B-School Awaits End of Jackson Trial; Ethical Questions Taking Central Role

While the Business School awaits the verdict in a four-year-old gender discrimination lawsuit that has brought heightened attention to the role women play across the River, the venerable graduate school appears to be quietly steering a new course in its teaching of ethics.

A federal judge's verdict is expected shortly in the case of Barbara Bund Jackson '66, former associate professor of industrial marketing, who charges she was denied tenure at the B-School in 1983 because she is a woman. Jackson is suing the University and Business School Dean John H. McArthur for a tenured post at the school, attorney fees and $847,000 in lost income.

Jackson's case came to an eight-day non-jury trial last May and June. The B-School's compliance has been at issue since testimony revealed that 10 years' worth of confidential tenure documents, which the judge ruled were pertinent to Jackson's case, had been incinerated. Allan A. Ryan, Jr., the lawyer representing the University, maintains that the destruction of the documents was inadvertent.

In addition, a tally sheet of the first vote on Jackson's tenure bid went undiscovered--despite court orders that Harvard submit all relevant documents--until a witness referred to it during the trial. Then, in July, the University turned over hundreds of pages of additional documents to Jackson, following Ryan's attempt to discover why the tally sheet had not been found earlier.

Jackson charged that the newly-discovered documents, which consisted mainly of administrative files, impeached earlier testimony from McArthur. The case was then reopened for Jackson to submit several new exhibits. The University maintained that McArthur's testimony was always consistent.

If Federal Judge Douglas P. Woodlock, Jr. awards Jackson the post she is seeking, she will become the fifth woman to receive tenure at the 80-year-old school, and one of four women among the school's current 90-member senior faculty.

Meanwhile, in the nearly two years since Wall Street's insider trading scandals increased interest in the teaching of ethics, a well-publicized $30 million grant to the school has allowed ethics to gradually find a place in the school's curriculum.

The three-week ethics module, approved last winter by B-School faculty and now required of first-year students, is a marked departure from the school's previous stance of attempting to integrate ethics throughout the curriculum.

The ungraded seven-session course has been praised by students and faculty as both a necessary first step in emphasizing ethics in its own right and as a springboard for discussing ethics further in all aspects of B-School coursework.

The ethics grant closely followed Wall Street's unprecedented scandal two years ago. Two-thirds of the money came from Ambassador to the Netherlands John S.R. Shad, who then chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission and who received a 1949 Harvard MBA.

Professor of Government Dennis F. Thompson, who heads the University-wide ethics program, says he supports the use of a required ethics course as a supplement to general treatment of the topic in other classes.

Thompson says that the B-School's renewed emphasis on ethics has allowed the ethical concerns of "some of the standard, well-known cases" to be viewed in a new light. "Sometimes this is even more effective," than a specialized class, he says.

The Rev. Robert K. Massie, a doctoral student at the B-School and a former fellow in Thompson's ethics program, says he thinks that students in the MBA program have grown increasingly concerned with ethical issues in recent years.

Massie says the B-School "has gone from really ignoring ethics or not putting it on center stage to really taking the lead. You're starting to get people who think ethics is being talked about too much--that's a good sign."

The first B-School students to take the ethics class express varying opinions about its worth.