No reports as yet of furious anti-bankers hurling bricks through business school windows. But business schools the world over are licking their wounds after being as close as they probably ever will come to being victims of a public witch-hunt. It is business schools, after all, which flooded the banking world with graduates of their prestigious MBA courses. They then helped the economy to nosedive.
One US website recently dubbed business schools the "academies of the apocalypse" and named and shamed dozens of international high-flying MBAs - "toxic bankers and scammers" - from Harvard MBA graduate Henry Paulson, secretary of the treasury under President Bush, who spoke vehemently against government regulation of Wall Street, to deposed HBOS chief executive Andy Hornsby.
So, were business schools responsible? "Collectively, no," says Jonathan Slack, chief executive of the Association of Business Schools (ABS), which represents all 114 UK business schools. "Although, hands up, yes, people with MBAs got into high positions in banks and were involved in high risk-taking."
Supporters argue that business schools have been - and still are - instilling business leaders with a corporate social responsibility (CSR) ethic. As important as profit margin and growth, they say, is a need to be socially sustainable, be it through environmental protection, gender and race equality, workforce rights, or avoidance of destructive risk-taking.
When greed was good
David Crowther, professor of CSR at Leicester business school, points out that the teaching of CSR and business ethics has been commonplace over the last 10 years - well before the banking mayhem. "[The financial crisis] was based on the behaviour of people who went to business schools 15 to 20 years ago, in the time of Thatcherism and Reaganism, when greed was good. We don't teach like that now - it's changed," he says.
Slack echoes this. "CSR is a core part of all business programmes ... and is moving up the agenda to the mainstream." Indeed, the most recent ABS annual report glows with examples of how UK business schools are "stepping up to the plate" and "researching heavily" into teaching CSR and sustainability. Almost all have a CSR focus somewhere in their MBA curriculum.
But some argue an overly rosy picture is being presented, and that business schools should not step back from acknowledging their part in corporate business culture, including the current crisis. "The financial crisis was not solely due to our graduates from 15 to 20 years ago," argues Hugh Willmott, research professor in organisation studies at Cardiff business school. "The younger generation who designed and dealt in complex derivatives instruments came out of business schools ... Business schools were involved."
Some academics are angry at what they say is a failure by business schools to reflect sufficiently deeply on a corporate risk-taking culture and regulatory failure. "There has been absolutely no fundamental rethinking of the business curriculum as a result of this crisis," says Dr Stefano Harney, director of global learning at the school of business and management at Queen Mary, University of London. "British business schools are behaving like ageing Latin American dictators after the cold war. Abandoned by all, even the US, they fight on, continuing to proclaim the theology of free markets and maintaining an anachronistic anti-socialist vigilance."
Harney says there is a failure to root CSR and business ethics firmly into courses. According to the Association of MBAs, just 20% of UK MBA courses have a mandatory CSR module. Otherwise it's elective. So, if a student doesn't fancy dedicated CSR, they duck out of it.
Slack points out that business schools are coming under pressure to make CSR modules mandatory. "I think you'll see more business schools doing it," he says.
But Harney demands more - including embedding CSR and ethics into all MBA modules. "This means placing responsibility and ethics inside modules that might seem most technical, like financial management and accounting, or e-marketing, not letting such principles be fenced off in a separate module," he says. "The global supply chain manager who does not monitor labour standards is unqualified for her job, and the human resource manager who is not honest with employees about the workload implications of new organisational structures fails to meet the minimum standards of his job."
But while MBAs have been top of the critics' hit list, what of the 400,000 annual UK undergraduate students who embark on a business or business-related course? It is argued that they should also engage more with CSR and ethics.
At Warwick business school, professors Alessia Contu and Andre Spicer are setting a benchmark for what a hands-on approach to teaching business ethics and CSR to undergraduates could look like.
Ethics and business
As a research project, 20 management undergraduates were asked to study ethics, democracy and human rights, and to meet international businesspeople working in CSR. These included representatives from accountancy group KPMG and the Suma workers' co-operative. Students then investigated Warwick University's CSR credentials and presented their analysis. It examined how the university performs on everything from CO2 emissions policy to the quality of student counselling services, to its relationship with companies such as Coca-Cola and BAE Systems.
Moves are afoot for CSR research to be incorporated into Warwick master's courses in business and management, which have no mandatory CSR module.
"To have undergraduate management students working in a real-life CSR project ... is rare in a business school," says Contu. "It's been a chance for our students to investigate what ethics, politics and responsible governance entails and how they operate in the institutions around them. It means students face directly the dilemma of what it means to be socially responsible."
Willmott welcomes CSR being pushed up the political agenda. "It increasingly means corporations can be vulnerable to claims that they are not being responsible enough," he says.
Yet there are questions about what CSR should be. What of a company with an excellent history of philanthropy but which engages in creative accounting to circumvent tax? Is it socially responsible?
Harney finds it "disturbing" that 98% of papers in the top 20 business and management academic journals "do not acknowledge the relationship between business practice and war, global violence or population displacement". Slack considers these an "extreme subset of CSR issues".
Contu sees such tensions as reflecting the "different political ideas and world views being played up within the CSR field". "It is a political battlefield over what our students should learn as valuable and relevant," she says. "And the decisions on what is included in our business school curricula are symptomatic of such a battlefield."