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
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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
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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 <ornerstonf|
et hical responsibility.
In a societx that values the acini
tion of wealth above all else,mait
and business leaders sometimesl
< aught plas ing tightrope over at
ab\ ss Tear of getting caught:
be the- only guiding principleofi
behavior. Because today's business!
dents are tonimortovv's managers]
lead e i s. \ me i ica it c ol leges ne«
stress the importance oi moralrespJ
hilitv among business students.
Jtthn MacDougall is a graduatesu
and a columnist for The Battalion.
Mail Call
I want my School House Rock
EDITOR:
T his letter is to address one of the most pressing prob
lems in American society today. T his far outweighs the
problems with a president who isn’t sure what he knows, a
reporter and vice president fighting it out on TV, a prom
iscuous TV evangelist or even the loss of our beloved Rud
der Dining Room. The problem to which Em referring is,
of course, “What has become of our Saturday morning
television.”
In a better day one could get up on Saturday and have
many quality shows to choose from. Shows like “Fat Al
bert”, “The Superfriends” and of course “T he Bugs
Bunny and Road Runner Show” were just a few of the pos
sibilities. These shows aren’t on regulary anymore, and
this represents a great loss to the tykes of today. But per
haps the greatest loss is the “School House Rock” series.
Without this aid, how is a child, in his years of nurturing,
supposed to learn how a bill becomes a law or how Rufas
Xavier Sasparilla is supposed to use a pronoun.
So Ags, I beg of you two things. First, let me know why
I can’t have Bugs Bunny with my Gap’n Crunch and “holy,
Loly, Loly, Get your adverbs here.” Second, and more im
portant, write your congressman, write your president,
write your mom, and tell them to assert their influence to
save America’s youth before it’s too late.
Please bring hack our Tweety Bird our Road Runner,
our Wonder Twins, our weird Harold. T ake away the
pseudo-entertaining Gobots, Transformers, and
blue Smurfs.
(five me “School I louse Rock” or give me death.
John Monroe ’90
It’s your dime
EDITOR:
After reading about where my and im fellowstude®
student service fees go, 1 had to write and pul in mv>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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