Since Babson was founded, students have explored business and ethics together. The first ethics class, offered in 1919 when the College was founded, acknowledged the need for responsibility and accountability in business.
An excerpt from the 1919 course catalog:
Business Ethics: Starting with the acknowledged evils existent in the business world today, this course traces them in large part to the influence of three types of social theory…fundamental principles applies: truthfulness in business…responsibility for the uses of money and power; socialism; modern anarchy.
Today, we continue to integrate ethics in innovative ways.
President Brian Barefoot on Ethics
Integrating Ethics into Babson’s Undergraduate Curriculum
Babson Receives Grant for Undergraduate Business Ethics Case Series
Ethics in our Graduate Curriculum
President Brian Barefoot on Ethics
With corporate ethics continuing to be a hot topic in today’s world, parents often ask me how we teach ethics at Babson. We start with a great respect for how parents and families have instilled their sons and daughters with a strong sense of ethics. So, our role is not to “teach” students about what is ethical; our role is to provide them with the tools to make choices, using an ethical framework for decision-making.
Teaching ethics at Babson differs in three fundamental ways from other colleges and universities.
First, the liberal arts and management faculty work together to develop a conceptual framework for teaching ethical decision-making. Seldom do you see this combined perspective of faculty members reflected in a foundation for teaching ethics.
Second, we teach ethics as part of an integrated approach to business, not as a stand-alone course.
Third, we have ethical decision-making discussions and teachings starting in the first year and continuing through the senior year. Why is this so important? Undergraduate students mature dramatically during their four years at Babson, so we make sure that we’re teaching ethics at different points in their college experience.
We’re committed to doing even more. For example, we’ve received a grant from the Geneen Foundation, which will be used to help fund the development of new materials that further integrate ethics into business exercises and cases. This reflects our belief that ethics is an investment in innovation. When my leadership team and I talk about what we’re doing in curriculum innovation, it isn’t just about what we’re doing in technology, it’s also about other areas, including ethics. This might involve new kinds of case studies and new ways of engaging students in ethical discussions.
And as a result of the generous donation of Lowell Shulman ’49, we will increase our outreach by presenting what we’re doing in ethics to the broader community. We’ll send faculty members and students to conferences and forums so others can learn from our innovations. The Shulman grant also will be used to bring speakers on campus to enrich our extracurricular activities with more perspectives on ethics.
Babson now offers an array of activities for students on- and off-campus that focus on turning ethical thinking into practice. Here are a few examples:
In 2004, Babson held its first annual Martin Luther King Jr. Heritage Celebration, highlighting Dr. King’s principles with programs and activities across campus, including an essay and speech contest, discussions of how to respond to social injustice in today’s world, a leadership award presentation, a keynote speaker, and a dramatic performance.
Last year, we held our seventh International Symposium on Spirituality and Business—the longest running symposium of its kind in the United States—which brought together business leaders, students, professors, and others with a commitment to integrating important values into business.
Our students continue to volunteer for a variety of community service efforts. The Bernon Center for Public Service facilitates almost 15,000 hours of volunteer and community service each year for undergraduates.
Looking ahead, we’re developing a greater sense of partnership with parents and alumni to further strengthen and enhance the Babson approach to ethics.
Integrating Ethics into Babson’s Undergraduate Curriculum
A team of business and liberal arts professors begins to integrate ethics across Babson’s undergraduate curriculum
By Dan DiPiro
One evening, a new Babson first-year student spends several hours reading through an ethical decision-making framework based on the moral philosophies of Kant, Aristotle, Mill, and a few other great thinkers. This framework is, essentially, a step-by-step guide for thinking through decisions. As she studies the framework, the student uses it to think through a personal decision regarding a friend. It takes the student some time to follow the steps laid out by the framework, but the process helps her clarify the problem she’s having with her friend, and evaluate, from various ethical perspectives, several different courses of action.
Throughout the student’s first year, each of her professors encourages her to use this same framework for thinking through decisions. As a sophomore, she uses the framework to analyze business cases, role-playing and simulation exercises. In her junior and senior years, she continues to use the framework in various business and liberal arts classes. By graduation day, she has used the framework many times, inside and outside of school, to think through all sorts of decisions. She is so familiar with the framework that using it has become second nature to her, something she does quickly and adeptly, almost instinctually. The framework has become an integral part of her thinking.
Over the last year, a committee of Babson business and liberal arts professors envisioned just such a learning experience as this one. In November, the Committee for Ethics in the Curriculum unveiled, in the form of two new readings, its new ethical decision-making framework. Now the committee is beginning to integrate that framework across the College’s undergraduate curriculum.
Babson has offered ethics courses for more than 50 years, and ethical discussions have always cropped up, as they will, in all corners of campus. Until now, however, Babson professors have had no single conceptual framework with which to coordinate a consistent integration of ethics. Now that they’ve created this framework, committee members say they want to foster an ethics conversation that will span business and liberal arts classes through all four undergraduate years. If students are formally exposed to ethics only through stand-alone ethics courses, committee members say, these students may come to believe that ethics may be switched on in one situation and off in another.
“Ethics is so important that we all need to be teaching it,” says committee member and the Murata Professor of Ethics in Business James Hoopes. “Ethics is everybody’s turf.”
The Framework
The committee’s two new documents explain an ethical decision-making framework based on the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. The framework will give students philosophical knowledge and analytical skills for ethical decision-making in and out of the workplace. “The documents are meant to give students a thorough decision-making process that considers all stakeholders and all possible impacts,” says Provost Michael Fetters, who oversees the committee’s work.
The two new readings are A Framework for Ethical Decision Making and Approaches to Ethical Decision Making. Short enough to be read in one sitting, each document addresses, essentially, the same material. The committee produced two different versions in order to make the framework adaptable to various classroom situations (availability of class time, students’ familiarity with the framework, etc.).
“I think the documents are good tools,” says Hoopes. “They have real ethics in them, real philosophy.”
Associate Professor of Management and Shawmut Term Chair Kate McKone-Sweet says, “The new tools are definitely an improvement. Babson has never before had a formal approach to building ethics into the curriculum.”
According to the committee’s plan, all Babson first-year students will work with the new ethics readings in the Foundation Management Experience, Foundations of Business Law, and the Freshman Year Experience, a seminar. As sophomores and juniors in the Intermediate Management Experience, they will continue to work with the readings. Finally, as juniors and seniors, they will use the readings in various business and liberal arts electives. The strength of this thorough integration lies both in the students’ using the framework repeatedly, and in their using it across various business and liberal arts classes.
“Every Babson student will work with the ethics documents several times,” says Hoopes. “The repetition will give students a better memory of the material. They’ll be more likely to stop and think when confronted with an ethical problem.”
“Our graduates will know the framework,” says Fetters. “They’ll know how to use it, and they’ll feel comfortable applying it in all situations.”
Babson Receives Grant for Undergraduate Business Ethics Case Series
Babson College has received a three year $150,000 grant from the Harold S. Geneen Charitable Trust to create a unique specialized ethics-centered case series in the undergraduate curriculum.
The 10-case series, “Ethics in Babson’s Undergraduate Curriculum: An Integrative and Holistic Approach,” will be developed by teams of undergraduate students under faculty guidance. Cases are planned to cover a variety of business situations, including specific scenarios that might occur in other countries or in family enterprises. The project focus is unique, as no comprehensive collection of case studies integrating ethical examination across business functions is currently known to exist.
Evaluation will center on student surveys before and after the introduction of the case series into the undergraduate curriculum. Babson alumni presently are surveyed one- and three-years post-graduation regarding the real-world application of coursework. Questions regarding ethical decision-making will be added to these surveys, recognizing that the true assessments of ethical teachings are the actions of Babson’s graduates.
Dr. Michael Fetters, Provost, Babson College, supports the unique addition to business education. “Beyond the classroom studies, we will reach out to share the findings with other business schools to help them understand and adopt the Babson approach to teaching business ethics. We will publish the findings and present them at conferences,” says Fetters, “and develop a portion of our website for efficiently disseminating Babson’s latest thinking on the teaching of ethics.”
Ethics in Our Graduate Curriculum
Ethics for MBAs
“We start in a different place with our MBA students,” Professor of Accounting and Law Carolyn Hotchkiss says of teaching ethics at the graduate level. “We rely more on the students’ undergraduate philosophy background.” Babson’s MBA professors do still provide students with an ethical decision-making framework, however. And ethics has been fully integrated into the MBA curriculum for more than five years.
Babson teaches its MBA students to test the ethical integrity of their reasoning with the “Four-Test Model.” Created by the Reverend Doctor Thomas Sullivan, director of spiritual life, the Four-Test Model consists of four questions that address the reasoning behind an act or decision: Am I willing to have others use this reason for decisions about me? (Golden Rule Test); Am I willing to use this reason in other areas of my life? (Consistency Test); Are the stakeholders to this decision likely to accept this reason as legitimate? (Stakeholder Test); Do I want to be the kind of person who values this reason above others? (Identity Test).
MBA students use the Four-Test Model as a tool for analyzing business cases, including several cases with pointed ethical components. “We’ve developed a case about Al Dunlap’s tenure at Sunbeam,” says Hotchkiss. “And we have a space shuttle case that presents ethical issues in operations management.”
Many MBA students have had work experiences that have heightened their interest in ethics, says Hotchkiss. “Some of them have found themselves on the bad end of ethical decisions in the workplace,” she explains. “These students bring a great, real-world perspective to the discussion.”
Sullivan says he has seen, during his six years at Babson, a pronounced increase in MBA students’ interest in ethics. “The world recently woke up to a lot of egregious business practices,” says Sullivan. “Our students don’t want to be seen in a bad light. They’re more concerned now, which makes classes more fun, challenging, and exciting.”
