McCombs TODAY

Austin American-Statesman, Feb. 28, 2009

By Eli P. Cox III, Professor of Marketing, Director of the Business Honors Program

It is tempting to respond to Thomas Palaima’s recent ad hominem attack on corporate culture with more of the same. However, such a response would trivialize the serious issues facing the University of Texas.

First, should UT act as a meritocracy rewarding excellence and competing in the market place for the best students, faculty, staff, administrators and donors? Does UT have aspirations to be one of the top universities in the world? If the answer is yes, then we necessarily place ourselves in competition with universities possessing similar aspirations and must devote a competitive level of resources to these activities. We do not always prevail in this competition, as the loss of Chancellor Mark Yudof and President Robert Berdahl illustrates. Additionally, UT consistently loses top undergraduate applicants, especially disadvantaged minorities, who find it less expensive to attend Harvard or Stanford.

Though the question of compensation is a critical one for a flagship university, the more serious issue concerns the university’s role in training good public citizens whether they study business or not. Former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman wrote a provocative book titled “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.” Kronman argues liberal arts education used to instruct people on how to engage in ethical behavior. Today there is pressure in the arts, like the sciences, to engage in publishable scholarly research. In addition, it is de rigueur that professors maintain their objectivity, avoiding the expression of value judgments in the classroom. Consequently, students may plagiarize on a term paper discussing the ethics of Immanuel Kant without seeing the irony. Sadly, we’re seeing our graduates in all walks of life who learned little about ethical decision-making during their undergraduate years.

The concept of economic man, Homo economicus, originated in economics but has extended to other social sciences. A Dictionary of Economics by Oxford University Press describes the economic man as: “A person who is entirely selfish and entirely rational.” In presenting his model of the legal justice system, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker indicates that he follows “the economists’ usual analysis of choice and assumes that a person commits an offense if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could get by using his time and other resources in other activities.” In “Capitalism and Freedom,” Milton Friedman, another Nobel Prize winner, states that: “No society can be stable unless there is a basic core of value judgments that are unthinkingly accepted by the great bulk of its members.”

If Becker is correct in saying that we are amoral and Friedman is correct that society is stable when most of us are moral, then we professors in both liberal arts and business have our work cut out for us. No professor should take the moral sidelines when things are falling apart around us.

Incidentally, rooms at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center are available for as little as $85.