Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/57462
Voicing Values, Finding Answers by Mary C. Gentile ethics issues are not also integrated into core courses. Perhaps the subject of ethics doesn't always make it into core courses because both faculty and students are unsure whether it is really possible for people to act on their values in the workplace. For example, when accounting faculty want to integrate ques- W tions of ethics into their cours- es, they often address the topic of "cooking the books." They discuss the pressures employ- ees face to engage in unethi- cal practices, such as altering earnings reports. They empha- size the consequences of such actions and the regulatory safeguards that exist to prevent them. All the while, they might consider the whole exercise to be futile if they don't know how to teach students to handle such situations when they arise—or if they believe it would be fruitless for young managers even to bring up those issues with their employers. This is not to say that faculty need to have all the answers about how young executives should behave if confronted with these situ- ations. But they should believe there's a way to find the answers and that it's important to try. The distinction between not knowing the A new program—a collaboration between the Aspen Institute and the Yale School of Management—helps students learn to speak up when confronted by ethically complex situations. hy do business schools find it so difficult to inte- grate ethics into the curriculum? Although stand- alone business ethics courses are unquestionably important, the topic becomes marginalized if 40 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2008