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Business School Students Learn Lessons from the Classics
In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence contemplates corruption in the marketplaces of Verona, noting, "Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied; and vice sometimes by action dignified."
Business professors Samuel Seaman (pictured right) and Michael Williams repeat this quote often to students in their new "Virtue and Commerce" course at Pepperdine's Graziadio School of Business and Management. The issue of virtue and vice in Shakespeare's time still resonates with business ethics today, and in this revolutionary class the quote has become a compass for the study of ethical questions raised in both classic literature and modern business practices.
Four years ago Seaman and Williams put their heads together on a faculty retreat in Florence, Italy, and envisioned an opportunity for Pepperdine students to look at business ethics from different perspectives. They began to talk at length about what a course might look like that used literature exclusively – an intriguing and innovative idea for a business course that, to look at the required reading list, more closely resembles a Great Books class at Seaver College.
"We noticed that companies were still experiencing moral crises in spite of laws and codes of ethics," Seaman explains. "So we continued to think that laws and codes weren't really having the effect that we wanted to see and that really good moral behavior comes more from understanding your place in narrative."
While ethical debates circulate on the global warming crisis and corporate corruption, the pair was interested in how ethics applied to personal relationships can also translate into wise business behavior, and decided that the most profound questions on virtue can be found in literature. They researched the idea and launched the new course in Spring 2008 with such works of classic literature as C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man and excerpts from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov.
| "Virtue & Commerce" Reading List Selection |
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The Country Bunny and the On The Supposed Right to Lie The Abolition of Man Two Lovely Beasts & Other Stories Shooting an Elephant |
"It really asks questions of students, rather than lecturing them," Seaman says. "We talked to a number of the professors at Pepperdine who teach the Great Books courses and they discussed with us this 'shared inquiry' approach where the faculty don't go in as experts, but go in and ask the provocative questions. And even if the students ask questions, the attempt is to ask even deeper questions."
The course has been a learning experience for the professors and students alike. Neither Seaman nor Williams have backgrounds in literature; Seaman studies mathematics and analysis, and Williams technology. The students, long accustomed to studying numbers, facts, and statistics, struggled with the unquantifiable or ambiguous nature of literary texts. So Seaman and Williams adjusted their approach and incorporated articles, short stories, works of art, and selections of modern-day film and television.
The contemporary examples yielded surprising results, as in discussions of the television show House or the 2005 film Thank You for Smoking. In the latter Aaron Eckhart plays the chief spokesperson for a major cigarette company. Many students found themselves siding with Eckhart's anti-hero – a man peddling a product he knows is harmful, but who does his work to a high standard.
"Several identified with the character because he had a job to do," Seaman says. "Even though he didn't support smoking and didn't want his son to be a smoker, he took the job and it was his responsibility."
By the end of the semester the students had grown comfortable with the "gray area" of literature, and suggested that a future "Virtue and Commerce" course might stick with the classics.
"They overcame the ambiguity issues," Seaman says, "and really discovered that the pure narrative was what caused them to think most deeply about acting well and about virtue," which, as Friar Laurence noted, is a difficult characteristic to pin down. Shakespeare's subjects and business practitioners today both know that what is right for the world at large might not be in the best interests of the shareholders, to whom the business is ultimately responsible.
"There is an ethical obligation to the shareholders," Seaman explains. "If management decided to just give 10% of all profits to a nonprofit organization without consulting the shareholders then that is just as unethical as some other behaviors we discussed. A good balance is needed: there's the fiduciary obligation to shareholders, and also the obligation to behave well."
Though new to Pepperdine, similar courses have been pioneered at MIT and Stanford. After the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit unveiled their Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) in 2007, it's likely that more business schools will start similar programs. Seaman and Williams are proud of their achievement in pursuing this topic ahead of the crowd.
"Instead of doing things because there are rules to follow," Seaman says, the course was about doing them because "it is the right and virtuous thing to do. We talked about some of the key virtues, such as wisdom and courage. It's interesting because there's nothing wrong with making money, but people often go overboard and there's this excess in trying to make money."
Seaman and Williams plan to run the course again in Spring 2009 with a stronger focus on the philosophical and literary texts, while maintaining the open discussions that are so vital to any debate about ethics.
"We don't suggest that there are any right answers necessarily," Seaman maintains. "We're just asking the questions."
by Sarah Fisher
July 2008
