A Kansas State University professor says the nation’s universities — including Kansas University — are falling short when it comes to teaching students about ethics in business.

Diane Swanson, associate professor of management and business administration, said less than half of top business schools required students to take ethics courses. That, she said, is cause for concern in the wake of such corporate scandals as Enron and WorldCom.

“I think it should shock the public given all the damage that has come from illegal and unethical corporate conduct,” Swanson said. “Students need a course to explain their future business responsibilities.”

But Paul Mason, business professor at Kansas University, said KU offered a popular elective course in business ethics. Although that course isn’t required, there are other ways for students to learn about business ethics, he said.

“I teach a class in accounting, and every chapter has a section at the end on ethical issues in the area we’re talking about,” Mason said. “It’s more of an application to the discipline.”

Swanson’s most recent study was an audit of the nation’s top business schools. Three required an ethics course, four required a course that combined ethics with another subject and the remaining seven have no ethics requirement.

Similarly, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business said only about a third of U.S. business schools offered ethics as a separate course.

Swanson noted that after the recent business scandals President Bush issued a press release urging business schools to be “principled teachers of right and wrong, and not surrender to moral confusion and relativism.”

She is working with a group of colleagues across the country to persuade the association to require at least one ethics course as a condition for accreditation.

“Provosts and presidents of universities should make sure they require a business ethics course,” she said. “They shouldn’t wait for faculty to form committees and hold meetings. They should take immediate action.”

K-State has required undergraduate business students to take an ethics course since 1967.

Mason, who teaches KU courses in ethics and financial fraud, said he didn’t challenge Swanson’s findings. But he said they didn’t paint a complete picture of ethics education.

He said business professors at KU had made a conscious decision to include more real-world examples of ethics cases in their classes.

“We like to say here we teach classes that are torn from the headlines,” he said. “I bet we do more in coverage in our courses in four years than they do in one semester in a course.”