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Cultivating Ethical Business Leaders

Ever since I saw the two movies, The Smartest Guys in the Room and Inside Job, I have been plagued with the question of how business ethics are taught in business schools.  More specifically, what makes the teaching of business ethics in business schools at Catholic institutions of higher education different from the way they are taught in Ivy League Schools and state universities, which are generally held up as models of “best practices”?  How does the teaching of business ethics, in light of Catholic teaching, prepare future workers in the areas of finance, economics and accounting for the “Wall Street Culture” in which they will be working?  If Catholic institutions are mere clones of their secular counterparts, it would seem that Catholic institutions have no unique voice or contribution to make in shaping the minds and hearts of future employees.  These employees will need to be able to withstand the heat and pressures that arise when firms put them in crossroad situations that demand that they make ethical choices even to the point of requiring them to be “whistle-blowers.”

 

It is one thing for a university to claim Catholic identity and to espouse Ex corde ecclesiae.  It is another for that university, and in particular its business school, to implement the vision throughout its curriculum.  Teaching one course in business ethics in a curriculum will not suffice.  Often this course is relegated to philosophical thinking which is, at best, minimally applicable to the real world of business. I believe that the challenge to the faculties in business schools in Catholic universities is to work in a collaborative way, under the leadership of a visionary dean, to develop a Catholic ethics-throughout-the-curriculum approach.  Namely, each professor would incorporate the Catholic sense of vocation-career and its ethical implications within the syllabus of the courses that they teach.  For example, in the Cameron School of Business, ethics is a learning goal for each and every one of the degree programs and is integrated in the various courses in each program.

 

Wherever students would turn in their class work, they would be confronted with the highest standards of ethical demands and be taught to see them in real world practices.  They must be prepared to understand the risks and challenges involved in seeking to live ethically in the workplace – e.g., the threat of job loss or extended legal action.  In other words, vocation would give a deeper sense of meaning and purpose to the business enterprise and the ethical implications inherent in that vocation; and career would provide students with the capacity for prudential judgment related to all that is necessary, technically, to compete in the workplace.  This approach is seen in the Cameron School of Business where students are assigned projects that focus on service and community. One example of the effectiveness of these projects is the 2006 Cameron School of Business MBA project.  Like all of these projects, it focused on ethics and corporate social responsibility, but it eventually opened the door for a student to a career in philanthropic nonprofit management and the opportunity to improve health and educational services in one student’s native country of Cameroon, Africa. In 2013, a student group created a water filtration system that can filter contaminated water and provide clean water for up to three years to underprivileged countries; this grew out of an assignment in their Operations Management course.

Finally, to achieve this vision it would also require that faculty meetings be creative venues in which faculty work together in strengthening each other to achieve a holistic approach to the degree programs.  Such a vocation-career approach would be the first criterion required in selecting deans and new faculty.  Anyone seeking a position in a Catholic school of business would do so precisely because they seek to grow in this expanded vision of the world of business and make their contribution to cultivating business leaders for the future.  Fortunately, Cameron School of business does precisely this and is a stellar example of a Catholic business school dedicated to educating leaders of faith and instilling ethical and social responsibility.

Fr. Donald S. Nesti, CSSp

Director, The Center for Faith and Culture

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