Business Ethics Education at Bay: Addressing a Crisis of Legitimacy

In this article I describe a crisis of legitimacy in business schools due to a longstanding habit of sidestepping ethics education. The accrediting agency helps perpetuate this dilemma by failing to require stand-alone ethics coursework, despite pressure from some constituents to do so in the wake of an earthquake of corporate scandals. This crisis could easily be resolved if business schools adopted a three-pronged approach to ethics education based on foundational coursework. Specifically, business schools should require at least one ethics course as a fulcrum for integrating ethics across the curriculum. As a third tactic, this effort should be augmented by other initiatives, such as hosting guest speakers, offering service-learning projects, and establishing endowed chairs in ethics.