Source: Diane Swanson, 785-532-4352
News release prepared by: Keener A. Tippin II, 785-532-6415

Friday, December 6, 2002

AMIDST CORPORATE SCANDALS, K-STATE PROFESSOR SPEARHEADING REQUIRED ETHICS COURSE INITIATIVE FOR BUSINESS SCHOOLS

MANHATTAN -- The names read like a corporate Who's Who list: Enron. WorldCom. Adelphia. Tyco. Citigroup. Qwest. Arthur Andersen. All of them guilty of corporate misconduct.

Diane Swanson, a Kansas State University associate professor of management saw these scandals in part as a failure by business schools to teach ethics and social responsibility, contributing factors to corporate wrong doing. As a professor of business ethics, she felt it her responsibility to speak out on these scandals.

Swanson wrote to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, which sets accreditation standards for graduate schools of business, to ask what that association was doing to strengthen business ethics education in light of the scandals. In return she received a "very cordial" but "totally unsatisfactory" response that said although the association was currently listing ethics first among content area in proposed standards for accreditation, the extent of coverage would be left up to each individual business school.

"Most of us who have been teaching for awhile in business schools know what that means," Swanson said. "It means that some schools won't have any, some schools will have some, some schools will pass around ethics to professors who perhaps have good intentions but have never taken a course in it.
"So all of a sudden these professors could be pressured to blend ethics with their own coursework, which might be marketing, finance, accounting, or human resource management. Of course, the people who teach in those areas rightfully want to emphasize their own expertise, so for them to attempt to tack ethics onto their coursework is very unsatisfactory to trained ethicists. The bottom line is that a threshold course in ethics and corporate responsibility should be a requirement in all business degree programs."

Subsequent to the reply Swanson and a colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, William Frederick, mobilized an effort via the Internet, e-mail and a network of colleagues to request that the association rethink the current approach, which they call the doctrine of flexibility.

Another colleague, Duane Windsor, a professor of management at Rice University, wrote an "eloquent" letter explaining why the association's flexible approach did not work well and arguing the need for a minimum of one course dedicated exclusively to ethics. Swanson and Frederick used the letter in their initiative.

"Many of us are saying there is nothing wrong with other professors teaching ethics as part of their own course," Swanson said, "but without a core course, it is just window dressing."

To date the initiative has the endorsement of almost 120 business professors, ethicists, human resource specialists, marketing professionals and others from a variety of fields. Swanson's efforts have not gone unnoticed in government either. Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts' office has placed her in contact with David Dunn, a special assistant to President Bush in the office of domestic policy.

From her point of view, Swanson said the initiative is "like handing the White House something up on a silver platter." She said so far President Bush and Congress have done several things recently to punish corporate wrong doing and beef up SEC rules. The initiative to strengthen ethics education would take these efforts one-step further to address one of the root causes of the problem.

"It's very bipartisan," Swanson said of the initiative. "Our idea is to create something akin to a national think tank on business ethics education where a lot of different players could come together, including corporate leaders, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business officials, public policy experts and business ethicists."

Swanson asserts that this endeavor is especially important, given her understanding that the U.S. Department of Education no longer recognizes the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business as an accrediting body within their policy domain.

"By what authority then does this accrediting body determine national standards for business education, if not as a private club determining its own rules?" Swanson asked.

If the Bush administration pays attention to the initiative, Swanson said the accrediting group would see that their educational standards for business standards are being viewed on a national level as an issue that directly impacts the common good. The initiative has gone further than she originally expected it would, yet Swanson still holds hope that the White House will consider facilitating a national think tank to study this issue for the long term.

"The initiative is not about scolding corporations," Swanson said. "It's about educating managers so that they recognize their responsibilities to society. At minimum, they need to hear that excessively selfish behavior is not laudable. I believe a lot of corporate crooks are products of myopic business education. Although not all of them learned immoral behavior in business schools, many of them were not encouraged to unlearn it there either."

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