Television audiences were treated to the latest installment of the corporate executive "perp walk" as ex-Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay last week was led, handcuffed, from an FBI office to a federal courthouse in Houston where he pleaded not guilty to fraud, conspiracy and other criminal charges related to the scandal-ridden company's bankruptcy.

	Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Diane Swanson, an associate professor of business at Kansas State University -- "[Ethics] can be very messy. It's never perfectly right. It's not like a profit equation on the computer ... so people are put off by it." Click photo for larger image. Related article Corporate fraud probers reach high-water mark by reeling in one big fish

Later that same day, a New York jury found Adelphia Communications Corp. founder John Rigas and his son, Timothy, guilty of conspiracy and securities fraud charges that stemmed allegations they looted their cable company's finances.

When Diane Swanson heard those news reports, she immediately wondered if Lay's very public indictment and the Rigases' conviction might provide a nudge to business schools that don't include ethics courses in their required curriculum. "I'm personally interested to see if the deans of those schools are going to wake up and say, 'Hey, we've got a lot of curriculum revisions to do.' "

Swanson, 54, who earned her doctorate in business from the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business, is an associate professor of business at Kansas State University and is chair of that school's business ethics education initiative. She's lobbied for the last several years for business schools to require ethics courses as a condition of accreditation.

A 2003 survey of BusinessWeek magazine's and The Wall Street Journal's 13 highest-ranked U.S. business schools found that only about half make ethics a required course. "That leaves thousands of [business] students without an ethics requirement," Swanson said.

In her classes at KSU, Swanson uses actual cases, including Adelphia and Enron and other accounting scandals involving Tyco and WorldCom, as teaching tools. Discussions focus on "the time-honored social contract between business and society," the responsibilities business leaders have "to stakeholders, investors and consumers," and "the government's role in the mix," she said.

Her courses also cover Securities and Exchange Commission regulations for publicly traded companies, federal sentencing guidelines and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which establishes standards for public accounting reform and corporate governance.

Unlike quantitative areas of business that have clear solutions, ethics "can be very messy. It's never perfectly right," said Swanson. "It's not like a profit equation on the computer ... so people are put off by it."

Swanson, a Kansas native whose teaching career includes stints at Old Dominion University, the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown and Robert Morris University, lived in Pittsburgh for a decade beginning in the mid-1980s while she worked on her doctorate in business at Pitt's Katz Graduate School of Business.

That's when her interest in business ethics was piqued. Swanson attended a seminar featuring Bill Frederick, a now-retired Pitt ethics specialist, and decided that ethics was a natural fit with her ideas about how human values relate to business.

She and Frederick worked together on Campaign AACSB -- an effort to make ethics a required course by the Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business, the agency that accredits business degree programs.

Though the campaign rallied support from 200-plus business professors and a couple of professional groups, AACSB has failed to act to date on the recommendation.

Still, Swanson is continuing her efforts through published papers and Internet communications. And she keeps close track of schools that have ethics courses or are in the process of adding them.

High on her list of schools doing a commendable job of exploring ethics is Duquesne University. Its Beard Center for Leadership in Ethics in the graduate business school "is soaring in ethics education; [it's] moving into a [national] leadership spot."

Students in Duquesne's master in business administration program have an ethics course requirement, as do students earning an undergraduate business degree at the school.

Swanson also gives high marks to Carnegie Mellon University, which requires an ethics course for MBA students, offers several ethics electives and maintains an ethics research center, the Center for International Corporate Relations.

Other universities she holds up as leaders in ethics education include Penn State, Pennsylvania, Virginia, George Washington and Colorado at Boulder.

But she's disappointed with Pitt, where the Katz School dropped ethics as a requirement for full-time MBA students several years ago. The school still offers an ethics elective to those students and requires its part-time MBA students to take an ethics course, said Katz spokesman Barry Kukovich. "Our goal is to spread ethics through all the courses in the school," he said.

Swanson argued that that approach doesn't work. "With only a little piece of ethics in human resources or management, how do students connect the dots? It would be like scattering economics across the curriculum."

Swanson was in Pittsburgh last week to visit family and was shopping on South Craig Street in Oakland when she heard a radio report about Lay's surrender to authorities and his not-guilty plea.

She said publicity surrounding that case as well as the Rigases' recent trail "helps the public reconnect [to the scandals] and see the commitment on the U.S. Department of Justice's part to get corporate criminals ... and to go to the top. It sends a message that we have to pay attention and that the government is responding to this earthquake of corporate crime."