Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56537
Pillars of Virtue by Jonathan Schonsheck from Enron's collapse in 2001 through the market's turmoil in 2009, the talking heads on the networks and cable channels have been issuing solemn calls for business schools to place a greater emphasis on ethics in the curriculum. One might think that, as a T he ongoing rapid-fire eruptions of atrocities in financial systems, from subprime mortgages to leveraged deriva- tives, make the misdeeds of Ken Lay and the Enron era seem faraway and quaint. Throughout the entire period professor of philosophy who teaches business ethics in an MBA program, I would wel- come these calls. After all, they result in greater promi- nence for the discipline and those who teach it. But my response is more conflicted and more complex. Are ethics professors the right people to ensure that future business executives operate out of a sense of virtue instead of a habit of vice? Our cultural attitudes about professors, I believe, are deeply ambivalent. In the popular media, professors are typically por- trayed as intelligent and likeable, in a bumbling sort of way. Pic- ture first Fred MacMurray and then Robin Williams as "The Absent-Minded Professor." Picture first Jerry Lewis and then Eddie Murphy as "The Nutty Professor." Sometimes the cultural attitude gets edgier. Recall Governor George Wallace's refer- ence to "pointy-headed intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight." Remember former vice president Spiro Agnew chan- neling Pat Buchanan as he derided intellectuals as "nattering nabobs of negativism." This was uttered, of course, before he was compelled to resign for failing to pay income tax—on bribes that he had extorted. 46 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2009 How much can an ethics professor realistically do to turn out graduates who will bring strong moral values into the corporate world?