Feedback from “Myths”

by Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.
www.RSDsolutions.com
mailto:info@RSDsolutions.com

As outlined in a previous blog “Business School Myths” (July 25, 2010), I was to present this paper to an academic conference in Cambridge. I did so last week (and thus the absence of new blogs as I was too busy enjoying the pub life of England and Scotland).

The overall feedback was very positive, but the one flash point was the “myth” that ethics is teachable. This “myth” significantly upset a lot of commentators who clearly believed that ethics was teachable – in fact they were doing so!

One participant went so far to give me the following “lesson”. To wit – “I teach ethics and it is effective! For example I teach my university students that plagiarism is wrong, and one student who handed in an assignment wrote at the end of it that he was sorry that he plagiarized most of the assignment.”

After I got through the emotions of horror and sadness, I had to laugh. The horror was for the fact that (some) University students need to be taught that plagiarism is wrong. The sadness was for this poor soul of a professor who thought she was being effective when in fact she was being anything but effective (the student still plagiarized). The laughter was for the absurdity of the whole thing.

I believe the Jesuits in early North America were basically right when they said “Get the boy before he is 6 and you have him for life”. While you might question whether our ethics are formed by 6, 12 or 18, the point is that by the time you have reached working age, your ethics are pretty well set in stone. Having a university course in ethics is not going to change anything, so let’s just forget about wasting time on that issue.