The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” We’ve long known about the importance of teaching ethics in the classroom, but every so often we see it’s time for a refresher course.
The financial meltdown that began in 2008 got a lot of people asking what went wrong on Wall Street.
“From Madoff to Stanford to AIG, Wall Street has become rife with corruption and greed, but where does all this filth come from? America’s business schools.”
That’s Comedian John Oliver on the Daily Show, asking business professor at Columbia University’s MBA program what business schools are teaching today’s students to help them avoid the mistakes of the past.
“We teach cases about corruption, choices they have to make and we teach them tools, by which they can say no if they’re asked to do something which is unethical.”
“Well this sounds fantastic. When are you going to start teaching this?”
“Uh, we have been teaching this for decades.”
“Would you say you’re good at your job?”
“I acknowledge there are lots of jokes about business ethics.”
Richard Wokutch is a professor in Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business
“The classic one being it’s an oxymoron or a contradiction in terms. But what I tell students is, it’s really the application of traditional ethical principals like utilitarianism, notions of rights and duties, or justice, to business situations.”
Wokutch says you have to watch out for over correction or you risk losing the very thing you’re trying to protect. These are the issues that a committee of professors and students at Virginia Tech has been grappling with to come up with a resolution to include a Scholarly Ethics and Integrity Component in Graduate Education. It went into effect last fall.
“There’s stories out there of people who have gotten into trouble in terms of plagiarizing parts of their dissertations.”
Greg Purdy, a PhD candidate in Industrial Systems and Engineering, is on the committee.
“And that’s a much more difficult area to get called out in terms of ethics and integrity. And here at Tech in particular, if something comes up, if we identify something that’s problematic, we can take care of that and not necessarily ruin someone’s career, but help them understand what they did was wrong and make sure that we can remedy that before they move on to other places where the stakes are higher.”
There are mechanisms already in place for punitive action if someone is found violating ethical standards. This resolution is aimed at preventing them by broadening the discussion and raising issues students may not have ever thought about
“One of the things that’s always blown my mind is the study of ethics and integrity is the idea of self plagiarism; that you can plagiarize yourself, you know it’s something I never really learned about until I started getting involved in this process.”
Many colleges and universities have ethical standards and resolutions to achieve them, but new situations constantly arise that were never seen as dilemmas before.
“For example we need to talk about, how do you manage research ethics across international projects?”
Rosemary Blieszner is Associate Dean of the Graduate School.
“And when you might have very different cultural experiences and expectations than what we may have here in the United States. And so we need to coach people about how to think about that and that you should be mindful to that you should really talk about that upfront in the research enterprise.”
Blieszner says it became clear to the commission that instead of teaching ethics in classes with that word in the course description, it should be part of every discipline, discussed in a variety of classes, meetings and settings.
