[B]usiness ethics lacks a core body of knowledge and an agreed methodology. With calls for business schools to “teach ethics”, this confusion is damaging. Courses can be added, but it is impossible to assess how well they fulfil their purpose without a sense of what that is.

Martin Sandbu, in the Financial Times, calls for serious moral philosophy to be taught in business schools. He contrasts traditional analytical thought to “faux-analytical concepts of strategy management and corporate responsibility,” and insists that rather than try to make business students into good people (he points out what UD has pointed out since this blog was a baby, that universities can’t make people good; they can only train them in strong forms of self-consciousness about goodness), b-schools should sharpen students’ moral self-awareness in general by teaching them how to argue intelligently about morality, and how to distinguish bad arguments about morality from good.

His idea will never fly because it lacks glamor. It’s not new, whereas “business ethics” is new (even if, as Sandbu points out, it doesn’t mean anything). It’s not based on specific workplace examples so it lacks that whole Group Project / Psychodynamics thing that people seem to like so much. It’s not based on charts (it has instead to do with unpredictable collective reflection), so it doesn’t work with the PowerPoint bullets many business school professors like to read.

Finally, moral philosophy is hard.

An art student at NYU sells cheese.

… from the gates of the White House.

Years ago my mother planted a calycanthus occidentalis in my front garden.

Only this season did it put out flowers – strangely scented lotus-like burgundy things .

(Charles Webber © California Academy of Sciences)

[Click picture for a bigger image.]

They run up and down its long thin branches.

When I scrape its bark, my fingers smell of cinnamon.

It wasn’t until I asked my neighbor, Barbara Shidler, to come over and tell me what it was that I could identify the calycanthus. I’d tried Google Images and gotten nowhere.

It’s so beautiful, it suits so well my dark house and garden, that I want to move it forward. (“Move your mahonia and put the calycanthus there,” said Lizzie, another neighbor who happened by. “Get rid of the mahonia. Stick it in the back.”)

It’s positively hallucinogenic.

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Okay, so that was rather difficult. Not the digging up part and the transplanting part. It’s been raining; the soil is soft. The tree is still thin and delicate.

But the bush just adjacent to the newly placed Spicebush has a cardinal nest with three eggs and an hysterical mother. [Scroll down for eggs, nest.] As I dug a hole for the calycanthus, I told off the bird for putting her nest steps from my front door.

I went to a great deal of trouble not to disturb the nest with my digging and watering. The mother bird flew off as I worked and watched me like a hawk from my roof. She didn’t stop chip-chip-chip-chip-chipping until I left.

UD‘s daughter, La Kid, is in Rome, and suddenly she’s surrounded by a million beatifiers. She and her friends didn’t realize they’d scheduled their Rome jaunt to coincide with this event. “Flags. Shirts with his name printed on them in big letters. Songs. Prayers…”

She’s upset that she missed gathering with her GW friends at the White House last night. I reminded her that she was in the crowd there for the Obama election celebration.

I also pointed out that she missed one world historical event, but was at the right place at the right time for another one.

… that there’s big news about Osama Bin Laden.

Killed or captured?

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Update: Bin Laden is dead.

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Remember.

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People are gathering at the White House to celebrate.

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Looks as though there are a lot of GW students among the celebrants.

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From the Gaston Gazette:

[Adam] Royston lives in a dorm just a few blocks away from the White House. He held up his cell phone and chants of “USA, USA” could be heard. He likened Sunday night’s celebration to gatherings for a new government in Egypt.

“There are tons of American flags,” said Royston, who is studying Middle Eastern government at the private school in the nation’s capital. “People are just running for the White House. I just knew that since this is a great day that I had to be there.

“This has got to be the most exciting day at George Washington University in my freshman year.”

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From the Associated Press:

Twenty-year-old Alex Washofsky came despite finals on Monday at George Washington University. He’s also a member of the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps.

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More GW reaction.

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Tomorrow, after she gives a final exam at GW, UD will again visit the Pentagon Memorial. She wrote about it in 2008, here.

Mike Bianchi, Orlando Sentinel.

[University of Central Florida] basketball coach Donnie Jones is being accused of using a convicted felon with ties to a sports agent as a conduit to funnel big-name recruits into his program.

Sadly, my first response when I read this story in The New York Times Saturday was this: Doesn’t everybody?

… At this point, it’s impossible to know if Jones is breaking the rules or simply pushing the envelope. And, frankly, when you look at the sad state of the NCAA, does it really matter?

Auburn, the national football champion, had a star player who somehow kept his eligibility and won the Heisman Trophy despite the fact that his father tried to sell his services for $180,000.

UConn, the national basketball champion, has a coach in Jim Calhoun who will be suspended for a grand total of three games next year despite the fact that the NCAA says he runs a cheating program that “fails to promote an atmosphere of compliance.”

John Calipari has been in charge of two different programs that had to vacate their Final Four appearances because of NCAA violations. He now holds the premier job in college basketball at Kentucky…

… when someone running a secondary school or a university turns out to be a plagiarist. These people spend a lot of time pontificating to their students about honesty, academic integrity and hard work, and when they are found out, it makes their students – and their students’ families – look like dupes.

As Karen Francisco reports in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:

Gwendolyn Griffith Adell is a member of the Indiana State Board of Education and administrator of a Gary charter school singled out for distinction by Gov. Mitch Daniels. She also stands accused of plagiarizing her doctoral dissertation.

Purdue University officials have confirmed they are reviewing the allegations.

Adell’s response so far is the classic I’ve just been hit with this response: Bullshit! I’m getting me a lawyer!

Once she calms down and realizes she’s been caught, she will probably go through many of the same stages most people – from the high and mighty German defense minister on down – go through:

She’ll admit there might have been one or two inadvertent lapses on her part.

She’ll ask her university for permission to correct the dissertation. This will be denied.

She’ll say she was busy having five children, running for political office, caring for her sick aunt.

She’ll say there’s a political conspiracy to get rid of her because she’s an outspoken critic of the establishment.

She’ll say her plagiarism occurred long ago and has nothing to do with what a great job she does. Judge her by her current work.

In her resignation speech, she will portray herself as a religious martyr.

… pipeline.

… tenuring.

Lately, there have been some odd gifts to universities. This one, from Bose to MIT, is of interest to tax consultants.

UD has also been puzzling over this one, from an anonymous American to the University of Sydney. The American flew with the painting to Sydney; when there, he or she explained that the university must sell the painting and use the proceeds (probably around twenty million dollars) for scientific research.

Which is fine. Great. But why not stay home, sell the painting, and designate the money to go to Sydney? Why go to the trouble of putting the painting in Australia for a few weeks before it’s sold? I’m pretty sure it’s not being exhibited, or used for research purposes.

Odd.

The professors on the editorial board of the Journal condemn the word “pet” as offensive.

The Village Voice writers, at the end of their post, provide a list of alternative terms.

… He had a gift for French and his native Spanish and was honored as an outstanding professor in 2005 and the school’s company grade officer of the year for 2006.

Not bad for a kid who had to teach himself English.

“He pushed all of us,” his daughter, Air Force Lt. Emily Short said Thursday. “His word for us was ‘Don’t do it the hard way, the way I did.’”

Born in Caracas, Ambard never lost his admiration for his adopted land. When he leaned English, he sought perfection and spoke without an accent. He told his children to be grateful for the gifts that come with American citizenship.

Good writing doesn’t have to shout to be noticed.

That also covers my case: no criminal record and a college professor. PLUS I don’t go into jewelry stores and announce to the salesperson that I’m there to rob the place because I think it’s hilarious to say things like that. So: no criminal record, college professor, AND not an idiot.

Alexander Asandei seems to have trouble holding his tongue. You can already detect the problem here, in his woeful Rate My Professors pages.

But Asandei does not merely reserve his wit (he likes to call his students “dumb”) for the classroom. When asked the other day, in a jewelry store, if he’d like some help, he said no, I’m just here to rob the place.

So he got arrested and smiled his way through a mug shot and all.

Asandei complained about jail conditions and said people are way too sensitive these days. He feels everyone overreacted.

Well, he’s too sensitive to jail conditions.