The mood is upon our MBA schools once more. Happened after Enron and it’s happening again. The B-School Boys are running around like insider traders with their expert networks cut off, squawking about how many of their graduates are going to the slammer for financial sleaze. What to do? What to do?

So once again here’s this horseshit about changing the curriculum to make the guys compassionate, caring and the rest of the c‘s: We’re going to create “leaders of competence and character, rather than just connections and credentials.”

Here’s how we’ll do it: We’ll take really smart 25-year-olds who should have learned basic morality when the rest of us did – when we were five – and we’re going to put them in groups and make them work together and this will make them caring compassionate competent and characterlicious. Plus we’re going to make them take courses in which we lecture them on right and wrong and how right, even if it earns you less money, is better than wrong.

***************************

Okay. So listen to UD on this one. It’s very late in the day, they’re entering a global capital market of a certain sort, etc., etc. There’s only one way you can get the attention of these guys. It’s cheap and it doesn’t involve messing with the curriculum. Actually it costs nothing.

Inaugurate a Guest Lecture series in which famous financial felons are whisked from prison for the day to talk to the guys. The felons get a little time off their sentences for each gig. If they turn out to be strong motivational speakers, they get lots of gigs and get lots of time taken off.

Since there will be a strong market in this activity, and since our jails are full of financial felons, MBA students have an embarrassment of riches speaker-wise. Each semester they must choose, from twenty guest felons, three talks to attend. Make it two. Make it four. But it’s a requirement. You have to go to some of these shows.

The felons do what Gore Vidal calls “a patter of penitence,” put up scary PowerPoints of them still in their gym shorts being led away in handcuffs, talk about how many people’s lives they’ve ruined, etc., etc.

If at some point in their presentation they are unable to cry – not loudly, but in a quiet manly way that the guys will relate to – the school should not ask them back. The idea is to scare the fuck out of the guys, and to appeal to what vestigial human emotions they may have left.

*****************************

As is always the case in stories like this, Harvard University is the focus. So let me address myself to that institution in particular.

If President Faust wants her MBA students to care about corporate responsibility, here’s what she does:

1. Hand a significant chunk of Harvard’s close to thirty billion dollar endowment over to global charities. If you spend it down, your own institution will look less douchey.

2. Acknowledge that your predecessor was a scandalously acquisitive capitalist who, as president, modeled that behavior for other people at the university. (“…[President] Lawrence Summers …made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks ‘too big to fail.'”) Pledge to avoid that sort of behavior at the top of the institution in the future.