Regarding the Wall Street financial mess, don't you wonder how top officers with MBAs from some of the highest-ranking business schools displayed such a lack of ethics?

Is saying "business and ethics" a contradiction in terms? Perhaps we have come to a crossroads between two attitudes on the subject.

One is that of Nobel Prize-winning Milton Friedman, who offered this oft-quoted declaration: "There is only one social responsibility of business: to use its resources to engage in activities designed to increase its profits as long as it engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

The other is that expressed by Robert Gates, then president of Texas A&M University and now U.S. secretary of defense, in the wake of the Enron scandal: "All of these cheats and thieves are graduates of our universities. The university community cannot avert its eyes and proclaim that is not our problem, that there is nothing we can do or that these behaviors are an aberration from the norm."

If a change of attitude is needed, where does that put schools of business, including those in the Pittsburgh region?

First, one needs to know that there is a continuing national debate about business education, with Pittsburgh in the thick of the argument.

One faction holds that the best way to teach proper conduct is to sprinkle ethics throughout economics, marketing, finance, accounting and other courses.

Another faction contends that this isn't enough -- that stand-alone ethics courses must be required for every business-school student.

National leaders for this latter viewpoint include William Frederick, now retired from the University of Pittsburgh's graduate business school, and two of his MBA proteges: Diane Swanson, now a professor at Kansas State University, and James Weber, founder of the Beard Center for Leadership in Ethics at Duquesne University.

Unfortunately, this Pittsburgh faction has been unsuccessful in persuading the national accrediting association, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, to accept the stand-alone ethics-course requirement. Many faculty members resist having their core curriculum "diluted" by ethics courses.

The latest report on the subject, from Bloomberg News, says only about one-third of U.S. business schools require stand-alone ethics courses. Whether the Wall Street meltdown will have any sway with the deans -- the real decision makers in the business-school association -- remains to be seen.

If one takes the stand-alone requirement as a gauge, the record in the Pittsburgh region is spotty. Duquesne clearly is out front, with an exemplary effort to inculcate ethics throughout the university. Every Duquesne student is required to take a three-credit ethics course.

In addition, Duquesne's Donahue Graduate School of Business requires every undergraduate to take a stand-alone business ethics course and every graduate student to take an applied business ethics course. Part of the school's mission is to prepare students to be "ethical business professionals and community leaders with an understanding of the global context of business and its social impact." No other business school in southwestern Pennsylvania is this rigorous on the subject.

Duquesne's influence goes beyond the university. The Beard Center every month or so hosts a lunch for the ethics compliance officers of the two dozen Pittsburgh corporations affiliated with the national Ethics & Compliance Officer Association. Included are such firms as Alcoa, Bayer, Consol, Highmark, PPG, U.S. Steel, and Union Switch and Signal. The agenda may be a lecture or a discussion on such topics as ways to investigate alleged unethical activity or to assess the overall ethical climate of a corporation.

Mr. Weber attaches the burgeoning of corporate interest in ethics to three dates. The 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act forbidding bribery abroad. The 1991 U.S. Corporate Sentencing Guidelines, which tightened once discretionary rules. And the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which, in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, added a host of new accounting requirements, including auditor independence, internal control assessment and enhanced financial disclosure.

Mr. Frederick believes that with globalization, ethics takes on a dimension beyond accounting and marketing practices. Corporations must act responsibly in dealing with the world ecosystem, for instance, whether the issue is global warming, population pressure, pollution, the preservation of rain forests and wildlife, and the like. Governments and international organizations alone cannot solve these problems, he says; corporations have a vital stake, too, for their own future as well as that of humanity.

Business must be a partner in such efforts, not a foot dragger, and must include a greater emphasis in MBA curricula on ethics, centering on stand-alone ethics courses. This clearly is needed to help rebuild public trust in the morality of America's business leaders.