While in recent weeks business schools have been criticized in the media for their perceived role in the current economic crisis, the Tuck School of Business is taking steps to increase the social awareness and accountability of its students through changes to its curriculum, according to Tuck Dean Paul Danos. Beginning with the class that will matriculate in September 2009, Tuck will require all students to complete courses in ethics and leadership.
Business schools have contributed to the longevity and severity of the economic crisis, according to Judith Samuelson, executive director of the Business and Society Program of the Aspen Institute, an organization that fosters leadership and accountability in business.
"Business schools teach through a model that's short-term and backwards-looking," Samuelson said. "They tend to teach around a model that business people, in order to succeed, need to externalize their costs and discount the future."
Danos argued, though, that business schools cannot be held responsible for business executives' bad decisions.
"They graduated 20, 30 years ago, so they're not products of our modern curriculum," he said.
Tuck will require students to complete an "Ethics in Action" course and a leadership class to graduate. The school will also mandate that students complete the Cohen Leadership Program, which gives students feedback from their peers on their leadership skills, and then requires students to formulate individual leadership plans. Although the program has existed for five years, it has not been required for graduation.
The changes in Tuck's curriculum are not a response to the economic crisis, Danos said.
"We're not creating a curriculum around this crisis, just as we didn't create a curriculum around the Enron crisis," he said. "Our approach is the right one: to prepare our students and create a long-run philosophical approach. We're educating people fundamentally and correctly, and we keep evolving it with more sensitivity to society."
Blaming business leaders' code of ethics in large part for the crisis, Danos said Tuck's curriculum aims to bring a "fresh mental attitude" to the economic industry.
"We're going to do more about ethics, we're going to do more with systemic risk analysis and we're going to do more to ensure that students have the right mindset to never stop questioning their assumptions," he said.
Samuelson said that Tuck's curricular changes are in line with the personal impact management model advocated by the Aspen Institute, which suggests that businesses should pursue transactions that benefit society, rather than solely promoting the shareholders' interests.
Most business schools, though, still do not place adequate emphasis on the importance of "the decisions they make and their impact on the world," Samuelson said.
In a survey of graduates of 15 business schools conducted by the Aspen Institute's Center for Business Education in 2007, only 43 percent of respondents said that "having a positive impact on society" was the most important goal in the first year after receiving their MBA.
"Business schools tend to be interdisciplinary and focused," Samuelson said. "But are they training [students] to be technocrats who can get jobs as analysts on Wall Street, or the thinker of the firm who can lead?"
Tuck teaches ethical and social responsibility in the classroom to ensure its students become socially aware business officials, several faculty members said.
"We want to produce business people who make good decisions," Tuck professor Robert Shumsky said. "I think leadership and having an ethical frame of reference are important components. We do both here [at Tuck]."
