Ethical behavior
David Adams, executive director of marketing and a professor of business at the 24,000-student, five-campus Oakland Community College, said he teaches his students that the entire market system is based on trust.
"The absence of ethical behavior is all too evident in what has happened in the market lately. If this becomes too deep-seated, the whole system collapses. It is important that students in businesses and other disciplines are taught and understand the necessity for ethical behavior. Democracy is based on trust. So many things in everyday life are based on civility and trust and reliance on the other person to do the right thing," Adams said.
"The disturbing implication for American society at large is that people are getting a kind of 'do your own thing' view of ethics," said Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, a conservative organization, in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 5 percent, which means, for example, the figure above could be as high as 80 percent or as low as 70 percent.

Area professors react
When Paul Graves, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Oakland University, learned of the poll, he said, "I'm always amazed by what I read in newspapers about what we teach.
"I was just reading an op-ed piece in a national magazine about how universities are teaching relativism," a theory that there is no universal right and wrong in any area, that ethical truths depend on the individuals and groups holding them.
"Every professor I know who teaches ethics, teaches (that) relativism is an implausible theory," Graves said. "I do hope my students would come away from classes having respect for the importance of basic honesty, respect for interest and rights of other people and not cheating on an exam."
Virinder Moudgill, Oakland University provost and vice president of academics, said the university has appointed new professors to deal with bioethics, which will cover such things as cloning, and a course on ethical issues in the department of philosophy.
"The university's important mission in conversation and communication with students is to shape ideas ... and to engage in dialogue to explore what is wrong and what is right," Moudgill said.
For his part, George Keith, vice chancellor of academics for OCC, said that besides teaching ethics of particular career fields, students should be taught about moral and ethical issues to help them arrive at conclusions for themselves or as a group.
Keith said it is also important that students recognize that what was considered right or wrong in society at one time may no longer be so today. For example, denying black people the right to vote was considered the "right" thing to do in Mississippi as late as 1960.
The professor also said students should learn the differences and similarities between morals and ethics in the United States and other parts of the world.

Right and wrong curriculum
Ken Johnson, president of Rochester College, a four-year, liberal arts Christian school, said public universities have moved away from teaching values in the past 20 years. That may be why more students are going to religious colleges, he said. From 1990 to 1996, the most recent data available, undergraduate enrollment increased by 5 percent at private institutions, according to a 1999 report in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The enrollment increase was 4 percent at public colleges, compared with a 24 percent increase at the 90 U.S. evangelical institutions that are members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, based in Washington.
"Parents and employers can have reasonable confidence that students who matriculate through the Christian educational system have been mentored substantially in the concepts of honesty, integrity and ethics," Johnson said.
"College educators (in secular and religious schools) hold a powerful role in society. If they care about the honesty, integrity and ethics of their graduates, they must accept the mantle of teaching high standards." He said they must teach moral values as readily as they teach the value of multiculturalism and protection of the environment.

At St. Mary's College of Ave Maria University in Orchard Lake, a Catholic institution, instructors focus on faith and reason to help students find deeper truths, said University President Thaddeus Radzilowski. "We aren't going to go into class and say it's right to do this and wrong to do that," he said. "The truths are rooted in the understanding of human condition and knowledge and science and how all those things reflect that meaning."

Business ethics
Regardless of the approach, students may be in need of some direction. Results of the national poll indicate the majority of students surveyed believed adults in the corporate world did not behave ethically in business. Fifty-six percent of them agreed "the only real difference between executives at Enron and those at most other big companies is those at Enron got caught," according to the poll.
Authors of the poll wrote in their report, "When students leave college convinced that ethical standards are simply a matter of individual choice, they are less likely to be reliably ethical in their subsequent careers."
But, despite the fact that the poll indicates students are not armed with clear standards of right and wrong during their college years, 63 percent said they thought they were prepared for ethics in the business world.

Ethics in context
At Wayne State University in Detroit, Bruce Russell, chairman of the philosophy department, saidteaching right and wrong in general may not be the mission of the university, but professors should teach it in certain classes or content.
"In political science, students discuss war," Russell said. "They talk about Hitler's action toward Jews was unjust and it was the right thing for the allies to oppose Hitler. That is a judgment that Hitler was wrong."
On the other hand, "there are classes of contemporary issues, where we talk about euthanasia and abortion," where there is discussion, but students make up their own mind.
"In an accounting class, with all this stuff about Enron, it does seem appropriate not only to teach how to keep books but to say 'this is the appropriate thing to do and not do.'
"Many ethical issues ought to be discussed in business ethics, medical ethics, but shouldn't be barred from accounting or English classes," Russell said.

©©The Oakland Press 2002

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