HBS To Bolster Ethics Course

In the wake of last year’s headline-grabbing corporate scandals, Harvard Business School (HBS) will require all students to take a semester-long course in ethics starting this spring.

But school officials say the plan to add the requirement—in lieu of a three-week ethics seminar—was in the pipeline before the current emphasis on corporate accountability.

“We’d been working on this idea well before Enron put an exclamation point behind what we’re doing,” said McLean Professor of Business Administration Lynn S. Paine.

The full-semester “Leadership, Governance and Accountability,” which will be required for first-year students, will be taught by 10 senior faculty who specialize in everything from finance to general management to marketing to leadership and ethics.

“In our judgement this is a pioneering course primarily because it brings so many disciplines together,” said Business School Dean Kim B. Clark ’74.

Many of the business school’s peers still require only short orientations in ethics. But Harvard is hardly the first to require a full course on ethics, according to MIT business ethics lecturer Leigh G. Hafrey ’73, who is also co-master of Mather House.

Some institutions, like Columbia, have already established semester-long courses, and virtually all institutions provide a thorough grounding in ethics at their orientations, he said.

Still, Hafrey said HBS has a strong ethics program.

“This is certainly a part of an ongoing effort at HBS to make ethics a central portion of the curriculum, and I think they’ve been successful,” he said.

Paine, who taught the three-week seminars in ethics and will co-teach the new course, said that the new complexity of business in the 1990s made the need for a longer course clear.

“[The seminar] wasn’t long enough to get depth or breadth in issues,” she said. “All of a sudden you have to start thinking about responsibility in a global context, and that creates a lot of complexity.”

The new course will deal with the responsibilities of companies and their leaders to their employees, customers, suppliers and the public, the role of personal ethics in the workplace and the challenge of building ethics for a whole company, Paine said.

“This is really unusual,” she said. “We will look at problems grounded in the real world from every perspective. You’ve got to think, ‘How do I make sound decisions for my company that will really stand up to scrutiny?’”

HBS Student Association Leadership and Values Representative Luis A. Cifuentes said that an emphasis on ethics drew him to HBS, and the new course is just the next step.

“We do touch a lot of things about ethics in every other course,” he said. “Anything that involves increasing that exposure to ethical dilemmas is always a good thing.”

—Staff writer Kate A. Tiskus can be reached at tiskus@fas.harvard.edu