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To: 10K a day who wrote (145996)	8/22/2002 10:48:12 PM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

AKRON, Ohio — In the wake of recent accounting scandals, the University of Akron business school is urging its students to enroll in a new ethics course — in the philosophy department. "Certain words are sort of owned by certain departments," said Stephen Hallam, dean of Akron's College of Business Administration. "One of the words that is sort of owned by the philosophy department in lots of universities is the word 'ethics.' " There is no clear consensus of how best to expand ethics offerings for business students, but a recent spate of accounting scandals that have tarnished once-mighty companies brought on by the new economy. "We will take the students to a prison and let them talk to some people who didn't believe that ethics would be very important," said Edwin Hartman, director of the Prudential Business Ethics Center at Rutgers University in New Jersey. All full-time business students there will be required to take an ethics class next year. Business schools, President Bush said in June, must be "principled teachers of right and wrong and not surrender to moral confusion and relativism." The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International — the major accrediting body for business schools — is in the midst of revising curriculum requirements, said chairman Jerry Trapnell. "I suspect the issue of ethics and related matters will get some careful attention," Trapnell said. "Are we doing enough? Are our standards sufficiently clear? Are we setting the bar so this will be an important consideration for our students?" Hartman said business schools in general did not focus heavily on ethics until the late 1980s, when they had to face the junk-bond scandals and the savings-and-loan crisis. Since then, most have increased their ethics offerings, he said, but the current bookkeeping scandal is raising attention again and making people take another look at their courses. However, Hartman noted that many colleges that are adding ethics components now say they were already updating the curriculum before the accounting scandals came to light at communications giant WorldCom and the once high-flying energy trader Enron. It is hard to shoehorn ethics into a two-year business curriculum, said David Vogel, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "The curriculum is under so many other pressures — to do technology, the Internet, globalization, the environment — (ethics) is competing with so many other things," Vogel said. "The curriculum is finite. You can't put everything in it." The Katz School of Management at the University of Pittsburgh is considering an approach that seems counterintuitive — eliminating ethics as a separate class, said Frederick Winter, the dean. He said it may be better to integrate ethics into other subjects they are studying, such as accounting or marketing. "Schools that think they can Band-Aid in an ethics class will be missing the boat," Winter said. At Ohio State University, the Fisher College of Business is developing a simplified roadmap for ethical considerations in business and will expand its elective ethics class, said associate dean Steve Mangum. "This year, we're not going to have any problem getting students volunteering to take the course," Mangum said. Akron opts to teach ethics through case studies in other courses, Hallam, the dean, said, instead of in a stand-alone class that students take to fill a requirement. But Hans Grande, 30, who graduated from Haas in May, worries that if ethics is not made a formal part of the curriculum, attention will fade and his peers will again be caught up in the moneymaking frenzy that fueled the high-tech boom and bust of the late 1990s. "I would worry that once the economy starts revving again, and there are more new technologies, people will get sidetracked," Grande said.