Ensuring Students Are Good Citizens

December 2015

Leadership-Lessons-From-a-Founding-Dean  Preparing-a-Global-Workforce  The-Value-of-AACSB-Accreditation  Ensuring-Students-Are-Good-Citizens

Highlights from this Segment

Q: As management education looks to the future, what roles and challenges do you see business schools embracing, within a broader societal context?

A: Back in 2006, AACSB had an initiative called Peace Through Commerce. A lot of business schools jumped on that because they realized that business schools were turning out students going into the workforce and that they had an obligation to ensure that their students were good citizens.

  • A lot of organizations as well as business schools are getting students from all over the world coming from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds who have various value systems. When they come to our schools to get educated, we have to look at our models of ethics and our paradigms to make sure they are appropriate for sending students into a global workforce.
  • We have to ask ourselves, with students who go out into this global workforce to seek employment—perhaps in countries other than their home countries, and often with a Western perspective—what kind of paradigms are those corporations using?
  • If our student body is becoming more diverse, should we be hiring more diverse faculty? Should we be engaging corporations from other countries to see what their paradigms are to help us enhance ours?
  • As leaders, we have to look at the different models we’re using now and see if we need to adjust them, adapt them to a changing workforce, and that’s our role as deans of business schools.