The Rady ad-hoc ethics committee, myself included, met with the Dean on Friday to talk about our research to date, current events in business ethics, and plans going forward. In particular, we discussed the Davos oath rolled out at the World Economic Forum, one that I think is an encouraging forward step from the Harvard oath. We also discussed ways in which other organizations, and particularly business schools, are approaching the problem: by building ethics into the application, enriching the curriculum with cases involving ethical dilemmas, or even posting brief ethics quotes on every classroom door. One issue that surfaced is that at the most basic level, we need a large-scale buy-in from the students in order for anything we come up with as a committee to really take root, and so after the meeting, we got to talking about what we could do to rally our classmates. The committee organizer, who we’ll call “Paul,” zeroed in on a key point that we want to impart: “Don’t be that guy.” In jest, I suggested that we run a spoof of the Rady ad campaign from the San Diego Airport featuring Bernie Madoff (who, buy the way, does not have an MBA) with Paul’s tagline superimposed.
We could put it on every classroom door.
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