Corporate Ethics as Requested Subject

The Financial Times reported on July 12 that major Business schools of US established a new subject of business ethics or integrated it to the existing course.

It is because the economy has been shaky due to an accounting irregularity of US companies, and some businessmen who graduated from the branch name MBA schools were involved in the corporate accounting irregularity.

For instance, Jeffrey Skiling who was the former CEO of Enron graduated from Harvard Business School is one of the ringleaders who led Enron to its ruin.

George W. Bush, the president of US emphasized in the speech of Wall Street on July 9 Business schools must be the schools which teach a rightness and wrongness clearly and most not submit to moral confusion and relativism

However, even president Bush graduated from Harvard Business School didn`t expose the accounting irregularity of Haken Energy he ran as a director in 1991 or was involved in the scandal of insider transaction.

According to the Financial Times, Baruch College of New York which is the major Business School in US, will hold a seminar for social responsibility of the company and rouse an awareness on the corporate ethics. Also, this school plans to have a compulsory subject of the ethics.

Business graduate school of Duke University already offered the ethics subject in the first semester of this year, and plans to provide the subject in the first semester of the next year. Rex Adams, the professor of this university, said ꡒWe will plan to establish the single subject of ethics and plan to ingrain the ethic thinking to all subjects.

For the minute example to learn a lesson from the corporate scandal, the University of California (UC) Irvine Campus, will establish the subject focused on Enron`s collapse from the second semester of this year. The professor Richard McKenzie said ꡒEnron is the good case for ethic problem and other various problems.

However, according to the corporate ethics institute of Pennsylvania University, Wharton Business School, prestigious business schools have exclude professors who majored in the corporate ethics from the professorate until now.

Eun-Taek Hong euntack@donga.com