Archive for ethics

University Chairman: bigot or a rap fan?

July 16, 2007 at 2:13 pm · Filed under Hypocrites, ethics

From the AP via msnbc.com:

The longtime chairman of the Roger Williams University board admitted Monday to using the N-word during a board meeting, saying it “kind of slipped out.”

“I apologized for that,” Ralph Papitto said in an interview on WPRO-AM. “What else can I do? Kill myself?”

Papitto, 80, who stepped down earlier this month after nearly 40 years on the board, admitted he had used the racial slur at a May meeting of the school’s board of trustees.

Papitto, who has given the school at least $7 million and whose name is on the only law school in Rhode Island, said he had never used the term before.

“The first time I heard it was on television or rap music or something,” he told WPRO.

OK. Which is harder to believe: this is the first time he used the n-word or that he is a rap aficionado?

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Ethics problems at Duke

May 1, 2007 at 8:39 am · Filed under duke, ethics

From Bloomberg:

Thirty-four first-year candidates for a master’s of business administration degree at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business were disciplined in the program’s largest cheating scandal. Nine students face expulsion for collaborating on a take-home test, in violation of the professor’s rules.

 What gets me is Bloomberg’s lead into the paragraph above:

The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure.

I think the failure to instill ethics in these young men and women occurred long before they stepped into a Duke classroom. 

Who is accountable? These aren’t twelve year-olds- it’s too late to blame mommy and daddy. These students are adults, they should know better. Teaching ethics to graduate students is going to fail, its too late.  If they don’t know the difference between right and wrong by this point in their lives a semester worth of lectures isn’t going to make a difference.

The pressure to achieve at business schools pushes some students to cheat, said W. Michael Hoffman, executive director of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Welcome to the real world.  A person’s true character is revealed under pressure- these students failed.

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