Professor Richard Shreve poses a conundrum to each incoming class during Orientation: It's your first day on the job as a freshly minted consultant. A partner at the firm calls you into her office and says, "We have a wonderful assignment for you with a new client. We need to do a competitive analysis on its market space. Call up its main competitor, introduce yourself as a grad student, and see if you can get some competitive intelligence." Uneasy? Not to worry, the partner tells you. "That's the way it's done in consulting." Would you, as an eager-to-please new hire, follow the partner's orders?
There are, Shreve then points out, many situations in which small lies are accepted. "This is my last offer." What good negotiator hasn't said that? Poker, a celebrated American pastime, is accepted to be a game of deception. And of course the bride is always beautiful on her wedding day. Are you going to disagree? You would lie in all of those cases, if necessary. Why not here?
Shreve, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley who holds both an MBA and a master's in divinity, then walks the students through a principle he teaches in his second-year elective on business ethics. Philosopher Sissela Bok, in her book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, has written that one should always tell the truth except in the case of harmless or white lies, situations in which all parties openly agree it is acceptable to lie, or situations that could justify using physical violence. With none of those exceptions applying here, Shreve takes a firm stance: you do not pose as a graduate student.
Fortunately for the audience at Shreve's lecture, they are graduate students with the time and guidance at Tuck to contemplate these dilemmas. Although Tuck does not require a course in ethics, typically between one-half and two-thirds of students choose to enroll in the ethics elective, making it arguably the most popular noncompulsory course. Combined with a conscious effort to present ethical issues through guest lecturers, Fireside Chats, and community service opportunities, Tuck is working to produce graduates sensitive to the nuanced situations they will face in their careers.
Renewed Interest in Ethics
In the wake of consecutive, breathtaking acts of misconduct at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and others, business schools around the country have sought to enhance their ethics curriculums. Shreve, who had been teaching a session on ethics during Orientation since 1992, started offering an ethics minicourse elective in 2000-01. In 2003, Dean Danos came up with an idea that has made the course uniquely Tuck: seven of the nine course sessions are taught by different Tuck faculty members from various disciplines. For example, strategy professor Constance Helfat helmed a discussion on how companies should deal with activists. Koen Pauwels, a marketing professor, helped students debate the ethics of marketing drugs directly to the public. Four or five sections of the course are offered each year, taught by either Shreve or Aine Donovan, adjunct associate professor of business administration at Tuck and executive director of the Dartmouth College Ethics Institute. The classes are usually capped at 25 students to allow for intense discussion. "I don't know of any other schools bringing in this range of faculty to teach ethics from the home of his or her discipline," says Senior Associate Dean Robert Hansen. "It's not just an ethical theorist teaching the course."
No Easy Answers
Hansen himself led a session in 2006 on Google's decision to accept censorship on its Chinese site. While pretending to be the board of directors at Google, the students debated whether they would launch operations in China, accepting the Chinese government's mandated censorship of sensitive topics such as Tiananmen Square and Falun Gong, or reject the principle of censorship and not enter the potentially lucrative market from within China. Which is more harmful—denying a billion people in-language access to a powerful technology tool or supporting censorship? "We started with about 75 percent deciding not to enter the Chinese market," says Donovan. "By the end, the majority said they would do it, although many had qualifications."
Problems such as these are ethical dilemmas. "Many people think a dilemma is, for example, 'Should I cheat on my wife?'" says Donovan. "That's not a dilemma—you shouldn't. A dilemma is a situation in which both parties make good points, and the right thing to do isn't clear." Often, says Shreve, executives make ethical missteps because they simply don't recognize when someone's rights are at risk.
Many of the dilemmas presented are much more complicated than they appear. Take, for example, a case study co-taught by Associate Dean David Pyke on child labor. Is it ethical for Nike—or any offshore manufacturer—to employ children as young as 12 or 13 in its factories? The answer seems obvious—no. Child labor is tantamount to exploitation, an obvious violation of human rights.
But Pyke adds some additional thoughts to the mix. In developing countries, schooling isn't always available for the poor, and a child's wage can be the only safety net against a family's starvation. In many circumstances, a child's alternative to factory work is prostitution. Provided the factory is clean and the work not abusive, wouldn't the denial of factory work be more unethical? If a single mother working in a factory can't afford day care, is it better for her daughter to sweep the factory floor, where her mother can keep an eye on her, or to roam the streets? In America's own history, young children ran plows and did farm chores. Was that unethical? Pyke employs two key ethical frameworks that the students have learned in Orientation and reviewed at the beginning of the elective. As the discussion winds down, students evaluate the decision using these rigorous frameworks. The decision is still incredibly difficult, and sometimes heart-wrenching, but students now have the tools to think through it carefully.
The framework Shreve uses when discussing ethics across borders comes from The Ethics of International Business, by Wharton professor Thomas Donaldson. The test, Shreve says, is whether a practice that seems suspect would be considered acceptable in our own country at a similar level of economic development. When the difference in economic development between the home and host countries is not an issue, the practice is permissible only if it is necessary to do business and it doesn't violate a basic human right.
"It's extremely tempting on all of these issues to say, 'It depends…' and ride that gray line," says Whitney Stull T'07. "Professor Donovan forced us to take a stand, and I think that was incredibly useful in pushing us to form our own opinions." Not that opinions didn't change during the class discussions. Says Stull, "Every time I thought I may have found solid footing for an argument, someone would bring up a point and I'd think, 'Oh…you're right.' The issues are just so incredibly complex."
Ethics in the Curriculum
Since 2003, Shreve has brought approximately 30 different Tuck faculty members into the course. "My subversive objective is to get ethics integrated throughout the curriculum," says Shreve. "When a faculty member has to wrestle with what case she is going to teach and what ethical questions exist in her field, that can't help but affect her other courses."
Tuck's efforts to turn out ethical businesspeople, after all, don't end with the elective course. Many of the speakers Tuck brings in shed light on ethics in the business world. In April, for example, Sandy Alderson D'69, CEO of the San Diego Padres and former executive vice president of Major League Baseball, talked about, among other things, the ethics he encountered in the business of baseball. Alderson was CEO of the Oakland A's when his star player, Jose Canseco, was involved in a steroids scandal. "There was an incredible ethical dilemma," points out Donovan. "His star performer was doing something that violated baseball's rules, but his team was winning pennants. The students loved hearing about that." Another speaker, Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, was very negative about the business ethics of the pharmaceutical industry. Says Donovan, "The students were not particularly happy with her stance, but if I were a business student going into pharmaceuticals, I would want to understand what that someone like Marcia Angell is going to say and make sure I can respond to those charges."
Many of these visitors interact with students in a less formal setting. Frequent Fireside Chats sponsored by the Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship allow students and faculty to have a discussion with a visiting guest. For Hansen, one of the more memorable chats was with David Greenberg, senior vice president and chief compliance officer of Altria Group, who spoke on the ethics of the cigarette business. While Hansen expected a libertarian argument that Altria is only enabling free choice, he was surprised by Greenberg's line of argument. "He was saying we will do whatever society wants," remembers Hansen. "If you want to shut us down, shut us down. But realize that our records are open, and our emails are traceable. Whatever boundaries society sets, we'll work within them. If you put us out of business, somebody's going to be producing cigarettes. We're the least of the possible evils."
Shreve uses one Fireside Chat each year to show students the downside to bad ethical decisions. "I trot out an ex-con who served time, ideally someone in his early 30s to whom the students can relate," says Shreve. Fireside Chats with white-collar criminals usually draw double the usual number of students.
"I find it fascinating that ex-cons really don't want to let go of their rationalization for doing what they did," says Shreve. "They'll talk about the progression of events that led to them crossing the line: 'My boss put pressure on me, the culture was corrupt.' I will say, 'At what point did you know that you had crossed the line?' Everybody in the room can see it, but typically the ex-con can't."
This annual chat plays into Shreve's philosophy that while it would be presumptuous to say Tuck is molding character in its graduates, the school can be conscientious about providing an atmosphere where character formation can flourish and where ethical values are celebrated. In contrast to the ex-con, Shreve makes a point to celebrate the good ethical decisions made in business, such as Johnson & Johnson's 1982 decision to recall Tylenol after several Chicagoans died from cyanide-laced pills or Merck's 1987 decision to provide Mectizan, its effective drug for river blindness, free to the world's poor rather than discontinue the unprofitable drug. Shreve also encourages Tuck professors to be ethics mentors for their students during the aculty seminar he offers each year on ethics. "I tell them, 'Students look to you for what passes as OK behavior. They know I'm going to take a stand—I'm the ethics guy. But if you show sensitivity to the issues, that's powerful.'"
Beyond Tuck
The final piece of the ethical environment is an experiential one, whereby Tuck makes available opportunities to learn from and give back to the Upper Valley community. Each year during Orientation, the school sends students to nonprofits such as Hospice of the Upper Valley or Habitat for Humanity. Many begin relationships with those organizations that last through their Tuck career. Besides the Orientation activity, the Allwin Initiative helps facilitate community involvement opportunities throughout the year, and students themselves take tremendous volunteering initiative through, for instance, Tuck Student Consulting Services. By working in the community, students see real-world problems firsthand and gain an increased awareness of the struggles many people face daily; they gain perspective on their own situation and on the effects their decisions as managers will have. Perhaps most important, they meet individuals who are some of the best role models for ethical behavior around—the directors, employees, and volunteers of the huge nonprofit sector that does so much to support our local communities. As Dean Hansen puts it, "Ethics is all about doing the right thing—and what better practice at doing the right thing, and behaving in a non-self-interested fashion, can there be?"
Although ethics subtly perfumes the experience for all students at Tuck, it is still the course that gives them the most in-depth challenge. Its reputation as a "not-to-be-missed" elective has been passed down by recent graduates, yet its popularity, its professors feel, has much to do with the nature of the subject. "If you look at our business-school curriculum," says Donovan, "how you figure out fourth-quarter earnings—that's not a debate. The ethics course is an opportunity for students to use the humanities part of their brain and wrestle with questions that don't have a clear answer."
After more than a year at Tuck, Dale Burnett T'07 was surprised by some of the arguments made by his classmates. "Everyone at Tuck is smart, but everyone sees things differently," he says. "It was interesting to get that reality check in an environment that's safe. Whether or not you change your opinions, it's impossible to walk away from the course not having come in serious contact with perspectives that make you say, 'Hmm….'"
And for any school that hopes to mold thoughtful graduates, a genuine "Hmm…" is a very good sound indeed.
