation course addressing the moral, legal, and political education of future business managers, taught by specialists and offered at the start of a school’s core curriculum—whether at the undergraduate or graduate degree level. He also proposes systematically integrating business ethics, business law, and areas such as stakeholder management and corporate social responsibility throughout the remainder of a business or management student’s education.

“If we expect our future business leaders to be value-setters, our business schools should profess and promote moral leadership over and above legal compliance or minimum adherence to corporate codes of conduct,” Windsor says. “Students should be provided the groundwork by ethic specialists to help them understand this increasingly complex subject area. Otherwise, simply infusing ethics into other coursework becomes highly superficial.”