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By JANEAN CHUN

Business ethics isn’t an oxymoron yet. But ethics courses in business schools? The contradictions are endless.

With apathetic students, fumbling instructors, shortsighted curricula and self-serving business schools, the eternal question can ethics be taught? remains unanswered. As business schools grapple to figure out why they should care about their students’ ethics, the courses falter in an academic haze.

“Ethics courses don’t need fine-tuning. They need to be blown up and revamped,” says Judith Samuelson of the Aspen Institute. “To some extent, we’re not getting at why ethics matter to business.”

What obviously does matter to business is shareholder wealth. “The shareholder paradigm is very attractive, partly because it’s easy to measure,” says Samuelson. “It’s neat and easy to figure out the cost benefit when all you’re measuring is the bottom line of a company.”

The focus on short-term profit rather than long-term perspectives means hard-to-pin-down factors like ethics end up as sideline topics. In the long run, that lack of base teaching about right and wrong can harm how business is conducted in America.

A recent informal survey of students reported in Salon magazine found that students cite ethics as the biggest dud in their management training. Some students are quick to drop ethics courses when their workload gets tough. And those who are enrolled in ethics courses may be subliminally encouraged to respond in a way that is ethically correct rather than be completely honest about how they would really act.

When examining hypothetical dilemmas, even unethical people know what they are expected to say. In the Salon article, a Wharton student says, “Nobody wants to look like a shark,” while a Stanford student points out, “You’re never going to recreate an ethical dilemma in the classroom.”

Perhaps the burden of change is not on the ethics courses themselves, but on the business schools that concentrate on loading students in the skills they need to find a cushy Wall Street job.

Intentions were good at first. Samuelson points out that in the 1950s and early ’60s, an effort emerged to elevate business education from technical training to professional status. There was one glitch: While medicine, law and engineering were marked by a notion of service to a broader public, business education was essentially guided by the market. And business has no essential code of ethics, no formal cousin to the Hippocratic Oath. It can be argued that the idea of ethics courses arose to replicate a sense of moral standards.

However, ambition often prevails, in business schools just as much as, if not more than, in business. Business schools are perceived as a “gateway to greater compensation and a quick rise to the top as opposed to a gateway to manage complex institutions,” Samuelson says.

If the schools that feed Wall Street do offer ethics courses, it’s sometimes out of the fear that alumni who do not know the investment laws and regulations will eventually graduate from Wall Street to prison.

Certain schools have tried to innovate. Samuelson says New York University, Cornell, Kellogg and the University of Denver have done interesting work in ethics courses, while the University of Michigan is trying to embed a notion of the relationship between community and business early in the educational process, even as early as orientation.

But two elements are missing or underserved in the ethics curricula: an essential link between society and the bottom line; and a look to business’ present and future role as the most important national and global institution of our day. In other words, why it matters.

In the meantime, certain business leaders have assumed the vision for ethics that business schools lack. “Maybe the real education is going to happen not at the MBA level, but at the firm,” Samuelson says.

But delegating the burden of ethics education to corporations will not be acceptable for long. Ethics will not only become a more important aspect of business, it will be a more complex one, as businesses large and small continue to expand into global markets.

Making ethical decisions outside one’s country and culture requires a whole new level of thinking, and a much deeper understanding of social and business-related consequences. If ethics are not ingrained in people’s psyche at the MBA level or even earlier, the repercussions will most likely be as severe as current ethics curricula are convoluted.

Janean Chun is an editor of Entrepreneur magazine. Her e-mail address is [email protected]. She is a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com.