Page 2/The Battalion/Wednesday, February 24, 1988 tr Opinion Who needs ethics when you have an MBA? John MacDougall A co mp a n y spends millions of dollars developing a wonder drug. Though company officials intend to warn users on the pill bottles about possible allergic reactions, r e - searchers have de- ie rmin e d that there exists a probability that one in 100,()()() users will experience an allergic reaction to the drug. Of those, one in 10 might die from complications. Should the com pany go ahead with production of the drug? A large Japanese firm manufactures three-wheel motorcycles that are ex tremely popular among young people. Sales have increased steadily during the last five years. A consumer research group has found that accident statistics for these vehicles are staggering. De spite warnings posted clearly on the gas tanks of these vehicles, accidents con tinue to grow proportionally to the number of users. As company presi dent, should you continue to produce these vehicles as long as there is suffi cient demand? You own a multi-national firm that builds waste treatment plants for for eign governments. The market compe tition for these plants is fierce. You know that your competitors have been paying off high-ranking government of ficials to secure lucrative contracts to build plants. Should you also bribe these officials to ensure a competitive chance? These oversimplified questions deal with matters of “business ethics.” In creasingly, this issue is garnering inter est in acadamia and the press. The downfall of Wall Street raider Ivan Boesky and his cohort Dennis Levine portends a decline in ethical business conduct. In colleges, students of busi ness today are being trained in the fun damentals of business administration — accounting, finance, analysis and man agement. But are they being taught or encouraged to do the “right thing” when a moral decision means certain fi nancial loss to the company? Here at Texas A&rM the verdict is not in. Consider the master’s program in If facts were gunpowder, Ron couldn’t blow his nose Donald Kaul I don’t know why people keep picking on Presi dent Reagan. He is one of the won ders of the world, a masterpiece of intellectual effi ciency. In an age when knowledge is power, Ronald Reagan has gone further, knowing less, than any world leader of his time. If facts were gun powder, President Reagan couldn’t blow his nose, yet there he is, seven years the leader of the Free World and riding high yet. That is not an accident; that is talent. We were given yet another example of the President's invincible ignorance just last week. The White House re vealed that the State Department made a deal with the Soviet Union in 1985 to end military aid to the Afghan rebels as soon as the Soviets began to pull out of Afghanistan. The thing is, the State De partment didn’t tell President Reagan about the deal. He has been going around saying that we’ll keep suppling the rebels until the Soviet pullout is nearly complete. This has added more than a little confusion to our negotia tions with the Russians. In most administrations — Oh, why be coy? In any other administration known to man or woman — that would be more than passing strange, the State Department going into business for it self. Not in the Reagan administration. This is a president, after all, who didn’t know we were siphoning funds from the deal to supply the contras and who didn’t much care, either. Given the op portunity to ask the principals what they were doing during the Iran-contra mess, Mr. Reagan was barely able to su- press a yawn. And yet he retains his popularity with the American public and seems sure to continue to do so until the end of his days. His genius has been to lower our expectations of presidential competence to the vanishing point. After seven years of Reagan, we expect so little from pres idents that even a gold-plated phony like Pat Robertson can be taken se riously as a candidate. And why not? Robertson is smarter than President Reaan and pays more attention to what’s going on. The legacy of the Reagan years is that now, truly, anybody can be president. It is a time that cries out' for H.L. Mencken, the acid-penned social com mentator of the ’20s and ’30s. In a not dissimilar time, with a not dissimilar pressident — Warren G. Harding — Mencken, in an essay called “On Being an American,” had this to say: “All of which may be boiled down to this: the United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men —that distinction is easy here because the gen eral level of culture, of information, of taste and judgement, of ordinary com petence is so low. No sane man, employ ing an American plumber to repair a leaky drain, would expect him to do it at the first trial, and in preceisely the same way no sane man observing an Arneri-. can Secretary of State in negotiation with Englishmen and Japs, would ex pect him rb Zomdo’ff better than second- best. Third rate men, ol course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in f ull control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.” Even allowing for the fact that Mencken was no great fan of democracy and was a bigot to boot, that passage rings ominously true today. For all of President Reagan’s hype about it being “Morning in America” there has been a kind of leakage of national pride in re cent years. When I was in college the Russians sent up the first space vehicle, “Sput nik,” and the nation was aghast. How could we have let a backward nation like the Soviet Union get ahead of us in space? We responded with an all-out ef fort and beat the Russians to the moon. The Reagan years have seen the vir tual collapse of our space program. We haven’t sent a human being into space in nearly two years and our unmanned program is almost non-existent. Mean while, the Russians charge ahead and no one seems to care. President Reagan talks about the “privatization of space”, and no one snickers. We grovel in gratitude at the feet of Mr. and Mrs. Reagan for their efforts in fighting drugs in this country, yet when we hear that the GIA has supported drug-runners like Panama’s Manuel Noriega and army officers in Hinduras in return for their aid in support of the Nicaraguan contras, no one expressed outrage. I suppose we feel that Ronald Reagan didn’t know what was going on. And I suppose we’re right. I think eventually President Reagan should have a day of his own, like Wash ington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. It would be on a Monday, of course, and we could celebrate the occa sion by forgetting things that we don’t want to think about. It would be a fitting memorial to a great man. Copyright 1987, Tribune Media Services, Inc. The Battalion (USPS 045 360) Member of Texas Press Association Southwest Journalism Conference The Battalion Editorial Board Sue Krenek, Editor Daniel A. LaBry, Managing Editor Mark Nair, Opinion Page Editor Amy Couvillon. Gity Editor Robbyn L. Lister and Becky Weisenfels, News Editors Loyd Brumfield, Sports Editor Sam B. Myers, Photo Editor Editorial Policy 1 he Battalion is a non-profil. self-supporting newspa per operated as a community service to Texas A&M and Brvan-Collegc Station. Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the editorial hoard or the author, and do not necessarily rep resent the opinions of Texas A&M administrators, fac ulty or the Board of Regents. The Battalion also serves as a laboratory newspaper lot students in reporting, editing and photography classes within the Department of Journalism. 7 he Battalion is published Monday through Friday during Texas A&M regular semesters, except f or holiday and examination perioefs. Mail subscriptions are $17.74 per semester, $34.62 per school year and $36.44 per full rear. Advertising rates furnished on request. Our address: The Battalion. 230 Reed McDonald, Texas A&M University. College Station, TX 77843-1 111. Second class postage paid at College Station. TX 77843. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Battal ion. 216 Reed McDonald, Texas A&M University, Col lege Station TX 77843-4 111. business administration. Under the di rection of Dan Robertson, the program has grown immensely in reputation and size during the last decade. The average score <4n die GMA’I entrance exam now is above the 85th percentile. The curric ulum stresses accounting, business anal ysis, marketing, finance and manage ment. Students are groomed for management positions in large corpora tions, which recruit heavily evers spring. Unfortunately, the program ignores discussions of business ethics in almost all the core classes. This has occurred for several reasons. First, there is an em phasis on a practical “case study ap proach that steers students away from philosophical abstractions. Second, there is a prevailing belief in laissez faire capitalism among most members of the A&rM faculty. In the Gollege of Business Administration and the Department of Economics, most professors adhere to the “free market” school of thought. They believe that the role of govern ment in business should be limited so the economy can operate smoothly, un fettered hy excessive government regu lation. Free market economics also stresses the importance of the pricing mechanism as the best means for dis tributing scarce resources. Taken to an extreme, the free market approach holds that ethical decisions really shouldn’t exist as suc h in the mar ketplace. Governments mav cm force ethical behavior through regulation, but a single firm cannot afford to make an uneconomical ethical dec ision as long as it competes with other firms that will not. Rather, business decisions should he* guided h\ the priciple of maximizing t he shareholder’s equit\. Nationwide, MBAs are being taught the nuts and bolts of business adminis tration. But are thev ready to tackle- tough ethical dilemmas? I he answer is “no.” according to John Shad, former Securities and Ex change commissioner who currently serves as ambassadoi to the- Nether lands. He recently donated $30 million to Harvard Business School to promote business ethics. Shad is distressed about the number of I larvard grads who have done post graduate work in federal pen itentiaries. Most schools take ethics for granted in t heir curriculum, lliere are a ft, ceptions. \i Stanford Tniversilv,\ students arc* required totakeacod ethics. Othei prestigious instiiuij| sin h as the Wharton School ofBusiJ incorporate ethics into other busi courses. I hough n is unlikely that a 1 c lass in corporate ethics con the Gordon Geckos ol the world(| t aking in millions ol dollarsthruujl sidei trading, a businesscurrici emphasizes ethical standards asap fessional responsibilits uouldheli < ial. If it were adopted by mosti colleges and universities, such a® ulum might serve as a I cents worth." I don’t belong to any clubs, althoughli^l to, so 1 do not “directly" receive any of the student56^1 fee benefits. However, I do use the weight facilitiesai Ware Field I louse. 1 don’t want to complain about how uowded itgrt there (although it does), but I would like to tnakeasugj tion to the powers above (the hoard of regents). If oiihiJ cents, one dime to the < ommon man, was takenoutof $65.00 student service fee, that would generateISifiM my calculator is working correctly, to buying and rep some of the weights that have been damaged fromn wear and tear. T he $3J500 is not a major chunkofolj A&M budget, and I’m sure that A&M can afford ii men and women would appreciate it. I It ink about ii. Josh Putter ’88 Letters to the editor should not exceed TOO words in length. Tin 1 ts - stoves the right to edit letters fot style and length, hut will make event) maintetin the author's intent. L.aeh lettei must be .signed tnul must inclwltll si/nation, address and telephone numhet of the writer. 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