Business Schools Blamed For VW Ethical Lapse & Bad ‘Bro’ Price Hikes

Darden School ethics professor Andrew Wicks

People used to say, four or five decades ago, that if you wanted to change the world, you should go to law school, says Rollert, a Yale JD. That’s changed, he says. “With good reason today there is a presumption, and a strong one, that if you really want to do good, if you want to make an impact on the world, you go to business school,” Rollert says.

Nevertheless, Rollert says he understands Queen’s cynicism, and adds that “there’s certainly more that business schools can do.” Primarily, business schools should be listening to students, and evolving in accordance with students’ ambitions, he believes. “To the degree that business schools are paying close attention to their students,” he says, “I think it actually will address and solve a lot of these problems.

“It’s a good thing for people like Professor Queen to occasionally sound the alarm, but I think that it’s more an alarm that’s a warning, rather than one that’s consistent with a five-alarm fire. The business school is not burning down, morally speaking.”

ETHICAL BEHAVIOR DOES NOT ALWAYS PAY OFF IN MONEY

Still, the lessons of a B-school education are a matter of interpretation. “There are ways in which abstract financial reasoning, particular criteria that only focus on maximizing shareholder wealth, can be construed to crowd out other things students are learning,” points out Andrew Wicks, a Darden ethics professor and director of the school’s Olsson Center for Applied Ethics.

And, to be sure, just as crime can pay, amoral or immoral business leadership can bring profits. “I’d love to stand here and tell you that being what you and I might call ethical always pays in the short term, but I don’t know that we could credibly make that case,” Wicks says. “But in the long term, for companies that want to survive and thrive, it is essential.”

Many perpetrators of business misdeeds are publicly demonized to the point of appearing evil, but Wicks sees them differently. “It’s more people a lot like us who can get twisted and turned around and make some pretty bad choices,” Wicks says. “These are more like the kinds of pitfalls that you and I and everybody who’s reading that news account can fall victim to at any time. The line between them and us is much thinner than we’d like to believe that it is.”

So business educators must hit students where they live: in their own skins. “Some people seem to think that because I’m in business, that ethics is therefore optional. We tell our students, ‘No,'” Wicks says. “The start of that argument is really around pushing people to think about, ‘What is a life worth living?’ I think everybody would agree that some level of material wealth is essential to have a happy life (but) having a big pile of cash is really not that helpful.

“It does come back to, ‘Who do you want to be?’ As a leader you’re doing ethics every day. All of the choices that you make have a moral dimension to them. The issue is, am I paying attention to that?”

DON’T MISS: DARDEN & WHARTON TOP ETHICS RANKING; A B-SCHOOL PROF ON ETHICS, POWER & GENDER