Making good choices when the path is unclear

Story by Kimberly Marselas
Illustrations by Brian Payne

Ignoring the giggles and vibrant chatter of students reluctantly returning for spring classes, James Green approaches with a smile and offers each one a pocket-sized slip of paper.

Instead of the usual contact information, these business cards bear a list of universal values like integrity and courage, as well as a six-step primer on ethical decision making. It's a heavy load to carry in a wallet, so Green encourages the wannabe entrepreneurs in his class to commit the principles and accompanying thought process to memory.

He then assigns the Hinman CEOs their first project of the semester: a case study of a medical supply company that reduced inspections to save money but ended up selling 30,000 faulty artificial hips.

So begins the "softer, gentler" portion of Hinman, a business and engineering program in which students master everything from project management to branding techniques-while avoiding the kind of ethical lapses that have undone much larger corporate players.

Across disciplines and throughout campus, professors and college administrators are emphasizing ethics with renewed fervor after the collapse of behemoths like Enron and WorldCom, as well as unethical choices that felled domestic diva Martha Stewart and journalists who once studied at the university.

"Ethics in the marketplace, in the environment, in economics is very complex," says V. Scott Koerwer, associate dean for executive education and marketing communications at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, kicking off a speaker series on ethics. "It's not an issue of right and wrong. It's very gray. We've got to debate and dialogue about it."

The business school has five courses devoted to ethics, but integrity and social responsibility are no longer topics reserved for the boardroom-bound. Departments ranging from education to engineering are preparing students for the types of morally ambiguous situations that abound in the workplace.

There are the obvious conflicts-teachers who form unethical relationships with their students harm the children and doom their own careers-and those that are more difficult to navigate. Building housing that conforms to another country's code requirements may be legal and cheap for contractors, but will the lower quality construction withstand the force of an earthquake or collapse on residents?

"Ethics isn't just about memorizing certain dos and don'ts," says Dennis Kivlighan, chair of the College of Education's Department of Counseling and Personnel Services. "The important thing is to help students understand the underlying principles of their profession."

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