Integrating ethics into the business school curriculum

Abstract

A project on teaching business ethics at The Wharton School concluded that ethics should be directly incorporated into key MBA courses and taught by the core business faculty. The project team, comprised of students, ethics faculty and functional business faculty, designed a model program for integrating ethics. The project was funded by the Exxon Education Foundation.

The program originates with a general introduction designed to familiarize students with literature and concepts pertaining to professional and business ethics and corporate social responsibility. This may be accomplished through orientation sessions, readings, packages, short classes and lectures.

The key segment of the plan is to have ethics modules developed and systematically integrated throughout key business courses. In the project experiment, sample modules were developed for courses in introductory marketing, introductory management, corporate finance and business policy.

The modules are designed to respond to the concerns of functional business faculty that they cannot be sufficiently authoritative in teaching ethics and that inserting coverage of ethics will displace critically important topics in their already crowded courses. On the other hand, the functional instructors found that, once encouraged, students were very willing to discuss ethical issues and that their sophistication increased throughout the course.