Are students looking at their business future in terms of ethics, or is ethics just a necessary evil?
Murphy: I teach at a religiously based school (Notre Dame), so ethics and values are, I think, more central to the curriculum than at many universities. Still, I observe a certain ethical relativism such that, for example, it doesn’t matter if one fudges a little bit on a resume. As educators or instructors, we have to signal to students that it is a slippery slope. I’m also a big proponent of letting students know they need to align their personal values as closely as possible with the organization they join, or they’ll be unhappy and unproductive. Petry: I saw students coming into the university as relativists-that is, they didn’t know that they could make judgments about others. They confused tolerance with being nonjudgmental. A second observation is that many students, especially business students, believe that they’re going to have to cheat to win. One very positive trend is that more and more businesspeople, ethics officers, and executives are going to campuses to say, “What you
