Should the U.S. Government Have a Role in Elementary and Secondary Education?

In a speech in January 2015, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged a continued central role for the federal government in education policy. He said the president was proposing to increase federal spending on elementary and secondary schools by $2.7 billion; Congress had appropriated $67 billion to the U.S. Department of Education—with $23.3 billion for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—in the 2015 budget.[1]  Typically, debate on the federal government’s role had focused on the use of standardized tests in holding schools accountable. I submit that a self-governing people has a duty to consider the wider implications, such as the impact of a greater role on the federal system. Otherwise, unintended consequences may show up after it is too late to do anything about them.

The full essay is at "Federal Policy in Education."

Ethical Theory in Business Ethics Courses

It may seem like an oxymoron, but faculty administrators at even research universities can be hopelessly narrow-minded regarding knowledge and how it is to be conveyed. For example, how often are faculty members encouraged to give a lecture or two re-teaching material largely missed on exams (followed by another, shorter examination on that material)? Do faculty administrators work with faculty members in professional schools to see to it that the applied courses are not severed from their basic (i.e., more theoretical substratum) discipline? One of the secrets in the “sauce” at Yale’s professional schools (e.g., Law, Divinity, etc.) is this salience of the respective basic disciplines (e.g., political theory and theology, respectively). Synergy comes gushing through once the false dichotomy is recognized. Before I went to Yale, I was a masters and doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh, where the dichotomy was alive and well in the university’s social reality; I had to “walk back” the dichotomy myself as I discovered philosophy (and religious studies) while I was still studying business.

Business ethics was one of my doctoral fields of study at Pitt. The philosophy department there was at the time one of the best in the U.S., so used an elective to take my first course in the discipline. I began with two intro courses; before I knew it, I was taking junior and senior courses, such logic and philosophy of mind. The latter course turned out to be the most intellectually intense course I took in my 18 years as a university student (had I discovered philosophy in college, I would have three rather than five degrees). It occurred to me at the time to start taking ethical theory courses, as business ethics was one of my doctoral fields. Within philosophy, I gravitated to practical philosophy—in particular, to ethics, political theory, and philosophy of religion. I treated these as foundations for the field of business, government, and society in business.

It dawned on me that none of the business doctoral students concentrating in business ethics had taken an ethical theory course in philosophy. That is to say, I was stunned to find a subfield of ethics reduced to management. Ethics proper is a subfield of philosophy, not business; ergo, business ethics is ultimately grounded in philosophy, with managerial implications. I think business schools have put the cart before the horse and letting go of the horse. A cart without a horse isn't going to go very far (though perhaps it can go in circles).

From my educational experience, I contend that ethics courses in business schools ought to emphasize ethical theory, with managerial implications/applications used as much to illustrate the theories as to understand the ethical dimension of business. Managers in the business world have told me that business schools should do what corporate training cannot, rather than being duplicative. I think deans miss this point, perhaps because they are so oriented to sucking up to corporate managers in order to get corporate donations. In my own thinking, theory enlivens rather than detracts from praxis. I think business school faculties are in the grips of the false dichotomy. Corporate managers would doubtless admit that they are ill-equipped to teach ethical theory. Moreover, training is a better fit with what corporate folks do. Business schools, or else philosophy departments, could offer regular as well as continuing education courses in business ethics with ethical theory readings, lectures, and discussions going beyond the superficial “rights, utility, and justice” hackneyed reductionism of business ethics courses in business schools. 

Exclusivism Eclipses Veritas at Yale

Michael Simons, head of the cardiology department of the School of Medicine, made unwelcome sexual advances in writing to Annarita Di Lorenzo,  a researcher 18 years younger at the school in 2010. Simons wrote that he wanted to kiss the woman’s lips, and every part of her “body in every continent and city of the world.”[1] Referring to Frank Giordano, the woman’s boyfriend at the time and subsequently husband, Simon wrote that the woman was choosing the wrong man.  Simons would keep Giordano from important meetings and assignments. The relationship between the two men became so difficult that Jack Elias, the chairman of medicine, took over the direct supervision of Giordano to protect the untenured instructor from Simon.

Nevertheless, Yale’s provost, dismissed a university committee’s recommendation that Simons be permanently removed from his position in favor of an 18-month suspension. Faculty members claimed that Simons’ success in snagging $5 million annually from the U.S. Government in grants in 2012 and 2013 had been a factor, as well as the fact that the provost had been chair of the economics department, where Simons’ wife was a faculty member. The monetary element would not be lost on virtually any academic administrator at any university, but the “old boys club” sticky web of connections at the elitist Yale could mean that “outsiders” suffer considerable abuse there; the Provost’s dismissiveness of the university committee’s recommendation is but one indication of how distorted the moral compasses can be among the most powerful in the “club.”

As most Yalies undoubtedly know, incremental exclusivisms exist within Yale; the pleasure for a faculty member in being selected to a higher post and a student in being “tapped” to join one of the secret societies strangely depends in no small measure on being able to see others excluded (i.e., hurt). In other words, rather than finding the sheer opening of a door to be fulfilling, the true pleasure lies in watching the door hit others in the ass the hinges swing back.

For example, as a student at Yale, I spent an “all-nighter” going through the admissions ritual of one of the debating parties in the Yale Political Union. Once I was in, the party’s chairman suggested that I attend a party that would be on an upcoming Friday night. “The party owns a secret society,” he explained to me, “so you and all other guys in the party can join the society.” Assuming that I would be able to join the society too, I cancelled my preexisting plans and attended the party, which was in a room half way up the university’s clock tower. In actuality, only three people were tapped. They had all been officers in the party’s elite, so I quickly realized that the chairman had wanted me to attend not because I would be tapped, but, rather, in order to watch his friends being selected. The chairman subsequently lied to party-members—saying that I had misunderstood him. Whereas most party members in such a situation typically resigned with great fanfare during one of the weekly debates, I did not resign; instead, I simply had nothing to do with the party or its little cadre of officers. To this day, I am a member of a party in the Yale Political Union.

My point is that deceit used to protect the club within the club at Yale is not a rare deed. Perhaps you can grasp more fully why De Lorenzo may have felt no avenue left to her but to leave the university,  why her husband’s career was effectively stalled by a jealous faculty administrator, and why the provost dismissed the committee’s recommendation. The pyramidal exclusivism within Yale is so strong that unfairness and even outright aggression may seem justified to some.

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1. Tamar Lewin, “Handling of Sexual Harassment Case Poses Larger Questions at Yale,” The New York Times, November 1, 2014.

Can Ethical Leadership Be Taught?

Can ethical leadership be taught? In the typical business school, this question would be interpreted, or “refurbished.” Can students be trained to become ethical leaders? While often conflated contemporaneously, these two questions are indeed distinct. Instructors, professors and school administrators should first decide which question is more relevant to their purposes. The question chosen should fit with the education, pedagogical method, and philosophy of education of not only the instructor or professor, but also the school itself. In this essay, I distinguish the two questions in order to unpack them with their full significance.

The question, Can ethical leadership be taught, can be interpreted as being centered on knowledge of the concept and theories of ethical leadership. Can this particular knowledge be taught? That is to say, if a student were to ask, What is ethical leadership? could the instructor or professor answer with a definition? Have scholars even come up with an agreed-up definition? More broadly, how does ethical leadership as a concept differ from that of leadership more generally? Do theories of ethical leadership explain it rather than merely being oriented to how to? Furthermore, do any extant theories relate the concept to other, related concepts such as strategic leadership or even strategy? If so, can such theories be taught to the students at a particular level of education? Last but not least, would teaching the theories toward an understanding of what ethical leadership is be in line with the approach of the particular business school? Some schools are more commercially-oriented than others.

The pedagogical goal in line with the question of whether the knowledge we have on ethical leadership can be taught is that students know more about ethical leadership as a phenomenon. Studying ethical leadership in applications, as for instance through case studies, is oriented here to understanding more about the concept through how it is exercised in practice. To be sure, praxis (i.e., in practice) cannot capture the entirety of a given concept. Accordingly, the case studies and even in-class simulations are secondary here.

Moreover, whether or not the students are more able to become ethical leaders themselves is theoretically separate even if, as Plato wrote, knowing to do the good is all one needs to do it on a regular basis. In other words, understanding what ethical leadership is may contribute toward a student being able to practice ethical leadership, but this byproduct is not the immediate goal in getting students to understand what ethical leadership is. In this perspective, moreover, a business school’s faculty studies the phenomenon of business so as to understand it better.

Alternatively, a business school may be oriented to training its students to be practitioners of particular skills in business. Here, the question of whether teaching ethical leadership can facilitate or enhance a student’s ethical leadership skills in practice is relevant. Crucially, we have shifted qualitatively from education to training—from knowledge to skills.

In their article on teaching ethical leadership, Carla Millar and Eve Poole point to character, or moral intuition, as being improvable in the classroom setting if experiential learning is used.[1] Whereas case studies involve examining how someone else exercised, or should have exercised, ethical leadership, experiential learning focuses on the decision-making in the student. “How would I handle this situation,” according to the authors, stimulates a student’s own moral compass, which in turn can facilitate the student’s skills in ethical leadership. Here, how is the operative question word, as it befits skill as primary.

Millar and Poole can be criticized for treating a simulation in a classroom as a “real” situation. Relatedly, lab experiments in psychology are not in the “real” world, so the artifacts of the lab environment must be taken into account in analyzing the data. Even if a simulation or putting the students in the place of an ethical leader in a case study gets the students to get an experiential sense of how to be an ethical leader, it is quite a leap to propose that such classroom activities make students more ethical or more inclined to be ethical should they become leaders. Ethical leadership is not like typing. Therefore, I think Plato’s approach is superior even though it puts knowledge of a phenomenon first. This would be ironic.

In terms of institutional conflicts of interest, being able to recognize them in practice, which is presumably preliminary to an ethical leader being able to avoid them, depends on first knowing what an institutional conflict of interest is. What is the relation between the two roles in a conflict of interest? How do they differ? What is a conflict of interest? Is such a conflict unethical even if it is not exploited?  The scholarly literature is split on this last question. Using case studies to learn how to handle institutional conflicts of interest depends on the student to generalize across a sufficient number of cases to figure out what a conflict of interest is. Most likely, however, an instructor simply assumes that presenting a few conflicts of interest to the students is sufficient for recognition purposes, and thus for being able to deal with them. The problem with this approach is that understanding in necessary for recognition beyond the few cases a student has studied. Moreover, studying what a conflict of interest is makes it more likely that a student will take them more seriously, ethically speaking.

It should be pretty obvious where I stand with respect to the two approaches. I contend that paradoxically learning what we know of an applied concept is the best means of enabling students to use the concept in praxis. Abstract knowledge and praxis are synergistic rather than antithetical. If I am correct here, then business school deans who are under the impression that companies want the schools to train future employees are not even serving those companies well by replacing education with training. Generally speaking, if something looks too convenient, it probably is better to take a more arduous route.

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[1] Carla Millar and Eve Poole, “Business Schools Are Failing to Teach Ethical Leadership,” The Guardian, November 26, 2010.

The Sopranos Hit Higher Education: A Case of Academic Politics on Steroids

Academic politics is a staple of university life. What happens when the blood sport gets out of hand may surprise even hardened university heavy-weights, not to mention the general public. I contend that the sordid fraud and other aggressive lies are of the sort that, when manifesting societally, can easily trigger political protests, which in turn can turn enforcers of the law into violators with impunity. The dynamics were on full display in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014. A common denominator does indeed exist: the propensity of human nature to abuse a monopoly of power and to view other people as objects rather than ends in themselves.

The entire essay is at "Political Protests"

Business Culture Forming Higher Education

“Publish or perish” is the infamous mantra of those intrepid scholars who work at research universities and many prestigious Liberal Arts & Sciences colleges dotting the map of the world. The need to demonstrate regular output is perhaps nowhere more stressed (hence, stress) than in the United States. As if the declining number of tenure positions (amid increasing reliance on adjuncts, not coincidentally) at colleges and universities in the U.S. were not enough of a challenge for the newly-minted doctors aspiring to the intellectual freedom that goes with the protection of tenure, that the young scholars are increasingly being subjected to an "assembly-line" process wherein faculty administrators treat their junior colleagues' published journal articles like chocolates on a conveyer belt puts scholarship at odds with itself and thus is utterly self-defeating from the standpoint of society gaining new knowledge.

Notre Dame’s business school, for example, requires two academic articles per year of its scholars who come up for tenure. That particular regiment teems with the oily scent of production management awkwardly being applied to a sort of ethereal assembly line that mechanistically combines ideas at regular intervals. As if subprime mortgages going into financial derivative securities (i.e., bonds), the compound ideas are themselves bundled into at least two major “salable products” per year, like clockwork. Such a rationalized, linear process hardly befits the mind of a scientist, social “scientist,” or philosopher. The process of ideational development (i.e., theory construction) can require sudden bursts of inspiration and imagination, stimulated by some good old-fashioned mind-wandering aided by the gentle push of reasoning.[1]

 Can scholarship be "produced" as though the ideas were on an assembly line?    

Image Source: www.prophecy1.com

Cramming a scholar’s methodology through a “meat-grinder” business model is like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Superimposing “cookie-cutter” production management tools onto scholarship can be expected to result in mediocre work that only incrementally adds to an existing paradigm. Put another way, the approach is not apt to result in another Kant or Einstein, and that's a pity considering how much computer technology could facilitate the scholarship of a great mind.

Enabling the category mistake, not just a few business schools pretend to be businesses, trimming the fecundity of true scholarship off like scrap metal in a factory. Primped-up grizzled suits (i.e., professors who play the part of “corporate executive” aided by a corporate script) pass like whispers through muffled corridors of fresh carpet to train future expert-consultants and managers with the aid of easily-memorizable power-point presentations standing in for lectures. Returning to well-ordered offices with comfortable chairs and only a few carefully stacks of papers on the desk-tops, the “scholars” write what they hope will be pleasing to the practitioners who read the “professional” journals and hire consultants.

With the deepening and widening of human knowledge being presumed readily regularizable temporally into distinct units of production, moreover, the work of a university employee ostensibly tasked with scholarship succumbs to the hegemony of business values. Those include the sheer constancy of monetized worth, as effected, for instance, by the regular output of ideas or automobiles. Moreover, monetization is held aloft as the criterion, fully capable of turning every thing (and person) into a commodity.

I suspect that people around the world, particularly in Europe, would graciously point to the hypertrophic importance that Americans attach to barren metal (i.e., money) and business mores or practices (e.g., being “professional”). In fact, this over-reach of business values in American culture may be spreading to Europe in the guise of avant-garde trends.

Months before the arrival of the turbulent twentieth century, John Watson (1850-1907), a European theologian and clergyman publishing under the pseudonym of Ian Maclaren, put his prescient observations of American culture to paper:  

“The friendly visitor to the United States, who is proud of her achievements and delighted by her brightness, stands aghast at the open and unabashed front of secularity. It seems to him as if not merely coarse and unlettered men, whose souls have never been touched, either by religion or by culture, but that all men, with a few delightful exceptions, bow the knee to this golden calf, and do it homage. Nowhere is there such constant and straightforward talk about money, nowhere is such importance attached to the amount of money which a man has acquired or possesses, nowhere is it taken so absolutely for granted that the object of a man’s work is to obtain money, and that if you offer him money enough he will be willing to do any work which is not illegal; that, in short, the motive power with almost every man is his wages. One is struck, not so much by what is said in plain words (although a dollar is a monotonous refrain in conversation), as by what is implied, and what is implied is this: that if you know the proper sum, any man can be induced to do what you want, even though his health, and his rest, and his family, and his principles, stand in the way.”[2]

More than a century later, European society would be more secular than its American counterpart. Proportionately, many more Americans attend a religious service on a weekly basis. Additionally, the explosion of mega-churches in several of the U.S. states did not translate into a corresponding “growth” in E.U. states. Even so, Watson’s description of the American obsession with income and wealth as necessary and decisive in the valuing of others and oneself resonates with what I have observed. Judging from the reactions of people from abroad, I get the sense that many Americans—especially those working in the business world—do indeed go overboard rather uniquely in reducing personal value to that which can be measured by how much money someone has in a bank account. Just as Watson intended to help rather than beat up on American society, I too want to see more balance as befits the heterogeneity of values that is at home in human nature.

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1. Hence the “absent-minded professor” label.

2. Ian Maclaren, “The Shadow on American Life: An Impression of a Recent Visit,” The Outlook, 63 (September 9, 1899), pp. 116-18.

Teaching Business Ethics Beyond Skill and Tactic

At the end of March 2010, Warren Buffet spoke to business students at Columbia University.  One asked the billionaire whether being ethical in business comes from how a person is raised or out of a business ethics course.  Buffet quickly answered that it is learned in the home. I concur.

A business ethics course properly understood is not prescriptive; rather, knowledge of ethical principles is learned and applied to topics in business as well as to business systems (domestically and comparative). Although understanding itself can change behavior, academic study is not geared to making a student more ethical. The focus, in other words, of an instructor or professor of business ethics ought to be on imparting knowledge rather than skills that somehow turn people into ethical human beings.

Following bullet-points on how to make ethical decisions, for example, does not make one ethical, just as the manipulation of symbols according to rules does not constitute understanding. Rather, for a person who is inclined to consider the ethical dimension at work or more generally, knowing more about ethics can come into play.

It follows that business ethics is not a skill or a list of tactics; education is not vocation. Paradoxically, understanding ethical principles and explaining their relevance to business is of value not only academically in terms of a college education, but also practically in terms of a career. In other words, knowing more about something—being able to explain it—is best for one’s practice.

For example, explaining why (not just how) there is a the structural conflict of interest in the rating agencies getting paid by the issuers—indeed, knowing what a structural conflict of interest is—facilitates recognizing such conflicts when they occur. Such a recognition is essential for a business practitioner who wants to make sense of an uncomfortable situation that is in actuality an institutional or individual conflict of interest. Moreover, if more of a given electorate understand and can recognize conflicts of interest, it is more likely that the elected representatives will enact legislation that obviates such conflicts. A viable republic is predicated on an educated and virtuous electorate.

That the Dodd-Frank Act of financial reform retains the issuer-pays system—relying almost exclusively on the rating agencies’ internal controls to somehow counter the temptations from the system itself—may mean that neither the general public nor the members of Congress sufficiently understood the nature of a structural conflict of interest when the law was written and enacted. Had more constituents understood the structural depth of the conflict in the issuer-pays arrangement itself, perhaps Sen. Dodd and Rep. Frank would have been able to resist the pressure from Wall Street and the rating agencies in order to root out the underlying cause of the conflict of interest.

Obviating the conflict of interest involving the rating agencies may not be as easy as it seems; even an investor-pays arrangement could involve a conflict of interest in that rating agencies would have an interest in rating an issue such that enough investors purchase it that the agency can realize a profit. Analyzing various alternatives for indications of institutional conflicts of interest would be a good means for students of business ethics to gain a better understanding of the nature of an institutional conflict of interest.

In short, short-circuiting knowledge by reducing education to vocation is paradoxically not in the interest of business; a business school in a university is not a corporation’s training center. Therefore, business professors and instructors should not conflate what they are with what they are studying and teaching. Even in terms of consulting, coming from a vantage-point that does not duplicate a corporate perspective (yet can relate knowledge to it) can be particularly valuable to managers. Ethically speaking, the most expedient route is not always the best of all possible worlds.