Richard S. Shreve
On Teaching Ethics to MBA Students
Richard S. Shreve Although Tuck School Professor Rick Shreve would describe himself as an investment banker rather than a professor of ethics, he has been actively involved in the study and teaching of business ethics since 1992, when he was invited to join Tuck's faculty. When he arrived in Hanover, Shreve had an MBA from Harvard, had worked for years as a successful investment banker and as a managing director at Morgan Stanley & Co., and had changed his path to pursue a masters in Divinity at Yale, with a view to becoming an Episcopalian minister. Perhaps Edward Fox, the dean of Tuck at that time, sensed that someone who was able to combine these seemingly diverse experiences could bring an invaluable perspective to the task of teaching ethics to budding business leaders. Fox was not the only one who spotted this potential-Shreve was also recruited to teach business ethics for three years at the Yale School of Management during the following years.
Recently, Shreve's work at Tuck has focused on two areas of interest to business students and future practitioners in the light of recent corporate scandals—integrating ethics into the MBA core curriculum and fostering character development in MBA students.
"The difficulty of integrating ethics into the core curriculum of a business school is well recognized," Shreve says. "Harvard Business School wrote a book on the subject, and Columbia Business School published a candid essay acknowledging that their efforts had failed. The principal impediment to success is the reluctance of the core faculty to teach a subject that is outside their area of expertise. And the common approach of inviting an ethics professor as a guest lecturer to address the ethical issues in a finance case, for instance, sends a powerful message to the students that ethics is not a mainstream concern in finance."
So how is Shreve tackling these difficulties? "At Tuck, we are pursuing a two-pronged approach to the problem. First, we hold a seminar for the core faculty members early in the academic year, sharing with them the information we present to the students in their business ethics classes and charging them to accept their responsibility to be ethical role models and mentors for the students. Then, during the year, we conduct an ambitious program of several Ethics at Tuck panels that address ethical issues relating to each of four core courses." The panelists, who are typically prominent business leaders and representatives of government and the media, attend classes with the students and participate in a panel discussion. Attendance at the panel is required for all students in the course, and the content of the panel is fair game for the students' final exam.
During his tenure at Tuck, Shreve says in his classes he has "intentionally focused on teaching practical business skills, rather than molding character." These skills include how to make a decision when faced with an ethical dilemma (not whether to accept a bribe for inside information, which is clearly wrong, but how to decide between the interests of the shareholders and those of the employees when they both have a legitimate claim) and how to use the language of ethics to defend a position that a course of action should not be followed because it is just plain wrong.
In response to the recent scandals in corporate America, Shreve's phone has been ringing off the hook with questions from the media asking, "What are the business schools doing about ethics?" Shreve says the press are not interested in how he is teaching practical business skills. "They want to know what I am doing to shape the character of the business leaders of the twenty-first century." To address this larger question, Shreve has developed a plan of action that works on a five-point framework that is not a separate class but an integral part of each professor's approach within ongoing core classes and electives. "At Tuck, we began to ask ourselves what we would do if we were to be intentional about molding character. After some research and consultation with academic colleagues, we developed a program that, surprisingly, does not involve more classroom time devoted to ethics.
The program includes these elements:
- establishing an environment where, starting at the top, ethical values are practiced and celebrated
- taking advantage of mentor relationships (faculty/student)
- celebrating moral exemplars (telling hero stories)
- providing opportunities to serve others (service learning)
- highlighting the adverse consequences of unethical behavior
A visit during the fall term from an ex-convict, as part of a series of ethics panels at Tuck, graphically illustrated this final point—Mark Morze recounted experiences of spending five years in a violent, overcrowded federal prison for his white-collar crimes. Shreve notes that though such dramatic interventions as are possible in the business school, they might not be appropriate in the board rooms of large companies. But he asserts that the five-point framework could help business leaders create the all-important ethically sound culture that corporate America so clearly needs to strive for.
"The programs we are pursuing at Tuck could apply in a corporate setting as well as in other educational institutions," he says.
Richard Shreve is adjunct professor of business ethics at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
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