Doug Guthrie, Contributor

Dean of the George Washington University School of Business

Touting the benefits of corporate responsibility and principled leadership is de rigueur in U.S. business these days, especially to rebut and placate the media or government regulators whenever the latest corporate ethical lapse hits the headlines.

Paying lip service to corporate responsibility is fashionable, of course, because it seems there are so many lapses, both large and small. Assessed individually they are frequently tales of greed gone bad; assessed globally, they reveal a pattern of abuse that undermines the social compact corporations have with their stockholders, consumers and society.

Certainly, there are fine examples of corporate leaders who have taken the lessons of the last decade of corporate mischief and malfeasance to heart, and they have instituted a more conscientious ethos within their institutions. Ian M. Cook, chairman, president and CEO of Colgate-Palmolive, is a great example of a leader who thinks more about ethics, social responsibility and protecting the brand than he does about the limelight. Still, there are too many reluctant corporate chiefs waiting for the public and the media to grow weary of “ethics” so they can return to the go-go ‘90s where the rules were played fast and loose.

Business schools not only have a responsibility to keep this issue front and center—and to weigh these cases in the classroom—but also to lay the foundation for a more ethical business culture. By instilling a deep reservoir of knowledge about values and corporate responsibility in their students, business schools can develop a corps of ethical leaders who will build and command a more principled corporate culture in the future.

It has not always been this way in U.S. business schools. For the last 40 years our mission has been teaching students how to serve the bottom line first and foremost. Sadly, there were times we taught our students that the end result was more important than the means of how we got there.

Such an approach has been with us for more than half a century. As far back as 1962, economist Milton Friedman dismissed the notion that corporations had a responsibility to society. “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.” More than anyone else, Friedman issued in the era of shareholder capitalism that define the 1980s and early 1990s.

Yet social scientists and business professors have speculated about this social role since the beginning of the 20th century, debating the notion that companies have social obligations and responsibilities, including, but not limited to, obeying the law, avoiding harm and doing the right thing. Despite these conversations, there was little momentum to carry them forward into the greater business community as an operating principle—one that had the same weight as shareholder value. As a society, we were faithful to profit before all else.

The laundry list of scandals over the last decade, beginning with Enron and followed by sordid and illegal schemes in the mutual fund, insurance, investment banking and brokerage industries, tells a brutal story of deceit and avarice, and it points out our failure in academia to comprehend the profound connection between developing ethical business leaders in universities and operating ethical corporation.

On the heels of the Enron scandal, Harvard Business School was among the first U.S. management programs to see the link, and it quickly required its students take a course in leadership and corporate accountability as a prerequisite to graduation. Ironically it had offered a similar course in the 1950s and 1960s.

While at New York University’s Stern School of Business, another pioneer, I was lucky to work with colleagues Bruce Buchanan, Sally Blount and Batia Wiesenfeld who fought for, designed and taught courses like “Business and its Publics” and to have built a robust Business and Society Program. The emphasis in those efforts was on teaching students about their responsibilities as business leaders while also examining the role of ethics and the law in the marketplace.

The idea of incorporating a values curriculum of any kind into business pedagogy was suspect at the time. As one colleague told me back then, “Aren’t we reducing the blocking and tackling for the other stuff that’s basically window dressing?” I remember thinking at the time, “What if ethics and values are the blocking and tackling?”

The George Washington School of Business, my current home, launched its own Institute of Corporate Responsibility in 2006, long before I arrived, and its programming is aimed at bridging the gulf that sometimes exists between theory and reality by serving as a global center for scholarship on corporate responsibility and its dissemination. The school also went so far as to embed ethics into the core curriculum, something many business schools have stopped short of doing.

These are all programs worthy of praise, but business schools in the United States and around the world must align their curricula to emphasize corporate responsibility in the classroom and the boardroom. Ethics in business must not be a fad that disappears around the next corner of economic resurgence. The lesson of the last decade is that when ethics fails to temper economic passions we all suffer, from the individual to the corporation to the society.