Re: business ethics

[Gar Lipow <lipowg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just to make a point though -- in fact business majors   were not
toughened a great deal. In fact a marketing major is considered one of
the easiest majors you can take.

The majors which have been made the most difficult (compared to 30 years
ago) are English and literature majors. To a lesser extent technical
majors have been made more difficult as well, because of greater general
education requirements on top of technical classes (I have to admit
probably a good thing).

In terms of ethics for business majors; most students with business
majors will admit they have already made a decision to go for the money
and to hell with ethics. In my experience there is generally  already an
awareness that to make a lot of money, they will have to break some
ethical rules.  Even if you could get your typical business student into
an ethics class talk jointly by Noam Chomsky and Michael Parenti, I
doubt it would her much good...

Jim Devine wrote:
>
> [was: Re: [PEN-L:16633] Re: Re: Re: Re: Atlas shrugged]
>
> At 04:09 PM 09/03/2001 -0700, you wrote:
> >Shouldn't the curriculum for business majors be substantially changed
> >so that issue of, say, corporate governance, is viewed through notions
> >of what counts as democratic accountability and representation-and not
> >just for the board and it's relation to shareholders; or that any
> >understanding of factor inputs into a production process needs to look
> >at environmental impacts as against merely price information. That's
> >just for starters.....
>
> Maybe, but the nature of our business program is under the control of the
> management types, who would never change it. (The economics department then
> "services" the business school, by teaching economics to its frosh.) We do
> have courses on oxymoronic "business ethics," but the bizad students don't
> care about that stuff.
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine