Newly minted Harvard MBAs, already violating ethics to make a buck
I had dinner tonight with a friend graduating from Harvard Business School tomorrow. Her family needs an extra ticket to the graduation ceremony. A fellow classmate is offering to sell her his spare ticket for $100. The catch? The administration has specifically told students they’re not allowed to sell tickets for cash, and if they do, their diploma can be withheld.
So under these clear unambiguous guidelines, our Fellow is already making a profit by acting against community standards. “But everyone does it” is, I’m sure, the rationalization. But it’s only a rationalization. I once hoped that places like Harvard would strive to instill in graduates a sense of duty to be an example of the highest standards of ethics and moral behavior. Nope. They aspire to get what they want, happily enjoying the privileges that come with the degree, yet stooping to the “everyone does it” excuse when asked to exercise a modicum of integrity.
“Everyone does it.” Imagine a world where “everyone” acted with honor, generosity, and trustworthiness. That’s a world where “everyone does it” might be a reason to follow the crowd.
Just read this today after reading a column on symbolic laws last Saturday - http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_6100731 - and watching the local news report last night on a ticket reseller about to open since Minnesota’s scalping laws are soon to expire.
Don’t know exactly what HBS is doing but can guess from what I have seen before. My guess: the same number of tickets are given to each student, this leaves some with too few and other with too many, HBS provides no mechanism for reallocation, the tickets are valuable, students will figure this out, and HBS figured out the preceding and decided to suppress the logical action that students would take.
okay, so paragraph two:
community standards - or reflections of rule makers beliefs?
everyone does it - or this rule seeks to prevent consensual transactions benefiting both sides?
strive to instill - agree but poor rule (and law) making undermines
Note: have read and enjoyed quite a few of these blogs. Even here there is a nice progression from specifics to generality to higher generality by paragraph.
June 14th, 2007 at 2:50 pm